A dialogue between Juan, eminent sociologist, and Notsew, learned philosopher, concerning the latter’s new theory of religion
NOTSEW. I don’t think I understand your school’s position very well, tell me Juan, why do you think so many people continue to believe God exists when there is no evidence to support their belief, and a huge amount of data that contradicts the existence of an all-powerful Christian god?
JUAN. It is not so hard to understand, the reason is nothing but tradition.
NOTSEW. I have considered this, but if tradition were this powerful then it should have no problem convincing large numbers of people that we have a geocentric solar system. That belief is far less fabulous then the belief in a god, is much older, and is at least supported by common sense. After all, it does seem as if the sun rises in the morning, rotates around the earth all day, and goes under the earth at night. Further, it does not explain why Christianity, an altogether new religion to most parts of China, is sweeping that land, gaining thousands of converts a day. The tradition in China, going back more than a thousand years and vigorously supported by The State, is a paternalistic Confucianism. Why is it that the well educated Russian people, as soon as the state withered away (not in the way Herr Marx would be pleased to hear about), fled back into the newly reopened orthodox church, even though for three generations they were taught that religion is just the "opiate of the masses," or a giant bourgeois conspiracy designed to create false class consciousness? Tell me Juan, does tradition explain these cases?
JUAN. I must admit that it can’t. It almost seems as if religion is innate.
NOTSEW But it is not innate. I, and many others, do not believe in God, or any other such supernatural nonsense. And, anyway, no ideas are innate, only psychologically probable.
JUAN. What do you mean by "psychologically probable?"
NOTSEW. Let me give you another example of a psychologically probable. I believe in the existence of my computer. Why? Because I perceive it. I can see the monitor, I can hear its fan, and I can feel its keyboard, and if I had the urge I could smell or taste it. But does that necessarily mean it's there? No. Last night, in a dream, I perceived some shoes floating around in my apartment. Does that mean there really are shoes floating around my apartment?
JUAN. Obviously not. What does your dream of floating shoes mean then?
NOTSEW. That is not important, and it would be better if we let our Freudian friends analyze dreams. What is important is that my senses are fallible, that they can perceive things like floating shoes that don’t really exist. Yet there is no way for me to prove that there is a computer at my desk or a man sitting in front of me right now without the aid of these fallible senses. Therefore, I have no solid proof there is a computer at my desk, or that you are sitting in front of me. Yet I continue to believe you are there, and what's more, I continue to talk to you.
JUAN. Why?
NOTSEW. I am psychologically inclined to do so. If I seriously doubted the existence of you or my computer, I would be insane, i.e., abnormal. In short, even though I cannot prove the validity of my precepts, I am psychologically inclined to believe in them. It is my contention that normal humans are psychologically inclined in the same way to have some sort of religion even though their beliefs can never be proven and are often disproven.
JUAN. You will need to prove this theory.
NOTSEW. I will. When John Locke wanted to find what rights are unalienable and natural to our species, he looked to the primitive savages of America, and also to biblical texts describing the state of society existing among the ancient and primitive Hebrews. I will also examine primitive and ancient cultures, but my purpose will be to find what religion is in its rudimental form, to find the source of religion, and use this information to formulate my theory.
JUAN. Another sociologist, the great Emile Durkheim, did a similar investigation.
NOTSEW. So I have heard, but my conclusions are somewhat different then his. Juan, have you noticed that the Judeo-Christian god just isn’t what he used to be? He used to be quite talkative, and was fond of parting rivers, causing great floods, and causing virgin births. The old God even turned Lot's wife Edith into a pillar of salt (though afterwards, according to the Apocryphal book IV Irene, Edith continued to menstruate every month).
JUAN. Yes, I have noticed he isn’t as active as he used to be. You know, when you think about it, the old Jewish god was just as weird as the early pagan gods, if not more so.
NOTSEW. Voltaire, in fact, made a sport of comparing the Bible absurdities and those of the pagans, Ovid especially, in his satire, The White Bull. But now God is much more reserved. God now is attributed with far fewer magical powers than he once was. The powers God now retains are thus the most important to the faith of those who believe in him, with the others jettisoned away by most for their silliness. You would probably know better than I, what are the major beliefs that remain in the minds of most educated people in the West?
JUAN. It’s hard to categorize such a large group, but I would say two important beliefs remain: that God judges every man after his death, and that God is omniscient. The first is especially important to Westerners, who value fairness and justness so much.
NOTSEW. It would seem the first is more important, but the latter is really the fountainhead of the former. Without omniscience, God would have no way of finding out "who was naughty or nice," or whom to send to heaven and hell.
JUAN. I hadn’t thought of them that way.
NOTSEW. What knowledge within God's omniscience is important, anyway? Is it that he knows pi to an infinite number of digits, the lineup of the 1934 World Series, and what's inside a chocolate without biting into it?
JUAN. Don’t be silly, Notsew. To the sociologists of the Functionalist School, of which I am a proud member, God's most important function is that he knows what evil one perpetrates even if no one else does. One can never get away with crime in the eyes of the Lord. Or, as a rich European nobleman once said, "I hope the servants believe in God so they don't pocket the silverware."
NOTSEW. Juan! I am an atheist, yet even I am offended at such a low and unmeaningful idea of God! Is he nothing more than a very effective security camera?
JUAN. What do you think the important part of God’s omniscience if mine is so horrible?
NOTSEW. The meaningful part of God's omniscience is knowledge of a type impossible to mere mortals: the knowledge of what other people think. No human authority can have this knowledge, therefore only God can punish one for having evil thoughts (as long as one keeps one's thoughts to oneself). This, the power to read minds, is the unique power God has, the one all his others rest upon.
Finally, after much distilling, we have the essence of the world's dominant religion. Because God's power resides in his ability to read minds, most good and evil to him revolves around good and evil thoughts. To worldly authorities premeditated murder is the worst crime, the only crime in America that is punished by death. But the Christian god has no problem with murderers, so long as they are sorry for what they did. Instead his anger is directed at those who would deny his existence or doubt his power. In other words: thought crimes.
I’m sure you can show me how the other major theistic religion is similar to Christianity in respect to thought crimes.
JUAN. Yes, the Moslem religion is similar. Again, murder is not the worse sin, shirking is. To shirk is to deny the divinity of Allah by associating him with corporeal objects.
NOTSEW. In fact, isn’t the reason that only abstract art is allowed in Moslem buildings because anything else might encourage the thought crime of shirking?
JUAN. Yes.
NOTSEW. As I have just shown, the very base of monotheistic religion is the ability of God to read minds. And if the base of a religion is its source, then the source of monotheistic religion is the belief that God can read one's mind. From here we can conclude that the source of all religion is the ability of somebody, not necessarily God, to read one's mind. And if that is the source of religion, then that must be what man is psychologically inclined to believe in.
JUAN. I can find no logical flaws in your argument Notsew, but they just don’t convince me. Can you please provide me with some empirical evidence that man is psychologically inclined to believe others can read his mind?
NOTSEW. I don’t know about all men, but I certainly am, or at least I was. I can remember thinking when I was a boy my parents could read my thoughts. Later, in sixth grade, I can remember ruthlessly suppressing any sexual or violent thoughts I had for fear that a teacher might be able to read my mind. I am hardly unusual. The secure wards of hospitals are full of people who think that the government is somehow monitoring their thoughts. The Psychic Friends Network boasts it has over two million callers a year. Prestigious universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and Duke, have conducted experiments testing whether people have extra sensory perception (ESP). The CIA has spent millions of dollars on psychics trying to learn the contents of the minds of the Russians, and a few decades ago people were wondering what part of the electro-magnetic spectrum ESP waves were on! NASA even got into the act when it had an astronaut try to send psychic messages from the moon. If this anecdotal evidence isn't enough, I decided to conduct a small survey to see roughly what percentage of college students believe in ESP or other types of mindreading. The results were similar to what I expected. Around three quarters of respondents checked yes at least once when I asked them if they believed in the various types of mindreading; quite a few feared the psychic powers of adults when they were children like I did, and still more currently believe in the mind-reading power of psychics and gods.
JUAN. You have definitely shown your case that belief in mindreading is widespread. Why do you think that is? Why on earth does man, whose primary tool of survival is his power of reason, have such an utterly irrational idea hardwired right into his brain?
NOTSEW. To make sense of this seeming absurdity, we must now leave the fields of theology and sociology, and look to biology for an adequate answer.
The behavior of animals, whether they be insects or mammals, falls into two distinct categories: behavior characteristic of social animals and behavior characteristic of solitary animals. Though their behavior is regulated in very different ways, the predatory behavior of a pack of wolves and a group of piranhas are more similar to each other than the predatory behavior of a pack of wolves and a single cheetah, even though both the cheetah and the pack of wolves are mammals of the order carnivora, and wolves and piranhas only share the same phylum.
Man is without doubt a social animal, as are all other Old World monkeys. In groups of social animals, including groups of men, it is in the interest of the group as a whole to have as little intra-group conflict as possible, lest some other group take advantage of this conflict. Therefore, groups where most of the members get along well have an evolutionary advantage over groups where there is much internal conflict. How can conflict be avoided? Compare the success of Pax Romana with the failure of the League of Nations, and you will see that Machiavelli was right: fear is a better way of keeping the peace than love.
JUAN. But fear comes at a great cost. In Roman times it was high taxes to support the legions.
NOTSEW. And in primeval times, when man evolved, the cost of keeping the tribe in fear of the leader was constant fighting—
JUAN. Exactly what the tribe was trying to avoid!
NOTSEW. What if, instead of constantly getting in fights, the leader was automatically feared and obeyed by the rest of the tribe?
JUAN. Unless the leader was an absolute incompetent, the tribe would be very successful. But how can a leader be feared if he never shows his tribe that there is a reason to fear him?
NOTSEW. He can do it by telling everyone that he has mystical powers. It, of course, would be very foolish (irrational) to believe him, but as I showed before, this is a rare type of irrationality that is beneficial to the group, and would thus be likely to be propagated. The result of this would be each generation of men would be more likely to have an irrational belief in the power of some leader than the one before. Not just any supernatural power would do, however. He couldn’t just say that he can fly or can live forever, because even leaders grow old and lame. What if the leader could throw thunderbolts and make rain? No, this wouldn't work either, because as soon as there was a raid on another tribe and the leader didn't use thunderbolts on them, he would be proven a fraud, and all it would take to debunk the rainmaker story is a drought. Any magical power over the physical world can be disproven. This is demonstrated simply by observing that the belief in God's physical magic was the first superstition that the early Christians abandoned. For example, they used to believe he knew everything and caused natural disasters, but now most only believe that God knows everything, which is not physical, but spiritual magic. Which brings me back to mindreading. If psychics have so little problem convincing modern men that they can read their minds, how easy it would then be for a witch doctor to dupe the half-witted illiterates who lived in primeval times. I know my leader, if he had any sense at all, would decide to choose mindreading as his magical power.
JUAN. Your evidence is very convincing Notsew, yet I wonder, if the belief in mindreading really is an evolutionary adaptation to promote harmony amongst groups of social animals, then wouldn’t we find it in groups of social animals besides man?
NOTSEW. Unfortunately, I cannot survey animals to find out if they believe in mindreading, and there are no reliable figures regarding how many of them call the Psychic Friends Network each year. I am left with no other means of knowing whether they believe in mindreading other than observing their behavior and speculating about the results. If my theory is correct, I would see evidence of something resembling the belief in mindreading in pack animals, and nothing of the sort in solitary animals. Fortunately I do not have to do any field testing, as I have conveniently have a specimen of each type of animal living in my own home, i.e., a cat and a dog.
I have often observed my dog cowering as soon as I get home in the evening. He seems to think I can read the guilt in his mind and know that he ate the steak set out to thaw in the morning without even going into the kitchen. To use a less mundane example, observe the arctic wolves sleeping in one big furry group. All an up and coming aggressor would have to do to dispose of his pack's leader would be to bite the leader in the neck while he is asleep. But that isn't what happens. The challenge to leader's authority occurs in the open in the day while the leader is wide awake. Why doesn't the young Turk kill his leader the easy way? I would maintain that wolves, in an unconscious and insentient way, also fear that others can read their minds. I see no behavior of this sort from my cat, who assumes I am a dolt who can not figure out who knocked down a lamp even though she is sleeping on the dresser that was formerly the lamp's home.
JUAN. That was my last objection to your theory. Could you summarize it so I may have a chance to see if I can find another?
NOTSEW. Gladly. To maintain order some social animals have the belief that their leader has magical powers, specifically, mindreading powers. Man is one of those animals. The belief that others can read one's mind is the base of most religions, and because that base, for evolutionary reasons, is psychologically probable, most people refuse to abandon their faith despite the light of reason or the threat of physical force. And that is my explanation for the persistence of religion!
JUAN. If I’m not in full agreement with you, I can see no objections to it at all.
NOTSEW. I didn’t expect your full immediate agreement, because another trait shared by most members of our species is that while we love all the sciences that show us the wondrous laws by which nature works, we resist accepting the fact that we are part of nature, are made of matter, and that science can be used to explain our behavior.