Religion: Biological Accident, Adaptation — or Both

By Brandon Keim March 09, 2009 | 5:56:12 PM

Whether or not God exists, thinking about Him or Her doesn't require divinely dedicated neurological wiring.

Instead, religious thoughts run on brain systems used to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling.

The findings, based on brain scans of people contemplating God, don't explain whether a propensity for religion is a neurobiological accident. But at least they give researchers a solid framework for exploring the question.

"In a way, this is a very cold look at religious belief," said National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist Jordan Grafman, co-author of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We're only trying to understand where in the brain religious beliefs seem to be modulated."

Though scientific debate about God's existence has transfixed the public, Grafman's findings fit into a lesser known argument over why religion exists.

Some scientists think it's just an accidental byproduct of social cognition. They say humans evolved to imagine what other people are feeling, even people who aren't present — and from there it was a short step to positing supernatural beings.

Others argue that religion is too pervasive to be just a byproduct. Historically, at least, it must have provided believers and their communities some sort of advantage, or else it would have disappeared.

The argument breaks down into the so-called byproduct and adaptation camps. Of course, they might both be right.

"Religious beliefs might have arisen as a byproduct," said Justin Barrett, an Oxford University specialist in the cognitive neuroscience of religion, "but once in place, they're pretty handy."

Grafman started by interviewing 26 people of varying religious sentiments, breaking down their beliefs into three psychological categories: God's perceived level of involvement in the world, God's perceived emotions, and religious knowledge gained through doctrine or experience. Then they submitted statements based on these categories to 40 people hooked to fMRI machines.

Statements based on God's involvement — such as "God protects one's life" or "Life has no higher purpose" — provoked activity in brain regions associated with understanding intent. Statements of God's emotions — such as "God is forgiving" or "the afterlife will be punishing" — stimulated regions responsible for classifying emotions and relating observed actions to oneself. Knowledge-based statements, such as "a source of creation exists" or "religions provide moral guidance," activated linguistic processing centers.

Taken together, the neurological states evoked by the questions are known to cognitive scientists as the Theory of Mind: They underlie our understanding that other people have minds, thoughts and feelings.

The advantages of a Theory of Mind are clear. People who lack one are considered developmentally challenged, even disabled. Anthropologist Scott Atran, a proponent of the byproduct hypothesis, has suggested that it let our ancestors quickly distinguish between friends and enemies. And once humans were able to imagine someone who wasn't physically present, supernatural beliefs soon followed.

But just as a Theory of Mind provided benefits, so might its supernatural byproducts and the religions that grew from them.

Unlike other animals, humans can imagine the future, including their own death. The hope given by religious beliefs to people confronting their own mortality might provide motivation to care for their offspring.

Supernatural beliefs may also have produced group-level advantages that then conferred benefits to individuals.

"You get some selective advantages, such as inter-group cooperation and self-policing morality," said Barrett. "And maybe the entire network of belief practices, and whatever is behind them, gets reinforced."

According to Barrett, religion may even have created a feedback loop, refining the Theory of Mind that produced it.

"It could be that when you're in a religious community, it improves what psychologists call perspective-taking," he said. "Exercising your Theory of Mind could be good for developing it, making your reasoning more robust."

David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University, said the findings fit with the idea that religion started as a cognitive byproduct and became a cultural adaptation, but cautioned against over-interpreting them.

"It's tremendous to see religious belief manifested at the neurological level," he said. "But there's a sense that when you bring things down to that level, that trumps other kinds of understanding. That's not true in this case."

Grafman declined to speculate, instead concentrating on what he hopes to achieve with future research: studying other kinds of religions than were represented in his small sample size, and comparing religious cognition to legal and political certainties.

"The differences and nuances between these types of belief systems will be important to understanding the deliberation that goes on," he said.

Grafman also stressed that the study examined only the nature of religion, not the existence of God.

"He, or She, didn't come in for the evaluation," he said.

Citation: "Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief." By Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron Barbey, Michael Su, Giovanna Zamboni, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 10, March 9, 2009.

Image: Neural activation produced by God's perceived love (left) and anger (right)/PNAS

See Also:

• Thinking About God — or Cops — Makes You Nicer
• Religion From an Evolutionary Perspective

Nietzsche Quotes

Short Overview:

Wikipedia

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhəlm ˈniːtʃə]) was a nineteenth-century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for metaphor and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth raise considerable problems of interpretation, generating an extensive secondary literature in both continental and analytic philosophy. Nevertheless, some of his key ideas include interpreting tragedy as an affirmation of life, an eternal recurrence (which numerous commentators have re-interpreted), a rejection of Platonism, and a repudiation of both Christianity (especially 19th-century) and Egalitarianism (especially in the form of Democracy and Socialism).

Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest individual ever to have held this position),[1] but resigned in 1879 because of health problems, which would plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of serious mental illness, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.

The Quotes:

• In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
  
• There are no facts, only interpretations.
  
• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
  
• Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
  
• Only sick music makes money today.
  
• It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right - especially when one is right.
  
• Without music, life would be a mistake.
  
• How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy.
  
• To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
  
• Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true.
  
• Convictions are the more dangerous enemy of truth than lies.
  
• He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.
  
• Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
  
• Man is more ape than many of the apes.
  
• He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
  
• There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world's religions
  
• The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
  
• In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
  
• Every extension of knowledge arises from making the conscious the unconscious.
  
• Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
  
• Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.
  
• In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
  
• It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
  
• Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
  
• One should never know too precisely whom one has married.
  
• Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!
  
• One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.
  
• Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine.
  
• Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
  
• I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
  
• Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.
  
• Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.
  
• How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to help us through life.
  
• Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.
  
• The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!
  
• In a friend one should have ones best enemy. You should be closest to him with your heart when you resist him.
  
• Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.
  
• All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.
  
• A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
  
• Memory says, I did that. Pride replies, I could not have done that. Eventually memory yields.
  
• The higher a man gets, the smaller he seems to those who cannot fly.