Why People Believe in God An Empirical Study on a Deep Question

Humanist, Nov, 1999 by Michael Shermer

The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal; and apparently follows from a considerable advance in the reasoning powers of man, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder.

--Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Several years ago I attended a most unusual conference at the Santa Monica Miramar Sheraton Hotel in southern California sponsored by the Extropy Institute. Founded in 1988, what is perhaps most striking about these "extropians" is the quasi-religious nature of their beliefs, including an almost faithlike devotion to science as a higher power. Scientism is their religion, technocracy their politics, progress their god. They hold an unmitigated confidence that, because science has solved problems in the past, it will solve all problems in the future, including the biggest one of all: death. For extropians, the vision of a paradisiacal future of longevity, intelligence, health, and wealth, delivered on the wings of scientific imagination, generates a loyal commitment (a type of faith) to a method, a body of knowledge, and a hope for a better tomorrow. Given their commitment despite their secular world view, perhaps faith is partly hard-wired in us all.

Seeing the Pattern of God

Humans are pattern-seeking animals. Our brains are hard-wired to seek and find patterns, whether or not the pattern is real. Psychologist Stuart Vyse demonstrated this in his research with his colleague Ruth Heltzer in an experiment in which subjects participated in a video game, the goal of which was to navigate a path through a matrix grid using directional keys to move the cursor. One group of subjects was rewarded with points for successfully finding a way through the grid's lower right portion, while a second group of subjects was rewarded points randomly. Both groups were subsequently asked to describe how they thought the points were rewarded. Most of the subjects in the first group found the pattern of point scoring and accurately described it. Interestingly, most of the subjects in the second group also found "patterns" of point scoring, even though no pattern existed and the points were rewarded randomly. We seek and find patterns because we prefer to view the world as orderly instead of chaotic, and it is orderly often enough that this strategy works. In an ironic twist, it would appear that we were designed by nature to see in nature patterns of our design. Those patterns have to be given an identity, and for thousands of years many of those identities were called gods.

In his 1993 book Fuzzy Thinking, Bart Kosko suggests that belief in God may be something similar to what we see when we look at the pattern in the Kanizsa-square illusion. The experience, Kosko suggests, is not unlike "our vague glimpses of God or His Shadow or His Handiwork ... an illusion in the neural wiring of a creature recently and narrowly evolved on a fluke of a planet in a fluke of a galaxy in a fluke of a universe." The neural wiring in our brain creates "neural nets"--or the sequence of neurons and the gaps between neurons called synapses that together operate in the brain to store memory and pattern information. "These God glimpses or the feeling of God recognition," Kosko intimates, "may be just a `filling in' or deja-vu type anomaly of our neural nets."

The Kanizsa square works to create the illusion of a square that is not really there. The four Pac-Man figures are turned at right angles to one another to create four false boundaries and a bright interior. But there is no square in this figure; the square is in our mind. There appears to be something there when in actual fact there is nothing there. As pattern-seeking animals it is virtually impossible for us not to see the pattern. The same may be true for God. For most of us it is very difficult not to see a pattern of God when looking at the false boundaries and bright interiors of the universe.

Do people see the pattern of God in the world and in their lives and therefore believe in God for perfectly rational reasons? And if they do, does that pattern represent something there or nothing there? Or are there other reasons people believe, such as an emotional need, a fear of death, a hope for immortality, an explanation for evil and suffering, a foundation for morality, parental upbringing, cultural influence, historical momentum, and so on?

To find out, I decided to do what I always do when I want to know why people believe something: ask. I began my research by asking a random sample of the U.S. population--defined by a professional polling agency, which provided the database--if they believe in God, why or why not, and why they think other people do. The results were most enlightening. But first we must consider another issue: is the propensity to believe in God hard-wired, either genetically or in the brain?