And what about belief in general? Belief plays a role in science, religion, and the supernatural. If scientists, priests, and mediums all have beliefs, then who is right? All of them deal with the unobservable, but they rely on different sources of evidence. Science has the scientific method of experiment and observation. The supernatural operates on the basis of personal experience and intuition. Religion is based on culture, testimony, and individual experiences. These descriptions are not perfect, but they capture some of the main differences. Science, religion, and the supernatural are usually treated separately, but we have to consider how they coexist and sometimes overlap in the same mind. I know religious scientists who believe in the supernatural. They bring to mind a Venn diagram showing three circles of beliefs. Some individuals see themselves firmly encamped in one of the circles, but the rest of us are spread out across all three fields. As belief systems, science, religion, and the supernatural are not neatly fenced off from each other but rather blend and blur at the edges, and we cherry-pick from different belief systems when the need suits us. This is important to appreciate as we try to understand the turf wars and tension about belief that have arisen in recent years.
RELIGION AS A VIRUS
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins denounces all supernaturalism but strategically focuses his attack on the main organized religions.
I decry supernaturalism in all its forms, and the most effective way to proceed will be to concentrate on the form most likely familiar to my readers – the form that impinges most threateningly on all our societies . . . I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.8
Every religion has a supernatural component, but not all supernaturalism is religious. I could be an atheist and still think that I have abilities that go beyond nature but without the need to believe in God. This is important because while all religions come from culture, this is not true for all supernatural beliefs. In making this distinction, we may better understand where supernatural beliefs come from, why they transmit so well, and why they are so difficult to get rid of.
Supernatural beliefs may emerge spontaneously in children as they develop as a natural by-product of their mind design. These beliefs do not need to come from culture. This may also account for why religious beliefs are so successful. Justin Barrett, a religious psychologist, similarly argues that mind design explains belief in God, but I think that such a natural explanation can be extended to all forms of supernaturalism.9 Religion does not have a monopoly on the miraculous. And if there is a natural origin for all supernatural thinking, then this presents a considerable problem for any attempt to remove supernaturalism, religious or otherwise.
Let’s examine the idea that belief is spread by culture alone. We have already seen that we tend to assume that experts know what they are talking about. So it is no surprise that naive children tend to believe what they are told. Maybe our human inclination to believe is something we cannot avoid. It could be immensely adaptive. Such a strategy would increase the learning potential of children by making it unnecessary for them to discover everything by themselves. That’s why communicating ideas has been so successful for human civilization. We can learn immense amounts of things about the world without ever having to experience or discover them ourselves. We can learn about people we have never met, places we have never been, and things we have never done and are not likely to do. In fact, we love to learn about things we cannot experience ourselves. However, as Dawkins points out, the same mechanism could be used by the naive child to spread nonsense and lies.
Are children gullible? As every parent knows, the answer is yes, but there are some interesting issues here. Their belief in cultural magical beings such as Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny shows that children are open to the possibility of believing the impossible. At the same time, they do appreciate that not all things are possible. Even infants can tell the difference between the possible and the impossible. For example, they recognize a magic trick when they see it. If you hide a toy behind one of two screens and then retrieve the toy from the second screen, as if it somehow moved invisibly from one to the other, six-month-old infants will look longer.10 Psychologists use such magic tricks to investigate what young children know about the world. If they seem surprised or look longer, then we can say that they noticed something was amiss. Somewhere in their brain, they know something isn’t quite right. How then do children come to know what is impossible?
Some knowledge appears to be built into babies by evolution, while other knowledge has to be learned. For example, from the start, babies seem to know the difference between humans and objects and to treat them as very different.11 Babies interact with people in a totally different way from their interactions with objects. By their first birthday, they have solid objects pretty much figured out, though they are still unsure about nonsolid objects like liquids, sand, and jelly.12 They can even predict how objects should behave. For example, they know that solid objects cannot float on thin air, and they stare in amazement if shown a conjurer’s illusion to create this effect.13 Are they reasoning about this in a logical way? Are they thinking in terms of why an object cannot float on thin air? When it comes to this type of reasoning, studies have shown that young children reason from experience rather than logic.14 Children make judgements based on their past experiences. If they have seen something happen, then they know it is possible. However, if they have not seen it happen, they regard it equally as impossible. For example, if told something unlikely – there are people who like to drink onion juice, for instance, or you can find a live alligator under your bed – pre-school children regard these things as being just as impossible as turning apple sauce back into an apple or walking through a brick wall. Only after some years at school can children start to understand that while some things are improbable, they are not necessarily impossible. Children are filtering information through their minds and looking for past experiences to compare it with. This explains why they also deny the possibility that social laws can be broken, for instance, by going barefoot to school or changing the colours of the traffic lights. Since they have never seen any of these events, they regard them as impossible. Also, pre-school children rarely explain why something is impossible. They can’t give you a logical argument. Rather, they seem to reason from example. So if you tell them there are things that happen in the world that they can’t check out for themselves, they are going to be vulnerable. If they trust you, they will believe you until they have had a chance to check out the truth of what you say.
One analogy often invoked for the spread of beliefs is to compare them to mental viruses or parasites that infect minds. Dan Dennett opens his book Breaking the Spell by comparing supernatural beliefs to the tiny parasitic lancet fluke, which colonizes the brains of ants and makes them repeatedly crawl up blades of grass.15 In doing so, the ant is likely to be eaten by a cow or sheep, thereby fulfilling the next stage of the parasite’s reproductive cycle. Dennett is comparing religious ideas to a parasite that makes us spread supernatural beliefs by infecting the child’s mind. Strong stuff, and deeply emotive, but Dennett misses an important part of the analogy: both viruses and parasites can infect only hosts that can accommodate them. That is why viruses and parasites cannot infect all species. Viruses can mutate and cross over to different species only after they have changed to fit into the host environment, not the other way around. This minidiversion into virology highlights an important point about indoctrination accounts of belief. Maybe ideas spread not only because children are programmed to believe any idea, but also because they believe ideas that best fit a receptive mind.