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By Root 476 0

I vividly recall inculcating this philosophy of science from Navarick because at the same time that we were conducting rigorous controlled-learning experiments in his lab, there was much hoopla about Thelma Moss’s parapsychology lab at UCLA, where she studied “Kirlian photography” (photographing “energy fields” surrounding living organisms), along with hypnosis, ghosts, levitation, and the like. Since these were trained scientists smarter and more educated than myself, I figured that there might actually be something to the paranormal. But once I discovered the skeptical movement and its reasoned analysis of such claims, my skepticism overrode my belief.

As well, my current belief that there is no such thing as “mind,” and that all mental processes can be explained only by understanding the underlying neural correlates of behavior, was primarily shaped by Navarick’s Skinnerian philosophy: “I reject ‘mentalistic’ explanations of behavior,” he reminded me, “i.e., attributing behavior to theoretical constructs that refer to internal states, like ‘understands,’ ‘feels that,’ ‘knows,’ ‘gets it,’ ‘figures out,’ ‘wants,’ ‘needs,’ ‘believes,’ ‘thinks,’ ‘expects,’ ‘pleasure,’ ‘desire,’ etc., the reified concepts that students routinely use in their papers despite instructions that they could lose points for doing so.”2 It isn’t just students who reify mind out of behavior. Virtually everyone does, because “mind” is a form of dualism that I shall argue in a later chapter appears to be innate to our cognition. We are natural-born dualists, which is why behaviorists and neuroscientists struggle so mightily—and frustratingly—to rein in mind-talk.

Because of my newfound interest in evolutionary theory after Brattstrom’s class, I studied ethology (the study of the evolutionary origins of animal behavior) under the deeply thoughtful and warmly advising Margaret White, who grounded me in the biology of human behavior and the evolution of social dynamics in primate groups. (She once sent me off to the San Diego Zoo to observe a silverback gorilla for an entire weekend, which both the gorilla and I—staring at each other for endless hours—found equally fruitless.) This was nearly two decades before the birth of evolutionary psychology as a full-fledged science, but the groundwork was laid for my later work on the evolutionary origins of religion and morality. I also took a course in cultural anthropology from the well-traveled and worldly Marlene Dobkin de Rios. Her lectures and books on her experiences in South America with hallucinogenic-imbibing shamans and the numerous animisms, spirits, ghosts, and gods made me realize just how insular my worldview was and how naive I was in assuming that my Christian beliefs were grounded in the One True Religion while all the others were so obviously culturally determined.

Together, these inputs led me to a personal exploration of comparative world religions and to the eventual realization that these often mutually incompatible beliefs were held by people who believed as firmly as I did that they were right and everyone else was wrong. Midway through my graduate training, I quietly gave up my religious belief and removed my silver ichthus (Greek for “fish,” sometimes rendered as “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior”) from around my neck. I didn’t announce it to anyone because no one really cared one way or the other—with the possible exception of my siblings, who were probably relieved that I would now finally quit trying to save them.

One of the first things I noticed upon losing my religion was just how grating I must have been around people of different faiths (or no faith at all) with my incessant evangelizing—the logical product of believing that you have the One True Religion to which others must convert or forever lose a chance at eternal bliss. To nonbelievers, such a forced choice between belief, with its ultimate reward in heaven, and disbelief, with its ultimate punishment in hell, sounds so harsh and, well, Old Testament. But it wasn’t meant to be that way. Earnest evangelicals—of which I