Despite the explicit separation of church and state provided for by the U.S. Constitution, the level of religious belief in the United States (and the concomitant significance of religion in American life and political discourse) rivals that of many theocracies. The reason for this is unclear. While it has been widely argued that religious pluralism and competition have caused religion to flourish in the United States, with state-church monopolies leading to its decline in Western Europe, 6 the support for this "religious market theory" now appears weak. It seems, rather, that religiosity is strongly coupled to perceptions of societal insecurity. Within a rich nation like the United States, high levels of socioeconomic inequality may dictate levels of religiosity generally associated with less developed (and less secure) societies. In addition to being the most religious of developed nations, the United States also has the greatest economic inequality. 7 The poor tend to be more religious than the rich, both within and between nations. 8
Fifty-seven percent of Americans think that one must believe in God to have good values and to be moral, 9 and 69 percent want a president who is guided by "strong religious beliefs." 10 Such views are unsurprising, given that even secular scientists regularly acknowledge religion to be the most common source of meaning and morality. It is true that most religions offer a prescribed response to specific moral questions— the Catholic Church forbids abortion, for instance. But research on people's responses to unfamiliar moral dilemmas suggests that religion has no effect on moral judgments that involve weighing harms against benefits (e.g., lives lost vs. lives saved). 11
And on almost every measure of societal health, the least religious countries are better off than the most religious. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands—which are the most atheistic societies on earth—consistently rate better than religious nations on measures like life expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, economic equality, economic competitiveness, gender equality, health care, investments in education, rates of university enrollment, internet access, environmental protection, lack of corruption, political stability, and charity to poorer nations, etc. 12 The independent researcher Gregory Paul has cast further light on this terrain by creating two scales—the Successful Societies Scale and Popular Religiosity Versus Secularism Scale—which offer greater support for a link between religious conviction and societal insecurity. 13 And there is another finding which may be relevant to this variable of societal insecurity: religious commitment in the United States is highly correlated with racism. 14
While the mere correlation between societal dysfunction and religious belief does not tell us what the connection is between them, these data should abolish the ever-present claim that religion is the most important guarantor of societal health. They also prove, conclusively, that a high level of unbelief need not lead to the fall of civilization. 15
Whether religion contributes to societal dysfunction, it seems clear that as societies become more prosperous, stable, and democratic, they tend to become more secular. Even in the United States, the trend toward secularism is visible. As Paul points out, this suggests that, contrary to the opinions of many anthropologists and psychologists, religious commitment "is superficial enough to be readily abandoned when conditions improve to the required degree." 16
Religion and Evolution
The evolutionary origins of religion remain obscure. The earliest signs of human burial practices date to 95,000 years ago, and many take these as evidence of the emergence of religious belief. 17 Some researchers consider the connection between religion and evolution to be straightforward insofar as religious doctrines tend to view sexual conduct as morally problematic and attempt to regulate it, both to encourage fertility and to protect against sexual infidelity. Clearly, it is in the genetic interests of every man that he not spend his life rearing another man's children, and it is in the genetic interests of every woman that her mate not squander his resources on other women and their offspring. The fact that the world's religions generally codify these interests, often prescribing harsh penalties for their transgression, forms the basis for one of their more persistent claims to social utility. It is, therefore, tempting to trace a line between religious doctrines regarding marriage and sexuality to evolutionary fitness. 18 Even here, however, the link to evolution appears less than straightforward: as evolution should actually favor indiscriminate heterosexual activity on the part of men, as long as these scoundrels can avoid squandering their resources in ways that imperil the reproductive success of their offspring. 19
Human beings may be genetically predisposed to superstition: for natural selection should favor rampant belief formation as long as the benefits of the occasional, correct belief are great enough. 20 The manufacture of new religious doctrines and identities, resulting in group conformity and xenophobia, may have offered some protection against infectious illness: for to the degree that religion divides people, it would inhibit the spread of novel pathogens. 21 However, the question of whether religion (or anything else) might have given groups of human beings an evolutionary advantage (so-called "group selection") has been widely debated. 22 And even if tribes have occasionally been the vehicles of natural selection, and religion proved adaptive, it would remain an open question whether religion increases human fitness today. As already mentioned, there are a wide variety of genetically entrenched human traits (e.g., out-group aggression, infidelity, superstition, etc.) that, while probably adaptive at some point in our past, may have been less than optimal even in the Pleistocene. In a world that is growing ever more crowded and complex, many of these biologically selected traits may yet imperil us.
Clearly, religion cannot be reduced to a mere concatenation of religious beliefs. Every religion consists of rites, rituals, prayers, social institutions, holidays, etc., and these serve a wide variety of purposes, conscious and otherwise. 23 However, religious belief- —that is, the acceptance of specific historical and metaphysical propositions as being true—is generally what renders these enterprises relevant, or even comprehensible. I share with anthropologist Rodney Stark the view that belief precedes ritual and that a practice like prayer is usually thought to be a genuine act of communication with a God (or gods). 24 Religious adherents generally believe that they possess knowledge of sacred truths, and every faith provides a framework for interpreting experience so as to lend further credence to its doctrine. 25
There seems little question that most religious practices are the direct consequence of what people believe to be true about both external and internal reality. Indeed, most religious practices become intelligible only in light of these underlying beliefs. The fact that many people have begun to doubt specific religious doctrines in the meantime, while still mouthing the liturgy and aping the rituals, is beside the point. What faith is best exemplified by those who are in the process of losing it? While there may be many Catholics, for instance, who value the ritual of the Mass without believing that the bread and wine are actually transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of Transubstantiation remains the most plausible origin of this ritual. And the primacy of the Mass within the Church hinges on the fact that many Catholics still consider the underlying doctrine to be true—which is a direct consequence of the fact that the Church still promulgates and defends it. The following passage, taken from The Profession of Faith of the Roman Catholic Church, represents the relevant case, and illustrates the kind of assertions about reality that lie at the heart of most religions:
I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the Body and the Blood, together with the soul and the divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into Blood; and this change the Catholic Mass calls transubstantiation. I also p
rofess that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species.
There is, of course, a distinction to be made between mere profession of such beliefs and actual belief 26 —a distinction that, while important, makes sense only in a world in which some people actually believe what they say they believe. There seems little reason to doubt that a significant percentage of human beings, likely a majority, falls into this latter category with respect to one or another religious creed.
What is surprising, from a scientific point of view, is that 42 percent of Americans believe that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of the world, and another 21 percent believe that while life may have evolved, its evolution has been guided by the hand of God (only 26 percent believe in evolution through natural selection). 27
Seventy-eight percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the word of God (eithet literal or "inspired"); and 79 percent of Christians believe that Jesus Christ will physically return to earth at some point in the future. 28
How is it possible that so many millions of people believe these things? Clearly, the taboo around criticizing religious beliefs must contribute to their survival. But, as the anthropologist Pascal Boyer points out, the failure of reality testing does not explain the specific character of religious beliefs:
People have stories about vanishing islands and talking cats, but they usually do not insert them in their religious beliefs. In contrast, people produce concepts of ghosts and person-like gods and make use of these concepts when they think about a whole variety of social questions (what is moral behavior, what to do with dead people, how misfortune occurs, why perform rituals, etc.). This is much more precise than just relaxing the usual principles of sound reasoning. 29
According to Boyer, religious concepts must arise from mental categories that predate religion—and these underlying structures determine the stereotypical form that religious beliefs and practices take. These categories of thought relate to things like living beings, social exchange, moral infractions, natural hazards, and ways of understanding human misfortune. On Boyer's account, people do not accept incredible religious doctrines because they have relaxed their standards of rationality; they relax their standards of rationality because certain doctrines fit their "inference machinery" in such a way as to seem credible. And what most religious propositions may lack in plausibility they make up for by being memorable, emotionally salient, and socially consequential. All of these properties are a product of the underlying structure of human cognition, and most of this architecture is not consciously accessible. Boyer argues, therefore, that explicit theologies and consciously held dogmas are not a reliable indicator of the real contents or causes of a person's religious beliefs.
Boyer may be correct in his assertion that we have cognitive templates for religious ideas that run deeper than culture (in the same way that we appear to have deep, abstract concepts like "animal" and "tool"). The psychologist Justin Barrett makes a similar claim, likening religion to language acquisition: we come into this world cognitively prepared for language; our culture and upbringing merely dictate which languages we will be exposed to. 30 We may also be what the psychologist Paul Bloom has called "common sense dualists"—that is, we may be naturally inclined to see the mind as distinct from the body and, therefore, we tend to intuit the existence of disembodied minds at work in the world. 31 This propensity could lead us to presume ongoing relationships with dead friends and relatives, to anticipate our own survival of death, and generally to conceive of people as having immaterial souls. Similarly, several experiments suggest that children are predisposed to assume both design and intention behind natural events—leaving many psychologists and anthropologists to believe that children, left entirely to their own devices, would invent some conception of God. 32 The psychologist Margaret Evans has found that children between the ages of eight and ten, whatever their upbringing, are consistently more inclined to give a Creationist account of the natural world than their parents are. 33
The psychologist Bruce Hood likens our susceptibility to religious ideas to the fact that people tend to develop phobias for evolutionarily relevant threats (like snakes and spiders) rather than for things that are far more likely to kill them (like automobiles and electrical sockets). 34 And because our minds have evolved to detect patterns in the world, we often detect patterns that aren't actually there—ranging from faces in the clouds to a divine hand in the workings of Nature. Hood posits an additional cognitive schema that he calls "supersense"—a tendency to infer hidden forces in the world, working for good or for ill. On his account, supersense generates beliefs in the supernatural (religious and otherwise) all on its own, and such beliefs are thereafter modulated, rather than instilled, by culture.
While religious affiliation is strictly a matter of cultural inheritance, religious attitudes (e.g., social conservatism) and behaviors (e.g., church attendance) seem to be moderately influenced by genetic factors. 35 The relevance of the brain's dopaminergic systems to religious experience, belief, and behavior is suggested by several lines of evidence, including the fact that several clinical conditions involving the neurotransmitter dopamine—mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and schizophrenia—are regularly associated with hyperreligiosity. 36 Serotonin has also been implicated, as drugs known to modulate it—like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, N,N-dimethyltryptamine ("DMT"), and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine ("ecstasy")—seem to be especially potent drivers of religious/spiritual experience. 37 Links have also been drawn between religious experience and temporal lobe epilepsy. 38 However predisposed the human mind may be to harboring religious beliefs, it remains a fact that each new generation receives a religious worldview, at least in part, in the form of linguistic propositions—far more so in some societies than in others. Whatever the evolutionary underpinnings of religion, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that there is a genetic explanation for the fact that the French, Swedes, and Japanese tend not to believe in God while Americans, Saudis, and Somalis do. Clearly, religion is largely a matter of what people teach their children to believe about the nature of reality.
Is Religious Belief Special?
While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little has been known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor has it been clear whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact. Several neuroimaging and EEG studies have been done on religious practice and experience—primarily focusing on meditation 39 and prayer. 40 But the purpose of this research has been to evoke spiritual/ contemplative experiences in religious subjects and to compare these to more conventional states of consciousness. None of these studies was designed to isolate belief itself.
Working in Mark Cohen's cognitive neuroscience lab at UCLA, I published the first neuroimaging study of belief as a general mode of cognition 41 (discussed in the previous chapter). While another group at the National Institutes of Health later looked specifically at religious belief, 42 no research had compared these two forms of belief directly. In a subsequent study, Jonas T. Kaplan and I used fMRI to measure signal changes in the brains of both Christians and nonbelievers as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. 43 For each trial, subjects were presented with either a religious statement (e.g., "Jesus Christ really performed the miracles attributed to him in the Bible") or a nonreligious statement (e.g., "Alexander the Great was a very famous military leader"), and they pressed a button to indicate whether the statement was true or false.
For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, our results were largely consistent with our earlier findings. Believing a statement to be true was associated with greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), a region important for self-representation, 44 emotional associations, 45 reward, 46 and goal-driven behavior. 47 This area showed greater activity whether subjects believed statemen
ts about God and the Virgin Birth or statements about ordinary facts. 48
Our study was designed to elicit the same responses from the two groups on nonreligious stimuli (e.g., "Eagles really exist") and opposite responses on religious stimuli (e.g., "Angels really exist"). The fact that we obtained essentially the same result for belief in both devout Christians and nonbelievers, on both categories of content, argues strongly that the difference between belief and disbelief is the same, regardless of what is being thought about. 49
While the comparison between belief and disbelief produced similar activity for both categories of questions, the comparison of all religious thinking to all nonreligious thinking yielded a wide range of differences throughout the brain. Religious thinking was associated with greater signal in the anterior insula and the ventral striatum. The anterior insula has been linked to pain perception, 50 to the perception of pain in others, 51 and to negative feelings like disgust. 52 The ventral striatum has been frequently linked to reward. 53 It would not be surprising if religious statements provoked more positive and negative emotion in both groups of subjects.