Why We Believe in Gods - Andy Thomson - American Atheists 09

dr. Andy Thompson negativity thank you how many of you here at some point in your life were religious believers of course most of us are why didn't my mind why did your mind why did our minds generate religious ideas religious beliefs and accept them why and what I hope to show you this morning is the answer to those questions we're getting tantalizingly close to a comprehensive cognitive neuroscience of religious belief robust theories empirical evidence and my plan this morning is to lay out for you some of the basics for this and then to give you some of the empirical evidence and to end on a historical note that I think both illuminates the past and the present and may tell us something about the future the way to think about my talk is that I hope to give you in a sense like a Swiss Army knife a Swiss Army knife of tools that you can take back to your community in the debates that you have with believers before I do that however I need to thank a number of people Dave for the kind introduction Ed Buckner and American Atheists for the invitation to be here today - Arlene Murray for some help with logistics for Tim Dix with all his help with the AV that you'll see today I also want to thank this man behind the camera here Josh timonin built absolutely and maintains one of the best educational websites in the world Richard Dawkins dotnet [Applause] behind him his partner Marie Norton Josh and marine have contributed to the material you will hear today and I particularly want to thank Richard Dawkins for the opportunity to work with his foundation but more specifically his work I think and I think this audience appreciates that when Richard Christopher Hitchens Sam Harris Dan Dennett ayaan Hirsi Lee when they published these books they are not only creating a sea change in the culture but they're putting their lives on the line people here know that there are others out there who don't share these ideas who are threatened by them and they really put their lives on the line for all of us I think we owe them an enormous debt of gratitude [Music] where do we start we start with Darwin Darwin's remarkable idea not only gives us the only workable explanation we have for the design and variety of all life on Earth his idea gives us the only workable explanation we have for the design and architecture of the human mind and in that architecture the pieces that generate religious belief basically you take Darwin's idea combine it with Watson and Crick with genetics and you have this this is the modern Darwinian synthesis every organism is an integrated collection of problem-solving devices designed over evolutionary time by natural selection to promote in some specific way the genes that produce that adaption let's look at us look at me okay the heart solves the problem of pumping blood hemoglobin solves the problem of transporting oxygen the lung solves the problem of extracting oxygen from the air at every single level of biological inquiry from membranes to mind Darwinian natural selection now this statement also I want you to look at carefully is also a statement about the human mind the mind is what the brain does and the brain evolved under the same rules of natural selection the brain is a collection and integrated collection of problem-solving devices designed over evolutionary time by natural selections to promote in some specific way the genes that built that adaption Steven Pinker has analogy that the human mind is like the Apollo spacecraft this compact collection of engineering devices solving a constant stream of problems only a few of them conscious to the astronauts you're sitting there now I'm on your retina upside-down in two dimensions specific adaptions are turning that into a three-dimensional image you don't know it and I'll show you you're watching my face my eyes you have very complex social cognitive adaptations some of which I'll show you contribute to religious belief now the other fundamental is this that we are and we now know risen Apes not fallen angels we arose in Africa put aside our ethnic religious racial differences underneath our skins we are all Africans we are all every one of the six billion people on this planet we are all sons and daughters of a small band of hunter-gatherers that arose in Africa about 70,000 years ago and conquered the world we're the last surviving hominid you may not know it this is your family history over here the common ends down here the common ancestor with chimps and bonobos and then this is the hominid line australopithecines lucy panther AAPIs and then here we are homo our genus Homo Homo habilis Homo erectus Homo heidelbergensis home on the and earth Allah and then we're the last surviving hominid this is Lucy up here Homo erectus about two million years ago and us and notice in particularly the area of the frontal lobes this shows it a little bit clearer on the left is a skull of a homo erectus on the right Homo sapiens notice in particular the enlargement of the frontal lobe area in for evolution pretty quick period of time we evolved these frontal lobes Y and Y if you remember one and a half two million years ago Homo erectus left Africa without language went to Indonesia the caucuses really in some sense conquered half the world they had conquered the physical environment by million years ago so what was left what was the most challenging complex part of our environment that drove the evolution of us well the most challenging complex part of the environment was probably each other and this is the this is the origin of our complex social cognitions why is this important because religious ideas religious beliefs are just the extraordinary use of everyday cognitions everyday adaptations social cognitions agency detection precautionary reasoning that religious belief religious ideas religious beliefs are a byproduct of cognitive mechanisms designed originally for other purposes now what's a byproduct I noticed a few people taking notes reading and writing is a cultural byproduct we don't have reading and writing modules in our brain it's a byproduct of fine motor skills vision a language music is a byproduct a byproduct of language hard vowels and consonants put to rhythm originally the rhythm of a beating heart and this is the essence of what religions are religions are byproducts of cognitive mechanisms everyday cognitive mechanisms the created and arise really as an artifact of our ability to imagine social worlds they're always always every religious idea is a human concept with some slight alteration now how many of you here love Big Mac meals now come on I'm a psychiatrist you can tell me you know it's confidential information is protected by HIPAA rules you can tell how many of you love Big Macs come on of course of course how many of you how many of you have cravings for broccoli cravings for broccoli I mean you can see there's variation in a species but there's very few alright why the reason for this is that if you understand the psychology of the Big Mac meal you understand the psychology of religion we have I'm serious let me show you this ok we evolved adaptations for things that were crucial and rare sugars of ripe fruit fat of lean game meat of salt those were crucial adaptations in our past and the modern world creates a novel form of it that comes from those adaptations but hi Jackson was supernormal stimuli ok not ripe fruit but a coca-cola not lean game meat but you know fat hamburger french fries soaked in in meat juice and it creates these supernormal stimuli but they're based on ancient adaptations let me just take you now on a little bit of a tour of some of these cognitive mechanisms the first is decoupled cognition now this is a fancy word for we can decouple our cognition in time since I have been talking I will guarantee you that everybody in this room has thought of while you're listening to me and paying close attention you have thought of a conversation you have had with somebody in the past or you are thinking about a conversation you're going to have with somebody later on today as I'm talking right now every one of us in this room can imagine and conduct in our heads a conversation with President Obama ok it is as you can see it's extraordinary and it's crucial for memory for planning absolutely one of the essences of our humanity it allows us these complex interact with unseen others complex social interactions with unseen others you can see that it's just one little step to you know communicating with a dead ancestor I don't know about you but I'm getting to the age where a lot of those near and dear to me have died and I catch myself still talking to them it's one step further to communicating to a god or gods hyperactive agency detection all of us will mistake a shadow for a burglar we will never mistake a burglar for a shadow we have these hyperactive agency detection mechanisms if we were to hear a loud bang right now we would all startle and we would assume it was not an accident it was agency and probably human agency now you may reasonably ask well okay how does decoupled cognition interacting with another how does hyperactive agency how does that lead to supernatural figures though I mean - you know supernatural burglars okay how do you get the next level up from human to supernatural this your minds fill in there's no there are no lines there but your mind see that Square and fill in the lines it's called intuitive reasoning and it underlines the essence of religious ideas which are minimally counterintuitive worlds MC eyes now what is what is this it's an optimal compromise between the interesting and the expected and it gives us attention to resting and memorable things let me illustrate if I tell you that that big tree out in front of the conference center will do your taxes wash your laundry you know reprogram your computer you're simply not going to believe me but if I tell you that tree on the night of a full moon will hear your wishes and grant them you might be vulnerable to believing that not this audience but Minich you but you might you might be vulnerable to it because there's just one slight twist but everything you know about trees is intuitively in there and you fill in the blanks now think of think of the judeo-christian God okay he's everywhere there's a little twist of physics but it's just a guy and you fill in the blanks you don't even think about it B you fill in the blanks there's no violation of basic human assumptions he's a guy he can understand my southern accent in English you know all the all the assumptions about humanists are filled in there's just one little twist and all religious ideas have these supernatural templates they have a counterintuitive physical property like you know God is everywhere a counterintuitive may have a counterintuitive piece of biology the virgin birth but Mary is otherwise just a girl counterintuitive psychology you know god knows what I'm thinking but if he knows what I'm thinking why do I still have to pray to him why do I still have to talk to him because again those basic assumptions about humanists are all still intact that's why we believe it that's why we'll we'll start to accept it and that's why it sticks in our heads there's always always the attribution of mental states human mental states look at any religious idea you know go back to your college courses think about any religious system any religious ideas you know of and they fit this model now we see this most clearly some of these vulnerabilities in children and I mean we're all children grown-up children from very early on or common-sense doulas what does this mean means you can take a five-month-old and you can have a box you can arrange for a box to move jump start like a person and a five-month-old will startle you know a five-month-old doesn't startle when a human being moves in exactly the same way so very early on you start to see that we have systems that are designed for dealing with agents with intentions and goals and physical objects you know children know more than they learn we come into the world with these systems already in place it is natural from very early on to think of disembodied Minds now you can flip it around and you can understand why this is crucial if I required a body to think about that person's mind that's a real liability it's burdensome I need to be able to think about somebody and think about what's going on in them and what their intentions or goals might be without them present Jesse Bering an island did some fascinating experiments a puppet show in which an alligator eats a mouse and then the children are asked well does the mouse still need to eat or drink and the children say no the mouse still moving around no does the mouse think certain things does the mouse want certain things and children say yes you start to see that division half of four-year-olds if you interview them have imaginary friends so that we see that the belief in some life separate from what is actually experienced in the body is the default setting of the human mind another thing about children is that they are causal determinants what does this mean well any mind that is oriented towards seeing intentions and desires and goals is going to over-read purpose if you ask a child what are birds for you know to to sing what are rivers for for boats to float on what are rocks for and for animals to scratch themselves okay we over read causality way over read causality and purpose if you go to the Dawkins website there's a fascinating interview between Richard Dawkins and Randy Nessie and at the beginning of the interview it's fascinating they both catch themselves talking about natural selection as an intentional agent when they realize they're using intentional language and they stop themselves and so it's very easy for us to imagine again intentional agents that are separate from ourselves children will spontaneously invent the concept of God what you start to see are these mechanisms that were born with make us all very vulnerable to religious ideas religious ideas are much easier its disbelief it's truly understanding say something like natural selection that is cognitively a little bit harder decoupled cognition hyperactive agency minimally an intuitive world promiscuous teleology starting to build this this list of cognitive mechanisms now we'll turn to the attachment mechanism the attachment mechanism in humans was laid out by psychiatrist John Bowlby in England and Mary Ainsworth the psychologists here and the attachment system is the fundamental caretaking system in mammals and think about religions you're in distress what do you do you've turned to a caretaker you turn to an attachment figure Alan Walker the great paleoanthropologist has this absolutely haunting story in his book about the Turkana boy and they found this 1.7 million year old fossil of an adult woman an adult Homo erectus woman 1.7 million years old and she had died of severe vitamin A poisoning which would have meant that she was hemorrhaging into her joints pain couldn't move it's a terrible way to die a closer inspection they noticed that there was a new bone growth and it immediately caught him they suddenly realized that this woman 1.7 million years ago had lived for months and that it meant that somebody was taking care of her bringing her food and water protecting her from predators you know sitting with her through the long dark dangerous nights in the savannas so you see this attachment system you know in our species or in our ancestors 1.7 million years ago the attachment system is both crucial to belief but what I want to show you is the attachment system is one of the things that makes it very hard to give up belief and we see this illustrated in Darwin's life remember Darwin went on the voyage of the Beagle 1831 to 1836 he comes home and his eyes his ideas are starting to gel John Gould tells him his finches are you know species that have never been seen before and he's realizes that species are not immutable he starts to think about evolution opens his notebooks this was his original a tree of life and sees that man may arise from animals and there is no need for any deity remember he went on the voyage of the Beagle as a creationist this is what he writes in his notebook in 1837 okay he's engaged to Emma Wedgwood his first cousin he realizes his species change they evolved but he doesn't have a mechanism then in September of 1838 he reads malthus's essay and he gets his idea he sees the mechanism the struggle for existence at September 1838 somewhere in that fall he told his fiancee in November he gets the first of these kind of letters she was distressed and she said this kind of thinking might cause a painful void between us they're married in January of 1839 in February of 1839 she writes him another letter after his death this letter was discovered and on the bottom in his own hand is written you don't know how many times I have cried over this by the 1840s Darwin is walking Emma and the children to the church on Sunday mornings stopping at the gate they go into church he goes off on a walk and it is reasonable to think that it is the the concern about his wife's reaction the potential rupture of that bond that's one of the things that led Darwin to sit on his idea for 20 years and we see this fear of loss of attachment even in one of the modern apologists Karl Giberson the Nazarene College physicist who is constantly talking about reconciling evolution and and and religion and he states it quite explicitly if he were to give up his faith he would lose his parents his wife his children fear of loss of attachment the rupture of that bond so we see that the attachment system is both crucial to religion it's one of the barriers to giving it up now I want to turn to theory of mind all of you here know that I have a mind like your mind with intentions wishes and desires but intentions wishes and desires that may be different from yours that you have to read these capacities come online oh I think when we're about three or four years of age now I want you to look at the picture of the left of bogart and then quickly look over in the picture on the right if you do that the picture on the left Bogaerts eyes are looking to his left when you look at the other picture bogart eyes are looking to the right but how can that be it's the exact same picture it's just flipped into a negative why to bogart I switch and what I'm trying to tease out here is to show you that you have an ascetic ated system when you look at faces you have a separate dedicated system that monitors eye gaze take a look at this for a moment and make a guess your gut make a guess as to what this individual is feeling right what anybody want to guess uneasy that's right uneasy okay what about this one playful its play it's playful now think about it for a moment you're looking at grainy black-and-white photos of eyes and you are making sophisticated discriminations about complex emotional states okay the women are a little bit better at it than the men but we can discern 212 complicated emotional states just from I guess if you're interested in this this is Sasha Baron Cohen smarter brother Simon baron-cohen at Cambridge this is much better than Borat but look at it and it's fascinating stuff and that again this is part of of theory of mind you probably can't read the caption here let me read it for you it says what do you think I think about what you think I think you've been thinking about okay and this is another part of theory of mind called intentionality with an S and it goes the first order is I think second order I think you think third order I think you think that I think fourth order and we can go to about five sometimes six orders and that's about it and you can see I hope we're this is absolutely crucial to social interaction utterly crucial and an again an extraordinary piece of cognitive software just extraordinary can everybody read the captions in there okay first one says I think he's very boring the stranger says I believe that she thinks I'm very attractive and the husband says I suspect that he believes that she wants to run off with him but you can see now look at what religions do religions again utilize this I believe I believe that God wants I believe that God want us to act with righteous intent fourth-order is social religion I want you to believe that God wants us to act with righteous intent fifth order communal religion I want you to know that we both believe that God wants us to act with righteous intent you see how religions utilize this cognitive adaption which is just an ordinary not so ordinary really good cognitive adaption is crucial to our social interaction now let me turn to one of the I think most exciting things that's come along in a long time just came out this past March and it is a paper by group of people with senior authors Kapo Gianna's this research comes from the National Institute of Health National Institute of stroke and cerebral vascular disease which I just love and what they did is that this is a unique study they took 20 men 20 women various religions and they put them in functional MRI machines and they read about a hundred different paired statements about religious experience knowledge various things God controls the world God is absent from the world God has views on marriage God disapproves of homosexuality God has ideas about marriage I mean there's just this long list and they put these individuals in functional MRIs and measure and ask them whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement and then measured their response if you're not used to seeing MRIs if you start you over here on the left that's like my right hemisphere has been removed and and you're looking at sort of a split brain you're looking in to my brain the right in the midline and then as we go down to the right the rest my right front my right right hemisphere is filling in so midline on the left and at the end on the right is the outer cortex and the patterns that arose were a a uniform God's love God's anger doctrinal religious knowledge and then experiential religious knowledge yeah in all these individuals the patterns came out the same well why okay there were three dimensions of religious belief that teased out God's perceived level of involvement God's perceived emotions and doctrinal knowledge and experiential knowledge all of this all of this was localized in networks that processed theory of mind theory of mind capacities and abstract semantics and imagery why this is important is that it's unique we know we've had MRI studies of Buddhist monks and some outliers but these are just ordinary people of various religious persuasions and what it shows is that the component of religious belief are served by well-known neural circuits circuits that we already know about which mediate these evolutionary adaptive cognitive mechanisms that religion is integrated into the brain using networks for social cognition they're not specific religious networks in the brain or specific religious networks in various individuals they come down on well-known circuits used in social cognition and this is I think powerful powerful evidence supporting the idea that religions arise from these ordinary evolved cognitive mechanisms used in social interaction and you've got to just love that this comes from the National Institute of Health now problem of dead bodies what do we do with dead bodies is he dead or is he sleeping and what happens when we are confronted with a dead body is that particularly if someone we love we've got a problem because there's a conflict there's a conflict between those theory of mind capacity that we have because those theory of mind capacities keep on going and the part of us the natural kinds modules that tell us this body is quite dead so the mind is alive the body is dead we have a conflict this is why when you lose somebody that you love you just keep on talking to them this is part I mean it's very hard because of our theory of mind modules it's very hard for us to conceive of our own desk this is why we plan our funerals as part of us a thing we're still going to be there okay and I had a patient a couple weeks ago his best friend committed suicide four weeks after he's text-messaging he's still text messaging his best friend okay and you can see that this conflict of theory of mind and natural con models module is the problem of dead bodies really dovetails with decoupled cognition these other things I've shown you and creates the the release and the idea of souls and the continued life afterwards which again is not I hope I've shown you is not that much of a stretch based on our evolved cognitive architecture what do you just do a gut check what do you feel when you see this man I feel kindly older brother and this is a concept that was discovered by Freud the concept of transference that we base current relationships on past relationships okay we set a grammar of relatedness very early in our lives how many of you seen the movie momentum okay it shows what happens when you lose that capacity you have to learn about social relationships each new time you can see how religions hijack these capacities for transference you know and particularly parental transferences so you start I hope to see how we hijack parental transferences and it also cues into the attachment system some other cognitive mechanisms childhood credulity as richard has said natural selection design child brains to soak up the culture around and a child can't tell the difference between good advice don't swim in the river with alligators and bad advice sacrifice a pig for the new harvest all of us are much much more deferential to Authority than any of us would like to believe the famous Stanley Milgram experiments that show that we will do things under the guide of an authority that we at another level know we shouldn't reciprocal altruism all of us keeping our heads who we owe and what we owe and who owes us and you can see religions utilize this you know if you sacrifice you'll receive something in return reciprocity this romantic love we have circuits in our brain designed for romantic love for intense focus and love and commitment to an individual and this cognitive mechanism is also used in religions think about Mother Teresa's recent letters where she talked about Mary and Christ if you've seen the movie The Painted Veil the Diane Rigg character the nun has this powerful soliloquy in which she talks about as a young girl she fell in love with Jesus moral feeling systems all of us have inferential moral systems that come online as early as Age 1 but it's very hard for us to be conscious of the origins of this we just sort of know it instinctively at a gut level it's very hard to be conscious of and this is what religions hijack and then they claim we wouldn't have morality if it weren't for them and they they recruit these moral systems obviously to lend credence and plausibility to gods particularly use these moral systems to link commitment mechanisms and you know to provide a competent morally competent witness and it helps us become conscious of our moral systems which are still you know basically instinctive I think this is a useful way to think about the difference between morality and religious morality morality is doing what is right regardless of what we're told religious dogma is doing what we're told regardless of whether it was right something that is related to this is altruistic punishment this as a cognitive mechanism all of us have we are willing to punish social cheats at a cost to ourselves all of us do it all of us have done it again crucial to social life suicide terrorism is just one step removed empathy now if I raise my right hand there are neurons in my left motor strip that are lighting up as you all are sitting there watching me raise my right hand the same neurons in your left motor strip light up exact same ones but you inhibit the response if I take my hand and I take this knife and I start to poke it in I'm feeling a little pain right now okay and some neurons are lighting up in my left sensory motor strip my thalamus and I'm starting I'm starting to feel pain okay as you are watching me do this the same neurons in your left sensory motor strip are also lighting up as I'm doing this all you've got to do is see me doing this and maybe a little wince on my face and you feel the same thing you literally feel my pain this capacity for empathy again crucial for social relationships how do religions hijack this this is a Filipino devotee who last year had himself nailed to a cross now I don't know about you but when I was a child I saw a lot of this and it really distressed me and I felt well maybe there's something wrong with me I'm kind but I can remember being distressed by this and every time that this kind of thing is displayed no matter how hard and you get to it at some level those those those parts of you that feel the kind of pain that would be induced by this torture will light up and you know religions hijack this capacity for literally feeling others pain to induce guilt and obligation another thing that we use are hard to fake honest signals of commitment how do you know I'm really committed you know why would you believe what I say I need to give you a hard to fake on a signal of commitment again crucial to social relationships you can see how religions utilize this all religions now suicide terrorism is another hard to fake on a signal of commitment it's connected with religious rituals and religious rituals tapped into another mechanism our threat response system they're compelling rigidly scripted usually have to do with cleansing and order and they enable rituals again I hope you start to see how all of these mechanisms sort of come together we experience them like consciousness is a seamless whole but they're really a very specific parts and religious rituals enable us to both demonstrate and have scrutinized are hard to fake honest signals they communicate intentions it's another way of communicating goals and intentions inculcate doctrines forge alliances create hope Salah entertain they are divorced from the original goal of protection they delimit sacred spaces and they exploit another thing that we're biased towards which is the gestalt law of the whole basically what this means is when you see a Flying V formation of birds you don't see the individuals you just see the formation the V okay the Gestalt law of the whole religions exploit this creating these attention arresting memorable and often intimidating spectacles designed again to engage us and make us tremble other other mechanisms that are involved motivated reasoning we doubt what we don't like confirmation Barnes we notice data that fits our beliefs mere familiarity and kin psychology and and this is huge in religion and all of us have mechanisms to identify and favor kin and you know religions hijack this just look at the Catholic Church you know the the priests or brothers the nuns or sisters the Pope is the holy father so I hope I have shown you and and this is just a you know a modest list this is not the complete list of the things that we have teased out the cognitive mechanisms designed for other purposes that come together to create religious beliefs religious ideas and make us vulnerable to believing them and passing them on so I'd like to end now on a little historical note that I think is interesting and may show the light to the future in 1918 80 years after Darwin had figured out his idea of natural selection William Jennings Bryan began what Dudley Malone called his duel to the death with evolution and it culminated in the John Scopes trial in Dayton Tennessee in the summer of 1925 only evolution survived Bryan did not Clarence Darrow put on one of the most spectacular cross exams of a hostile witness ever and utterly on devastated Bryan took him apart on this witness stand William Jennings Bryan died five days after the trial things remain quiet for about 40 years and then in the 1960s we begin a sequence of court cases starting the the ones in yellow are the Supreme Court cases and starting with the Epperson case which banned any bans on teaching evolution and then there was the pushback from the religious the religious the attempts to get creation taught creation science there have been 17 cases in major cases in the most recent being the Dober case and in each case science and evolution has won at the Scopes trial Dudley Malone who was an Irish Catholic divorce lawyer and who was Clarence Darrow zko counsel gave what is considered the best speech of the trial the academic freedom speech in which he said teach science teach evolution but he said there was no conflict between religion and science and if you remember the Dover case a Kenneth Miller the brown biologist was one of the chief plaintiffs experts and he said intelligent design you know was not science but there was no conflict between religion and science and that made it into Judge Jones's decision I think this audience knows that there is indeed a conflict between science and religion and if I have done my job this morning and if I've done my job well I hope I have shown you that we are on the threshold of a comprehensive cognitive neuroscience of religion okay and it deepens the conflict between science and religion okay not just the science of evolutionary biology which Darwin started but the science of the mind the evolutionary cognitive neuroscience which Darwin also started and it deepens that conflict and it is not long before any psychology textbook for a psychology textbook to be current and up-to-date it will have to include this cognitive neuroscience of religion and it's not going to be long before age on scoped or a Jain scoped moves to teach cognitive neuroscience of religion in a high school class in a public school and you and I know that there will then be litigation the litigation will be brought by the religious right and I think I hope given what I've shown you this morning that your feeling about that litigation is the same as mine which is bring it on thank you very much and [Applause] thank you very much given all the multiple systems making us vulnerable to religious thought and belief how do you explain what happened in our brains that we have what systems account for how we have challenged those other systems and become non-believers again I think it is going to be unique to every individual there's a narrative there's a story there to every individual but I think it is probably education and intelligence it's cognitively harder to reach disbelief and I think that's one of the reasons that the more educated individuals tend to be you know not religious the more intelligent more educated so I think it's a function of each individual's unique experience but probably also intelligence in education but I mean do you remember I just cured do you remember when and how you changed you want to say I mean I was a biology major and and had everything differed from what I was taught as a child and I had a little bit of help from my mother who was a devout Christian but she taught me evolution and looking at fossils from the time I was five years old and up so I kept going back to that say well if everything she's saying doesn't match what she taught me she's got the problem I'm the way I'm on the right path so I majored in biology to prove her her talk and her doing I found was correct but the words she just said out of habit were incorrect well thank you to your mother [Applause] there's been a lot of talk about closing Guantanamo Bay one tanomo Bay and I wonder if you can give a prognosis if you will of what is going to happen or what do you think could happen is this a bad situation could a weak breathing terrorist like in the book that you recommended the looming tower Guantanamo you create greater religion hitted we're more vulnerable to religious belief when we are powerless and and and it we're looking for an attachment figure we're looking for social community you know I'm sure the men coming out of Guantanamo are going to be more devout Muslims I mean that would be my prediction but so you would think that it's a bad idea to close Guantanamo to close it absolutely absolutely I mean the I mean it's a violation but that's a different main reason the violation of fundamental civil liberties I mean the basic principles that this country was involved with it's an outrage for those that are interested look in the New York Times a couple weeks ago where they printed the stuff from the Red Cross report about the torture of the prisoners it is it is just terrible thank you theists tend to use the same information and turn it around and say oh look God created the brain so that it has these exact places where belief in God is stored and we're all programmed by God to believe in God so God must exist they can turn that around pretty well how do you see that in those terms okay the question is theists say that God invented the brains that are that have got all these mechanisms my response in those arguments is actually Christopher Hitchens he has a wonderful thing about you know that God sat there for you know just in terms of our genus Homo I mean sat there for two million two million years with folded arms while people LED short brutal lives and then now just a couple thousand years ago in intervenes and with a couple of illiterates in the desert I mean it's just I mean that but Hitchens I think has the best response to that I mean because they neuroscience shows neuroscience shows the gradual evolution of these mechanisms I mean a lot of these social cognitive mechanisms that I showed you have their precursors as you can imagine in chimpanzees and and other primates thanks for the talk Andy it was great being devil's advocate and turning the situation around you use the expression that religion is hijacked many of our natural cognitive mechanisms in preparation for the next Scopes trial that you were mentioned could you say that based on the fact that if I was to have an MRI scan right now and look at the picture and then if I was going away and learn Swahili for a year or something and come back my MRI picture would be completely different my my brain would have developed to to understand that language what can you say from that evidence that it's actually religion that has created these cognitive mechanisms and we have religion to thank for our increased cerebral capacity I'm not sure I understand and understand the question let me let me give it a try it but no I if you went and learn Swahili and we're exposed to their religions your MRI would not be substantially different when read any sort of religious statements whether it's this religion and Swahili other religions here I think the same social theory of mind mechanisms would be engaged so I think your MRI would look similar is that I I was saying why why did I why did our brains develop in the first place was it that it just happened was it a natural emergent ability or what what gave us the increased cerebral capacity seventy thousand years ago before before prominent man Willie ended there were so the theory is that there were selective pressures to be able to negotiate social relationships better that that that that was the driving force was the was being able to negotiate social relationships better and then when language came on we needed even greater cognitive capacities for the expansion that language gave social relationships that's my understanding but I'm not an expert in that area what I'm saying is my idea would be that it was actually religious beliefs that the board about those that social adherence to each other know maybe I but again I'm not an expert ich thank you young I think it's woody when you had the slide up there of the evolution of Homo whatever we became from from from Lucy to Angelina Jolie you called Angelina the last may I suggest that maybe Angelina was just the next and there's another revolution to come and maybe one after that well maybe but my understanding experts is I think there's just simply too many of us for there to be you know you know a change and fundamental human nature that you know we're still in the modern world in our modern skulls is a stone age brain that fundamental human nature is is unlikely to change that's my understanding yes sir yes first I want that I congratulate you on a marvelous presentation I think it was very clear and almost revolutionary and helping us to understand how religion got here I was so impressed by it I was going to suggest I think it needs to be much more widely publicized than it even has been to date and I was going to suggest that a mechanism for it might be a computer program called let's build a religion and try to show using these various mechanisms how you can get Catholicism and Judaism then reformed Judaism and cannibalism and Oh well all kinds of different religious ideologies by invoking these various mechanisms that you put in different ways and I think if you're a little less full the religion kit just had a bunch of the world's great religions we could show how great religions can be synthesized by your mechanisms and I think it would help to profoundly inform the public as to how they got to the religious views that they have no no no I think it's a great idea No thank you thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

Views: 1,242,211

Rating: 4.7033734 out of 5

Keywords: Andy Thomson, Gods, God, Religion, Science, Psychology, Origins of religion, cognitive mechanisms, Evolution, Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins

Id: 1iMmvu9eMrg

Length: 54min 6sec (3246 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/PopAndLocknessMonstr]

Absolutely fascinating to me. Thank you very much for sharing.

[u/Chyndonax]

Just finished watching. This guy has solid and comprehensive theory about why belief in god is so widespread. Much more complete than any I've seen so far. Should be required watching in school.

[u/jus1haz2]

The blue is kind of annoying, should have gone with another color. Very fascinating video though!

[u/cyclopsface]

My own pet theory is that we have evolved the need to listen to our parents and look up to them for how to live etc. (for obvious reasons - this is why we have technology and culture). At a certain age we realize our parents are imperfect, mere humans like ourselves, and eventually we even grow beyond them as they get weak with old age. But now we have this vestigial need for parents with no object, so we make up a perfect parent: someone who knows everything and to whom we can always look to for advice on how to live. It's said that children think of their parents as gods, but I think the situation is the reverse: we think of God like we used to our parents. Of course I haven't watched this video yet :), maybe he says the same thing

[u/schawt]

Is it just me or is that a damn good quality video.

[u/itsinthebook]

Once upon a time the theory of everything included god. Darwin purged it. Christians don't believe in evolution, so they stagnate.

[u/ArtVandeley]

Completely offtopic comment, but the video lead me to richarddawkins.net and it really disappointed me. All you see are ads about his books and dvds.

I mean, come on, that's not what this is all about right ? The books, talks, interviews, publicity, etc.

I think it's pathetic to call your web a "clear-thinking oasis" and have half of the home page used for selling your work.