Religion played an important role in the evolution of our species. Many people still feel it’s important today. But it can also lead people to make bad decisions.
How do religions make people feel like they’re finding what they’re looking for in life? And how can that bring people’s feelings into conflict with each other? How do religions seem to give people the answers they’re looking for, but do it in ways that keep them from noticing better answers from outside their religion? Where does religion turn into religious fundamentalism?
ACT I
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Which came first in the evolution of our intelligence, science or religion?
Both of them depend on abstract thinking. The evolution of our abstract thinking led to people asking questions about the world they had no way to answer with facts at the time.
What happens to people after they die?
How did the world begin?
How does it work?
How can people coexist?
What should people do in life?
Every religion in the world is a reasonable answer to all of those questions that people thought of with the information they had at the time.
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Our intelligence evolved because chimpanzees climb in trees and live in groups. Science began with chimpanzees experimenting with the physics of sticks and rocks and imitating each other’s discoveries.
Religion began with their awareness of each others’ mental states and trying to cheer each other up. Today they lead to two separate bodies of ideas that in many ways are incompatible. But they both originate from a level of our intelligence that’s not only older than words, it’s far older than our species.
That means there’s no easy way to separate them. But the better we understand them, the better the choices we can make in how to interpret them.
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Religious fundamentalism is a big, commonplace, everyday life example of a problem that human psychology leads to in many ways.
In aviation it’s called a sensory illusion. It means a situation you get into that mimics the subconscious decision making factors of a situation that affected our ancestors, but that has different causes.
Your instinctive reaction to the decision making factors evolved as a good reaction to the situation that affected our ancestors, but doesn’t correspond to the situation you’re actually in.
You feel a simple example of it every time you ride in a car.
Why do you wear a seatbelt? When the car accelerates you feel yourself moving. But when you stay at a constant speed the feeling goes away. Does that mean it’s safe to take off your seatbelt?
No. It means that when you accelerate the fluids in your inner ear shift, which makes you feel it. When you stay at a constant speed they settle down and the feeling goes away. The motion of the fluid in our inner ears makes us feel ourselves moving, but our ancestors didn’t have anything like cars in the stone age, that made them move smoothly at a constant speed. The only thing that made the fluids in their inner ears settle down was to stop moving.
If you take off your seatbelt and then hit a tree going 50 miles an hour, you’ll be depending on divine intervention to save you, because physics will throw you through the windshield.
Things like this are the reason we need to ask ourselves why we feel the things we feel, and we have to be willing to believe we could be wrong about things we assumed were real.
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When you have a feeling and then you express it in words, what’s Step 3 in that process? What do you use the words for after that?
The words represent ideas. How do you use the ideas?
Metaphysics are the ideas that are the starting point for a philosophy.
Epistemology is the process for discovering new ideas.
Now we can see more clearly the conflict between science and religion. Everyone has stories about the origin of the world, how it works, life, death, morality, and purpose. Non-religious people think about all those things too.
The metaphysics of any religion with a god or other supernatural intelligence says that the motivating force of the universe is a being. All life forms have goals. That means the epistemology of a religion like that is some way of trying to figure out what that being’s goals are. But in the story of Being Human on Planet Earth we started with four simple mathematical patterns and we’ve followed them through physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology one simple step at a time, and we didn’t need to start talking about the goals of living things until we got to biology, since that’s the study of living things.
That approach to talking about the world has led us right up to talking about all the diversity of all the world’s religions all at the same time, where every religion is an answer to five basic questions people all over the world have been asking for thousands of years.
ACT II
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Religious fundamentalism starts with people expressing their feelings in words, and then assuming those words are metaphysical truths, everywhere, all the time.
That’s just selfishness. The world doesn’t always work the way you want it to work. Most of us learn that when we’re three.
The first problem is that religious explanations of how the world works are wrapped up with morality and purpose. The second problem is that they’re all tied together with assumptions about the personalities of gods.
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You can see the first problem in the way we use the same words to talk about facts and morality.
Is it right? Is it wrong?
You can do this. You can’t do that.
I could do this. I couldn’t do that.
Saying that something is right or wrong doesn’t make it clear if we’re talking about whether or not information is factually true, or we’re talking about a moral judgement.
Saying someone can or can’t do something doesn’t make it clear if we’re talking about whether or not an action is physically possible, or we’re talking about whether or not it violates a moral responsibility that people feel.
Saying that you could or couldn’t do something doesn’t make it clear if you’re talking about whether or not the action is physically possible for you, or you’re talking about whether or not you’re willing to do it.
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The fact that our everyday language doesn’t distinguish between facts and morality shows you how far down in our concept of normal thinking this discrepancy lies.
Our ancestors evolved their abstract thinking because they used tools and lived in groups. But the fact that we don’t normally use words to distinguish whether we’re talking about physics or morality suggests that for most of the time our abstract thinking and language were evolving, those two categories of ideas were separated enough that our ancestors didn’t notice they were lumping them together into one idea of things people can and can’t do.
In the stone age physics was the science of chipping sharp edges onto rocks, throwing rocks, and eventually tying things together. Morality was the structure of group living that resulted from how people felt about various things, and eventually, the stories the older people told younger people about parts of life that were too abstract for them to describe with physics as they knew them. But if you assume that your ancestors’ stories about the parts of life that were abstract to them were right, you assume those parts of life must still be that abstract to us, and that any effort to understand them better that doesn’t lead to your ancestors’ conclusions must be wrong.
That makes education a threat to some people’s idea of religion. Because the more facts people learn, and the more they learn about the connections among the facts, the more concretely we can talk about what is and isn’t possible, and the less we need to talk abstractly about what we should or shouldn’t do.
ACT III
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The second problem is that when you assume that how the world works is wrapped up with morality and purpose, and you assume all of that is wrapped up in the personality of a god, you make complicated situations that depend on abstract thinking much more difficult to resolve.
If you said that you couldn’t kick your grandmother down a flight of stairs, what would I think you meant by that? .
Maybe you mean she’s really heavy and you’re not strong enough. Maybe you mean you lost both of your legs in an accident.
I would assume you meant you were unwilling to do it. But why are you unwilling?
For most people it would be because of the sense of responsibility they feel for their grandmother, and to old women more broadly, and to people in general.
Or maybe you mean that you hate your grandmother so much you want to do it but you don’t want to go to prison for it.
Or maybe you mean that you believe that if you did Zeus would smite you with a lightning bolt.
This is not a complicated situation. There are many good reasons not to kick your grandmother down the stairs. As long as you believe in at least one of them, you aren’t going to do it.
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But what about situations that are more complicated?
A hundred years ago we could say that people can’t transition from one gender to another in the sense that we didn’t have the technology to make it happen. Now we do have the technology. But some people still say people can’t do it.
Physically it is possible, so the only remaining obstacle they’re talking about is a moral one. But what is that obstacle, exactly? Where do those people feel that moral responsibility lies?
Do people have a moral responsibility to individual people to inhabit a body they don’t want? Do people have that responsibility to society as a whole? Why? Do the people who make that argument really feel it would be too difficult for people to learn new names and pronouns, and figure out which bathrooms transgender people are supposed to use?
Or do they believe that their interpretation of what their god wants makes the facts irrelevant?
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How does that attitude fit into questions that are even more abstract? What does that say about health care or immigration or the price of college or our tax structure? What does it say about global warming?
If people’s fear about doing something that they believe their god doesn’t want people to do makes them feel that facts aren’t relevant, there is no amount of facts you can show them that will convince them to start talking about what the facts are, or even to start thinking about what the facts mean.
The same goes for people’s sense of purpose. If people’s assumptions about what their god wants people to do doesn’t make a disastrous outcome of climate change seem realistic to them again, there is no amount of facts you can show them that will convince them that the facts are real.
ACT IV
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Any time you tell a story, whether it’s part of a religion or entertainment, education, or the evening news, you’re faced with a trade off. Which is more important, the information in the story being factually accurate, or getting people to listen to the story? Where is the optimal balance between the two?
The reason religious fundamentalism appeals to people is the same basic reason religion in general does. If you feel that you and all the people you’re telling your story to understand well enough the things that affect you, it doesn’t matter how accurately you represent information that none of you can put to use in your decision making.
A large number of people who understand their situations well enough to succeed at their goals is more powerful than a smaller number of people who understand their situation better than they need to succeed at their goals.
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Racism is a problem with how people feel about other people, and how people try to make other people feel about themselves.
That takes a lot of people with a purpose working together for morality to fix. It depends on people understanding a lot about the people living in groups part of how the world works. It doesn’t depend on anyone knowing anything about physics.
That’s made religion a good staring point for the Civil Rights Movement.
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On the other hand, that isn’t a clear victory for religion. While many Civil Rights leaders were inspired by one interpretation of The Bible, the segregationists were inspired by a different interpretation of The Bible.
On the one hand, in the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament Moses leads the Israelite slaves out of Egypt. But then, the Book of Leviticus outlines rules for owning slaves.
In the first four books of the New Testament, Jesus tells his followers to do unto others as they would have others do unto them, and he overturns the tables of money changers for their greed. But he also gives his followers instructions on how to beat their slaves.
In the King James Version he calls them servants. But really, what kind of servants could he mean? He doesn’t say anything about warning them when they make mistakes or firing them. He talks about people beating their servants as if the servants don’t have the choice to quit their jobs.
There are no passages in The Bible where Jesus instructs anyone to free their slaves, or to free other people’s slaves, or where he instructs slaves to run away.
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What’s the difference between religion and religious fundamentalism?
How many more people do you feel you need to get on your side to succeed at your goals?
If you believe you already have enough people on your side, you can pursue whatever purposes you want and you don’t need to negotiate anything with anyone. On the other hand, if you’ve been using your religious stories to keep people working together but you need more people on your side to win, then you need to interpret your stories in a way that inspires your group while also leading them to common ground with other people.
If you believe in a religion, what are the most important parts of it to you? Is it a collection of stories about life that you share with a community of like minded people? Is it a way of trying to control what other people think?
Which things in life do you interpret in terms of your god making decisions? If someone else doesn’t interpret those things as your god making decisions, and that leads them to valuable discoveries that expand people’s understanding of the world, what should you do? Learn about what they discovered? Or discourage people from learning what they discovered?
ACT V
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Andrew Newberg has written 10 books so far about the psychology of belief. Another good introduction to this part of the story is his book Why We Believe What We Believe.
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Whatever you believe in, ask yourself: What’s the most important part of your belief system? Is it the answers people have found? Or is it the questions they asked?
Every religion and life philosophy in the world is built on the search for answers to the same questions yours is. What does that mean to you?
The story of Being Human on Planet Earth isn’t a story about any one religion. It’s a story about what happened when all of our ancestors asked the same questions about life, and then thousands of years later we all got to talk to each other.