21/11/2014 Is God an Accident?

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DECEMBER 2005
VIDEO
Is God an Accident? A Four-Dimensional
Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: Tour of Boston
the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently In this groundbreaking video, time
psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that moves at multiple speeds within a
may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a single frame.
predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an
incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question ...
PAUL BLOOM DEC 1 2005, 12:00 PM ET

 I. God Is Not Dead

When I was a teenager my rabbi believed that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who was

living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was the Messiah, and that the world was soon
to end. He believed that the earth was a few thousand years old, and that the

fossil record was a consequence of the Great Flood. He could describe the

afterlife, and was able to answer adolescent questions about the fate of Hitler's
soul.

My rabbi was no crackpot; he was an intelligent and amiable man, a teacher and
a scholar. But he held views that struck me as strange, even disturbing. Like

many secular people, I am comfortable with religion as a source of spirituality
and transcendence, tolerance and love, charity and good works. Who can object

to the faith of Martin Luther King Jr. or the Dalai Lama—at least as long as that
faith grounds moral positions one already accepts? I am uncomfortable, however,
with religion when it makes claims about the natural world, let alone a world
beyond nature. It is easy for those of us who reject supernatural beliefs to agree
with Stephen Jay Gould that the best way to accord dignity and respect to both
science and religion is to recognize that they apply to "non-overlapping
magisteria": science gets the realm of facts, religion the realm of values.

For better or worse, though, religion is much more than a set of ethical principles
or a vague sense of transcendence. The anthropologist Edward Tylor got it right
in 1871, when he noted that the "minimum definition of religion" is a belief in
spiritual beings, in the supernatural. My rabbi's specific claims were a minority
view in the culture in which I was raised, but those sorts of views—about the
creation of the universe, the end of the world, the fates of souls—define religion
as billions of people understand and practice it.

The United States is a poster child for supernatural MORE IN TECHNOLOGY

From Atlantic Unbound: belief. Just about everyone in this country—96 percent
in one poll—believes in God. Well over half of Americans
When Fitbit Is the
Interviews: "Wired for believe in miracles, the devil, and angels. Most believe Expert Witness
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/12/is-god-an-accident/304425/ 1/9
21/11/2014 Is God an Accident? - The Atlantic
in an afterlife—and not just in the mushy sense that we KATE CRAWFORD
Creationism?"
Paul Bloom on mysticism, will live on in the memories of other people, or in our
fundamentalism, and the good deeds; when asked for details, most Americans say
elusive nature of art. they believe that after death they will actually reunite
with relatives and get to meet God. Woody Allen once
The New Work of
said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my Words
work. I want to achieve it through not dying." Most Americans have precisely MICHAEL ERARD

this expectation.

But America is an anomaly, isn't it? These statistics are sometimes taken as yet
Americans Still Use
another indication of how much this country differs from, for instance, France the Whole Pig
and Germany, where secularism holds greater sway. Americans are SHIRLEY LI

fundamentalists, the claim goes, isolated from the intellectual progress made by
the rest of the world.

There are two things wrong with this conclusion. First, even if a gap between
America and Europe exists, it is not the United States that is idiosyncratic. After
all, the rest of the world—Asia, Africa, the Middle East—is not exactly filled with MAGAZINE ARCHIVE
hard-core atheists. If one is to talk about exceptionalism, it applies to Europe, not
the United States.

Second, the religious divide between Americans and Europeans may be smaller
than we think. The sociologists Rodney Stark, of Baylor University, and Roger
Finke, of Pennsylvania State University, write that the big difference has to do
with church attendance, which really is much lower in Europe. (Building on the December 2014 November 2014 October 2014

work of the Chicago-based sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley, they argue
that this is because the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in
which churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their
product, whereas European churches are often under state control and, like
many government monopolies, have become inefficient.) Most polls from
European countries show that a majority of their people are believers. Consider September 2014 WWI Issue July/Aug 2014
Iceland. To judge by rates of churchgoing, Iceland is the most secular country on
earth, with a pathetic two percent weekly attendance. But four out of five
Icelanders say that they pray, and the same proportion believe in life after
death.

In the United States some liberal scholars posit a different sort of exceptionalism,
June 2014 May 2014 April 2014
arguing that belief in the supernatural is found mostly in Christian conservatives
—those infamously described by the Washington Post reporter Michael More back issues, Sept 1995 to present.

Weisskopf in 1993 as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command." Many

people saw the 2004 presidential election as pitting Americans who are religious
against those who are not.

An article by Steven Waldman in the online magazine Slate provides some

perspective on the divide:

"As you may already know, one of America's two political parties is
extremely religious. Sixty-one percent of this party's voters say they pray
daily or more often. An astounding 92 percent of them believe in life after
death. And there's a hard-core subgroup in this party of super-religious
Christian zealots. Very conservative on gay marriage, half of the members of
this subgroup believe Bush uses too little religious rhetoric, and 51 percent of
them believe God gave Israel to the Jews and that its existence fulfills the
prophecy about the second coming of Jesus."

The group that Waldman is talking about is Democrats; the hard-core subgroup
is African-American Democrats. In Focus

Finally, consider scientists. They are less likely than non-scientists to be religious

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/12/is-god-an-accident/304425/ 2/9
21/11/2014 Is God an Accident? - The Atlantic
—but not by a huge amount. A 1996 poll asked scientists whether they believed
in God, and the pollsters set the bar high—no mealy-mouthed evasions such as "I
believe in the totality of all that exists" or "in what is beautiful and unknown";
rather, they insisted on a real biblical God, one believers could pray to and
actually get an answer from. About 40 percent of scientists said yes to a belief in
this kind of God—about the same percentage found in a similar poll in 1916. Only
when we look at the most elite scientists—members of the National Academy of
Sciences—do we find a strong majority of atheists and agnostics. Liv ing in War-T orn Sy ria

These facts are an embarrassment for those who see supernatural beliefs as a
cultural anachronism, soon to be eroded by scientific discoveries and the spread
of cosmopolitan values. They require a new theory of why we are religious—one
that draws on research in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, and JUST IN
developmental psychology.

II. Opiates and Fraternities

On Immigration, Obama Fulfills
His Promise to Progressives
PETER BEINART
One traditional approach to the origin of religious belief begins with the
observation that it is difficult to be a person. There is evil all around; everyone
we love will die; and soon we ourselves will die—either slowly and probably Next Year, One Billion Works Will
unpleasantly or quickly and probably unpleasantly. For all but a pampered and
Be Free to Use Online
ROBINSON MEYER
lucky few life really is nasty, brutish, and short. And if our lives have some
greater meaning, it is hardly obvious.
Ferguson Protests Are Coming to
So perhaps, as Marx suggested, we have adopted religion as an opiate, to soothe Your City
ADAM CHANDLER
the pain of existence. As the philosopher Susanne K. Langer has put it, man
"cannot deal with Chaos"; supernatural beliefs solve the problem of this chaos by
providing meaning. We are not mere things; we are lovingly crafted by God, and
serve his purposes. Religion tells us that this is a just world, in which the good will
be rewarded and the evil punished. Most of all, it addresses our fear of death.
Freud summed it all up by describing a "three-fold task" for religious beliefs:
"they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty
of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for
the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on
them."

Religions can sometimes do all these things, and it would be unrealistic to deny
that this partly explains their existence. Indeed, sometimes theologians use the
foregoing arguments to make a case for why we should believe: if one wishes for
purpose, meaning, and eternal life, there is nowhere to go but toward God.

One problem with this view is that, as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker
reminds us, we don't typically get solace from propositions that we don't already
believe to be true. Hungry people don't cheer themselves up by believing that
they just had a large meal. Heaven is a reassuring notion only insofar as people
believe such a place exists; it is this belief that an adequate theory of religion has
to explain in the first place.

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bedava oyunlar • 3 years ago

nice post.
1△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Nudvwiv Aninoquisi • 3 years ago

Yes certain rituals bring what William McNiell calls muscular bonding but you should
pay attention to tenor Jan Peerce who never missed a performance with dysentary.
He was Kosher and as he traveled the world he brought his stomach with him. The
same one that gave him the great voice and all of that adulation. He was a self-
aware man.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Nudvwiv Aninoquisi • 3 years ago

Both this and Pinker's thoughts on the Arts seem bound by Western object-relations
languages. I suspect that the verb based process languages would not have nearly
the angst that you do around ownership of one's self. I also wonder what their
relationship would be to autism?

The problems of Domains fighting amongst themselves in the West i.e. Science vs
Religion vs. Economics vs Government vs Education etc. seems to me to be a
problem of Gestalt. There is no sense of the synergy of the whole and how the
superiority of one domain over the other can endanger the Gestalt. That the problem
becomes one of health both physical and mental or balance.

The West is locked in vertical relationships. Modern economics is a disaster as it

tries to explore the necessity of horizontal relations in the allocation of scarce
resources. The Euro is about to fail because of an inability to deal with horizontal
relations between members. Each country sees itself as on top and of more correct
value to the whole for some assumed story. We all fear for the internet because of the
conscious desire for Westerners to verticalize the Internet for profit and destroy the
horizontal relationship because IMHO that's the way their languages work.

Babies have a God relationship built in through parental dependency. They don't need
an accident of history to explain that fact. It's taught in the womb and at birth to every
living being.
7△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Nathan Douglas > Nudvwiv Aninoquisi • 2 years ago

The greatest failure of the West is not its vertical relationships but the sheer
number of philosophy majors posting on their cell phones while on break from
mediocrely flipping burgers.
5△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

heteroclitejumble > Nathan Douglas • 2 years ago

The greatest failure of Nathan Douglas was that dumb post. Ha ha,
people who study philosophy work at Starbucks/McDonalds. What a
novel and unusual thing to express, my word.

Now go grade my students' papers.

7△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

bobthechef > heteroclitejumble • 9 months ago

Does everything have to be about novelty? I thought philosophy
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/12/is-god-an-accident/304425/ 5/9
21/11/2014 Is God an Accident? - The Atlantic
was about the truth. Oh wait, it USED to be. Today, it's a
sausagefest where the guy who comes up with the biggest pile
of steaming bull excrement wins.

I wouldn't trust you to grade my students' papers. You'd undo all

my efforts to cure them in reason. The wanking would make
them stupid.
2△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

bobthechef > Nathan Douglas • 9 months ago

The real problem is that bullcrap manages to pass off as philosophy
these days (Derrida comes to mind, but there's more!). Frankfurt is
right: we have an epidemic case of bullcrap. People don't really care
about the truth. People like to shoot the sh** to feel like they're doing
something intellectual (throw a few words around, make assertions
without justification, arrogance all the way).

Nudvwiv is one of those people. Seems heteroclitejumble is too. Funny

thing is they're lackeys, philosophists. We serious philosophers, upon
encountering a philosophist, will look at each other and say "who the
hell is this guy?". Imagine if Deepak Chopra gave a talk at a physics
conference. Yeah, that.
2△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Rebecca Neher • 3 years ago

I would disagree with this paragraph:
"This theory explains almost everything about religion—except the
religious part. It is clear that rituals and sacrifices can bring people
together, and it may well be that a group that does such things has an
advantage over one that does not. But it is not clear why a religion has
to be involved. Why are gods, souls, an afterlife, miracles, divine
creation of the universe, and so on brought in? The theory doesn't
explain what we are most interested in, which is belief in the
supernatural."

The rituals cultures acquire (for the sake of social cohesion, or so goes the argument)
are, in many cases, arbitrary practices. And everyone would recognize this and
discount those rituals if these rituals didn't having the backing of people's beliefs that
those rituals have real, metaphysical bases in a supernatural reality. The backing of
God, or gods, or spirits, makes rituals feel objectively meaningful.

The author appears to be making the mistake, articulated for instance by David Sloan
Wilson, of not distinguishing the proximate evolutionary mechanism from the ultimate
evolutionary mechanism. Yeah, the ultimate mechanism for religions and their rituals
may be social cohesion; but the proximate mechanism- the thing that drives, from a
subjective perpsective, an organism to act the way it does- is that religions and their
rituals have a real, meaningful, and objective reality from the standpoint of the human
mind, and thus these rituals must be carried out and adhered to (they have for
instance, real consequences in the afterlife; in appeasing gods in order to have good
harvests; in casting out evil spirits and attracting benevolent ones; etc.).
6△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Edward Low > Rebecca Neher • 2 years ago

Your response does not address the author's specific claim that religions
survive despite the fact that they seem to invoke something extraneous, as
opposed to any other ritual. Unless of course, you're claiming that these rituals
seriously have consequences like 'good harvests'. It's interesting, but
irrelevant.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Brian Rush • 2 years ago

"The anthropologist Edward Tylor got it right in 1871, when he noted that
the "minimum definition of religion" is a belief in spiritual beings,
in the supernatural."

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21/11/2014 Is God an Accident? - The Atlantic
No he didn't, unless you want to exclude Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and
many versions of Neopaganism from the category of religion, along with the most
mystical interpretations of Christianity and Islam.
4△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Hypersapien • 2 years ago

"nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence
of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the
universe. "

Excuse me? Where do you get "nearly everyone" from? The fastest rising religious
affiliation in the world is "none".

You are a religious chauvinist and I decline to read your article.

5△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

mcw09 > Hypersapien • 2 years ago

He gets "nearly everyone" from, you know, facts. "Fastest growing'" is a far, far
cry from "largest."

I'm an agnostic, but wow, you need to dial it down a notch. The guy is
obviously *not* a "religious chauvinist" (ludicrous term, by the way), which
you'd have figured out if you'd read the article instead of going into hysterics
over a simple statement of fact. It's a damned good article.
13 △ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

KM • 2 years ago
It seems to be a be bit of circular reasoning to propose that people intuit order in
randomness, and so if they see order in something that cannot be "proven"
empirically, it must be random and this intuition must therefore be "false."
Also, I am sick of people equating the fringe beliefs of a small and largely ahistorical
minority of the world's Christians (Biblical literalists in backward parts of the USA) with
Christianity. The father of genetics was a Catholic monk, you know. The largest and
oldest Christian denominations - Orthodox and Catholic - don't have issues with
Darwin and don't claim the Earth is 5000 years old etc. etc.
11 △ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

LeonelAdam > KM • 2 years ago

...
goo.gl/VdGUE
1△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Joshua Jackson • 2 years ago

Gould was wrong, they overlap and only a sloppy thinker with no grasp of logic could
come to that conclusion. If mainstream science is correct in its materialist
assumptions then you can take all that "values crap" and shove it. Rape, the Mona
Lisa, your daughters first birthday party, abortion and the holocaust all have the same
moral standing.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Josh McConkey • 2 years ago

This is a well thought out overview, but the author has made an error in his a priori
assumption that no god exists. Philosophically, one should not exclude that possibility.
It may be true.
2△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

scott werden > Josh McConkey • 2 years ago

While the author made clear what his own personal views are on god, I did not
see that his analysis had anything to do with whether the god that a particular
religion venerates does in fact exist or not. The author is simply exploring
where the fundamental nature of body-soul duality originates from since that
duality is at the core of many religions. A theistic person may well believe that
god instilled the dual nature in man as part of his "plan", and that may well be
true, but that argument is not inconsistent with the author's work.
6△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›
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21/11/2014 Is God an Accident? - The Atlantic
6△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Edward Low > Josh McConkey • 2 years ago

Philosophically, we shouldn't believe in induction or an external reality either.
But try having meaningful discussions having excluded those assumptions.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

jahnabibarooah • 2 years ago

I think there are a number of problems with this article. It is not true that just because
one is religious, one believes in either miracles, divine creation, afterlife, a soul or
even God. I think it is high time that we consider the depth and breadth of religious
beliefs before making sweeping statements about religion.
1△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Moderate213 > jahnabibarooah • 2 years ago

What, then, is "religion" to you? (I mean this sincerely; it's an interesting idea
you posit here.)
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Jackie Chiles > jahnabibarooah • 2 years ago

you disagree with religion being defined as a belief in the supernatural?
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Edward Low • 2 years ago

'If bodies and souls are thought of as separate, there can be bodies without souls. A
corpse is seen as a body that used to have a soul. Most things—chairs, cups, trees—
never had souls; they never had will or consciousness. At least some nonhuman
animals are seen in the same way, as what Descartes described as "beast-
machines," or complex automata. Some artificial creatures, such as industrial robots,
Haitian zombies, and Jewish golems, are also seen as soulless beings, lacking free
will or moral feeling.'

You forgot the Romneybot3000.

1△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

rameshraghuvanshi • 2 years ago

One thing is very clear, we created God because we want.God. God don't want
us.We want God because in this uncertain world man afraid too much to death..What
happen after death this question is haunting to mankind form ancient time so to get
relief mankind created God.He is essential for us till death is there.I don't think science
become us immortal. When mankind become immortal then we don't need idea of
God. but it is absurdly impossible.If mankind become immortal there is no meaning to
evolution ,and there is no meaning to life man may suicide. Only death give meaning
to life.so man always created illusions.soul, heaven, hell,death after life all illusion are
essential for living..I think as many illusions created by man they giving meaning to his
life.
2△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

bryancostanich • 2 years ago

MOST POPULAR
This article needs a TL;DR.
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