The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (14 page)

Even in their day,
The Bridgewater Treatises
were so larded with Christian propaganda that they were dismissed by most members of the scientific community. The anatomist Robert Knox, a known critic of natural theology (but better known as the anatomy professor involved in the infamous Burke and Hare body-snatching case, in which Knox paid a pair of murderers to supply him with fresh corpses for his dissection lectures at the University of Edinburgh), apparently had a good sense of humor too, referring to them as “The Bilgewater Treatises.”
³²
But despite the dubious quality of the work, one can see from the Kirby passage highlighted above just how central theory of mind was, at the time, to the burgeoning field of natural theology.

In fact, it continues to be central to this day, and it is part of the reason that many contemporary natural scientists see no inherent conflict between their faith and their work. In self-proclaimed “evolutionary evangelist” Michael Dowd’s
Thank God for Evolution
(2009), the same old theme emerges anew. Dowd, who brandishes the unusual self-identity as both Darwinian and Christian apologist, writes that “facts are God’s native tongue!”:

You may be surprised to learn that natural theology still has its supporters among some rather prominent philosophers and scientists. In 2008, for example, the John Templeton Foundation sponsored a major international conference on the subject at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. The primary aim of this gathering—fittingly called “Beyond Paley: Renewing the Vision of Natural Theology”—was “to review every aspect of the question of whether the divine can be known through nature.”
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Just like William Kirby, modern-day advocates of natural theology tend to view God as a sort of enigmatic foreigner speaking a foreign tongue, the intricate and beautiful language of nature. And their primary scientific task is to translate this strange, almost unintelligible language into a form that reveals His benevolent, creative intentions for humanity. (Or at least one that satisfies their own personal view of what His intentions should be.) Guest speakers at the Oxford event were well-known figures in the Christian community, such as Simon Conway Morris (a Cambridge evolutionary paleobiologist whose Gifford Lecture the previous year had been titled “Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation”), Justin Barrett (a psychologist who believes that the human mind evolved in the way that God intended it to evolve, for us to perceive Him more accurately), and Alister McGrath (controversial author of
The Dawkins Delusion,
and one of the principal advocates of a modern-day “scientific theology”).

What is ironic is that these contemporary scholars are, in all probability, using their mindlessly evolved theory of mind to make meaning of the meaningless. Either that, or we must concur with them that meaning is in fact “out there” and that the evolution of the human brain was indeed guided by God, a God that slowly, methodically, over billions of years, placed our ancestors into the perfect selective conditions in which they were able to develop the one adaptive trait—theory of mind—that, in addition to serving its own huge, independent, adaptive functions for interacting with other human beings, also enabled this one species to finally ponder His highly cryptic ways and to begin guessing about what’s on His mind.

The theory of natural selection, of course, has more than enough explanatory oomph to get us from the primordial soup of Day 1 of life on earth to the head-spinning, space-traveling, finger-pointing, technologically ripe conurbations we see today. Even if an intentional God were needed for Existence with a capital “E” (which is by no means obvious), He certainly wasn’t needed for our particular human existence. Neither was He needed for the evolution of the cognitive system—theory of mind—that has allowed us to develop theories about unobservable mental states, including His. And He definitely wasn’t needed to account for what we’ve evolved to perceive as “good” and “evil” that, too, is the clear handiwork of natural selection operating on our brains and behaviors.

There’s no more reason to believe that God frets about the social, sexual, or moral behaviors of human beings—just one of hundreds of presently living species of primates—than there is to believe that He’s deeply concerned about what Mediterranean geckos have for lunch or that He loses sleep over whether red-billed oxpeckers decide to pick bloated parasites off the backs of cows or rhinoceroses in the Sudan. We are just one of billions of species occupying this carbon-infused planet spinning in this solar system, and every single one of these species, along with every single detail of their bodies, behaviors, and brains (even if they lack bodies, behaviors, and brains) can be accounted for by natural evolutionary processes. As the legendary biologist J. B. S. Haldane replied cheekily after being asked what he had learned about God from his work in studying evolution, “The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
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Isn’t it astounding how all the convoluted, endless paths of thought, all the divine wild goose chases ever known or to be known, begin and end with the same cognitive capacity—this theory of mind?

4
CURIOUSLY IMMORTAL

I
N HIS NOVEL
The Counterfeiters
(1925), the French author André Gide introduces us to a disheartened, world-weary old man named Monsieur de La Pérouse. With his wife gone and his beloved grandchild painfully indifferent to his affections, La Pérouse decides to end his lonely life once and for all. For years, he has kept a loaded pistol at his bedside for precisely this sad occasion. But oddly enough, when he finally decides to go through with his suicide, the old man finds himself in a rather unexpected psychological predicament:

La Pérouse’s dilemma is a good example of how our evolved theory of mind has come to play an interesting trick on us in our ability to reason clearly about death. It’s not just God’s or other people’s minds that we’re so busy thinking about, but also our own minds. And reasoning about our future selves, particularly what we’ll be experiencing given an imagined set of hypothetical variables such as those believed to be present in the afterlife, is much like reasoning about what it’s like to be another person. Both rest on our ability to temporarily suspend—in Rutgers University psychologist Alan Leslie’s terms, “de-couple”
²
—the actual here and now of our present mental experiences and to put ourselves in the shoes of a different character faced with an entirely different set of realities. After all, who or
what
are the dead (even our own future dead selves) but bodiless minds?

For
The Counterfeiters
’ old La Pérouse, who desires nothing but the peaceful obliteration of all his obsessive, depressing thoughts, who hopes to enter into the endless void of dreamless sleep, his trigger finger is paralyzed by this theory-of-mind block. As a materialist, he realizes it’s silly, yet he can’t help but fear the jolting boom—a sound that, in his imminently destroyed brain, wouldn’t linger long enough for him to flinch.

From the perspective of a psychological scientist, the central question is not whether there is or is not an afterlife, but instead why this question arises at all. And it’s not just religion where we find it flaring up. The question of what happens to us after we die is a staple of popular culture. And the assumption, in nearly every case, is that we are more than just our physical bodies—that our bodies contain an “essence,” or a “soul,” that unhinges itself at death. As consumers in the world of secular entertainment, we are inundated with products featuring the ghost genre. There’s a virtual glut of dead souls gumming up our television channels (such as the CBS series
Ghost Whisperer
, James Van Praagh’s
The Other Side,
and a spate of British paranormal “reality” shows such as
Most Haunted
); our movie theaters (everything from
The Sixth Sense
[1999] to children’s films such as
Coraline
[2009] feature the translucent spirits of the dead); our bookstores (recent titles include Van Praagh’s
Unfinished Business: What the Dead Can Teach Us about Life
and Sylvia Browne’s
All Pets Go to Heaven
)—even our radio stations. You’d be forgiven, for example, if ever you found yourself on a quiet drive nodding your head along in agreement with the twangy, sweetly discordant lyrics of folk singer Iris Dement’s “Let the Mystery Be” (1993), a humble paean about the hereafter in which Dement assures us that “no one knows for certain” what happens when we die and so we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking otherwise.

In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead too?

Yet, people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My own psychological research in this area has led me to believe that these illogical beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving only to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are also an inevitable by-product of our theory of mind. In thinking about the “what’s next” after death, our everyday theory of mind is inadequate; in fact, it falls flat on its face. Because we have never consciously experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.

The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside by science-minded individuals as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called “terror management theory” contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.

According to terror management theorists, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position while listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this book, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality” terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now the book still had a faint pulse.) But one sign of trouble for terror management theory is that other researchers have consistently failed to find any correlation between fear of death and belief in the afterlife. In other words, just because someone has a lot of death anxiety doesn’t mean she’s particularly likely to believe in life after death; there’s simply no connection.

A few researchers, including me, argue increasingly that the evolution of theory of mind has posed a different kind of problem altogether when it comes to our ability to comprehend death. This position holds that, owing to their inherent inability to project themselves sufficiently into an afterlife devoid of all sensation and mental experience, our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal. It’s this cognitive hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of the evolved human cognitive architecture, and specifically the always-on human theory of mind, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.

The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for
The Humanist
,

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died, your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal
Synthese
, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”
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This observation may not sound like a major revelation, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why the nineteenth-century German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”
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And although Sigmund Freud ultimately abandoned this line of thought in favor of the disappointingly more lackluster “wish fulfillment” theory of belief in the afterlife (essentially, the catchall skeptic’s view that we believe because we want it to be true), even the father of psychoanalysis once started digging in this direction. In his essay,
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
(1913), Freud pondered why young soldiers were so eager to join the ranks during the First World War, and he concluded that this strange glitch of the human mind probably had something to do with it. “Our own death is indeed quite unimaginable,” he wrote, “and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators…in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”
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Camus wrote of an atheistic and materialist doctor in
The Plague
(1947) who once mused on the black fate of his plague-stricken patients: “And I, too, I’m no different. But what matter? Death means nothing to men like me. It’s the event that proves them right.”
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We can see now how Camus’ doctor is fundamentally mistaken; given that he won’t be there to confirm his own hypothesis, he’s apparently unaware that such proof remains eternally just out of his reach.

Psychological disorders often provide insight into normal cognitive processes gone awry. A rare delusional disorder called Cotard’s syndrome frequently manifests as the belief that, though conscious, one doesn’t exist, or that one is already dead yet psychologically immortal. Two French psychiatrists, David Cohen and Angèle Consoli, describe one such case in a commentary: “The delusion consisted of the patient’s absolute conviction she was already dead and waiting to be buried, that she was immortal, that she had no teeth or hair, and that her uterus was malformed.” The authors conclude that “the very existence of Cotard’s syndrome supports [the] view of a cognitive system dedicated to forming illusory representations of immortality.”
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It’s not just existential philosophers, psychiatric patients, and eccentric characters in old French novels who err in this way. A study I published in the
Journal of Cognition and Culture
in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man, a schoolteacher with marital problems named Richard.
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Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his vehicle plowed into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative about Richard’s state of mind just before the accident (he was said to be busy ruminating about his wife’s infidelity as he drove to work), I queried them as to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience mental states. “Is Richard still thinking about his wife?” I asked them. “Can he still taste the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does he want to be alive?”

You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy, or get headaches. Yet most of these test subjects gave answers indicative of “psychological-continuity reasoning,” in which they envisioned Richard’s mind to continue functioning despite his death. For example, they said things such as, “He isn’t angry at his wife anymore because he sees the bigger picture now and has forgiven her,” or “He still remembers what he studied last night in preparation for his lesson today, but that stuff doesn’t matter anymore,” or “He doesn’t want to be alive, because it’s better where he is now.” In general, this finding of psychological-continuity reasoning came as no surprise, given that, on a separate scale, most respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an afterlife.

What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified themselves as having “extinctivist” beliefs (they had ticked off the box that read, “What we think of as the ‘soul,’ or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies”) occasionally gave such continuity responses too. In fact, 32 percent of the extinctivists’ answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that Richard’s emotions and desires survived his death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested that the extinctivists reasoned this way for Richard’s “higher-order” mental states (such as remembering, believing, or knowing). For example, one particularly vehement extinctivist thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a numskull for even asking. But just as well, he proceeded to point out that of course Richard knows he’s dead, because there’s no afterlife and Richard sees that now. This student reminded me of the English poet John Gay, who had this rather playful epitaph inscribed on his tombstone in 1732: