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21 reviews for:
The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life
Jesse Bering
3.78 AVERAGE
21 reviews for:
The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life
Jesse Bering
3.78 AVERAGE
This book puts forward the theory that human's belief in God has led to our success as a species. What I enjoyed about this author is his more balanced and sensible approach than the extreme views of someone like Richard Dawkins who is just a fundamentalist of a different kind. The author sees religion as a cultural construct but the belief in God (or something similar) as very different. He demonstrates through "theory of mind, how even non-believers we still turn to God to cope when dealing with death (our own and others), serious illness or tragedy. He explains how "theory of mind" enables us to find and apply meaning in our lives and reduce anxiety, whether it is those who thought that a flood was a punishment from God or when someone close to us passes we look for "signs" of them watching over us. This quote about a natural disaster was gold! "Yes God killed many people, acknowledged believers. But "praise Jesus", he spared a lot of lives too...namely theirs". This is a very accessible read and I found it one of the best books I have read that articulates so well our ability to self-reflect, plan and find meaning outside our immediate self. And coming to terms with our mortality can be difficult - which is why God is so important in many people's lives.
challenging
informative
reflective
fast-paced
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3015978.html
It's a short and breezy exploration of the psychology of belief - not as wearyingly hostile as Richard Dawkins, but equally taking it for granted that there is no "there" there. I was particularly drawn into the first few chapters' exploration of theory of mind - our ability to attribute mental states to others and to adapt our behaviour to take others' mental states into account. This is one of the things that makes us human - not just that we have a greater cognitive ability than other animals, but that we treat each other as fellow individuals. Bering makes a strong argument that belief in God, or in the supernatural, is a natural development from the fact that we have theory of mind, and therefore is to an extent an evolutionary adaptation to cope with our intelligence and social natures. He then ranges around the areas of philosophy, psychology and organised religion with a bit less impact, but he has set up the argument well enough (and the book is short enough) that I enjoyed following it though to the end. I must read more of his books, which include Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? and Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us.
It's a short and breezy exploration of the psychology of belief - not as wearyingly hostile as Richard Dawkins, but equally taking it for granted that there is no "there" there. I was particularly drawn into the first few chapters' exploration of theory of mind - our ability to attribute mental states to others and to adapt our behaviour to take others' mental states into account. This is one of the things that makes us human - not just that we have a greater cognitive ability than other animals, but that we treat each other as fellow individuals. Bering makes a strong argument that belief in God, or in the supernatural, is a natural development from the fact that we have theory of mind, and therefore is to an extent an evolutionary adaptation to cope with our intelligence and social natures. He then ranges around the areas of philosophy, psychology and organised religion with a bit less impact, but he has set up the argument well enough (and the book is short enough) that I enjoyed following it though to the end. I must read more of his books, which include Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? and Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us.
Is there an innate instinct for belief in God? The Theory of Mind states that humans have the (perhaps unique) capacity to put themselves in other people’s shoes and imagine what others are thinking; we tend to see others as doing things intentionally and for a reason. When someone winks at you, your brain isn’t content with processing the superficial layer of behaviour being exhibited by this other person, but wants to know what this behaviour is about. Other animals certainly have minds; but they don’t tend to exhibit this Theory of Mind that is so highly developed in humans. The jury is still out on whether we’re entirely unique in having ToM; but we are certainly the best at it. Our evolved brains apply this ToM not only to the innards of other people and animals, but to categories that haven’t any mental innards at all. We completely overshoot the mark in ascribing mental states to things that cannot possibly have mental states. What if God’s mental states were all in our minds too? Since the brain is a product of evolution, and natural selection works without recourse to intelligent forethought, this mental apparatus of ours evolved to think about God without God needing to be real.
- Why is the purpose-of-life question so seductive? Many atheists claim to still need purpose in life, suggesting that logical thought runs counter to our natural psychology. Wanting to understand our origins (and the origins of the universe too) seems to be an eruption of our innate human minds that is then clothed in religious talk. In Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development, artificialism referred to young children’s seeing aspects of the world as existing in order to solve certain human problems; Piaget thought that artificialist beliefs never went away and cropped up in the nonbeliever’s mental representations; in other words, even though the non-believer said he didn’t believe, he still acted as though there were something akin to God. People, and especially children, are thus promiscuous teleologists, in that they think things exist for a pre-conceived purpose; can we ever truly grasp the completely mindless principles of evolution by random mutation and natural selection? Understanding destiny for what it is - a cognitive illusion that is alluring and deadly - can make us resist those who say they have special knowledge about what God has in store for us. So to see an inherent purpose in life, whether purpose in our own individual existence or life more generally, is to see an intentional creative mind, God, that had a reason for designing it this way and not any other way. Natural selection, a mindless process, disputes this; we aren’t accidents, as that implies that there is a mind who created us, but he made a mistake. Rather, we simply are. Owing to our ToM and teleological reasoning, it is difficult for humans to refrain from seeing humans in intentional terms.
- Just like other people’s behaviours, natural events can be perceived by humans as being about something other than their surface characteristics only because our brains are equipped with the specialised cognitive software that enables us to think about underlying psychological causes. Natural events outside the head are filtered through our evolved ToM and interpreted subjectively inside the head. Just because we humans see, feel, and experience meaning doesn’t make meaning inherently so. When religious folk credit God with all the complexity of the universe, they are, in all probability, using their mindlessly evolved theory of mind to make meaning of the meaningless.
- Why do bad things happen to good people? This question presupposes an intelligent, morally concerned agent behind the scenes. Gray and Wegner argue that human suffering and God go hand in hand; when bad things happen, we look for the culpable human agent to blame; when misfortune is not trailed by a responsible agent, people need to find another intentional agent to imbue the event with meaning and allow some sense of control; cue God. Gopnik suggests that humans have an innate explanatory drive that causes us to search for causal explanations because knowing why feels good. This explanation doesn’t need to be correct; it just needs to sound plausible. People say that God will disappear once we have a complete causal explanation of the universe; but this only answers how and we will always ask why. People expect retribution for moral wrongdoing, and this is a completely natural way of thinking. Real life is seldom a drama with a satisfying ending; but people can’t help but conceive of life as being a narrative with a linear progression and a satisfying ending. We’ve evolved a powerful set of cognitive illusions that prevents us from seeing clearly, and we cannot get rid of these illusions any more than we can get rid of colour vision. Narrative psychologists believe that we secretly portray ourselves as living out a sort of preauthored screenplay that will eventually end in some meaningful, coherent way. So who is writing the script? Whatever your theological view (God is passive, God is screenwriter, etc) all theories evoke your ToM and all have something to say between morality and this-worldly pain. In any event, it’s hard to shake the view that someone is keeping watch over us; something invested in our behaviours and feelings; something that cares.
- When we feel like we are being watched, we will change our behaviours to be more pro-social. Our internal beast is impulsive and hedonistic because that sort of behaviour payed off for our ancestors in the past. This beastly capacity is still with us, overlayed with a more modern capacity to get in the minds of others and control our behaviour; and these two capacities are in perpetual conflict. Why should getting in your mind matter? If you see me do something bad, you will go and tell the others which will decrease my chances of reproduction, so I’d better watch my behaviour around peeping toms! Patience, restraint, modesty - these are all desirable and socially endorsed, not because they’re heavenly virtues, but because they’re pragmatic. Luckily, we possess, not only an ability for self-restraint, but the concept of God who constantly watches what we do to make sure we are making the right decisions; decisions which happen to be favourably inclined toward morals and social norms. Destiny, seeing signs in natural events, and the attribution of misfortune to some previous transgression, all coalesce in the human brain to form a set of functional psychological processes. They are functional because they breed explicit beliefs and behaviours that were adaptive in the ancestral past. The illusion of God engendered by our theory of mind, was one very important solution to the adaptive problem of human gossip. By curtailing bad behaviours, the sense of being observed by a morally invested, reactive Other, especially one that created us and for whom we’re eternally indebted in return, meant fewer self-destructive scraps for those ravenous wolves of gossip to feed on. Does this disprove God? Of course not; it may be possible that God designed the human cognitive structure so that we may be able to perceive Him. But the facts of the evolutionary case imply strongly that God’s existence is rather improbable. The illusion can be so convincing that you refuse to acknowledge that it’s an illusion at all. But that may simply mean that the adaptation works particularly well in your case. So, knowing what we do now, is it wise to trust our evolved, subjective, mental intuitions to be reliable aguges of the reality outside our heads, or do we instead accept the possibility that such intuitions in fact arise through cognitive biases that - perhaps for biologically adaptive reasons - lead our thinking fundamentally away from objective reality?
- Why is the purpose-of-life question so seductive? Many atheists claim to still need purpose in life, suggesting that logical thought runs counter to our natural psychology. Wanting to understand our origins (and the origins of the universe too) seems to be an eruption of our innate human minds that is then clothed in religious talk. In Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development, artificialism referred to young children’s seeing aspects of the world as existing in order to solve certain human problems; Piaget thought that artificialist beliefs never went away and cropped up in the nonbeliever’s mental representations; in other words, even though the non-believer said he didn’t believe, he still acted as though there were something akin to God. People, and especially children, are thus promiscuous teleologists, in that they think things exist for a pre-conceived purpose; can we ever truly grasp the completely mindless principles of evolution by random mutation and natural selection? Understanding destiny for what it is - a cognitive illusion that is alluring and deadly - can make us resist those who say they have special knowledge about what God has in store for us. So to see an inherent purpose in life, whether purpose in our own individual existence or life more generally, is to see an intentional creative mind, God, that had a reason for designing it this way and not any other way. Natural selection, a mindless process, disputes this; we aren’t accidents, as that implies that there is a mind who created us, but he made a mistake. Rather, we simply are. Owing to our ToM and teleological reasoning, it is difficult for humans to refrain from seeing humans in intentional terms.
- Just like other people’s behaviours, natural events can be perceived by humans as being about something other than their surface characteristics only because our brains are equipped with the specialised cognitive software that enables us to think about underlying psychological causes. Natural events outside the head are filtered through our evolved ToM and interpreted subjectively inside the head. Just because we humans see, feel, and experience meaning doesn’t make meaning inherently so. When religious folk credit God with all the complexity of the universe, they are, in all probability, using their mindlessly evolved theory of mind to make meaning of the meaningless.
- Why do bad things happen to good people? This question presupposes an intelligent, morally concerned agent behind the scenes. Gray and Wegner argue that human suffering and God go hand in hand; when bad things happen, we look for the culpable human agent to blame; when misfortune is not trailed by a responsible agent, people need to find another intentional agent to imbue the event with meaning and allow some sense of control; cue God. Gopnik suggests that humans have an innate explanatory drive that causes us to search for causal explanations because knowing why feels good. This explanation doesn’t need to be correct; it just needs to sound plausible. People say that God will disappear once we have a complete causal explanation of the universe; but this only answers how and we will always ask why. People expect retribution for moral wrongdoing, and this is a completely natural way of thinking. Real life is seldom a drama with a satisfying ending; but people can’t help but conceive of life as being a narrative with a linear progression and a satisfying ending. We’ve evolved a powerful set of cognitive illusions that prevents us from seeing clearly, and we cannot get rid of these illusions any more than we can get rid of colour vision. Narrative psychologists believe that we secretly portray ourselves as living out a sort of preauthored screenplay that will eventually end in some meaningful, coherent way. So who is writing the script? Whatever your theological view (God is passive, God is screenwriter, etc) all theories evoke your ToM and all have something to say between morality and this-worldly pain. In any event, it’s hard to shake the view that someone is keeping watch over us; something invested in our behaviours and feelings; something that cares.
- When we feel like we are being watched, we will change our behaviours to be more pro-social. Our internal beast is impulsive and hedonistic because that sort of behaviour payed off for our ancestors in the past. This beastly capacity is still with us, overlayed with a more modern capacity to get in the minds of others and control our behaviour; and these two capacities are in perpetual conflict. Why should getting in your mind matter? If you see me do something bad, you will go and tell the others which will decrease my chances of reproduction, so I’d better watch my behaviour around peeping toms! Patience, restraint, modesty - these are all desirable and socially endorsed, not because they’re heavenly virtues, but because they’re pragmatic. Luckily, we possess, not only an ability for self-restraint, but the concept of God who constantly watches what we do to make sure we are making the right decisions; decisions which happen to be favourably inclined toward morals and social norms. Destiny, seeing signs in natural events, and the attribution of misfortune to some previous transgression, all coalesce in the human brain to form a set of functional psychological processes. They are functional because they breed explicit beliefs and behaviours that were adaptive in the ancestral past. The illusion of God engendered by our theory of mind, was one very important solution to the adaptive problem of human gossip. By curtailing bad behaviours, the sense of being observed by a morally invested, reactive Other, especially one that created us and for whom we’re eternally indebted in return, meant fewer self-destructive scraps for those ravenous wolves of gossip to feed on. Does this disprove God? Of course not; it may be possible that God designed the human cognitive structure so that we may be able to perceive Him. But the facts of the evolutionary case imply strongly that God’s existence is rather improbable. The illusion can be so convincing that you refuse to acknowledge that it’s an illusion at all. But that may simply mean that the adaptation works particularly well in your case. So, knowing what we do now, is it wise to trust our evolved, subjective, mental intuitions to be reliable aguges of the reality outside our heads, or do we instead accept the possibility that such intuitions in fact arise through cognitive biases that - perhaps for biologically adaptive reasons - lead our thinking fundamentally away from objective reality?
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.5 stars
I don't read or enjoy a lot of non fiction, but I found this super entertaining and educational at the same time. :)
I don't read or enjoy a lot of non fiction, but I found this super entertaining and educational at the same time. :)
An evolutionary psychology approach to why people tend to believe in gods, karma, ghosts and a higher purpose of life.
Jesse Bering has written a thoughtful piece that both make you smile and see religiosity and scepticism in a new light.
Jesse Bering has written a thoughtful piece that both make you smile and see religiosity and scepticism in a new light.
Because the author is so open about his atheism, I think it's easy to forget at times that the topic of this book is not the existence of God / a god / gods / deities, etc. Instead, the book reviews how the evolutionary psychology of humans has uniquely pre-disposed us to believe in the existence of an omniscient deity or deities that observe(s) and judge(s) our thoughts and actions and in of some form of afterlife. I actually feel like these are questions you can engage with and think about regardless of your spiritual / religious beliefs, as long as you are not in the habit of believing things just because you want to and refuting them because you don't. This is definitely a book based on scientific evidence.
That said, if you have a background in cognitive and/or social and/or evolutionary psychology, it's unlikely you'll encounter anything all that new, and you may feel like some of the more basic points are belabored. (Every time he started explaining how the theory of mind works again, I was all "Yes, I get it.". It was interesting to hear him put the literature together in slightly different ways, but by & large, my response was mostly, "Huh. That makes sense."
On the other hand, if you don't have much background in psychology, it may completely blow your mind.
In any case, it's a short, entertaining, not-too-technical, easy to read book, so not much to lose either way.
That said, if you have a background in cognitive and/or social and/or evolutionary psychology, it's unlikely you'll encounter anything all that new, and you may feel like some of the more basic points are belabored. (Every time he started explaining how the theory of mind works again, I was all "Yes, I get it.". It was interesting to hear him put the literature together in slightly different ways, but by & large, my response was mostly, "Huh. That makes sense."
On the other hand, if you don't have much background in psychology, it may completely blow your mind.
In any case, it's a short, entertaining, not-too-technical, easy to read book, so not much to lose either way.
I found this book very interesting, though it was a little repetitive. I didn't disagree with much, and I did enjoy learning about the theory of mind. It was well-written, with a nice balance of the personal- not too much, not too little.