Christians and Muslims, please turn away. It’s about to get ugly.
Jews and atheists, keep reading: you don’t believe in Hell, so there’s really
no downside to being exposed to my heresy.
Let me begin by disclosing that I am an atheist. My theory
of religion is that religion is a mixture of mythology and psychological
defects arising from “design flaws” in the human brain. I can explain the myth
part of religion very simply: ancient humans circa 10,000 BC to 1500 AD did not
have science, but they needed theories to explain the natural phenomena they
observed, so they dreamed up gods and supernatural forces to explain lightning,
fire, death, etc. The mental illness side of religion is the more interesting
aspect, which I will discuss here.
What is a “mental illness”? Let me begin with two
foundational premises. First, humans are animals. Second, the mind is the
brain. If the brain’s purpose as an organ in the body is to think, then we can
define “mental illness” as a physical malfunction of the brain which interferes
with the brain’s ability to think properly.
My basic idea is that religion is a type of mental illness,
not as extreme as insanity or delusions or schizophrenia, but lacking in sanity
and based upon brain malfunctions. It should be clear that religion, in itself,
would be defined as a “mental illness” by most psychiatrists if not for the
fact that billions of people believe in religion and that makes it socially
acceptable and immune from criticism. If someone came up to you on the street and
said to you that God has spoken to them, your natural reaction would be to think
that this person is completely insane. But for some reason when a book written
2000 years ago says that God spoke to people it is regarded as truth and not as
evidence that the Bible’s authors had mental health problems.
It is perfectly understandable that so many people believe
in God. I believe that the human brain has evolved several “design flaws,”
problems with how the brain works which make it easy for human beings to
believe in religion. A list of these mental illness vulnerabilities follows:
1. Confirmation bias. Brains have “confirmation bias” of
thinking that something might happen, and then when it happens they think it is
supernatural because there was a chance it wouldn’t happen, or else they notice
when what they expect happens and don’t notice when what they expect doesn’t
happen so they believe in the supernatural. Thus when a person has a religious
belief they tend to feel that their experiences confirm their beliefs, but when
they have an experience which would refute their belief they simply ignore it. For
example, when a believer wins the lottery they think God gave them good luck,
but if the very next day this same person’s best friend gets sick and dies they
won’t notice it as it reflects upon the existence of a supposedly omnipotent
loving God. Another example of confirmation bias: you have a feeling that
something will happen and then it does happen, you think you predicted the
future, but you do not notice the ten other times today that you felt something
was going to happen and it did not happen.
2. Subjectivism, and prayer as a reaction to helplessness.
Ayn Rand had a theory which she called “primacy of consciousness,” which is
really subjectivism, the feeling that brains have that thoughts, beliefs, and
feelings, can alter reality supernaturally without any physical activity or
physical causation. The brain knows that what it perceives is real, so some
brains incorrectly infer that reality is coming from perception, when in fact
perceptions and beliefs are coming from physical reality. This explains the
belief in the power of prayer. When the brain is totally helpless it turns to
prayer as the only thing it can do, and then when the person who prays is
somehow saved they credit the prayer and believe in the supernatural. The
people who survive disasters and who prayed to God and were saved then become
fanatical believers who tell everyone else to pray, but nobody ever hears from
all the people who had emergencies and prayed and their prayers were not
answered and they died. When people think that subjectivism is true they think
their beliefs and feelings can change reality so when they are helpless they pray.
I think the brain actually has a design flaw which makes the mind try to get
control of the situation in situations where the person is totally helpless instead of simply accepting one's helplessness.
3. The blank slate problem. The brain is born empty and is
essentially programmed like a computer by what it is taught from ages 1 to 15.
Young children have no knowledge or experience and most often they simply
believe what they are taught. And as adults the human brain tends to simply go
with what it already believes instead of questioning beliefs or using critical
thinking directed in upon itself. This is why most people believe in the
religion they were raised on and were taught by their parents. If there was one
true religion then you would expect everyone to believe in the same religion,
and if people reached religion is a result of thought then one would expect
various religions to overlap geographically. The fact that each region has one
majority religion (e.g. Christianity in Europe
and the USA,
Islam in the Middle East, Hinduism in India) is what
you would expect if religious beliefs come from what parents teach to their
children. It is rare for a belief to come as the result of what a person
reasons independently instead of what you are taught and indoctrinated in. This
is because of a design flaw in the human brain which causes brains to soak up
beliefs that they are fed as young children instead of thinking critically from
a young age.
4. Conformity and obedience to authority. When I took
Psychology 101 in college I was taught that it was well established by
scientific experiments that the human brain has two tendencies: the obedience
to authority and conformity tendencies, which are wired into the human brain.
Humans will take orders from a perceived authority figure which they would not
take from normal people. And an individual will tend to say that he believes
things which parallel the beliefs of the group that he/she is a member of, in
defiance of his/her own independent perceptions. So religions get people to say
they believe in them because everyone else believes and people tend to conform
to the beliefs of the group. If atheism were popular then everyone would be an
atheist, but because religion is popular everyone is a believer. Also religion
creates authority figures, and the human brain has a tendency to obey.
5. The stress reaction. It is well established that the
emotion centers in the human brain react to fear and panic by shutting down the
thinking centers in the brain and giving energy to the “fight or flight”
response which is accompanied by fear and panic in the emotional parts of the
brain. This design flaw in the human brain makes people behave stupidly and
irrationally in crisis situations, which makes people tend to seek help from the
supernatural to save them instead of calmly, rationally figuring out how to
solve the problem.
6. Habits. The subconscious mind parts of the brain tend to
develop habits, and the argument can be made that the human brain can be
conditioned, like a dog or a bird, to repeat the same behavior if it has been
given a reward repeatedly for performing that behavior in the past. This
conditioning and subconscious repetition tends to embed traditions
in human behavior, which would not exist if decisions were always made as a
result of reasoning.
7. Hallucinations. Most people erroneously believe that they
see with their eyes. That is not how the brain works. The eyes send neural
signals to the vision centers in the brain, and the vision centers in the brain
are what actually forms visual perceptions which are “seen” by the mind,
really, by the conscious mind which I believe is the frontal cerebral cortex or
perhaps the entire frontal lobe. Thus, when the brain chemicals malfunction or
the neurons malfunction and misfire and there is an imbalance in neurotransmitter
chemicals, it is very possible for the brain to believe that it is “seeing”
something which simply does not exist. And these hallucinations are influenced
by the ideas which are already in the mind, so if your brain malfunctions you
might think that you are hearing God speak to you or seeing spirits which look
like your religious beliefs. The brain plays tricks on the mind, and this is
probably what happens to ancient “prophets” who thought God was speaking to
them. I do not believe that the possibility of hallucination makes it
impossible to achieve certainty and knowledge, and hallucination is not an
excuse for philosophical doubt and skepticism. But we humans do need to be
aware that our brains are vulnerable to design flaws, and also that the people
we trust, and the groups we follow and go along with, are all of them
vulnerable to human brain design flaws.
8. Problems in the different parts of the brain
communicating with each other, i.e. a flaw in the evolution of interneurons.
This takes many forms:
A. Confusion regarding who hears your thoughts: you hear
your own thoughts and think God is listening to you. This is a brain
malfunction. You also talk to yourself in your thoughts and think you are
talking to God, which is part of the origin of prayer. Prayer is talking to
yourself in your thoughts and hearing yourself think, and a brain malfunction
and the lack of an evolved set of neurons within the brain for the brain to see
its own activity permits the mind to think that it is talking to God and that
God is listening, the mind sees someone listening but the neurons don’t make
the connection that the thing which is listening is also the thing that is
thinking. As a matter of neuroscience it is well established that the center in the brain which speaks and forms words is not in precisely the same location in the brain as the center which hears and interprets words. I believe that religious mental illness can arise when these different hearing and speaking centers in the brain do not communicate properly with each other and when the brain does not pay attention to its own thinking and fails to pay attention to its listening to its own thoughts and is not properly self-aware of its own thinking, in other words if the brain does not know that it thinks to itself then it believes that it is speaking to God.
B. The visual
parts of the brain when they hallucinate send signals to the frontal
cortex/conscious mind and you see the hallucination but your brain does not
tell you that it is a creation of the imagination and not from the sensory
receptors in the eyes, this is a design flaw in communication between the eyes
and the brain and between the different parts of the brain, which would not
exist if the neurons had evolved better.
C. The ability
to “will” or wish, of the conscious mind to send signals to the brain stem or motor
cortex (which control the muscles and move the body) desiring things to happen,
and the brain perceives no difference between sending a signal to the muscles
to move the hand, which it can do, and sending out signals to cast a magic
spell to make it rain, i.e. to “wish/will” it to rain, which it cannot do. If the frontal cerebral
cortex received accurate signals from the brain stem and motor cortex to see
where its signals went and what they did then this would simply not exist.
In conclusion, if religion comes from brain malfunctions then
it is highly debatable whether people are “to blame” for mistaken religious
beliefs, since the physical matter of the brain is to blame, and conscious
choice plays a minimal role. People are not weak and stupid, they are merely
human, all too human. Perhaps religion will remain in the human species until
the human brain takes its next steps of evolutionary progress. Perhaps wars
between Christians and Muslims will lead to nuclear war and our total extinction
before that evolution can happen. These are merely idle speculations. However,
from a biological, scientific point of view, there is an adequate explanation
of religion purely from physical causes and with no reference to the actual
real existence of God or anything supernatural.
