The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (17 page)

So according to these authors, attributing moral responsibility to God is a sort of residual spillover from our everyday social psychology in dealing with other people. “Without another person to blame,” write the authors, “people need to find another intentional agent to imbue the event with meaning and allow some sense of control.”
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The following little vignette may help clarify the researchers’ position:

If you’re like most of the participants who read a version of this story in Gray and Wegner’s study, you’ll say, “Of course not. The dam worker did it, dummy.” But something interesting happened when the authors removed the human agent. Half of the participants read the same story sans the malevolent dam worker. In other words, they learned only that the water level had risen suddenly and drowned the whole family; and as you might expect, these people were much more likely to attribute the event to God than were those in the “dam worker” condition. Furthermore, participants reasoned this way only when the family drowned. By contrast, when there was no “moral harm” (the lunch got ruined, but the family was fine), God wasn’t to blame.

In another clever study, Gray and Wegner created a U.S. state-by-state “suffering index” and found a positive correlation between a state’s relative misery (compared to the rest of the country) and its population’s belief in God. To create an objective measure of such relative misery, the investigators used data from the 2008 United Health Foundation’s comprehensive State Health Index. Among other manifestations of suffering, this regularly compiled index includes rates of infant mortality, cancer deaths, infectious disease, violent crime, and environmental pathogens. What Gray and Wegner discovered was that suffering and belief in God were highly correlated,
even after controlling for income and education
. In other words, belief in God is especially high in places such as Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina—and so is misery, at least as it was defined in this particular study. And that, say the authors, is no coincidence. Wherever there is a trail of woe, God is curiously afoot.

Gray and Wegner are very much aware of the logical counterargument that God is also invoked for explanations of positive events and joyous occasions. The authors don’t deny this fact, but nevertheless they argue that God is especially likely to arise in people’s heads in response to life’s unpleasantries. “God may serve as the emissary of suffering,” they write, “but He can also be an emotional crutch…That God may be both the cause and cure of hardship suggests why harm leads us to God more strongly than help—with help people may thank Him, but with harm people both curse and embrace Him.”
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These findings shed light on why the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in early 2010 served only to galvanize the faithful. Yes, God killed many people, acknowledged believers. But, “praise Jesus,” He spared a lot of lives too—namely, theirs.

Another piece of the puzzle may lie in the way that our neural architecture articulates with our emotions. University of California at Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik suggests that humans have an “innate explanatory drive” that strongly motivates us to search for causal explanations. About a decade ago, Gopnik wrote a book chapter, provocatively titled “Explanation as Orgasm and the Drive for Causal Understanding,” in which she claimed that we seek answers for the same reason we’re driven to achieve sexual climax—that is to say, for the sheer thrill and phenomenological bliss of it.
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It’s only an analogy; but it’s a useful one. Just as those few seconds in bed or on top of the washing machine feel naturally grand and put a smile on your face, so, too, does that fleeting eureka moment in solving a mind-tickling problem leave you glowing. (So maybe doing crosswords or Sudoku isn’t going to have you exactly biting your bottom lip in ecstasy, but you get the basic idea.) In short, knowing why feels good. Not knowing why leaves us aching for explanatory release.

Physiologically speaking, says Gopnik, your brain is rigged up to chase these short-lived moments of pleasure: orgasm in the one instance because sex is nature’s feel-good ruse to get your genes out there, and explanation in the other because knowing why things work the way they do enables you to learn and therefore to make more adaptive responses in the future. This drive for causal knowledge is especially apparent during early childhood, a developmental period in which it’s essential for individuals to gather up as many facts about the way the world works as possible. If you’ve ever seen a toddler use the cat’s litter box as his own personal archaeological excavation site, evaded a curious five-year-old’s brutal inquisition about nipples, or wrangled a barbecue lighter away from a
Blue’s Clues
pajama–clad pyromaniac, then you already know how gluttonous children are for exploratory-based knowledge. These urges of curiosity settle down over time—much like our sex drive a lot later in life. But, also like the force of people’s sex drive, the longevity of our raging curiosity varies from person to person. In fact, Gopnik believes that scientists who are intrinsically motivated to solve their complicated research problems are a lot like children. Both are perpetually chasing after explanatory highs.

The thing is, Gopnik points out, your explanation doesn’t actually need to be correct to give you that satisfying bolus of orgasmic pleasure driving your search for answers. Again, it’s similar to sex. Gopnik writes, “The function of sex is still to reproduce even if reproduction doesn’t occur in the vast majority of cases.”
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Sex leads to orgasm, and that feels good as an end in itself, even if it’s ultimately a fruitless cardio exercise. Likewise, when it comes to the innate explanatory drive, you’ve just got to believe you’ve solved the problem to derive the pleasure:

In other words, although our explanations are scattershot, questionable, and often flat-out wrong, they’re also occasionally right—especially when we’re working from within a scientific framework. And getting it right some of the time is a lot better than never attempting to solve problems to begin with. According to Gopnik, because the occasional truthful causal explanation gave our ancestors a competitive edge over those without the inner desire to seek such answers at all, the overall system, albeit buggy and prone to generating supernatural logic, would have been targeted by natural selection.

So, for the sort of question we’re interested in here—“Why do bad things happen to good people?”—we might borrow from Gopnik’s analogy and think of God as wearing the cognitive chastity belt of a brainteaser: He has His reasons for being so prudish with us in our demands for answers, but given our innate explanatory drive, we still can’t keep ourselves from trying to get into His drawers. And simply concluding that “it’s not for us to know” isn’t without its own explanatory appeal. Using our theory of mind, many people reckon that God has His own moralistic logic but He holds the cards close to His chest and it’s not for us mere mortals to comprehend. Perhaps, as one can say about the biblical character of Job, who was something of a mouse at God’s paws, God sometimes completely blindsides us as a way of bringing us closer to Him. After all, we seldom give God more thought than when we’re personally in the crosshairs of calamity or impending ruin.

Many nonbelievers favor the view that humans resort to such superstitious explanations without sound, scientific causal knowledge. As we increasingly understand how the natural world operates, say defenders of this view, our need for God increasingly shrivels and it can be expected to disappear altogether—eventually. In theological parlance, this view is referred to as the “God of the gaps”: because we need to feel in control over the fickle doings of nature, God is plugged in by default as the responsible party wherever there are gaps in our knowledge. A good example of this commonsensical view is found in a quote by the American physicist Richard Feynman, who remarked that

In principle, plugging God into the gaps works well because our theory of mind enables us to attribute causes to an agent who presumably knows something that we don’t know. Science is hard work. Even if we’re in the dark, we can rest assured that there’s a reason and just leave it at that.

But there’s a major problem with this everyday view that science simply replaces God in having greater explanatory power and predictive value. Even when the true causes are known, acknowledged, and embraced, many people still appeal to God for an explanation. Knowing
how
doesn’t stop us from asking
why.
Consider the suspension bridge disaster in Victorian England described at the opening of this chapter. The greatest mystery of all is not why a seemingly reasonable and just God would so cruelly visit such a fate upon the hapless children and families of Great Yarmouth on that spring day back in 1845, but why the survivors, and we looking back on them, would find this question of meaning so natural to ask to begin with.

There was no ostensible need, after all, to “make sense of” the bridge’s collapse, because the cause was perfectly obvious and accepted by the townspeople: just another fatal concoction of a circus proprietor’s grandiose schemes, children’s universal taste for the theatrically absurd, and a lazy welder whose foreman was probably too busy to notice his slacking off on the job. It wasn’t a question of accountability either. The construction company owner made it perfectly clear that he, rather than God, was responsible for the catastrophe when he personally footed the bill for dozens of the victims’ burials. So why does the question of meaning so instinctively arise in the wake of a rather intelligible misfortune? Why can’t we turn off our theory of mind in such cases?

In every human society ever studied by anthropologists, uncontrollable tragedies have been seen as caused intentionally by a mindful, supernatural agent. For most of us, this “agent” is God. For others, it’s one god among many, or perhaps a disgruntled ancestor or a tetchy witch. And often, misfortunes are thought to be about something we’ve done wrong—and sometimes simply what we’re thinking about doing wrong.
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But the important point is that reasoning in such a superstitious manner and having scientific knowledge are not mutually exclusive. As the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard uncovered in his famous study on witchcraft beliefs among the Azande of Southern Sudan, although people may have no formal education, this doesn’t mean they’re naive, and it certainly doesn’t mean they’re oblivious to logical, scientific, natural causes. Rather, misfortunes are simply the means whereby witches conduct their trade.

One of the most famous passages of all anthropological ethnographies is from Evans-Pritchard’s
Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande
(1937), in which the author gives an example of the villagers’ typical reaction to misfortune:

Evans-Pritchard discovered that such naturally occurring questions among the villagers inevitably led them to accusations of witchcraft. More recently, University of Texas psychologist Christine Legare, along with Susan Gelman from the University of Michigan, discovered that Sesotho-speaking South Africans are reasonably well versed in the biological causes of AIDS, but their knowledge about the disease doesn’t stop them from viewing infected people as being cursed by a witch also. What this means is that in a country where a devastating 30 percent of pregnant women are HIV positive, scientific education may not be the silver bullet to the disease’s eradication we presume it to be. Clever witches, for example, can interfere with one’s decision making, or put an especially attractive—and infected—young woman in a young man’s path on the same day he forgot to tuck a condom into his wallet.