How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [91]
What does make for an interesting story? Why do we tell stories and so enjoy hearing them? Cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, in his book The Mind’s Past, argues that we are all storytellers, in the sense that we take the facts of our everyday experience and weave them into a narrative, from which we spin doctor our self-image. “The spin doctoring that goes on keeps us believing we are good people, that we are in control and mean to do good.” Gazzaniga calls the brain mechanism that carries out this task the interpreter, “probably the most amazing mechanism the human being possesses.” Dreams serve as another example, since at least some appear to be random firings of neural impulses that are hung together by our internal storyteller—recall dreams you have had that include disparate elements and people never found together in reality, yet make perfect sense in a dream narrative. This is the power of the pattern-seeking, storytelling animal.
What has this to do with religion and the belief in God? We have recognized two primary purposes of religion: (1) The creation of stories and myths that address the deepest questions we can ask ourselves: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What does our ultimate future hold?; (2) The production of moral systems to provide social cohesion for the most social of all the social primates. God(s) figures prominently in both these modes as the ultimate subject of mythmaking and the final arbiter of moral dilemmas and enforcer of ethical precepts. Why did this capacity to tell stories, create myths, construct morality, develop religion, and believe in God evolve?
THE HOW AND THE WHY: IN SEARCH OF DEEPER ANSWERS
In the seventh century B.C.E. the Greek philosopher Archilochus penned one of the pithiest yet most thoughtful epigrams when he observed: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing.” Twenty-two centuries later the nineteenth-century British philosopher William Whewell described science as employing a foxlike method to arrive at a hedgehoglike conclusion, that he called a consilience of inductions, or what might also be called a convergence of evidence. Bringing into focus numerous theories, models, and data from disparate and unconnected fields, each one of which converges to a similar conclusion, together allows us to increase the confidence in our theory. We know, for example, that evolution happened not by any one fossil or organism, but by tens of thousands of bits of data from unrelated fields, all of which converge to a single conclusion; paleontology, geology, comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, molecular genetics, population genetics, zoology, botany, biochemistry all independently point to an evolutionary history of life on Earth. Together they converge to an inescapable focal point of scientific truth.
We can engage this convergence method to understand how and why religion and belief in God evolved in human societies. (This book, in fact, has been doing just that, using the convergence and comparative methods from the various behavioral and social sciences such as neurophysiology, behavior genetics, cognitive and social psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, and archaeology.) A survey of the extensive body of literature on religion shows that this is one of the most complex of all human social phenomena, not explicable in terms of an overriding hedgehog theory. We need to take a foxlike approach, yet look for a consilience of evidence to see what these disparate fields of thought might reveal. There is no question that different cultures express religious behavior in many different and unique ways. But is there something underneath these diverse expressions?
To get at the deeper question of the purpose of religion, I begin with evolutionary theory and the distinction biologists make between how questions and why questions. How questions are concerned with proximate causes—the immediate or nearest cause or purpose of a structure or function—the “how does it work?” type of