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Doctor Andy Thomson.
Thank you!
How many of you here, at some point in your life, were religious believers?
Of course! Most of us are.
Why did 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
uh... 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.
To Arlene-Marie for some help with logistics.
For Tim Dicks with all this help with the AV that you'll see today.
Also I thank this man behind the camera here: Josh Timonen.
Built absolutely and maintains one of the best educational websites in the world,
richarddawkins.net
Behind him his partner Marine 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 Ali;
when they publish 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!
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, ok?
The heart solves the problem of pumping blood;
hemoglobin solves the problem of transporting oxygen;
the long solves the problem of extracting oxygen from the air.
At every single level a biological inquiry,
from membranes to mind:
Darwinian natural selection.
Now this statement also - I want 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, an integrated collection of problem solving devices,
designed over evolutionary time by natural selection,
to promote in some specific way the genes that build that adaption.
Steven Pinker has the 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 am 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 a very complex social cognitive uh... adaptations,
some of which -I'll show you- contribute to religious belief.
Now the other fundamental is this:
that we are, as we now know, risen apes, not fallen angels.
We arose in Africa.
Put aside are 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 are the last surviving Hominid.
You may not know it: this is your family history.
Over here, the common ancestor... down here, the common ancestor with Chimps and Bonobos.
And this is the Hominid line.
Australopithicenes, Lucy.
Panthropus and here we are, ***. Our genus ***.
*** habilis, *** erectus, *** heidelbergensis.
*** neanderthalensis and then, we are the last surviving Hominid.
This is Lucy, up here.
*** erectus about two million years ago.
And us.
And notice in particularly the area of the frontal lobes.
This shows is a little bit clearer.
On the left is a skull of a *** erectus, on the right *** sapiens.
Notice in particular the enlargement of the frontal lobe area.
And for evolution pretty quick period of time we have all of these frontal lobes.
Why?
If you remember, 1.5 - 2.0 million years ago, *** erectus left Africa, without language,
went to Indonesia, the Caucasus...
Really in some sense conquered half the world.
They had conquered the physical environment by a 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
eachother!
(Laughter)
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.
Religious ideas, religious beliefs are a by-product of cognitive mechanisms
designed originally for other purposes.
Now, what's a by-product?
I noticed a few people taking notes.
Reading and writing is a cultural by-product.
We don't have reading and writing modules in our brain.
It's a by-product of fine motor skills, vision, language.
Music is a by-product.
A by-product 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 by-products of cognitive mechanisms,
everyday cognitive mechanisms, that 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, it's protected by HIPAA rules.
How many of you love Big Mac? Come on!
Of course! Of course.
How many of you... how many of you have cravings for broccoli?
Cravings for broccoli?
You can see there is variation in a species.
But it is very few. 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 hijacks them with super-normal stimuli.
Not ripe fruit, but a coca-cola.
Not lean game meat, but a fat hamburger.
French fries soaked in meat juice.
And it creates these super-normal 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.
This is a fancy word for... we can decouple cognition in time.
Since I have been talking, I will guarantee 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 were thinking about a conversation
you're going to have with somebody later on today.
As I'm talking right now,
everyone of us in this room can imagine and conduct in our heads
a conversation with president Obama.
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 interactions 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 *** right now we would all startle,
and we would assume it was not accident: it was agency and probably human agency.
Now, you may reasonably ask:
Well ok, how does decoupled cognition - interacting with another -
how does hyperactive agency,
how does that lead to supernatural figures though?
I mean to supernatural burglars?
How do you get the next level out from human to supernatural?
This!
Your minds fill-in... there is, there are no lines there,
but your minds see that square and fill in the lines.
It's called intuitive reasoning.
And underlines the essence of religious ideas
which are Minimally Counter-Intuitive worlds: MCIs.
Now, what is this?
It's an optimal compromise between the interesting and the expected.
And it gives us attention arresting 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, uh... 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 believe in it.
Not this audience, but many people.
(Laughter)
But you might be vulnerable to it, because there's just one slight twist;
everything you know about trees is intuitively in there
and you fill in the blanks.
Now, think of the Judeo-Christian god.
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, but you fill in the blanks.
There's no violation of basic human assumptions.
'He's a guy, he can understand my southern accent of English...'
All the assumptions about humanness are just filled in.
There's just one little twist.
And all religious ideas... have these supernatural templates.
They have a counter-intuitive physical property. Like you know, 'God is everywhere'.
Counter-intuitive uh... may have a counter-intuitive piece of biology:
- the *** birth -
but Mary is otherwise just a girl.
A counter-intuitive 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 humanness are all still intact.
That's why we believe it.
That's why will start to accept it and that's why it sticks in our heads.
There is 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.
We see this most clearly, some of these vulnerabilities, in children.
I mean, we're all children grown up.
Children from very early on are "common sense dualists".
What does this mean?
It means you can take a five-month-old and you can have a box,
you can arrange for a box to move jumpstart like a person,
and a five-month-old will startle.
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.
Now, 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.
You can flip it around and you can understand why this is crucial.
If I require 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,
think about what's going on in them,
and what their intentions or goals might be,
without them present.
Jesse Bering in Ireland did some fascinating experiments.
A puppet show in which an alligator eats a mouse.
And then their children are asked:
"Well, does the mouse still need to eat or drink?"
And the children say "no".
"Is the mouse still moving around?" "No."
"Does the mouse think certain thinks? Does the mouse want certain things?"
The 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 determinists.
What does this mean?
Well, any mind that is oriented towards seeing intentions and desires and goals
is going to overread purpose.
If you ask a child: "What are birds for?" You know: -"To sing."
"What are rivers for? -"For boats to float on."
"What are rocks for?" -"For animals to scratch themselves."
Ok? We overread causality. Way overread causality and purpose.
If you go to the Dawkins website
there's a fascinating interview between Richard Dawkins and Randy Nesse.
And at the beginning of the interview, it's fascinating: they both catch themselves
talking about natural selection as an intentional agent.
And 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.
It's disbelief, it's truly understanding, say, something like natural selection,
that is cognitively a little bit harder.
Decoupled cognition, hyperactive agency, minimally counter-intuitive worlds,
promiscuous teleology...
...starting to build 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, a psychologist here.
And the attachment system is the fundamental care-taking system in mammals.
And think about religions: You're in distress, what do you do?
You turn 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 *** 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.
But on closer inspection they noticed that there was new bone growth.
And it immediately caught them.
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
sitting with her through the long, dark, dangerous nights in the savannas.
So you see this attachment system 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 ideas are starting to gel.
John Gould tells him his finches are species that have never been seen before.
And he's realized that species are not immutable, he starts to think about evolution.
Opens his notebook - this was his original tree of life -
and sees that man may arise from animals and there is no need for any deity.
Remember he went on board of the Beagle as a creationist.
This is what he writes in his notebook in 1837.
He's engaged to Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin.
He realizes that species change: they evolve. But he doesn't have a mechanism.
And in September 1838, he reads Malthus' essay and he gets his idea.
He sees the mechanism: the struggle for existence, at September 1838.
Somewhere in that fall, he told his fiancé.
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 were married in January 1839.
In February 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 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 twenty years.
And we see this fear of loss of attachment even in one of the modern apologists.
Karl Giberson.
A Nazarene College physicist, who is constantly talking about reconciling evolution 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.
With intentions wishes and desires that may be different from yours.
These capacities come online... I think when we we're about 3 or 4 years of age.
I want you to look at the picture on the left of Bogart
and then quickly look over on the picture on the right.
If you do that, the picture on the left Bogart's eyes are looking to his left.
When you look at the other picture, Bogart's 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 do Bogart's eyes switch?
And what I'm trying to tease out here is to show you
that you have a separate dedicated 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 and make a guess.
Use your gut, make a guess as to what this individual is feeling.
Anybody want to guess?
Uneasy?
That's right, uneasy.
What about this one?
Playful.
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.
The women are a little bit better at it than the men,
but we can discern 212 complicated emotional states just from eye gaze.
If you're interested in this, this is uh...
Sacha Baron Cohen's smarter brother, Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge.
This is much better than Borat.
But look at it. It's fascinating stuff.
And again, this is part of theory of mind.
You probably can't read the caption here, let me read for you. It says:
"What do you think I think about what you think
I think you've been thinking about?"
And this is another part of theory of mind called intensionality, with an s.
And it goes like this.
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, were this is absolutely crucial: to social interaction.
Utterly crucial.
And again, an extraordinary piece of cognitive software.
Just extraordinary.
Can everybody read the captions in there?
Ok, first up the wife 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!!!"
You can see now.
Look at what religions do.
Religions again utilize this.
"I believe."
"I believe that God wants."
"I believe that God wants 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."
And see how religions utilize this cognitive adoption,
which is just an ordinary -not so ordinary, really-
but cognitive adaption that 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.
It is the paper by a group of people with senior authors: Kapogiannis.
This research comes from the National Institute of Health.
National Institute of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease.
Which I just love.
And what they did is that... this is a unique study.
They took twenty man, twenty 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.'
There's this long list and they put these individuals in functional MRIs,
and asked 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 over here on the left, that's like
my right hemisphere has been removed
and you're looking at a split brain, you're looking into my brain
right in the midline,
and then as we go down to the right, the rest of my right front...
my 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 uniform.
God's love, God's anger.
Doctrinal religious knowledge.
And then experiential religious knowledge.
And in all these individuals the patterns came out the same.
Well, why?
There are three dimensions of religious belief, that teased up.
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 with Buddhist monks in some outlines,
but these are just ordinary people of various religious persuasions.
And what it shows is that the components 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 what I think powerful evidence supporting the idea that religions arise
from these ordinary evolved cognitive mechanisms used in social interaction.
And you gotta just love this comes from the National Institute of Health.
[Laughter]
Now.
Problem of dead bodies.
What do we do with dead bodies?
Is it dead or is it asleep?
And what happens when we are confronted with a dead body,
is that, in particular if it's someone we love,
we've got a problem because there's a conflict.
There's a conflict between those theory of mind capacities 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 him.
This is part... it's very hard because of our theory of mine modules.
It's very hard for us to conceive our own deaths.
This is why we plan our funerals, as part of us
thinks we're still going to be there.
I had a patient a couple of weeks ago whose best friend committed suicide.
For weeks after he's still text messaging his best friend.
And you can see that this conflict,
the theory of mind and natural kinds modules, the problem of dead bodies
really dovetails with decoupled cognition and these other things I've shown you
and creates the release and the idea of souls and the continued life afterwards.
Which again is not, as 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.
We set a grammar of relatedness very early in our lives.
How many of you have seen the movie Momentum?
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.
And particularly parental transferences.
So you start, I hope, to see how we hijack parental transferences
and how it also queues into the attachment system.
Some other cognitive mechanisms.
Childhood credulity. As Richard has said.
Natural selection designs child brains to soak up the culture around them.
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 showed 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 keep in our heads who we owe and what we owe, and who owes us.
And you can see religions utilize this.
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 "marrying Christ".
If you've seen the movie The Painted Veil,
the Diana Rigg character, the nun, has this powerful soliloquy
in which she talked about when as a young girl
she fell in love with Jesus.
Moral feeling systems.
All of us have inferential moral systems that come online has early is age one.
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 it, and this is what religions hijack.
And then they claim we wouldn't have morality if it weren't for them.
And they recruit these moral systems, obviously, to lend credence and plausibility to gods.
Particularly use these moral systems to link commitment mechanisms,
to provide a competent, morally competent witness.
And it helps us become conscious of our moral systems
- which are still 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 again is 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 the social life.
Suicide terrorism is just one step removed.
Empathy.
If I raise my right hand,
there are neurons in my left motor strip lighting up.
As you all are sitting there watching me raise my right hand,
the same neurons in your left motor strip light up; the 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 feel a little pain right now
and some neurons are lighting up in my left sensory motor strip,
my thalamus
and I'm starting
I'm starting to feel pain.
Ok? 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 gotta do is see me doing this,
and maybe a little whince 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 thought: "Well maybe there's something wrong with me..."
but I can remember being distressed by this.
And every time that this kind of thing is displayed,
no matter how hardened you get to it, at some level
those parts of you that feel the kind of pain
that would be induced by this torture, will light up.
And religions hijack this capacity for literally feeling other's 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?
Why would you believe what I say?
I need to give you a hard-to-fake honest signal of commitment.
Again: crucial the social relationships.
You can see how religions utilize this. All religions.
Suicide terrorism is another hard-to-fake honest signal of commitment.
It's connected with religious rituals, that tap into another mechanism:
our threat response system.
They're compelling and 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 in our consciousness as a seamless whole,
but they're really very specific parts.
And religious rituals enable us
to both demonstrate and have scrutinized our hard-to-fake honest signals.
They communicate intentions; it's another way
of communicating goals and intentions.
Inculcate doctrines, forge alliances.
Create hope, solace, 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.
Ok? 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 mechanisms that are involved:
Motivated reasoning: we doubt what we don't like.
Confirmation bias: we notice data that fits our beliefs.
Mere familiarity,
and kin psychology.
And this is huge in religion.
All of us have mechanisms to identify and favor kin.
And religions hijack this.
Just look at the Catholic Church, you know:
the priests are brothers, the nuns are sisters, the pope is the holy father.
So, I hope I have shown you...
And this is just a modest list.
This is not the complete list of the things that we have teasted 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 'dual to the death' with evolution.
And 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 devastated Bryan.
He took him apart on his 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 with uh... the ones in yellow are the Supreme Court cases...
starting with the Epperson case which banned any bans on teaching evolution.
And then, there was the pushback from the religious,
the attempts to get creation taught; "Creation Science".
There have been seventeen cases, major cases, the most recent being the Dover 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's co-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,
Kenneth Miller, the Brown biologist, was one of the chief plaintiff's experts
and he said intelligent design 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 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.
And it deepens the conflict between science and religion.
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
you will have to include this cognitive neuroscience of religion.
And it's not going to be long before a John Scopes, or a Jane Scopes
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.
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!
[Applause]