Thank you. It's a great pleasure to see all of you here
tonight. The festival has had conversations about science
and religion over the years. Perhaps some of you have come to some of those. And oftentimes, there are two sides represented
in that conversation and sometimes the two sides, you know, science and religion, sometimes
they're contentious, sometimes they're harmonious, but tonight we're doing something differently. We really only have one side here tonight. So the group of people who are going to come
out for this discussion, they're all scientists. They all come from the background of science,
but our goal is to see if by walking this one side, this one trajectory of science,
we can gain some illumination into the other side. Into the side of religion side of faith. Before I bring out our esteemed group of panelists,
I just want to set some context and to do so, I'm going to begin with something which
is presumably familiar to many of you. So this is what a beautiful midnight sky brimming
with stars looks like in New York City. Now, I also have a little cabin, Upstate New
York in the Catskill Mountains and when I'm up there and it's a nice, dark night sky,
I can look up and see something that looks just like this. Maybe not just like this. This is takes a Hubble Space Telescope, you
know? But you get the idea and when you see a wondrous
sky like this, you can't help but ask yourself, how does it all work? How did it all come to be? And I have spent part of my professional life
trying to advance the scientific understanding of some of these questions, and because I
work on the more mathematical end of physics, when I look up, I tend to see order and harmony
in a peculiar language. The language of mathematics, a language of
symbols. But, many others, when they look up at a sky
like this, it brings to mind other things, right? Ideas of soul, of eternity, of divinity, of
God. And for some, that kind of talk, it feels
kind of loose or vague. For some, it's even off-putting. But when you look at the data, you see something
utterly remarkable, right here in the 21st century, the modern technological age and
we have long since cracked the atom, explored the surface of Mars, detected gravitational
waves and so much more. There are still many of us who are believers. So if we look at some of the numbers, about
say 2.2 billion of us identify as Christians. About 1.7 billion is Muslims. Hindus, Buddhists, that gives us another two
billion, plus, if we throw in my little tribe, it's about 14 million, right? And then if we add in the atheists, this takes
us to one and half billion which is just to say there's a lot of people on this planet
who would look to the heavens and think of heaven. So if aliens were able to sweep down toward
planet Earth, and let's say they had some wondrous equipment that allowed them to detect
religious belief, to give us a kind of heat map of faith, this is what our planet would
look like. You could probably work out the color scheme
for yourself. Blue is Protestant, Red is Catholic and so
forth. You get the idea. We are a religious planet. Personally, I am not religious in any conventional
sense, but I do consider myself spiritual and I certainly do consider myself curious. One thing that I have certainly gotten ever
more curious about is why do we believe? Now, the simplest answer is we have religious
belief because what religion tells us is true. That raises a whole lot of challenges that
we're all familiar with and perhaps the most relevant for tonight's discussion is there
are over 4000 distinct religions practiced on Earth and if we just take one of them,
say we parse Christianity a little more finely, there are over 33,000 distinct denominations. They can't all be right. So the natural supposition is that at most
one of them is right, which would mean that if Sarah here, happy in her own beliefs, she
denies therefor the beliefs of all others, like Terrik over here who again, happy in
his own faith, denies the validity of all others and that goes true for Pim and for
Ofryim and also for Amalyia and it even holds for, say this guy over here, Richard,
who not only denies in the validity of all other beliefs, he denies the validity all
beliefs. We may be a believing planet, but most of
us deny the validity of most beliefs, which means that even if Sarah holds to her religion
because it is true, she still needs to explain why everybody else holds to their own misguided
faiths. And that holds true for everybody else. So this takes us to a simple but remarkable
conclusion. Normally, the discussion of science and religions,
you know, it all comes down to what's right, what's wrong, what's true, what's false. But here we see that even if a given religion
is true, it hardly changes the question at all. We still need to ask why it is that so many
of us have a tendency to believe. We have to ask yourself, what is it about
the human species that drives us to find order and meaning and, in particular, to find the
turn toward the supernatural so utterly natural. 1936, this guy over here, Albert Einstein
wrote a letter to a school girl named Phyllis who had asked Einstein about his own religious
beliefs. Everyone who is seriously involved in the
pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifested in the laws of the
universe. One that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to
a religious feeling of a special sort which is surely quite different from the religiosity
of someone more naïve. Much has been made about Einstein's use of
this phrase, religious feeling, but his later writings made very clear that he was speaking
of an abstract spirituality, not a conventional religion. The word of God is, for me, nothing more than
the expression and product of human weaknesses. The bible a collection of honorable, but still
primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can,
for me, change this. Charles Darwin, the Father of Evolution by
natural selection, he allowed for the possibility of God. I have never denied the existence of God. I think the theory of evolution is fully compatible
with faith in God. I think the greatest argument for the existence
in God is the impossibility of demonstrating and understanding that the immense universe,
sublime above all measure and man, were the result of chance. At the same time, Darwin also noted that a
religious belief, a religious sensibility could emerge from the interplay between biological
and cultural evolution. Nor must we overlook the probability of the
constant inculcation in a belief of God on the minds of children, producing so strong
and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains, not yet fully developed that it would be as
difficult for them to throw off their belief in God as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive
fear and hatred of a snake. The Dalai Lama has his own iconic perspective
on these issues. Both Buddhism and modern science shared a
deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualized as a transcendent being,
as an eternal unchanging principal such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality. Both Buddhism and science prefer to account
for the evolution and emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelations
of the natural laws of cause and effect. From the methodological perspective, both
the traditions emphasize the role of empiricism. In the Buddhist investigation of reality,
at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority,
no matter how deeply venerate a scripture may be. Years ago, I had the pleasure of sharing the
stage with the Dalai Lama in an event that took place down in Texas and I had an opportunity
to ask him a question. The question is asked was, I said, "Look,
there are all these books out there that make the case that what we're doing in modern physics
is somehow a recapitulation or a reflection of ideas that ultimately find their origin
in eastern religious thought." So I asked him, "Is this true? Is this your perspective?" And he very forthrightly said, he said, "Look,
when it comes to questions of consciousness, that's where we have something to offer science." But he said, "When it comes to understanding
the fundamental laws and the particles and all that detail about how the world actually
works," he said, "We need to look to science." So it was a kind of remarkable moment where
this great spiritual leader showed this remarkable and broad embrace of science. At the same time there are great scientists
who show a similar embrace of religious thought. Here's Nobel Laureate, William Phillips. The point is that there are plenty of scientists
who see no difficulty in being serious about their science and serious about their faith. I know plenty of others, and you’ve see
the statistics that support that idea, but nevertheless there is a common misperception
in society that this isn’t the case. And here's Francis Collins, head of the National
Institutes of Health. I think most people are actually kind of comfortable
with the idea that science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it's not the whole
story and there's a place also for religion, for faith, for theology, for philosophy. But that harmony perspective doesn't get as
much attention. Nobody's as interested in harmony as they
are in conflict, I'm afraid. 2015, Pew Research Foundation found that the
percent of Americans that agreed with the statement that science and religion are often
in conflict, they found that agreement with that was almost 60% and that again is often
how the conversation is framed. Science versus religion. That is an important question. It may come up here tonight, but it's not
the focus of what we're talking about here tonight. And so we're asking ourselves, can we use
science to illuminate religion? Can we gain some understanding of why people
have a need to look to a power beyond themselves, beyond the laws of physics? Is that need written into our DNA? The natural selection for that kind of worldview,
right? Why in the world does this world have so many
brains that want to believe? That's the question. And to deal with this question, try to gain
some insight, we have a great group of thinkers and I'd like to now bring them out to the
stage. Our first participant is professor emerita
from the College of William and Mary, where she taught anthropology for 28 years, author
of numerous books, including Personalities on the Plate, How Animals Grieve, and Evolving
God. Please join me in welcoming our first guest
... Barbara King on the fly. Our next guest is a research scientist at
NYU Langone Medical Center. He's also professor of cognitive and affective
neuroscience at NYU, co-founded the Nonduality Institute where he is the principle science
investigator. Please join me in welcoming neuroscience,
Zoran Josipovic. Also with us tonight is a university distinguished
professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School
and the Mass General Hospital. In addition to the book, How Emotions Are
Made, she has published over 100 scholarly papers. Please join me in welcoming Lisa Barrett. All right, finally. Our guest is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology
at Harvard University, a two-time Pulitzer prize finalist and author of the bestselling
books including, How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct, a pioneer and champion
of evolutionary psychology, named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People, please
welcome Steven Pinker. All right, so we're going to have a pretty
free form discussion here, where we're going to try to address some of these questions
and we're going to organize the discussion into three parts, roughly speaking. A kind of trinity of parts, befitting for
tonight's discussion. We're going to talk about some of the history
of religious belief. We're going to talk about the longevity, the
fact that this is something that has stuck with us for some time. Then we're going to focus on the benefit,
if at all, for this kind of way of interacting with the world. What I'd like to do before getting started,
if you don't mind, especially since it's a nice small group here, it's good to get a
sense of where people are coming from in this kind of discussion, so if we could just sort
of go one by one, just sort of give us a sense of where you ... We'll do it ... If you don't
mind, and you don't have to, but if you're willing to share it, just a couple of words
on where you come from in the religious spectrum. Steven, you willing to just say a few words? You mean our own beliefs personally? If you don't mind. You don't have to, but if you're willing to. Yeah. Well, I don't believe in the existence of
supernatural entities, including God, souls, spirits, genies, devils, and so on. I am a ... I belong to the same tribe as you. I'm Jewish and appreciate many of the iconography,
the traditions, the community of my own and other cultural groups, but that doesn't mean
you have to sign on to the content, and I don't. Right. Lisa. I would say Steve pretty summed it up pretty
well for me too. We practice some rituals in our home as sort
of, I don't know, not exactly archeological artifacts, but they are kind of artifacts
of the past, you know? If we decide to light candles on Friday night,
I'm using candlesticks that my great-grandmother schlepped from Russia and that people have
been doing this for over 5000 years, and that's meaningful. I also think that Judaism is an interesting
moral code that is somewhat ... emphasizes somewhat more behavior over intent, which
is appealing to us in some ways. I would say we're ... colloquially we're atheists
as a ... definitely in our house, although we do have trappings of, as I said, of ritual
in the way that I described. Yep. Zoran. I was raised as atheist, but later discovered
that really my family believed in scientism. Like, science has an answer to everything. It's a form of religion, I think for some
people. Personally, I have practiced meditation for
over 35 years and I'm mostly interested in this mystical unitary states are known to
us as the consciousness where people experience both unitary consciousness, either alone or
unitary consciousness with experience. I'm interested what it does to a person and
what it does to the brain. Right. Barbara. Growing up in New Jersey, I was raised as
a Presbyterian, spent a fair amount of time in church. I know identify also as an atheist. When I travel, I do find myself drawn to churches,
to sitting in the stillness of a church and to looking at the art and the architecture. I think that is a beautiful part of our history,
but I do that as an atheist. And for my own sense of spirituality, I go
to a Springsteen concert. Right. So, you know, there are some curious human
behaviors that strike us as unusual, like, I think ... I don't know how much of this
is true, but Beethoven is said to have always dunked his head in a bucket of ice water every
morning. Ben Franklin is said to have stood naked in
front of an open window every morning. Nikola Tesla, you know, a great champion and
iconic scientific figure, apparently used to curl his toes a hundred times each night
before going to sleep. So you sort of hear those, you raise your
eyebrows, it's kind of curious and so on. But, we don't feel the need to explain that
kind of behavior, but when it comes to a behavior that is pervasive and that lasts for thousands
of years, then it feels like it deserves an explanation and that's really why we're having
this conversation here tonight. So, maybe start with you, Barbara. When I hear the word faith or religion, my
mind automatically goes toward one of the major religions that are practiced in the
world today. Is that too limited of you? Yeah, I think it's a very natural view, but
speaking anthropologically, if we were to do that heat sensing map of the world, we
would see people who not only believe in God, or don't believe in God, but also many, many
people who believe in gods, plural, spirits in the forest, venerate ancestors, or have
an enormous range of beliefs. So, I think broadening our view to understand
that there's numbers of ways, not just in the past but now, to believe is a very helpful
starting point. Now, you've also done work where you've gone
beyond this species, right? Absolutely, yes. My work is in animals and there's a fascinating
conversation going on now about whether it is reasonable to suggest that other animals
than us, do have a sense of either spirituality or religiosity and there's very invigorated
debate going on. You know, Jane Goodall was the very first
person to suggest, as far as I'm aware, that chimpanzees may be spiritual. But this is continued over decades. This is not my view. I am not suggesting that chimpanzees are spiritual
or religious. Where I come in is suggesting that their behavior
is an evolutionary platform, so that what we see in our closest living relative gives
us and understanding of the building blocks of what later became our religiosity. So, we know that chimpanzees, for example
at a waterfall, can show what we might understand as a sense of awe and wonder. We know that chimpanzees can take the perspective
of another through theory of mind. We know that they can show empathy, compassion,
that they have their own rituals and their own rules. And so I think that we wouldn't be where we
are today without our primate past, which includes, of course, not only living apes,
but what we'll talk about later I imagine, other human ancestors. Early Homo sapiens, Neanderthals. So, just as culture evolved, language evolved
and technology evolved, I believe that that human religious imagination evolved. So, Steve, part of what we're doing here is
trying to think about behavior and think about evolution and sort of how they can play off
of each other, and I know that the field of evolution in psychology is dedicated to trying
to make those kinds of connections precise. Can you just give us a sense of what evolutionary
psychology actually does and how it can give insight into these kinds of issues? Well, the brain, like other complex organs,
owes its non-random organization to natural selection. That if there are circuits in the brain that
accomplish improbable feats, then natural selection is the explanation for how they
got wired up the way they are. And we're going to ask of various psychological
features whether they are adaptations. That is, whether they increased the chances
of reproduction in our ancestors. For a lot of psychological features that's
pretty straightforward to do. It's no mystery why we see in stereo, because
it's a ... for many reasons, highly adaptive to get a sense of the third dimension. Why we're repulsed by kinds of substances
that are likely to carry disease. Why we find certain partners sexually attractive. For religion, it's a religious belief. For supernatural belief, it's not so obvious. I don't think there's any accepted theory
that religious belief, per se, is an adaptation. Rather, it can be a by-product of other adaptations. In particular, the ability to attribute minds
to other people. We can't literally get inside people's heads. A mind is invisible, colorless, odorless,
tasteless, but we couldn't survive as social beings unless we assume that other people
had minds as we do. We interpret their behavior in terms of their
beliefs and desires. From there it may be a short step to attribute
minds to entities that aren't other human beings, such as to trees and rivers and the
wind, in which case we call it animism. We attribute minds to inanimate entities,
to our own artifacts, in which case we call it idolatry. Or to no hunk of matter in particular, in
which we call it ... in case we call it spiritualism. Disembodied souls and spirits and father-like
entities that don't have any material existence, but have this thing that we naturally attribute
to one another. So it would be an extension. One would then have to explain why the adaptation
of attributing minds to others, sometimes called theory of mind, or mentalizing or mind
reading, or intuitive psychology, why should be so easy to overextend it to entities that
aren't in fact brains. And there, part of the answer comes from experience,
what kind of input do we have in living our lives that makes this belief congenial and
a number of anthropologists have pointed out that before the advent of modern neuroscience,
the idea that minds can exist independently of brains was not so farfetched. There's actually some compelling and empirical
data. Edward Tyler I think was the originator of
this observation, that when we dream for example, it's apparent that some part of us is up and
about, walking around in the world and our body's in bed the whole time. A natural hypothesis is that our ... some
locus of experience is not wedded to the body, but can part company from it. Or in death, if someone suddenly collapses,
they may look identical to the way they were a few minutes ago, but something seems to
have left their body that animated shortly beforehand. And reflections in still water, shadows, seem
to capture the essence of a person, including their activity, their expressions, their goal
directed actions. And again, divorced from the actual hunk of
flesh. If you're in a trance from lack of sleep,
or a fever, or a drug, again, the experience is that your mind can part company from your
body. So, if you combine those experiences with
our natural habit of attributing minds, it's not farfetched to think that minds can exist
separately from bodies. Now we know better. We know that the brain is the locus of experience,
that there are many ways in which the brain can be vulnerable to illusions, dreaming being
an obvious case. There's brain activity when we're asleep and
that's why we experience things. But, before modern neuroscience, it wasn't
such a crazy belief. One other ingredient is that we depend for
our beliefs on other people, on experts.i believe a lot of things that I have no basis
for believing in my own experience. Like quantum physics. Yeah, like superstrings. I really believe-
You believe in superstrings? I do, because very smart people tell me that
they exist and I trust them. I don't say they exist. They may exist. That they may exist. I give some non-zero probability of that. That opens up a niche for people to market
all kinds of beliefs about unobservable entities including gods and messiahs, and devils and
so on, and a whole set of questions which I won't talk about now is, what are the incentives
for the purveyors of supernatural beliefs? What's in it for them to get other people
to believe in gods and souls and spirits. There are plenty of reasons, but that's the
other part of the story. Now presume the overactive assigning of agency
out to the world is better than an underactive version of it, right? If you're walking around and there's a rock
and you happen to think that it has a mind, so be it, but if you're walking around and
there's a snake and you don't think it has a mind, you don't think it can attack you,
that's probably not a good thing. So, evolutionary speaking, presumably this
overactive assigning of agency has adaptive value. Possibly. It's not so clear. If it involves making sacrifices that are
ultimately irrational, if it involves being manipulated by others, maybe not. But it may just be that the overall benefit
of being able to attribute minds outweighs the cost in cases where others can exploit
us. In the case of animals, of course, animals
actually do have minds so it's not such a crazy thing. Indeed, a lot of ... In some hunter-gatherer
peoples, they do attribute enormous amounts of intentionality to the animals they hunt
and with good reason, 'cause the animals really are trying to escape them for the same reason
that we try to escape from threats. So, that degree of extension is not so farfetched. It's when it comes to rocks and rivers and
mountains and trees and wind, that it becomes more problematic. Right. So, Lisa, what is your view in terms of are
we at some level wired for belief, or is that not an important part of the equation? I think it is actually. When we say ... When you ask are we wired
for beliefs, I think that that can mean a couple of different things, right? So, in a sense, you could say, well, all brains,
actually every brain on this planet, to some extent, is wired to make predictions about
what's going to happen next based on what's happened in the past. So, brains are not wired to react to things
in the world, they're wired to predict. It's metabolically efficient to predict. Physiologically, most of the biological systems
we have in the body are predictive to some extent. And so, if you mean ... A lot of people talk
about predictions where ... When I say prediction I mean, our brains for example, change the
firing of their own neurons in advance of sensory input arriving to the brain. That's how you're understanding the words
that I'm speaking to you right now. You've had a lifetime of experience of patterns,
encoding patterns of what these sounds refer to and the patterns in their temporal contingencies. All brains work like this and if you believe
that a prediction is like a belief, which scientists do write about predictions this
way, as if they are beliefs or explanations that are preemptively offered to anticipate
and explain incoming sensory inputs, then yes, we are wired. Another way in which we're wired, you could
say, is that- But that's for belief in things presumably
that are demonstrably true. That's belief in any case, right? So, the idea that the brain is wired for prediction
as opposed to reaction, is a general explanation, it's a general computational approach to understanding
meaning making of any sort. So, that means making meaning of fluctuating
changes in light, which you experience as sights, as vision. It's making meaning of fluctuating changes
in air pressure, which you experience as sounds. And it's also making meaning of changes that
happen longer ... longer temporal sensory changes which we would think of as an episode
or an event. Little infant brains, you know, newborn brains
... A newborn brain is not like a miniature adult brain. It's not completely ... it's wiring isn't
completely finished and we ... So, what infants are doing to some extent, is they're waiting
for a set of wiring instructions from the world. The brain expects certain inputs in order
for it to wire itself normally and it wires itself both to the physical circumstances
it grows up in, but also to social circumstances it grows up in. We encourage ... So, that's sort of the normal
aspect of brain development that's related to being wired for belief, but we also wire
our children for belief in other ways. We indulge them. In our culture, we indulge them in believing
in animacy of their blankets and their little cars and their little toys and some people
in this room might believe that their cars have minds, right? So, we do ... that's another way in which
brains can become wired for belief in the sense of development actually influences the
wiring of the brain. Then there, we could also talk about feelings
as the root of belief. That to some extent feeling is believing. When you believe ... When you feel something
very strongly, you are more likely to believe it and feeling is at the core of the wiring
of our brains, and really you could argue most mammalian brains. Some people would like to make that argument,
pull that argument even earlier. I'm going to come back to that in a for Zoran,
you've spent some time studying the human brain. Do you feel that there's evidence that we're
... there's an internal physiological predilection for religious belief? Yeah, I wouldn't so much ... Yes. As much as brain is I think organized to be
conscious, it's organized for spiritual experiences and indirectly for beliefs just as Steve and
Lisa pointed out. I think something happened to us, to our species,
right? We don't know when, maybe 3000 years ago,
5000 years, maybe longer. Suddenly, we became conscious. We became conscious in very unique way. It's not just we have experience, or that
we have conscious experience, but we know that we are conscious. We have implicit knowing that we are conscious. We have an expression of religiosity going
as far as we have records, you know, around 3000 years ago, maybe longer actually, but
we don't have records any more of that, that people were really trying to figure out what
is this thing. We're conscious, what is it? Who is this person who is conscious? What is it that's conscious inside us. And also, what is this universe? The way it appears when we perceive it with
the depth of our consciousness, not just with the surface of our mind, but with the deepest
part of ourselves. And so that gives rise to some very kind of
a deep core sort of explorations in the nature of human mind that we have records of. When we look at the ... What I personally
feel is sort of the innermost core of the religious practices, pretty much in every
religious traditions we find this, this unitary experiences, experiences of consciousness
itself. They can be either very deep mental silence
in which all mental processes quiet down and then there is either just complete blackness
and then within it, there's just awareness. Consciousness itself. Doesn't think, doesn't feel, doesn't need
to do anything, but it's aware and knows that it's conscious innately, directly. Doesn't have to think. Doesn't have to take itself as an object. Just consciousness itself. Then, that deepest part of ourselves, if it
wakes up suddenly, and within our experience, then the quality of our experience changes
dramatically, from this ordinary experience where I'm over here, I am limited to my body,
I'm limited to my surface of my skin, whatever my mind has constructed and learned over the
course of my life, who I am, what the world is, how to relate to each other, how I relate
to others. So, we have this elaborate self-world model
inside our head that filters everything you experience. That takes a break temporarily, however briefly,
and suddenly we experience that everything is one reality. One interdependent, but also at the same time,
one consciousness that seems to extend, that's the experience and encompasses everything. I think that religiosity tried to capture
what this is. When the theistic religion says that God is
simultaneously transcendent and immanent in all things. So, in all things. In this experience here that we're having,
right now sitting in this wonderful place, this is the experience of God being transcendent
and immanent at the same time. That is one way of saying it, right? I didn't look at it that way, but that's very
true. So, another way to say it is that we have
two sides to our consciousness. One side is mind that creates experience. The other side is awareness which is just
like a mirror. It simply register what is happening without
doing anything to it. The two are different. In this view, they're separated by the substrate
which is kind of like an unconscious film. Matrix. It actually exists in the universe, they say. I don't. What's interesting, what happens is when the
mind wants to find what consciousness is, it just finds itself. It finds attention, it finds intelligence,
and it finds vigilance, but it can't ... If it doesn't know how, it can't penetrate through
this unconscious substrate. And then it's basically concludes there is
no consciousness. It's just a mental processes, right? From the side of awareness, what the substrate
does is awareness can't recognize itself. It can't recognize what it is directly so
it experiences itself as a subject who is having experience. From that perspective, spirituality and spiritual
beliefs are consciousness trying to find itself. It's trying to figure out what it is. So, Barbara, can you take us back to the earliest
evidence that we have for that kind of internal self-reflection that ultimately we think may
have been the seeds for religiosity? The first thing I'd like to start and say
is that, yes, it's certainly true that we attribute intentionality to a lot of animals,
but the fact also is that they are intentional. So, we certainly don't have a corner on the
market of intentionality or consciousness or sentience or any of these other things. But if we're going to talk about the human
evolutionary trajectory, we know that our species is about 200,000 years old. Our genus is around 2.4 million years old. So the question becomes when do we start seeing
any of these symptoms, if you will. It's very interesting that there's a cave
in South Africa, Rising Star cave, that is the home of this human, perhaps ancestor,
but hominid in any case, called Homo naledi and apparently there were numbers of individuals
who were literally dragged by others into a very deep, subterranean chamber in this
cave. So, Rising Star is a very famous project in
paleo anthropology and one can watch often live feeds of the scientists trying to study
these chambers and they have to crawl through these incredibly small passageways. And yet, we know that approximately 250,000
years ago, people were disposing of their dead in very intentional ritual ways, going
through a lot of effort and a lot of energy to do this. The problem becomes-
Is that controversial or is that why? Beside the fact that they're bringing the
people to the chamber is not particularly controversial. The next step… But whether it was a ritual burial. Exactly. The next step is controversial because of
course we have this small problem, which is that belief doesn't fossilize, so we don't
know, and we have people, we have a chamber, and we have our minds and as we're talking
about we're searching and yearning always to figure this out. But isn't it the case though that it's ... the
people of ... anthropologists have already discovered, let's say Homo neanderthals skeletons
that are ... You know, they've been buried and posed in a particular way with things
around them and so, it's- Like in Sungir, right? Right, but we're going in a kind of order
so I'm starting a little earlier than Neanderthals. We have the roots of Neanderthal populations
this time, but what's so fascinating is that the Neanderthal burials don't come to a hundred
thousand years ago or 60,000 years ago in Sungir in Russia, which is a Homo sapiens
site just mentioned, is like 27,000. So, my idea is that, again, we have some glimmers
and some intriguing hints, 250,000 years ago. Now, let's just fast forward, let me leap
over many thousands of years, we've come to Neanderthals. They are not our ancestors. They are our cousins. We used to say that they lived from 200 something
thousand to 40,000 and then they went extinct. We no longer say that because here in the
audience there's tons of Neanderthal genetic material and many populations, except some
populations in Africa because we did not have Neanderthals in Africa, we find just as you
were saying, Lisa, that there are very intentional burials with all kinds of grave goods. So people didn't just stick people in the
earth. They marked the graves as something special. To give you one example, there's a 40,000
year old burial of a toddler in what's today Spain, with a hearth all around, 60 sets of
oryx and bison horns, a rhino skull. This was a place that mattered. In some sense we can think of it as a sacred
place. The question is, is there belief in an afterlife? Is there belief in supernatural beings? How would we know? We're imposing a great deal of our framework
onto the past. Keep going in time, we come to cave art. And, of course, we're familiar with the cave
paintings. These are not only early Homo sapiens, but
also in some cases Neanderthals. We do know that now. This is a relatively recent discovery, that
we are not the only cave painters, but what's fascinating for me about this is you have
these glorious depictions of animals that these people hunted, but in addition to that,
some very mystical and fantastic figures. A bird-headed man in Lascaux cave in France. A human that is part bison. Some other just wild figures. So this is not just people representing the
reality they saw before them, but rather there's an interest in what is not in front of you,
what is not just here and now. We fast forward one more time. We go to Turkey, to this particular, perhaps
temple, Gobekli Tepe, is dated to that period on a hill in Turkey. Massive 50 ton blocks that people moved onto
a hillside and carved with, again, elaborate, largely animal, images. We think this is a ritual space. Not everyone agrees. This is contentious. But in every single case there is a good argument
to be made for the possibility of the human brain uncoupling itself from the here and
now, to think about these questions of the supernatural. And we have hints. We have to go forward in time again before
we come to a really institutionalized religious system. But again, the reason that I think the human
religious imagination evolved because of all these earlier cues. Right, right. I think it's important ... I think that Barbara's
bringing up something really important and that is, we're all talking ... We're sort
of fluidly talking back and forth as if spirituality and religiosity are identical forms of meaning
making and they're really not. There are many, many ways to be spiritual. Some involve belief in a supernatural deity
with agency, but not all of them do, right? Some of them ... sometimes spirituality means
just being full of awe and wonder at something larger than you, that transcends itself transcendence,
like in connecting with nature for example. As Einstein was saying in his book. Exactly, and I think ... So, one way to think
about this is that when we're talking about the evolution of religious thought or spiritual
thought or we're talking about the biology of spiritual thought, we have to be thinking
about the fact that we're talking about different psychological features here. One has to do with connecting to something
in the moment that's bigger than you and that might transcend you. One element or feature is about explanation,
right? Another is about agency. And so those may not have all evolved at the
same time, or perhaps they're not all meaningful for all people, so maybe everyone in this
room has had a spiritual experience. They might not call it that, but they've had
an experience where they've connected to something that's bigger than themselves that leaves
them feeling awestruck, but not everyone would take the additional steps of trying to find
an explanation in that or trying to find agency in that and so forth. But if we do go and focus on beliefs that
do transcend just a sense that there's a larger reality that you were a part of and goes toward
a supernatural belief in things that science typically would not confirm, do you see the
potential for an adaptive value, for a progression that would lead to a brain that would have
a tendency to do that? It's hard to give an adaptive explanation
for belief in entities that don't exist. There can be an adapter of explanation for
the search for explanations which obviously are not infallible and they can be misled
by absence of evidence, by people who have an interest in promulgating certain explanations. I think what you have to direct the question
at not the content of beliefs that we associate with particular religions, but just in particular
ways of thinking, but ways of interpreting the world, ways in which people influence
the beliefs of one another. What are the kinds of things that we can hypothesize
and then what does that leave us vulnerable to hypothesizing which, from the perspective
of science, we know may be incorrect, but can nonetheless be very seductive to a mind
that is apt to think in certain directions. So what's your view say of those who've made
the case that the adaptive value is not so much in the actual belief in things that perhaps
don't exist, but it is from the cohesion, the group cohesion that that can yield if
there are many people for whom that belief is shared, then all of a sudden you've got
a stronger group bonding? Does that hold any weight for you at all? There is a folk theory of evolution that adaptations
are all for group cohesion because whenever there is some mysterious aspect of human psychology
for which it's not clear what the adaptive value is, people will say, "Well, it fosters
group cohesion." Why do we enjoy music? Group cohesion. Why do we dance? Group cohesion. But there a couple things wrong with that
style of explanation. I'm very deeply suspicious of the explanation
always says group cohesion. One of them is, group cohesion is not, in
fact, what natural selection selects for. It selects for propagation of genes. Sometimes groups, cohesive groups can help
the individuals that compose those groups, but if a group is too cohesive, you could
be exploited by the group. You could be cannon fodder. You could be a sacrificial victim for the
benefit, for the cohesion of the group. But any gene that would allow you to be exploited
by the group would be selected out because genes are selected much more quickly than
groups. Also, I think it's too easy to use our own
intuition that we like to bond over music, over religion and so on, but that is itself
a part of our psychology that needs an explanation. Why would beliefs in invisible entities make
a group coherent more? You can't take that for granted. That's as much of a puzzle to a psychologist
as… But we do see, we do see evidence of that
even though we may need to explain it. We do, although ... the supernatural beliefs
can also divide a group, needless to say. There are wars of religion and precisely because
they ... The content of those beliefs aren't derived from shared experience. They're not things that everyone can just
open their eyes and see. They're things you have to be told. And that means that if you're told by different
shamans or different priests or imams than you can go to war over those beliefs. That's why I think that group cohesion doesn't
strike me as a satisfying explanation for belief. Lisa, do you have a different view of that? I have ... yes, I think I have a different
view or maybe I want to add some information. You can be contentious. You could just like-
Believe me, I have no problem with being contentious, at all. Anyone who knows me, knows this is true. Here's what I want to say, that I think that
there is an immediate advantage potentially, which is there are two that I can think of
that relate to the functioning of a nervous system in the following way. First of all, uncertainty is tremendously
stressful for a human nervous system. And I don't mean stress in a euphemistic way. I mean it adds a metabolic burden to a nervous
system which if it persists can actually make someone sick and I think religious beliefs
can reduce uncertainty. They sometimes explain the unexplainable. Things that we now might explain through science,
used to be thought of as magic or as caused by a deity. So, I think in some ways it is not just psychologically
comforting, it's actually physiologically potentially less ... it reduces people's stress. It reduces their, what scientists would call
allostatic burden. Very simply, just step back one minute and
say, partly our brains evolved not to think and see and feel, but in order to regulate
the systems of our body. As our bodies got more complex, brains got
bigger. A brain's main job is to keep the systems
of your body alive and well so that you can propagate your genes to the next ... let me
just finish. I know you're going to disagree, but ...
Your brain is constantly running a budget for the resources in your body and it's not
budgeting money, it's budgeting glucose and salt and so on and so forth. And so, if you think about your brain running
a budget for your body, uncertainty just drains that budget. Drains that budget much faster and makes it
really harder for people. There's also, I think, a social aspect to
this too, in the sense that we are social animals, we evolved to be social animals. It's one of our major adaptive advantages,
to be social animals. But what that means is that we regulate each
other's nervous systems. We don't bear that body budget on our own. We have other people to help us do it. There are other social species, right? So, insects are social, and they regulate
each other's nervous systems through chemicals, through scent. Rats, and some mammals, add touch and they
might add hearing and primates add vision. We, as primates, have all of those ways to
regulate each other. Plus, we have ideas that we share. And so, there are many ways in which religious
belief can actually reduce the metabolic burden on the nervous system. Is there data for that? I mean, is there data that really makes a
convincing argument that religious belief does reduce ...
There actually is. I'm not advocating this, I'm just saying as
a scientist, there is data. There are data to show that people who ... I
want to say this, you know, I'm not negating any of the challenges or problems that religious
belief introduces to a fitness argument. I'm just saying that there is this other side
where there are data to show that people who are religious actually are somewhat happier
and healthier and have greater well-being. But that's because, of course, they're living
amongst other people who believe what they believe. Steve, you had a response again. Barbara ... yeah. I just really wanted to make the point that
we're actually operating in a framework of human exceptionalism when we keep asking things
like, was social cohesion part of the reason that we were religious, or did being religious
drive social cohesion, because, you know ... Why are we not asking about orcas, for example. Orcas are exquisitely cohesive and they do
things as a group and they regulate each other as individuals and they solve their problems
as a group and they manage to do that without God. And chimpanzees manage to do this without
God. So, I think that in addition to the problems
that Steven pointed out with social cohesion arguments, that they're thrown out constantly
that we can just look at the natural world and we can see that there are so many different
pathways for this. If we only look at our species and we don't
take this comparative approach. We're not going to get answers to these questions. Yeah. Steve. Lisa, I agree that are religious belief can
reduce stress but I don't think that that can be an explanation as to why it's adaptive. Because the fact that uncertainty leads to
stress is itself an adaptation, namely there ... we're missing some information that's
critical to our well-being and we're ... when we get stressed and nervous that motivates
us to seek out that information or to act in a way that keeps us safe even in the state
of ignorance. But there can't be an adaptation to reduce
stress by false certainty. That is, by being certain about something,
some claim about the world that in fact is not true. Because if I'm really nervous, say because
I think there might be a predator, and someone convinces me, no, it's actually a rabbit appearing
in the guise of a predatory cat, that might reduce my stress, but it's not an adaptation. Fair enough, fair enough. So Barbara, you gave us some history of where
you think this may have begun all the way back in human history. What's your sense of why it has persisted
for so long? I tend to come back to this issue of community
and practice. Because I think if we shift the perspective
from looking so much at belief and sacred texts, which we tend to do in today's world. You know, you put up a slide that talked about
the percentage of the pie in terms of Christianity and Islam and that's one important aspect
of this, but I think that for many of the world's people, there is just something that's
irreplaceable about that sense of community, that sense of ritual practice and that sense
of familiarity. And it is ... Sure, it's possible to try to
replace that with some other ways to find those same things, but there is something
about the connectivity that comes through the transcendence that I think is important. When you bring those two elements together,
the community and the transcendence and sharing that emotional meaning making. And one of the things that i like very much
about the people who are discussing whether there's faith in other animals is the idea
of breaking the link between making religion always be about text and belief. So I think that that helps us understand this
question a little bit. The idea ... I think about what Martin Buber
wrote, coming from the tradition of Judaism, when he wrote that all of real life is encounter. There's something that's particularly transporting
about sharing encounters of transcendence and I really feel it has something to do with
the persistence that we see. But clearly, when we talk about the spirituality
instinct, that's a very fraught term because of the secularization that's happening in
the world. If that really were to be considered an instinct,
how do we explain the tremendous transformation that we're undergoing? So people are finding humanism communities,
other communities with a different type of transcendent connection. I think there's a balance between what continues
as very, very strong tradition that carries communities forward together with new ways
of imagining some of these very same things that are coming about. The ways that people can experience religion
now. I mean, they extend into communities with
AI. They extend to virtual realities, virtual
churches, virtual connection, virtual mosques, but also the idea that we're beginning to
think just differently about animals and nature. We know Emily Dickinson's church, right? Well, we also know that one of the beauties
of the evolutionary perspective among many others, is not only understanding our own
place in the world, but our really deep sharing with other animals. And so, I think there's the possibility that
we are going to continue this shift of finding different ways of sharing transcendence as
I feel with nature, with animals. So does that transcendence relate to ... I
mean, Steven J. Gould, I believe once said that all religions begin with an awareness
of death. So, is that transcendence profoundly connected
with death or is it somehow independent of it? I think you've hit on an important thing. Part of my last six years of my work has been
very profoundly taken up with the question of animal grief and animal mourning. And I'm not suggesting, again, to be very
clear that animals have some kind of sacred sense of death, but they have a deep awareness
of loss, so that we find over and over again- Can you give an example? I mean, that's… Yeah, I can give loads of examples. For example, with elephants we know that the
entire community responds if a matriarch dies. There was one particular example in Africa. A particular community of scientists who followed
for seven days, a parade of mourners who came to this particular matriarch who had died. Her name was Eleanor. Not only her family, but matriarchs of other
families. Some stood vigil over the body, some rocked
over the body. Others showed distress. So my definition of animal grief involves
some kind of symptom of distress. Social withdrawal, failure to eat, failure
to sleep, some vocalizations. But it's not only the, what I call the usual
suspects, the big brained mammals like chimpanzees, cetaceans and elephants where we see this. My research is showing that we find it in
animals as different as collared peccaries in Arizona, chickens, all sorts of domestic
animals, the animals that we live with. And again, what I think is so important about
this is not necessarily that the animals have the same awareness of death that we have,
but that they feel this profound sense of loss. That is emotional meaning making and that's
where they enter into this community of sort of a transcendent experience in an animal
sort of way that I think is the foundation for this discussion. So, Steve, let me ask you. Transcendent experience, community, is one
powerful way of thinking about what religion provides. On the other side of the discussion, you've
got people like Dan Dennett. You got people like Pascal Boyer, and various
others, whose explanation tends more toward a mechanism. The spreading of ideas. The spreading of memes, you know? An idea jumps from brain to brain, to brain
and it naturally tickles certain receptors that we are naturally attuned to and therefore
certain ideas have a tendency to stick and spread, among them being the very ideas that
constitute religious belief. Is that an approach that you think gives us
insight or is that not a useful way of thinking about it? Yeah, because what puzzles us when we try
to explain the prevalence of religious belief, is not so much why people mourn the dead,
feel a sense of loss, feel it profoundly affects their lives because it does profoundly affect
their lives, it ought to. If you didn't mourn someone when they were
dead, when they die how could you have loved them when they were alive? That is, in a sense an easier set of reactions
to explain. What puzzles about religion is belief in the
Trinity and in hell and in 72 virgins and all of the other contentful beliefs that go
well beyond a sense of awe at the immensity of the cosmos or loss in the sense of death. That's where Pascal Boyer and Dennis Barbour
and others going to step in to why we're vulnerable to such specific beliefs as opposed to emotional
reactions to major events that affect us. There, I should actually credit Pascal Boyer
for linking the idea that we are mentalizing, we're apt to attribute minds to others as
one of the core explanations for why we are subject to religious beliefs that leads to
spiritualist beliefs. Right. So, Lisa, what's your view on these two sort
of poles, the need for community transcendent experience and perhaps something that just
speaks to the way in which certain ideas naturally stick inside a brain that evolved to perform
certain tasks and survive? I think that both of those explanations to
some extent are phenomena. I'm not really sure if you're referring to
them as explanations or just phenomena, are actually rooted in our sociality as a species,
so I think it's not a metaphor to say that we regulate each other. We do, in very substantial ways and in ways
that we're completely unaware of and part of how we do this is we create meaning that
is shared and realities that emerge only by virtue of collective agreement. What I mean by that is ... We're talking here,
for example, about grief and that animals, non-human animals feel grief and so on. Non-human animals feel loss, for sure. I think there's no question that that's the
case, and they suffer. I think there's no question that's the case,
but research on emotion suggests pretty clearly that there is no inherent emotional meaning
in any set of physical signals that occur from your body. What we do is ... humans, is we learn to impose
meanings on those signals, right? So, a scowling face for example, is not a
universal display of anger. People only scowl about 25% of the time when
they're angry and they scowl at many other times when they're not and there are many
cultures around the world, including hunter-gatherers who don't recognize a scowl as anger, for
example. In many cultures, and it's an interesting
question about why this is the case, but we'll just hold that aside for a moment, what we
do is we impose meaning on a scowling face, we impose meaning on a scowl and by virtue
of that meaning that we've imposed, the scowl actually literally takes on that meaning and
we can easily predict what's going to happen next. What I mean by this is it sort of works in
the same way as money works, right? There's no inherent ... Nothing that's ever
served as currency in human cultures does so by virtue of its physical nature alone. What happens is a group of humans impose a
meaning on pieces of paper, or little rocks, or salt, or barley, or big rocks in the ocean
that can't be moved, or mortgages, or any number of things and all of a sudden, those
things literally take on value. They can be traded for material goods only
because we all agree that they can and when someone moves their agreement, when people
withdraw some number, people withdraw their agreement, those things no longer have value. Well, emotions are kind of built in the same
way. Heart rates change, faces move, distress can
occur out of loss when you lose someone who helps to regulate your body budget and you
lose that person, you feel like you've lost a part of yourself because sort of you have
actually lost someone who's helped you regulate your nervous system. We impose meaning on those physical events
that take on that meaning. I mean the physical events take on those meanings
by virtue of the fact that we, as a culture, agree that that's the case. I think that in my view, this is partly why
memes occur, because ideas are contagious in a sense because we often as part of our
... one of our superpowers as a species is the ability to create meaning. The ability to create something real where
there used to be nothing real, only by virtue of collective agreement. We impose meaning on something physical and
then that physical thing takes on a bigger meaning. To some extent, I think we also do this with
what we think of as transcendent experiences. So, when a group of people are all together
having a similar experience at being awestruck or wonderstruck at something in nature, there's
an opportunity for creating social reality, for creating a meaning that wasn't there before,
that supersedes just the shared wonder of the moment and so, I don't see these ends
as really different. I see them as kind of emerging out of the
same capacities- So, in the remaining time, maybe we can just
focus on humans and on religious belief and maybe we could start with you, Barbara. Mm-hmm (affirmative). There's been a view that's been around for
a long time that as science progresses, it kind of pushes out the need for religion,
in terms of its explanatory capacities and so forth. Now it's suggested over time that the role
of religion would decrease. Do you imagine that that is the pattern that
will play out or is that a completely wrong and oblique way of thinking about the role
of religion and therefore what its future will be? Yeah, it's interesting. I feel two things at the same time. I do think that the increasing tendency towards
humanism and secularization is a very welcome thing. I mean, I did say that I am here speaking
as an atheist, as a person who is a non-believer. We certainly want to be able to think clearly
about science and about the forces that act in this world and we know, all of us know
that religion is not always helpful in that particular way. At the same time, I think it's really important
to think again about the cross-cultural patterns and the number of people in the world who
don't fall into believing in big sky gods, who don't even, in some cases, have a word
for religion. I'm not suggesting that that makes them different
in any kind of scale of intelligence, not at all. We know that all human populations have the
same capacities. But sometimes, just being religious is just
the way life is. It's so much a part of the era, of the way
that you live that it's not something that is going to change. I think these are two different ways of looking
at it and I'm not sure how to weigh them. I'd be interested to hear what other people
would say about that. Why don't we go right down the line. Zoran, do you have any ...
I think that at its best, it gives us a framework to experience the spirituality, to be able
to connection to something that's larger than ourselves. And so, if it fulfills that role for people,
I think then that's, you know, that it's its purpose. I hope that as the ages go, the science and
spirituality basically flow through each other smoothly. I think that for that, really we just need
more research in these topics. Lisa, thoughts on the future? I think I would stand by my descriptions that
I think that there are some advantages to religious belief, but I think there are also
some major, major disadvantages, some of which Steve has talked about and I think it ... From
my perspective it's probably about time to wonder whether or not the disadvantages outweigh
the advantages, frankly. Because there are other meaning making systems
that are available to humans to help them make sense of the world, some of which may
not have the disadvantages. They may have the advantages of religious
belief, but they might not also have the disadvantages. So, I probably lean more in the direction
of wondering how it would be possible to test that, to investigate that. Steve, thoughts on that? Several trends in the overall historical archival
of disbelief when there's a lot of religions have become more humanistic. They don't take their literal beliefs as seriously
as they used to. If you're a real, believing Christian and
that if you don't accept Jesus then you're going to go to hell, then you really ought
to try to convert people at sword point. And you really ought to slay heretics. You'd be doing ... It's like a great public
health measure. You're saving eternity of suffering in hell
for billions of people. But most Christians, no matter how seriously
they take their belief, don't try to convert people at sword point anymore. They don't have inquisitions and they're not
completely consistent and that is a kind of benign hypocrisy among many believers that
they fortunately don't act on the totality of their religious beliefs and that's been
a very beneficial trend. The institutions persist with the all-encompassing
nature of the beliefs, we get deluded. Another is that when people switch their religious
affiliations, the overwhelming tendency is toward no religion at all, so the world is
becoming less religious. There are two reasons why that may seem hard
to believe. One of them is that religious people have
more babies and so the number or religious people is actually increasing, and projected
to increase even as the number of people who switch are switched in the direction of no
religion. The other is that religious groups tend to
be more politically organized. So, the problem with secularists and humanists,
and so called nones, N-O-N-E, not N-U-N, that is people with no religion, is they don't
vote. Evangelicals all vote. I shouldn't say all. Something like 80% of evangelicals vote, 25%
of just the unaffiliated vote. And so there's a outsized influence of religion
in politics because of this organization. Our perception of the growing influence of
religion is in, not exactly an illusion, but it is pushed along by the greater fecundity
and greater political organization of the religious, even as the overall direction is
away from religious belief with secularization, including the United States, which was a ... for
a long time was an outlier that every other western democracy had become less religious
than the United States. The United States is now moving in that direction
as well. One final question which is sort of the inverse
of the topic that took up some of our time in thinking about animals and their reactions
and beliefs. What if we flip it the other way? So, a hundred years from now, or 500 years
from now, we get visited by an alien civilization and we show them what we've learned in math
and physics and they nod their tentacles and they ... you know, we're all sort of good. But then we show them our religious beliefs. Do you think that they'll look at that and
say, "Yeah, yeah, we get it. You know, we've got out Jesus too." Or will they be completely baffled as to what
this thing called religion is? Barbara, thoughts on that? Wild speculation. I have no idea the answer to that question. Fair enough. If I had to guess, I would guess baffled. I think that if you think about how 500 years
ago, we didn't know much about electromagnetism right? And now, we can go all kinds of things with
and we can actually entertain ourselves with. Well, think of the aliens come and they understand
the function of consciousness in the universe, right? And they can use consciousness that we use
for all kinds of things. It's not any kind of mysterious thing for
them. That's I think where it's going. Lisa? I don't think they'll be baffled and I don't
think that they'll necessarily share ... I mean, I'm just ... I'm not even speculating,
I'm imagining. I think that they will see it as part of the
evolutionary trajectory of ... Or evolutionary development of a species and maybe something
that was a necessary step along the way, but became unnecessary at a certain point. Final thoughts on that one, Steve? I tend to agree there. It may be similar to our attitudes towards
the animistic beliefs of people that we've come across. We can ... or an intelligible but we might
consider them obsolete. Do you think that they will have had a similar
evolutionary trajectory? I know there ... Is this an intrinsic part
of the way in which a living system would evolve that can survive that will necessarily
ascribe agency in the world and tell stories about what those agents do and the role that
they play or is this some peculiar thing that happened to the human species? A great question, a profound one, but I suspect
that ... I guess the question is, does sociality depend on reciprocal mentalizing, attributing
complexity to other creatures? I suspect it does, but a speculation and if
so, would there be enough evidence early enough in the history of an intelligent species that
it would not be tempted by over-attribution of cognitive organization to entities that
may not actually have it. Very good. So, one day we may find the answer to that
question, but until that time, please join me in thanking the group here.
