How We Believe, 2nd Ed. Read online

  One deeper motive contributing to the search for God comes from the fact that the Hebrew Bible has God’s influence slowly but ineluctably fading as the story unfolds, so that by the end God’s face is almost completely hidden and humans are left to fend for themselves. Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman documents this phenomenon in his 1995 work, The Disappearance of God:

  The Bible begins, as nearly everybody knows, with a world in which God is actively and visibly involved, but it does not end that way. Gradually through the course of the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament, Holy Scriptures, or tanak), the deity appears less and less to humans, speaks less and less. Miracles, angels, and all other signs of divine presence become rarer and finally cease. In the last portions of the Hebrew Bible, God is not present in the well-known apparent ways of the earlier books. Among God’s last words to Moses, the deity says, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” (Deut. 31:17, 18; 32:20). By the end of the story God does just that. The consequences and development of this phenomenon in the New Testament and in post-biblical Judaism are extraordinary as well.

  Extraordinary indeed! Where did God go and, more importantly, why did He choose to disappear? Friedman explores these questions and provides some intriguing answers. He closes his exploration with a discussion of the relationship of science and religion, and a comparison of Kabbalah and cosmology, concluding: “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.” This depends, of course, on how one defines God, but I am more interested in the search than the disappearance. Is the New Age resurgence in spirituality an attempt to uncover the hidden face? Perhaps the face is to be found in a mirror. In her splendid little book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, biologist Ursula Goodenough explores this possibility in what she calls “religious naturalism”: “If religious emotions can be elicited by natural reality—and I believe that they can—then the story of Nature has the potential to serve as the cosmos for the global ethos that we need to articulate.” In any case, this longing and search tells us something very deep about the need in the human psyche for the spiritual and sacred aspects of life not often found in the sciences or humanities. Yet they are there if you know where to look.

  SACRED SCIENCE

  Scientists and skeptics must address the fact that God is alive and well at the end of the second millennium—and likely will be at the end of the third. It would appear that news of God’s death will always be premature. Atheists, humanists, skeptics, and freethinkers who envision the day when the world will be free of God and religion are about as likely to realize their dream as are the anarcho-capitalists who foresee the end of all government and the privatization of the entire world. Such beliefs, in fact, are themselves a type of secular religion, like those that sprang from Europe at the turn of the twentieth century—Marxism, Freudianism, and social Darwinism. Even scientism, in some extreme circles, turns into a type of secular faith where all things come to those who believe.

  In fact, science is a type of myth, if we think of myths as stories about ourselves and our origins (and not in the pejorative sense of myths as things “untrue”). Many gain considerable emotional, even “spiritual,” satisfaction from reading scientific articles and books by geologists about the creation of the Earth, by paleontologists about the evolution of life, by paleoanthropologists about human origins, by archeologists about the genesis of civilization, by historians about the development of culture, and especially by cosmologists about the origins of the universe. Tens of millions of people watched Carl Sagan’s 1980 Cosmos series with rapt attention. In 1997 the PBS series Stephen Hawking’s Universe gripped viewers every Monday night. Books on evolution by Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Donald Johanson, and Edward O. Wilson are eagerly sought by readers and often find themselves on bestseller lists. Why? Because at these boundaries of scientific knowledge the lines between science, myth, and religion begin to blur as we ask ultimate questions about ourselves, our origins, and our place in the cosmos.

  In 1998 I witnessed a sublime example of the scientific sacred when Stephen Hawking visited the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), as he does nearly every year in meeting with Kip Thorne, John Preskill, and other cosmologists. During his visits he often agrees to deliver a public address via his now-familiar voice synthesizer that has an almost surrealistic, otherworldly resonance. Hawking was slated for the largest venue on campus—Beckman Auditorium—which holds 1,100 people. When that hall filled, the staff piped a video feed into Remo Hall, filling another 400 seats. This was not enough, so large theater speakers were pointed out toward the quad area where hundreds more sat on the grass, rock-concert style, listening to a scientific superstar. When he rolled into Beckman Auditorium and down the aisle in his motorized wheelchair, Hawking received a standing ovation, as he did upon his departure. He delivered his standard lecture about the Big Bang, black holes, time, and the universe, all covered in his bestselling book A Brief History of Time, which broke all records for the number of weeks any science book has been on a bestseller list. There followed an illustrated version of the book, as well as a documentary also entitled A Brief History of Time, followed by a documentary about the making of the documentary!

  The mythical nature of science, however, was not as obvious in Hawking’s lecture as it was in the subsequent question-and-answer period. The majority of the audience was not especially interested in the minutiae of quantum mechanics or the nuances of cosmological theories. What people wanted were The Answers to the Big Questions: “How did time begin?” “What was there before the universe?” “Why does the universe bother to exist at all?” There are no Final Answers to these Big Questions, of course, but this does not stop people from asking. Here the public was given an opportunity to inquire of a physically disabled but cognitively brilliant man the biggest question of all: “Is there a God?”

  Stephen Hawking’s lectures are delivered at normal speed because he writes them ahead of time and the computer feeds the words to the voice synthesizer at a staccato pace. But answering questions is another thing altogether. Hawking must construct his sentences word by word, at a glacially slow meter. During this process his colleagues talk to the audience until the answer comes. For this final question, however, the effect was one of unbearable anticipation. Asked an essentially unanswerable question, Hawking sat there in his chair, rigid and stone quiet, only his eyes darting back and forth across the computer screen. One had the feeling of having traveled to Delphi or Mecca, now forced to wait in bursting expectation of The Answer to the Biggest Question. A minute or two went by as cosmologist Kip Thorne politely explained how Stephen’s computer works. Finally it came. With humor and politeness Hawking, wisely, explained: “I do not answer God questions.”

  It did not matter, because the answers themselves do not matter as much as the process of thinking about the questions and contemplating their ultimate meaning. God is not dead because God represents these ultimate concepts that have been with us as long as we have been human. It is the concepts themselves that reach into the deepest parts of our minds. To contemplate them is not the exclusive domain of either science or religion. It belongs to all of humanity. To that end science too is sacred in the sense of pondering these majestic and timeless issues. What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one’s hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe’s creation and did not blink? That is deep and sacred science.

  Chapter 3

  THE BELIEF ENGINE

  How We Believe

  We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of freethinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.

  —Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, III, 1836

  At 9:00 P.M. on Wednes
day evening, August 3, 1997, the renowned sage and Vedic philosopher from India, Sri Leachim Remresh, took to the airwaves on WGN radio’s Milt Rosenberg Show to offer pearls of psychic wisdom to Chicago listeners. Remresh explained that he presently lives in Sedona, Arizona, a New Age capital of sorts, where the Earth’s mystical energies are focused in special vortices. Having traveled extensively throughout India, and studied under some of the great Himalayan sages, Remresh enlightened his listeners on how the linear mode of Western scientific thinking restricts our ability to perceive other dimensions, times, and forces. Callers were told they need only give their birth date and ask a single question for Remresh to tap into the cosmic vibrations.

  The first caller, a woman born in 1953, wanted to know if her present relationship was going to work out. Remresh cut straight to the woman’s heart, telling her that she had previously been married but was now in a relationship with a man who was not as committed as she. In fact, he might even have someone else on the side. The woman gasped in acknowledgment. That was precisely the problem. What should she do? Remresh told her that she already knew what she needed to do. Another caller, a woman born in 1941, wanted to know what she should do about her son. Remresh once again drew upon psychic harmonies, telling the woman that her son was presently adrift in life but that in a few years he would turn his life around; she should not worry too much that he has no goals. Remresh was absolutely right. She wished her son would do something, anything! She gave Remresh a 95 percent psychic accuracy rating. The host then announced he had an even more startling revelation, right after the break, of course.

  Sri Leachim Remresh, it was revealed, was simply Michael Shermer spelled backwards (with a couple of letter reversals to ease pronunciation). I was in Chicago as part of my national book tour for Why People Believe Weird Things, and Milt asked if I would play along with this experiment to show how easy it is to appear to have special insight into people’s lives, and how convinced people can become when such bold proclamations are offered. I generally shun such deceptive tactics, but the point was well made. With no formal training in how to be a psychic (and with no psychic abilities whatsoever), I repeated the mantras of New Age gurus, offered some generalizations about human behavior I learned as a student of psychology and in forty-three years of life experience, and let my callers do the rest. The first woman was about my age. She referred to her “relationship,” not her marriage. Since most people my age have been married at least once, her previous history of marriage was an easy guess. Statistically speaking men are more promiscuous than women, and women are more committed to relationships than men, so it did not take a genius (or a psychic) to figure out what was behind her question. The second woman was fifty-six years old, so I figured her son must be in his late teens or early twenties (since people are having children later in life these days). Many guys that age are lost souls, rudderless and unanchored, seeking independence from their parents but not yet parents themselves. So I played the odds and was right again.

  Among magicians this process is called “cold reading,” and is practiced by those who bill themselves as “mentalists.” Start with generalizations, then work your way to specifics, using subject feedback (verbal as well as nonverbal when available). The four areas people most want to know about are obvious—love, health, money, and career. So you work your way through them, spending about ten to fifteen minutes on each. Sri Leachim Remresh was successful for the same reason all mediums, psychics, palm and tarot card readers, and astrologers are successful—the people who come to them for advice believe they will be successful. Once that belief is in place, the mind makes certain it is confirmed.

  Why? Why are we so gullible? Why is it so difficult to discriminate between what is real and what is bogus? The answer can be found in understanding the power of belief systems that drive, and as often as not distort, our perceptions of reality.

  THE PATTERN-SEEKING ANIMAL

  In our complex and contingent world, random events often happen in seemingly peculiar sequences that cry out for meaning. We usually rise to the occasion, finding patterns in nature even when they do not exist or have no real significance: the “eagle rock” overlooking the 134 Freeway in Eagle Rock, California—it is just a stone outcropping but our minds see in it the general shape of an eagle-like bird; the “JFK” stone in Hawaii looking for all the world like the late president in profile; the face of Jesus in a tortilla; the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. The first two are amusing but do not strike observers as filled with cosmic import. For some, however, the latter two trigger emotional responses linked to spiritual significance—witness the crowds that appear whenever the Virgin Mary makes her “appearance” on a barn door, in the shadows of trees, or, recently, on the side of the Ugly Duck car rental building in Clearwater, Florida, where the faithful come in wheelchairs and canes to be healed.

  We are especially attracted to patterns with a spiritual or religious link, which touch our deepest desire for there to be a Something Else calling the shots and running the show. For some, that Something Else is God; for others it is angels, or fate, or synchronicity, or collective consciousness, or some universal life force. For thousands of years our myths and religions have sustained us with stories of meaningful patterns—gods and God, supernatural beings and mystical forces, the relationship of humans with other humans and their creators, and our place in the cosmos. For the past four centuries, however, science has provided a means for determining which patterns are real and which are illusions, and so we have expelled most ancient and medieval traditions from the pantheon. Or have we?

  The Virgin Mary appears in Clearwater, Florida. Humans are pattern-seeking animals, quite adept at finding meaning even in random patterns of light and shadow, such as this “sighting” of the Virgin Mary on the south window of the Ugly Duck car rental building on Highway 19. The image was “discovered” just before Christmas 1996, and before long devotees transformed the parking lot into a shrine. The image was actually caused by a film of oil from a nearby palm tree, sprayed onto the window by sprinklers.

  A Gallup poll conducted in 1991 revealed that half of all Americans believe in astrology and almost as many believe in extrasensory perception, or ESP; a third believe in the lost continent of Atlantis and in ghosts; and a full two-thirds believe they have had a psychic experience. Do we really live in the Age of Science? We do, but we mostly partake of the fruits of science—technology—whereas fundamental principles of scientific thinking are often poorly taught and rarely employed.

  One reason for this tendency to believe in the supernatural is that we may be hardwired to think magically. We have lived in the modern world of science and technology for only a couple of hundred years, yet humanity has existed for a couple of hundred thousand years. What were we doing all those long-gone millennia? How did our brains evolve to cope with the problems in that radically different world?

  Evolutionary psychologists—scientists who study the brain and behavior from an evolutionary perspective—make a reasonable argument that the modern brain (and along with it the mind and behavior) evolved over a period of about three million years from the small, fist-sized brain of the Australopithecines to the melon-sized brain of modern Homo sapiens. Since civilization arose only about 13,000 years ago with the domestication of plants and animals, 99.99 percent of human evolution took place in our “environment of evolutionary adaptation,” or EEA. The conditions of the EEA are primarily what shaped our brains, not what happened over the past thirteen millennia. Evolution does not work that fast. The brains of 25,000-year-old Cro-Magnons appear to be no different than ours. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, codirectors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have summarized the field this way:

  Evolutionary psychology is based on the recognition that the human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational devices that evolved to solve the adaptive problems regularly encountered by our hunter
-gatherer ancestors. Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives, shared conceptual frameworks, emotion programs, content-specific reasoning procedures, and specialized interpretation systems—programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature.

  Steven Pinker describes these specialized computational devices as mental modules. Pinker’s “module” is metaphorical, however. Modules are not necessarily located in a single spot in the brain (although they can be, as with Broca’s area for language). He describes it as something that “may be broken into regions that are interconnected by fibers that make the regions act as a unit.” A bundle of neurons here connected to another bundle of neurons there, “sprawling messily over the bulges and crevasses of the brain” might form a module. Their interconnectedness rather than location is the key to the module’s function. The brain then is not so much a single organ as it is a system of specific organs evolved in the EEA to solve specific problems.