Essay Competition: If God Is A Delusion - Why Bother? by Michael J. Rush

This essay tied for third place in the Mary Evans Picture Library competition. It appears here unedited.

In December 2007 Terry Pratchett, author of the best-selling Discworld novels, was diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s disease[1].  He characteristically described his situation as ‘an embuggerance’ and wished to maintain an optimistic attitude.  In one interview he said, ‘We should be aware that it's an illness, it's not some visitation from heaven. This is something that can't be repeated often enough…It's not something to be ashamed of.  It's not because you've done something wrong.’[2] In an interesting twist, he later reported what some may describe as a religious experience.

‘I’m certainly not a man of faith, but as I was rushing down the stairs one day . . . it was very strange. And I say this reluctantly, because I am trying to deal with this situation in as hard-headed a way as I can. I suddenly knew that everything was okay, that what I was doing was right, and I didn’t know why… It was a thought that all the right things are happening in the circumstances; and I thought, ‘Well, that’s all right then.’ I don’t actually believe in anyone who could have put that in my head – unless it was my dad, and he’s been dead a few years.'[3]

Despite this experience, Terry Pratchett remains a non-believer.  So what is the significance of religious experience and what does it tell us about the ‘God delusion’?

The Argument from Religious Experience

Richard Dawkins (2006, P92) dismisses the argument from religious experience for the existence of God.  For Dawkins such experiences are simply due to misperceptions or hallucinations that are misinterpreted by the gullible.  He also implies a connection with pathology in defining ‘delusion’ as ‘a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder’ (Dawkins, 2006, P5 & P88).  However, there are significant differences between religious and psychotic experiences.  Many mystics are able to successfully integrate their experiences into daily life in a life-enhancing way (Davis, 1989).  Psychotic experiences are usually frequent, frightening, and not sought after whilst mystical experiences are rare, pleasant and welcomed (Newberg et al, 2001).  This is an important point that I shall return to later as it suggests that perfectly ‘normal’, healthy, psychologically well-balanced people can have such experiences.  Unfortunately, Dawkins’ (2005) five page dismissal of religious experience misses what is probably the most common argument; not just that an individual can come to believe in God after a religious experience but that there is a ‘common core’ to religious experience (Davis, 1989).  This core is asserted to be the same transcendent truth at the heart of all religions merely interpreted differently by each experiencer due to their linguistic and cultural environment.  It is not religious experiences in general but more specifically mystical types of experiences that are said to support this thesis (Ward, 2005).  The common elements include feelings of peace, joy, ecstasy or bliss.  In addition a loss of the self-other boundary - from feeling an interconnection with others or the natural world, to unitive experiences with the world or a deity, to ultimate absorption in divinity or the Absolute.  Therefore, a Buddhist may describe the experience as enlightenment, a Christian may describes it as union with God, and a Hindu may describe it as Brahman.  This argument is often associated with Perennialism; the doctrine that each religious tradition reflects part of one true primordial or ancient wisdom tradition.  Many individuals and traditions including Aldous Huxley (1944), Annie Besant (1897), Ken Wilber (1993), and Frithjof Schuon (1984) have adopted this view.

However, there are problems with this approach.  The ‘contextualists’ such as Katz (1978) lay down a serious challenge to Perennialism by arguing that all experience is mediated by language and culture.  If this is correct then there is no such thing as a pure experience that can be interpreted after the event.  Its socio-linguistic background determines the experience itself.  The emphasis here is on the differences between experiences; enlightenment is not the same as experiencing union with God.  Contextualists emphasise the intimate relationship between the features of an experience and the tradition within which it is experienced.  Contrary to Huxley and the Perennialists Gershom Scholem (1946) made this point saying that there is no such thing as mysticism per se, there is only Jewish mysticism, Christian mysticism, Islamic mysticism, etc.

How then do we account for the apparent similarities between some religious experiences whilst also taking into account the formative role of language and culture?

Mental Models & Delusional Beliefs

The reports about Terry Pratchett finding God were exaggerated and he responded, ‘There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.’[4]  He gave an account of his experience and when asked where he thought it came from he replied:

‘Me, actually - the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem In Alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.

It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.

I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.’

This could be described as nature mysticism and is not uncommon in accounts of religious (or spiritual if you prefer) experiences (Hardy, 1979).  Even Dawkins (2006, P15) acknowledges the value of such experiences referring to them as ‘Einsteinian Religion’.  Above, Pratchett suggests a link between his own experience and that of the Biblical Abraham.  The observation that there are common elements between religious experiences does not necessarily mean that they share a transcendent source.  Alternative explanations could be that they share common cultural influences, common environmental developmental constraints, or are due to universal psycho-physiological processes.  Dawkins (2006) explains that humans have evolved to automatically create internal, subjective maps or models of the external, physical world.  Without such models, the individual would not be able to function effectively in their environment.  We may be aware of some of our mental models but many of them are largely unconscious (Park, 2005).  These conscious or unconscious models represent our ideas or beliefs about the world (Newberg, & Waldman, 2007, P21).  However, these models are not simply learnt from the external environment.  Noam Chomsky (2002) developed the idea of a Universal Grammar, an innate ability to acquire language.  He observed that all languages can be reduced to a set of principles and parameters that enable the growing child to learn the language prevalent in its environment.  The parameters are set at an early stage of development, for example grammatical word order in an interrogative sentence.  The principles however are hardwired and represent the grammar universal to all languages.  Chomsky suggested that there was a biological ‘language organ’ that evolved so that we can use language.  Steven Pinker (1994) has suggested that there may be modules for other universal human traits such as intuitive biology, self-concept, and kinship.  These examples suggests how our experience of the world may contain commonalities (due to our innate principles) whilst at the same time also exhibiting multiple differences (due to the parameters set by culture and society).  In the case of religion Pascal Boyer (1994) outlines a number of these innate principles and explains how they relate the cognitive environment (EC) to the objective’ environment (EO),  for example, ‘naïve physics’, ‘animate objects’, and ‘intuitive psychology’. Religious ideas, argues Boyer, violate the expectations of our innate mental models, or schema, of how the world should work.

Neuroscientists Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg (1999) have proposed a neurocognitive explanation for how religious beliefs, rituals and experiences may develop.  They list seven cognitive operators, or functions of the mind/brain:

• the Reductive Operator, which is responsible for our ability to analytically dissect or reduce an idea into its component parts,
• the Holistic Operator, which enables us to see the bigger picture and understand how many discrete parts can interact as a whole,
• the Abstractive Operator, which allows us to form abstract mental concepts and categories,
• the Quantitative Operator, which provides our ability to perform basic mathematical functions,
• the Emotional Operator, which assigns emotional value, importance and sense of reality to our experiences,
• the Causal Operator, which compels us to postulate cause and effect relationships to our perceptions,
• and the Binary Operator; which interprets the world in terms of opposites.

d’Aquili and Newberg explain how these operators work together to enable us to construct myths about the world which would have been critical for our survival.  They give a hypothetical example of a prehistoric hunter who is surprised by a noise from the nearby woods.  The cause of the noise is unknown and the causal operator immediately suggests putative causes; the noise is either a succulent pig or a hungry leopard.  Associations are triggered in the hunter’s memory and are influenced by his emotional operator.   The binary operator presents the problem in terms of a potential life or death situation.  The possibility of the leopard takes precedence, the hunter believes this may well be the true explanation, and flees.  He may never know whether there really was a leopard or a pig but from a survival point of view it is better to miss lunch than to be lunch (Newberg et al, 2001, pp67-70).  They go on to suggest that it is these same functions of the mind/brain that compel people to form religious beliefs and ritual.  In addition to their theory about the cognitive operators mentioned above, d’Aquili and Newberg also have a neuropsychological model for mystical experiences.  They have observed and described, using SPECT brain imaging techniques in meditating Buddhists, the correlated neurological brain activity.  They found that during such mystical states the areas of the brain responsible for our sense of space and time, that is orientating our selves to the outside world, become inhibited.  This would help to explain the sense of loss of self and timelessness often reported in these kinds of experiences (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999).  However, these neurocognitive mechanisms, cognitive operators and orientation areas, are unlikely to be devoted just to spiritual experiences.  They may underlie other common human traits including language and abstract concept formation.  The important point here is that, as mentioned earlier, the underlying neurocognitive processes are not pathological or merely misfiring.  They have an important role to play in our successful adaptation to the environment.

The Naturalness of Delusional Beliefs

Obviously, the leopard in the woods example is one that would directly affect the survival of our hypothetical early human.  However, it seems plausible to suggest that less direct, but advantageous, models could also be formed.  In other words, the disparity between the EC and the EO would be greater, but still significant enough to make a difference to an individual’s or society’s interaction with the environment.  This implies that we can have beliefs that are, in effect, ‘delusional’ in that they have little if any direct correlation with the external, or real, world but which still perform some useful purpose.  Language may be one such example.  Although it requires a physical medium, the air if spoken or paper and ink if written down, language itself cannot be reduced to vibration of particles or the atoms and molecules of that medium.  Language necessarily requires a psychological world within which it has meaning.  It may symbolise objects in the physical world but equally it may symbolise abstractions in the mental world.  Another example may be the value of money that obviously plays such an important role in the modern world.  We assign value to the coins and notes that we all rely upon and yet there is no inherent value in copper, silver, or paper.  If the human race vanished overnight, there would be no money left in any of the world’s bank vaults, merely bits of metal and paper.  Terry Pratchett makes the point brilliantly in Hogfather, one of his Discworld novels. The story is about the power of belief and why it is necessary.  The relevant quote comes from the metaphorical lips of Death (who always talks in block capitals) in discussion with Susan, his granddaughter:

‘All right,’ said Susan. ‘I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need...fantasies to make life bearable.
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN.  TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE
‘Tooth fairies? Hogfathers?  Little –’
YES.  AS PRACTICE.  YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
‘So we can believe the big ones?’
YES.  JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY.  THAT SORT OF THING.
‘They’re not the same at all!’
YOU THINK SO?  THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY.  AND YET – Death waved a hand.  AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME … SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point-‘
MY POINT EXACTLY.
She tried to assemble her thoughts.
THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON'T TRY TO TELL ME THAT'S RIGHT.
‘Yes, but people don't think about that,’ said Susan. Somewhere there was a bed...
CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE'S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A BED IS A... A NORMAL THING. IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT.
‘Talent?’
OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY. YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS.
‘You make us sound mad,’ said Susan. A nice warm bed...
NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME? (Pratchett, P270)

Newberg (2006) makes the same point and suggests love, romance and passion as influential, useful beliefs that nevertheless do not exist outside of our minds.  He says, ‘Thus, at the core of our knowledge, we find that we embrace many unconscious assumptions that never have been proven to be true.’  Similarly, Crystal Park discusses ‘global beliefs’ in the context of meaning:

‘Global beliefs (also called “assumptive worlds,” “personal theories,” or “worldviews”...) are widely encompassing beliefs such as fairness, justice, luck, control, predictability, coherence, benevolence, and personal vulnerability.  These beliefs form the core schemas through which people interpret their experiences of the world’ (Park, 2005, P297).

Perhaps the most controversial example of a natural delusional belief is our sense of self or ‘I’.  If Susan Blackmore (2002) is correct then our everyday awareness of self is no more than a psychological illusion constructed on the fly.  If God doesn’t exist then perhaps neither do we!

The Usefulness of Delusional Beliefs

William James (1902) suggested judging religious experience by its fruits and, despite multiple negative examples cited in The God Delusion, positive fruits are certainly no less numerous.  Marianne Rankin (2008) summarises the impact that religious beliefs and experiences can have on individuals and, in turn, on the society of which they are inevitably a part.  She provides us with examples including William Wilberforce whose religious convictions encouraged him to pursue the abolition of slavery, Sir Francis Younghusband who founded the World Congress of Faiths interfaith organisation, and Dame Cicely Saunders who began the Modern Hospice Movement.  This suggests that what is important is not the empirical validity of religious, or delusional, beliefs.  Instead, the importance of such beliefs lies in their function, not in the next life but in this.

One of these functions is that beliefs about God, that is religious beliefs, provide people with an orientation in life.  They are a model by which people can steer their lives through the physical and psychological worlds within which they live, move and have their being.  Dawkins (2006) refers to Robert Winston’s Judaism in this sense as ‘belief in belief’ and Les Lancaster makes it explicit ‘The insights from such [mystical] writings may be valuable irrespective of the ontological status of the entities, just as psychological insights into self-related activity are valid irrespective of the reality of “I”’ (Lancaster, in press).  In this respect there may be a parallel with the ideas of Abraham Maslow, famous for his influential hierarchy of needs model.  He attempted to show that values (he called them Being-values), such as ‘Goodness’, ‘Truth’, and ‘Beauty’ were biologically determined and that individuals have the potential to reach self-fulfilment or self-actualisation (Maslow, 1971).  Successful self-actualisers, said Maslow, were more likely to have ‘peak experiences’ (Maslow, 1970).  Unfortunately, Maslow failed to provide evidence that the values he espoused are biologically determined and these values were themselves largely subjective and culture bound.  For example, Maslow had a tendency to denigrate both women and homosexuals.  However, Michael Daniels (2005), whilst criticising Maslow’s theory, has suggested that self-actualisation may serve as a useful myth despite the lack of empirical support for its assumptions.

‘In this way a theory of self-actualization should, I believe, be understood as providing a myth of human development, a meaningful narrative that enables people to make sense of their existence, to plan their route through life, to conjure elusive experiences and events, and to facilitate subtle transformations.  It is a mistake, therefore, to consider research into self-actualization only as a philosophical or scientific enterprise.  More fundamentally, it is a personal and mythical quest.’ (Daniels, 2005, P136)

Jorge Ferrer (2002) makes the same point arguing that ‘spiritual cosmologies are not primarily descriptive systems in need of experiential testing, but prescriptive systems that invite us to radically transform ourselves and the world.’  The role of religion in providing meaning is described in a similar way by Park (2005) as a ‘meaning making process’ which follows a violation, by external circumstances, of an individual’s global beliefs or worldview.  However, this process is not specific to religious beliefs about the world.  Joseph Campbell (1971) suggested this when he described beliefs as ‘myths to live by’, not because they are objectively true but because they provide a guiding framework for our lives.  The new mythology, wrote Campbell, should be addressed ‘not to the flattery of “peoples,” but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centres of Mind at Large – each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons’ (Campbell, 1971, P266).  It is important to note that this is not the argument that we need religion for moral behaviours, but rather that we need ‘delusional’ beliefs for many of our behaviours.  Arguments about the God Hypothesis miss the point because beliefs are not necessarily formed in a conscious, rational way.  Likewise, concluding that God is a delusion also misses the point because it only addresses the question of validation or ‘truth’ (Dawkins, 2006, P4).  It is perhaps more pertinent to ask what functions do beliefs, and not just religious beliefs, serve.

Nothing Special About Religious Beliefs

The conclusion to this argument may well annoy both theists and atheists.  The former as it suggests a reductive explanation for religious beliefs and the latter as at the same time it also suggests the equivalence of all beliefs from a neuropsychological perspective.  Recent evidence for this conclusion comes from fMRI brain imaging studies performed by Sam Harris et al (2009).  They found that belief and disbelief were content independent, ‘…the distinction between believing and disbelieving a proposition appears to transcend content’.  My conclusion is that religious beliefs are not exceptional and do not deserve to be credited with any special status over and above that of other beliefs about the world.  Justin Barrett (2000) seems to be saying much the same, ‘…the cultural phenomena typically labelled as “religion” may be understood as the product of aggregated ordinary cognition’ and he asks ‘Are god-concepts much different to gorilla-concepts?’  Therefore, religious beliefs whether they are generated or validated by religious experience or not, are not a special type of delusional belief.  They influence the individual and society for better or worse, just as other ‘delusional’ beliefs, for example the ‘value’ of money, the ‘fairness’ of justice or the ‘sweetness’ of romance.  Singling out religious beliefs for special attention is a result of a religiocentric view and misleads us when thinking about the existence of God.

In conclusion if God is indeed a delusion, why bother?  Answer, because we can’t help it; we cannot stop believing, we need our delusions whether they be religious or not.  It may not be possible to use the putative ‘common core’ of religious experience as evidence for the transcendent. However, in today’s world, torn by sectarian division, could it form the basis of a myth for us to aspire to if not live by?  Perhaps this is good reason to always be sceptical of our own scepticism.  At least that is my personal belief…

Bibliography

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Barrett, J.  2000.  Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 4, No. 1.
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References

[1] Available online at: http://www.paulkidby.com/news/dec2007.html accessed 31/12/09.
[2] Terry Pratchett: Alzheimer's Disease Is Now Affecting My Work (2008) available online at: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4019605.ece accessed 31/12/09.
[3] Alzheimer’s Leads Atheist Terry Pratchett To Appreciate God (2008) available online at: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4087520.ece accessed 31/12/09.
[4] I Create Gods All The Time - Now I Think One Might Exist, Says Fantasy Author Terry Pratchett (2008) available online at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1028222/I-create-gods-time--I-think-exist.html accessed 31/12/09.