Read Online The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering - Free Book Online
Authors: Jesse Bering
Tags: Religión, General, Psychology, Spirituality, Personality, Body; Mind & Spirit, Cognitive Psychology, Psychology of Religion
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masking our body odors by drowning our glands in a factory-derived effluvium, even though the use of deodorant and perfume clearly also goes against the natural order of things.
Another modern example of how teleo-functional thinking intersects with moral reasoning is the issue of medically assisted suicide. Those who believe that one’s life is owned by God are more likely to view medical euthanasia—as well as abortion and capital punishment—as being morally wrong. If a person’s essence is created by God, as many believe it to be, then it follows that individuals haven’t the right to purposefully cause their own death, because that right is seen as being God’s alone. Suicide therefore becomes a form of intellectual theft; the self redesigns its end in an act of mutiny against its creator. As an angst-ridden Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in his Diary of a Writer (1873), “I condemn that nature which, with such impudent nerve, brought me into being in order to suffer—I condemn it in order to be annihilated with me.” 38
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—usually God—that had a reason for designing it this way and not some other way. If we subscribe wholly and properly to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, however, we must view human life, generally, and our own lives, individually, as arising through solely nonintentional, physical means. This doesn’t imply that we are “accidents,” because even that term requires a mind, albeit one that created by mistake. Rather, we simply are. To state otherwise, such as saying that you or I exist for a reason, would constitute an obvious category error, one in which we’re applying teleo-functional thinking to something that neither was designed creatively nor evolved as a discrete biological adaptation.
Yet owing to our theory of mind, and specifically to our undisciplined teleological reasoning, it is excruciatingly difficult to refrain from seeing human existence in such intentional terms. To think that we are moral because morality works in a mechanistic, evolutionary sense is like saying that we are moral because we are moral; it’s unfulfilling in that it strips the authority away from a God that created us to act in specific ways because He knew best, and He would become disappointed and angry if we failed to go along with His rules for human nature. But peeling back the cognitive illusion of the purpose of life as we have done in this chapter gives us our first glimpse into the question asked at the outset of the book: Has our species’ unique cognitive evolution duped us into believing in this, the grandest mind of all? So far, the answer is clearly “yes.”
3 SIGNS, SIGNS, EVERYWHERE SIGNS
J UST AS WE see other people as more than just their bodies, we also tend to see natural events as more than natural events. And again, this seeing beyond the obvious is the consequence of the very peculiar way our brains have evolved, with a theory of mind. At every turn, we seem to think there are subtle messages scratched into the woodwork of nature, subtle signs or cues that God, or some other supernatural agent, is trying to communicate a lesson or idea to us—and often to us alone. Usually, it’s about how we should behave. So we listen attentively, effortlessly translating natural events into divine or supernatural messages.
The best examples of seeing God’s mind at work in nature tend also to be the most laughable, but from them we can see just how people’s religious and spiritual views articulate with our species’ evolved theory of mind. The outspoken African American mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, suggested to reporters in 2005 that Hurricane Katrina, one of the most savage and destructive storms ever to strike North American shores, was in fact a climatological testament to God’s vitriolic fury at the drug-addled
Another modern example of how teleo-functional thinking intersects with moral reasoning is the issue of medically assisted suicide. Those who believe that one’s life is owned by God are more likely to view medical euthanasia—as well as abortion and capital punishment—as being morally wrong. If a person’s essence is created by God, as many believe it to be, then it follows that individuals haven’t the right to purposefully cause their own death, because that right is seen as being God’s alone. Suicide therefore becomes a form of intellectual theft; the self redesigns its end in an act of mutiny against its creator. As an angst-ridden Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in his Diary of a Writer (1873), “I condemn that nature which, with such impudent nerve, brought me into being in order to suffer—I condemn it in order to be annihilated with me.” 38
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—usually God—that had a reason for designing it this way and not some other way. If we subscribe wholly and properly to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, however, we must view human life, generally, and our own lives, individually, as arising through solely nonintentional, physical means. This doesn’t imply that we are “accidents,” because even that term requires a mind, albeit one that created by mistake. Rather, we simply are. To state otherwise, such as saying that you or I exist for a reason, would constitute an obvious category error, one in which we’re applying teleo-functional thinking to something that neither was designed creatively nor evolved as a discrete biological adaptation.
Yet owing to our theory of mind, and specifically to our undisciplined teleological reasoning, it is excruciatingly difficult to refrain from seeing human existence in such intentional terms. To think that we are moral because morality works in a mechanistic, evolutionary sense is like saying that we are moral because we are moral; it’s unfulfilling in that it strips the authority away from a God that created us to act in specific ways because He knew best, and He would become disappointed and angry if we failed to go along with His rules for human nature. But peeling back the cognitive illusion of the purpose of life as we have done in this chapter gives us our first glimpse into the question asked at the outset of the book: Has our species’ unique cognitive evolution duped us into believing in this, the grandest mind of all? So far, the answer is clearly “yes.”
3 SIGNS, SIGNS, EVERYWHERE SIGNS
J UST AS WE see other people as more than just their bodies, we also tend to see natural events as more than natural events. And again, this seeing beyond the obvious is the consequence of the very peculiar way our brains have evolved, with a theory of mind. At every turn, we seem to think there are subtle messages scratched into the woodwork of nature, subtle signs or cues that God, or some other supernatural agent, is trying to communicate a lesson or idea to us—and often to us alone. Usually, it’s about how we should behave. So we listen attentively, effortlessly translating natural events into divine or supernatural messages.
The best examples of seeing God’s mind at work in nature tend also to be the most laughable, but from them we can see just how people’s religious and spiritual views articulate with our species’ evolved theory of mind. The outspoken African American mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, suggested to reporters in 2005 that Hurricane Katrina, one of the most savage and destructive storms ever to strike North American shores, was in fact a climatological testament to God’s vitriolic fury at the drug-addled
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