The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

by Michael Shermer

We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow. I call this process belief-dependent realism, where our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it. Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time.

because no one model is adequate to explain reality, we are free to use different models for different aspects of the world.

Although there is no Archimedean point outside of ourselves from which we can view the Truth about Reality, science is the best tool ever devised for fashioning provisional truths about conditional realities.

once people commit to a belief, the smarter they are the better they are at rationalizing those beliefs. Thus: smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.

The Enlightenment ideal of Homo rationalis has us sitting down before a table of facts, weighing them in the balance pro and con, and then employing logic and reason to determine which set of facts best supports this or that theory. This is not at all how we form beliefs. What happens is that the facts of the world are filtered by our brains through the colored lenses of worldviews, paradigms, theories, hypotheses, conjectures, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through living. We then sort through the facts and select those that confirm what we already believe and ignore or rationalize away those that contradict our beliefs.

Reason’s bit is in the mouth of belief’s horse. The reins pull and direct, cajole and coax, wheedle and inveigle, but ultimately the horse will take its natural path.

A little religion is one thing, but when it is all one talks about it can become awkward and uncomfortable for family and friends who don’t share your faith passion.

Lewis. Although all this theological training would come in handy years later in my public debates on God, religion, and science, at the time I studied it because I believed it, and I believed it because I unquestioningly accepted God’s existence as real, along with the resurrection of Jesus and all the other tenets of the faith.

We were there to do science, and that is almost all we did. Religion was simply not part of the environment. So it was not the fact that I learned about evolutionary theory that rent asunder my Christian faith; it was that it was okay to challenge any and all beliefs without fear of psychological loss or social reprisal.

Ludwig von Mises was first among equals; he taught me that interventionism leads to more interventionism, and that if you can intervene to protect individuals from dangerous drugs, what about dangerous ideas?13

First of all, why would an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God care whether I believed in him? Shouldn’t he know this ahead of time in any case? Even assuming that he has granted me free will, since God is said to be omniscient and outside of time and space, shouldn’t he know everything that happens? In either case, why would “belief” matter at all, unless God were more like the Greek and Roman gods who competed with one another for human affections and worship and were filled with such human emotions as jealousy. The Old Testament God Yahweh certainly sounds like this type of deity in the first three of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2–17, King James Version): “I am the LORD thy God.… Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” Yikes! The sins of the fathers are to be borne by their children’s children’s children? What sort of justice is that? What kind of God is this? This just sounds so … well … ungodly to my ears. Most people have learned to get over jealousy, and I’ve even managed to keep it in check much of the time myself, and I’m no god, that’s for sure.15 Wouldn’t an omniscient,...

Lord, I did the best I could with the tools you granted me. You gave me a brain to think skeptically and I used it accordingly. You gave me the capacity to reason and I applied it to all claims, including that of your existence. You gave me a moral sense and I felt the pangs of guilt and the joys of pride for the bad and good things I chose to do. I tried to do unto others as I would have them do unto me, and although I fell far short of this ideal far too many times, I tried to apply your foundational principle whenever I could. Whatever the nature of your immortal and infinite spiritual essence actually is, as a mortal finite corporeal being I cannot possibly fathom it despite my best efforts, and so do with me what you will.

The problem we face is that superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old. Anecdotal thinking comes naturally, science requires training.

Patternicities do not occur randomly but are instead related to the context and environment of the organism, to what extent it believes that it is in control of its environment. Psychologists call this locus of control. People who rate high on internal locus of control tend to believe that they make things happen and that they are in control of their circumstances, whereas people who score high on external locus of control tend to think that circumstances are beyond their control and that things just happen to them.23 The thinking here is that having a high internal locus of control leads you to be more confident in your personal judgment, more skeptical of outside authorities and sources of information, and have a lower tendency to conform to external influences. In fact, people who consider themselves “skeptics” about the paranormal and supernatural tend to score high in internal locus of control, whereas self-reported “believers” in ESP, spiritualism, reincarnation, and mystical experiences in general tend to rate high in external locus of control.24

Malinowski noted this in particular among the Trobriand fishermen—the farther out to sea they sailed the more uncertain the conditions grew, along with the uncertainty of success at a catch. Their levels of superstitious rituals rose with their levels of uncertainty. “We find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range,” Malinowski explained. “We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under the control of rational methods and technological processes. Further, we find magic where the element of danger is conspicuous.”25

31 As a lifelong observer of the usually successful Los Angeles Lakers, for example, I can attest to the fact that long winning streaks are notched up to such simple explanations as smooth teamwork, hard work, and the natural talent of the players, whereas the occasional loss generates dozens of column inches and hours of radio talk time in the endless search for this, that, and the other cause—Kobe and Shaq’s feud, Phil’s bad back, payroll disputes, too much travel, too many Hollywood distractions, and so on, anything but the fact that the other team just outplayed them.

Residents were given plants and the opportunity to see weekly films but with some variation of control. Residents on the fourth floor, who were in charge of watering the plants and could choose the night of the week they wanted to view the film, lived longer and healthier lives than the other residents, even those given plants that were watered by the staff. It was the sense of control that had the apparent effect on health and well-being.33

Occasionally I am challenged about the harm of people embracing superstitions, along the lines of: “Oh, come on, Shermer, let people have their delusions. What’s the harm?” Setting aside for the moment the playful reading of one’s astrology chart in the newspaper or one’s fortune in an after-dinner cookie, my general answer is that it is better to live in a real world than a fantasy world. The harm, in fact, can be deadly serious when our patternicities are of the Type I false-positive type. What’s the harm? Ask the victims of John Patrick Bedell, the gunman who attacked guards at the entrance of the Pentagon in March 2010, who now appears to have been a right-wing extremist and 9/11 “truther.” In an Internet posting, he said that he intended to expose the truth behind the 9/11 “demolitions.” Apparently the delusional Bedell intended to shoot his way into the Pentagon to find out what really happened on 9/11. Death by conspiracy.

Examples of agenticity abound. Subjects watching reflective dots move about in a darkened room, especially if the dots take on the shape of two legs and two arms, infer that they represent a person or intentional agent. Children believe that the sun can think and follows them around, and when asked to draw a picture of the sun they often add a smiley face to give agency to it. Genital-shaped foods such as bananas and oysters are often believed to enhance sexual potency. A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality or essence is transplanted with the organ.

We are natural-born supernaturalists, driven by our tendency to find meaningful patterns and impart to them intentional agency. Why do we do this?

scientists are not trained to detect trickery and intentional deception, the very art of magic.

Consistent with belief-dependent realism and my thesis that belief comes first, explanation second, the self-declared atheist Simpson attributed his experience to a “sixth sense” that he figured was probably an evolutionary remnant from the distant past that he simply called “the voice.”

increased levels of dopamine appear to be more effective in making skeptics less skeptical than in making believers more believing.

Belief in the Brain How is it that people come to believe something that seemingly defies reason? The answer is in the thesis of this book: beliefs come first; reasons for belief follow in confirmation of the realism dependent on the belief. Most belief claims fall somewhere in the fuzzy borderlands between unquestionably true and unmistakably false.

belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.

The scientific principle that a claim is untrue unless proven otherwise runs counter to our natural tendency to accept as true that which we can comprehend quickly.

“I think, given the subject matter, both groups were less certain of their answers. The surprise, of course, is that it was both groups. One might have expected Christians to be less certain that ‘the Biblical God really exists’ than that ‘Michael Jordan was a basketball player.’ But atheists seem to show the same effect when evaluating a statement like ‘The Biblical God is a myth.’”

In sum, because we so readily impart agency and intention to inanimate objects such as rocks and trees and clouds, and to animate objects such as predators, prey, and our fellow human beings; because we are natural-born dualists who believe in mind beyond body; because we are aware of our own minds and the minds of others; because we are aware of our own bodies as separate from all other bodies; because our brains are naturally inclined to weave all sensory inputs and cognitive thoughts into a meaningful story with ourselves as the central character; and, finally, because we are able to decenter ourselves from our time and space into another time and space, it is natural for us to believe that we have a timeless and eternal essence. We are natural-born immortalists.

the fact that we cannot fully explain a mystery with natural means does not mean it requires a supernatural explanation.

In the case of the afterlife, just because we do not have a 100 percent completely natural explanation for all of the experiences that people have near death does not mean that we will never understand death, or that there is some other mysterious force at work. It certainly does not mean that there is life after death. It just means that we don’t know everything. Such uncertainty is at the very heart of science and is what makes it such a challenging enterprise.

According to Oxford University Press’s World Christian Encyclopedia, 84 percent of the world’s population belongs to some form of organized religion, which at the end of 2009 equals 5.7 billion people. That’s a lot of souls. Christians dominate at around 2 billion adherents (with Catholics accounting for half of these), Muslims come in at a little more than a billion, Hindus at around 850 million, Buddhists at almost 400 million, and ethnoreligionists (animists and others in Asia and Africa primarily) make up most of the remaining several hundred million believers. Worldwide, there are about 10,000 distinct religions, each one of which may be further subdivided and classified. Christians, for example, may be apportioned among about 34,000 different denominations.1

God is the ultimate pattern that explains everything that happens, from the beginning of the universe to the end of time and everything in between, including and especially the fates of human lives. God is the ultimate intentional agent who gives the universe meaning and our lives purpose. As an ultimate amalgam, patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all other forms of theisms and spiritualisms devised by humans.

“It is extremely doubtful whether the offspring of the more sympathetic and benevolent parents, or of those who were the most faithful to their comrades, would be reared in greater number than the children of selfish and treacherous parents of the same tribe. He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.”

“There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection [of the group].

Around five thousand to seven thousand years ago, as bands and tribes began to coalesce into chiefdoms and states, government and religion co-evolved as social institutions to codify moral behaviors into ethical principles and legal rules, and God became the ultimate enforcer of the rules.6 In the small populations of hunter-gatherer bands and tribes with a few dozen to a couple of hundred members, informal means of behavior control and social cohesion could be employed by capitalizing on the moral emotions, such as shaming someone through guilt for violating a social norm, or even excommunicating violators from the group. But when populations grew into the tens and hundreds of thousands, and eventually into millions of people, such informal means of enforcing the rules of society broke down because free riders and norm violators could more readily get away with cheating in large groups; something more formal was needed. This is one vital role that religion plays, such that even if violators think that they got away with a violation, believing that there is an invisible intentional agent who sees all and knows all and judges all can be a powerful deterrent of sin.

Your culture may dictate which god to believe in and which religion to adhere to, but the belief in a supernatural agent who operates in the world as an indispensable part of a social group is universal to all cultures because it is hardwired in the brain, a conclusion enhanced by studies on identical twins separated at birth and raised in different environments.

When dopamine is released by certain neurons in the brain it is picked up by other neurons that are receptive to its chemical structure, thereby establishing dopamine pathways that stimulate organisms to become more active and reward certain behaviors that then get repeated. If you knock out dopamine from either a rat or a human, for example, they will become catatonic. If you overstimulate the production of dopamine, you get frenetic behavior in rats and schizophrenic behavior in humans.

I am less interested in why people believe in this or that god or join this or that religion, and more interested in why people believe in any gods or join any religion. To that end, I want to pull back and look at the bigger picture of history. As a back-of-the-envelope calculation within an order-of-magnitude accuracy, we can safely say that over the past ten thousand years of history humans have created about ten thousand different religions and about one thousand gods. What is the probability that Yahweh is the one true god, and Amon Ra, Aphrodite, Apollo, Baal, Brahma, Ganesha, Isis, Mithra, Osiris, Shiva, Thor, Vishnu, Wotan, Zeus, and the other 986 gods are false gods? As skeptics like to say, everyone is an atheist about these gods; some of us just go one god further.

Even within the three great Abrahamic religions, who can say which one is right? Christians believe Jesus is the savior and that you must accept him to receive eternal life in heaven. Jews do not accept Jesus as the savior, and neither do Muslims. In fact, only roughly two billion of the world’s 5.7 billion believers accept Jesus as their personal savior. Where Christians believe that the Bible is the inerrant gospel handed down from the deity, Muslims believe that the Koran is the perfect word of God. Christians believe that Christ was the latest prophet. Muslims believe that Muhammad is the latest prophet. Mormons believe that Joseph Smith is the latest prophet. And, stretching this track of thought just a bit, Scientologists believe that L. Ron Hubbard is the latest prophet. So many prophets, so little time.

Virgin birth myths likewise spring up throughout time and geography. Among those alleged to have been conceived without the usual assistance from a male were Dionysus, Perseus, Buddha, Attis, Krishna, Horus, Mercury, Romulus, and, of course, Jesus. Consider the parallels between Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, and Jesus of Nazareth. Both were said to have been born from a virgin mother, who was a mortal woman, but were fathered by the king of heaven; both allegedly returned from the dead, transformed water into wine, and introduced the idea of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the creator, and both were said to have been liberator of mankind.

The kings of Egypt themselves were inextricably connected with Osiris in death. When Osiris rose from the dead, they would rise also in union with him. By the time of the New Kingdom, not only pharaohs but mortal men believed that they could be resurrected by and with Osiris at death if, of course, they practiced the correct religious rituals. Sound familiar? Osiris predates the Jesus messiah story by at least two and a half millennia.

Shortly after the crucifixion of Jesus there arose another messiah, Apollonius of Asia Minor. His followers claimed he was the son of God, that he was able to walk through closed doors, heal the sick, and cast out demons, and that he raised a dead girl back to life. He was accused of witchcraft, sent to Rome before the court, and was jailed but escaped. After he died his followers claimed he appeared to them and then ascended into heaven. Even

Despite the fact that virtually everyone labels me an atheist, I prefer to call myself a skeptic. Why? Words matter and labels carry baggage. When most people employ the word atheist, they are thinking of strong atheism that asserts that God does not exist, which is not a tenable position (you cannot prove a negative). Weak atheism simply withholds belief in God for lack of evidence, which we all practice for nearly all the gods ever believed in history. As well, people tend to equate atheism with certain political, economic, and social ideologies, such as communism, socialism, extreme liberalism, moral relativism, and the like. Since I am a fiscally conservative civil libertarian, and most definitely not a moral relativist, this association does not fit. Yes, we can try redefining atheism in a more positive direction—which I do regularly—but since I publish a magazine called Skeptic and write a monthly column for Scientific American called “Skeptic,” I prefer that as my label. A skeptic simply does not believe a knowledge claim until sufficient evidence is presented to reject the null hypothesis (that a knowledge claim is not true until proven otherwise). I do not know that there is no God, but I do not believe in God, and have good reasons to think that the concept of God is socially and psychologically constructed.

God did it. Who created God? God is he who needs not be created. Why can’t the universe be “that which needs not be created”? The universe is a thing or an event, whereas God is an agent or being, and things and events have to be created by something, but an agent or being does not. Isn’t God a thing if he is part of the universe? God is not a thing. God is an agent or being. Don’t agents and beings have to be created as well? We’re an agent, a being—a human being in fact. We agree that human beings need an explanation for our origin. So why does this causal reasoning not apply to God as agent and being? God is outside of time, space, and matter, and thus needs no explanation. If that is the case, then it is not possible for any of us to know if there is a God or not because, by definition, as finite beings operating exclusively within the world we can only know other natural and finite beings and objects. It is not possible for a natural finite being to know a supernatural infinite being.

At this point in the debate my erstwhile theological opponents typically turn to ancillary arguments for God’s existence, such as personal revelation, which by definition is personal and thus cannot serve as evidence to others who have not shared that revelatory experience.

Muslims as the fastest growing religion, or Judaism as the oldest religion that has survived millennia of attempts to eradicate it, or Christians who believe that the disciples would never have gone to their deaths defending ...

I have built a strong case that belief in a supernatural agent with intention is hardwired in our brains, and that the agent as God was created by humans and not vice versa.

any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.

Deduction III. If today we can engineer genes, clone mammals, and manipulate stem cells with science and technologies developed in only the past half century, think of what an ETI could do with fifty thousand years of equivalent powers of progress in science and technology. For an ETI who is a million years more advanced than we are, engineering the creation of planets and stars may be entirely possible.21 And if universes are created out of collapsing black holes—which some cosmologists think is probable—it is not inconceivable that a sufficiently advanced ETI could even create a universe by triggering the collapse of a star into a black hole.22 What would we call an intelligent being capable of engineering life, planets, stars, and even universes? If we knew the underlying science and technology used to do the engineering, we would call it an extraterrestrial intelligence; if we did not know the underlying science and technology, we would call it God.