On the God instinct

On the God instinct

Posted on November 30th, 2010 by Frank Wilson

In a blog post titled The God Instinct. Some notes , Mark Vernon quotes William James: “Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see ‘the liver’ determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul.” Vernon then adds a gloss to this: “Only atheists don’t usually consider dismissing their own convictions on evolutionary grounds. Funny that.”

I linked to Vernon’s post on my blog and added a comment of my own: “Now there would be an interesting piece: using evolutionary psychology to explain away evolutionists’ convictions.”

I am not one of those who doubt the soundness of Charles Darwin’s explanation of how species came about. But I do object to turning his explanation into a theory of everything, if for no other reason than that the quest for a theory of everything is a dubious undertaking. Such a theory would have to be based on something other than itself, and that something could not itself be explained by said theory.

Vernon’s post was in reference to a book by Jesse Bering called The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. “Bering’s theory,” Vernon says, “rests on a philosophical idea that philosophers have, in fact, been questioning for at least a century.” As he further explains:

It’s the theory of other minds, the notion that we infer what others are thinking and feeling, because we don’t have direct access to what’s going on inside their heads. The argument is that we are so good at inferring the contents of the minds of our fellows that we tend to do it to objects that clearly don’t have minds at all. ‘As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owning to the weight of selective importance placed on our theory-of-mind skills, we sometimes can’t help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven’t even a smidgeon of a neural system there to generate the psychological states we perceive,’ Bering writes. It’s only a small step from seeing minds in non-living objects, to seeing minds in non-existing objects. Like God.

As a personalist, I think that the starting-point for getting at reality is the self that, deriving from the world, necessarily participates in that world. In other words, qualities that we identify with the self — consciousness, purposefulness, etc. — are also present, however rudimentarily and diffusely, in the composition of the world. Existence is necessarily and essentially interpersonal.

This seems less of stretch when we think of one’s relations with animals or even plants. But what about inanimate objects? Stones, for instance, which certainly seem to lack “even a smidgeon of a neural system”? Well, I have a number of stones that I feel especially connected to. I know full well that this feeling has much in common with what is known as participation mystique, which C.G. Jung defined as “a term derived from Lévy-Bruhl. It denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity.”

I don’t have any trouble distinguishing myself from my favorite stones, nor do I feel even a partial identity with them, but I do feel a direct relationship with them. From the moment I first laid eyes on them they seemed to call out to me. I think this is the way man originally encountered the world. As Jung also points out, this is “a relic of the original non-differentiation of subject and object, and hence of the primordial unconscious state. It is also a characteristic of the mental state of early infancy, and, finally, of the unconscious of the civilized adult.”

I happen to think it is healthy to remain in touch with this “primitive mentality.”

So, for me, what Bering sees as the source of “the God delusion,” I see as a sensing that ingredients of personality are present even in “non-living objects.” At no point, however, is this sense likely to cause me to believe in something non-existent. I know the difference between a rock and a unicorn.

I might also add that I don’t think any of us infer what others are thinking and feeling. We simply know immediately — intuitively, in the Aristotelian sense — that we and they are fundamentally alike.

Bering would doubtless see in this viewpoint some organic cause. But before he or others try to figure out what that might be, they would do well to figure out what the organic causes of their own viewpoints might be.