Humans are social animals, and to participate in society we have to share conventions: things that we all agree have some common value. These are the things that can hold a group together. Some conventions are everyday and mundane, such as the money convention of exchanging pieces of paper or lumps of metal for goods. Others are more profound. Certain documents, such as Magna Carta, or the US Declaration of Independence, are more than just pieces of paper. They are sacred objects. They represent important points in civilization, but we revere them as objects in themselves. There’s something more to them than simply the words written on them. Or a sacred item could be a book or a painting, a Mozart manuscript or an original Vermeer. Both can be copied and duplicated but it’s the originals we value the most. In the same way, a building or location can be sacred. Shrines and churches are obviously holy to the religiously devout, but we can all share in a deeper sense of the value of a place. If you support Manchester United, it’s Old Trafford. If you are a Chicago Cubs baseball fan, it’s Wrigley Field. These stadiums are more than just sports arenas. To the fan they are hallowed grounds, imbued with as much sacred value as a temple.13
Society needs sacred values – anything that we hold to be special and unique beyond any given sum. You can’t put a price on a sacred value, or at least you should not willingly do so. Because they cannot be reduced to any scientific or rational analysis, sacred values represent a common set of beliefs that bind together all the members of a group and apply to all of them. Without sacred values, society would deteriorate into a free-for-all in which individuals are only out for themselves. When our societies have sacred values, we are all bound to acknowledge and conform to the group consensus that there are some things that simply should not be bought, owned, or controlled by another group member. Sacred values confirm our willingness to be part of the group and share beliefs even when such beliefs lack good evidence.
Over the coming chapters I hope to show you how our supernatural beliefs can make sense of our sacred values. Don’t take my word for it. That would be storytelling. Rather you, the reader, need to come up with your own opinion based on the evidence presented in the following pages. So that you can navigate the path ahead more clearly, let me show you the roadmap.
In the opening chapter, I begin with the notion of ‘mind design’ – something organized in the way we interpret the world around us – and how it produces some surprising beliefs. Most of us willingly accept that our minds can make mistakes, but we all think we can overcome these errors if given the right information. That’s because we all think that we are reasonable. Have you ever heard anyone admit that he or she is unreasonable? Despite our confidence in our own reason, sometimes our capacity to be reasonable is undermined by our gut reactions, which can kick in so fast that it’s hard to rein them in with reason. Take the example of evil and our belief that it can be physically real. If you don’t believe me, consider how you would feel if you had to shake hands with a mass murderer such as I discuss in chapter 2. Why do we recoil at the thought? Why do we treat their evil as something contagious?
I then want to turn your attention to origins. Tracing the first evidence of supernatural beliefs to the beginnings of culture, I show that, while science has made considerable strides over the last four hundred years, supernaturalism is still very common. Then I want you to consider origins within the individual and the development of belief in the growing child. One of the main points I want to make in the book is that children naturally reason about the unseen aspects of their world, and doing so sometimes leads them to beliefs that form the basis of later adult supernatural notions. In particular, the ways in which young children reason about living things and about what the mind is and can do clearly show the beginnings of ideas that become the basis for adult supernatural beliefs. These are emerging long before children are told what to think, which brings me back to one of the major themes of the book: supernatural beliefs are a product of natural thinking.
Over the next couple of chapters, I examine this natural thinking and how children organize the world into different kinds of categories. In doing so, they must be thinking that the physical world is inhabited by invisible stuff or essences. Science may be able to teach children about real stuff that makes up the world, such as DNA and atoms, but our childish essential reasoning continues to influence the way we reason and behave as adults. This is no more obvious than in the case of our attitudes toward sacred objects. Sacred objects are deemed to be special by virtue of their unique essence, which people believe connects them to significant other people. These can be parents, lovers, pop stars, athletes, kings, or saints – anyone with whom we feel a need to make a connection.
The remaining chapters of the book focus on sentimentality and the irrational fears that we can so easily detect in others but often fail to recognize in our own reasoning. Before concluding the book, I examine the latest thoughts about a brain basis for individual differences in the supersense. Some people are much more willing to entertain supernatural beliefs even when they are highly educated. How can we understand this? Here we consider the brain mechanisms that may be responsible for generating and controlling beliefs and how these can change over the course of a lifetime or during an illness.
By the time you get to the end of this book, I hope you will appreciate that the development of a child’s mind into that of an adult is not simply a case of learning more facts about the world. It also involves learning to ignore childish beliefs, which requires mental effort. Education helps, but it’s not the whole story. We need to learn to control our childish beliefs. I also briefly consider why there may be a connection between the supersense and creativity. Maybe creativity depends on our capacity to leap over logic and generate new ways of looking at old problems. In which case, creativity and the supersense may be stronger in those of us who are less anchored to reality and more inclined to sense patterns and connections that the rest of us miss or simply dismiss. They are always there in the background of our minds, pushing us toward the supernatural.
In the final pages, I bring these issues together and return to the supersense and the notion of sacred values with an explanation for why human society needs to believe that there are some things in life that must be considered unique and profound. Not only is there room for such beliefs in the modern mind, but they may be unavoidable.
What people choose to do with their beliefs is another matter. Whether religions are good or bad is a heated debate that I will leave to others. I just think that supernatural beliefs are inevitable. At least knowing where they come from and why we have them makes it easier to understand belief in the supernatural as part of being human.
So let’s begin that scientific search for the supersense.