Despite occasional comments that the world would be better off without religion, I like to think of myself as an agnostic who is at the very least sympathetic to religion, and certainly fascinated by it. I once described it to a professor with the metaphor of watching people dance without being able to hear the music.
It’s no wonder then that I was attracted by the title alone to Michael Shermer’s _How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science_. Shermer is better known as head of the Skeptics Society and for his _Why People Believe Weird Things_, and while it might not seem likely from these credentials, Shermer is — by his own account — sympathetic to religious belief himself. Perhaps not sympathetic — understanding. That fact sets him as an outsider looking in on religious belief.
That wasn’t always the case. There was a period when Shermer considered himself a Christian. A fundamentalist, even. He once gave a professor a copy of Hal Lindsey’s _The Late, Great Planet Earth_ in an effort to proselytize. Instead of seeing the light, the professor
Saw red and hammered out a two-page, single-space typed list of problems with Lindsey’s book. I still have the list, folded and tucked neatly into my copy of the book. (6)
Eventually Shermer abandoned the Christian worldview for a materialist view of the world. He was still intrigued by religion, though, and this led eventually to him exploring how people believe.
This is not to be confused with the question of “Why people believe.” Shermer begins the book by explaining “the God problem” is insoluble. He is not out to disprove God’s existence, for that can’t be done, he argues. He also holds that God’s existence can’t be proved, and that therefore the most logical position for him is that of agnosticism.
To explain further, Shermer uses Donald Symons’ question, “Do you believe in [fill in any three letters] exists?” then quotes Symons extensively:
You have to know more about what’s in the brackets and how its existence or nonexistence might be determined or, at least, what kinds of evidence might potentially bear on the question. If you find out that the questioner has no ideas about the characteristics of the [ ] (such as, for example, whether it is made of matter), and more importantly, states that no conceivable observation could have any bearing on the existence/nonexistence question, then to me the original question is meaningless, or incoherent, or empty, or some similar concept. (10)
Since we cannot know — in a scientific sense — any of these characteristics, then it becomes a matter of faith. And that’s more or less where Shermer leaves it.
Shermer’s goal, then, is to explore the notion of belief from a strictly psychological, biological, generally scientific point of view. In other words, how did belief evolve?
To do this, posits “The Belief Engine.” Humans are pattern-seeking animals, Shermer notes, and “humans evolved a Belief Engine whose function it is to seek patterns and find causal relationships, and in the process makes mistakes in thinking” (39). Religion is not the inevitable outcome, though: “under certain conditions it leads to magical thinking while under different circumstances it leads to scientific thinking” (38). Yet how could this possibly work?
Humans evolved to be skilled pattern-seeking creatures. Those who were best at finding patterns (standing upwind of game animals is bad for the hut, cow manure is good for the crops) left behind the most offspring. We are their descendants. The problem in seeking and finding patterns is knowing which ones are meaningful and which ones are not. Unfortunately are brains are not always good at determining the difference. The reason is that discovering a meaningless pattern (painting animals on a cave wall before a hunt) usually does no harm and may even do some good in reducing anxiety in certain environments (38).
Shermer then outlines two kinds of thinking errors:
Type 1 Error: Believing a falsehood
Type 2 Error: Rejecting a truth
Shermer continues:
In some cases, neither of these errors will automatically get us killed, so we can live with them. […] The Belief Engine is an evolved mechanism for helping us survive, because in addition to committing Type 1 and Type 2 errors, we also commit what we might call a _Type 1 Hit: not believing a falsehood_ and a _Type 2 Hit: Believing a truth_.
One might wonder whether the book at this point is starting to take a somewhat antagonistic view of religion. It’s an almost a Golden Bough-ian view of religion: cave paintings and magical thinking led eventually to cathedrals and theology.