ONE ON ONE WITH GOD

this is based on an excerpt from my book The Incredible Shrinking Mind

Part Two: Darwin’s God

Pascal Boyer is a brilliant anthropologist, who attempts to explain religion by two principal means: evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology. His seminal book, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, provides a wonderfully logical, explanatory structure of his own highly original point of view. His strategy is to show that religion does not create social situations: it latches on, instead, to already existing, culturally relevant, inference-rich mental systems, and reinforces them. Religion, he ingeniously shows, is therefore natural and if it did not exist in a given local culture, most likely it would be invented.

Like most anthropologists, he seems to equate all religions, all tribal and primitive rites (including ours) with one another. The absurd, irrational aspects of religious, magical thinking he explains by alluding to cognitive errors (dissonance, false positive, etc.) and the side effects of our ancestrally rooted evolutionary psychology: i.e., the need to think in animistic, coalitional terms. He stresses that, after all, out of countless counterintuitive ideas, only a few will survive: those that meet the numerous needs of already existing, inference-rich systems. All other religious ideas will fall by the wayside.

Whenever he can, Pascal Boyer tries to use the tools of experimental psychology to bolster his theory. He points to certain psychological tests allegedly “proving” that certain supernatural concepts are consistently recalled better than what he calls “mere oddities”: i.e., citing how “a table that felt sad” was recalled better than “a table made of chocolate.” Although this is an interesting observation, I do not find anything, especially from a psychodynamic standpoint, surprising in this result. A table, for example, that really was made out of chocolate could conceivably be found in any New York Chelsea art opening. An actual table, however, that somehow was capable of feeling sad would rock the world of physics. In the same vein, it is hardly surprising that a “man with six fingers” is less remembered than a “man walked through a wall.”

What is most impressive about Pascal Boyer is the way he shows there is an underlying cognitive structure to a diversity of supernatural concepts. He mentions, for example, how in a story recall test by J. Barret, the statement, “God saves a man’s life and at the same time helps a woman find a lost purse,” is remembered as God first helping one person and then attending to the other. Boyer explains this by noting that, from a structural standpoint, supernatural concepts that contain “only one oddity” are recalled better than concepts with two or more oddities. The fact that a manlike God, who is both omnipotent and omniscient, could exist is oddity enough. The fact that such a Supreme Being would also simultaneously be in two different places doing two different things with equal ease and proficiency is too much oddity to handle. Boyer offers this as “proof” that supernatural concepts possess an underlying cognitive structure.

What Boyer cannot say, however, is whether such cognitive structures are the cause or the effect of supernatural concepts. His so-called “proofs” do not really come close to experimentally demonstrating the validity of his theory. Not surprisingly, there is an alternative, and much simpler, psychodynamic interpretation. It is understandable, under the stress of a peculiar story recall, the ordinary person, who cannot be expected to be adept at metaphysical speculation, will have trouble envisioning a rather inconceivable counterintuitive side effect of being omniscient: i.e., to be able to be in two seemingly disconnected places simultaneously. They will, instead, unconsciously slip back into a far more familiar form of linear thinking. Does this mean then that they don’t really believe in God’s omniscience? Or could it mean instead that to believe in God’s omniscience requires the same kind of close attention that is needed if one is asked (as they often are in logic tests) to spot the hidden connection between seemingly random, disconnected sentences? That people therefore who believe in God’s omniscience, do so analogously in a kind of compartmentalized fashion: a part of their mind believing in a human look-alike who happens to have unlimited powers and another part trying to believe in an unimaginably abstract idea such as infinity, by imagining the simplest and crudest physical object possible (such as counting one object after another without ever coming to an end)?

We see, once again, that evolutionary psychologists like Pascal Boyer seem to forget that they work with toy models of the world, and what they are essentially offering, from a strictly scientific point of view, is an explanation of their hypothetical toy model. In no sense can their inferences, once they are applied to the real world from which they have been derived — and on whose behalf they have been co-opted — be said to be specific. If confronted, they will admit this, claiming all they are doing is presenting a first step, albeit exciting and promising, towards a necessarily much fuller explanation.

There can be little doubt their reductive aspirations have been fortified by the spectacular success of their champion, Charles Darwin, who, arguably, managed to reduce the almost infinite diversity of evaluation to the central mechanism of natural selection (a theory that famed cosmologist Roger Penrose has nominated as probably the greatest example of reductive success in the history of the life sciences). They overlook that natural selection, once hit upon, is incredibly easy to understand in the sense that Newtonian gravity — as an instantaneous force in inverse proportion to the squared distance between any two objects (apple and head; moon and ocean tides; human and earth, etc.) can be readily grasped.

They therefore fail to see natural selection, like Newtonian gravity, are classic examples of magically simple algorithms — applicable to an almost infinite diversity of permutations — in no small part because they do not deal with the emergent phenomena that can come from group dynamics. Since the most baffling emergent phenomenon in the cosmos is subjective awareness, this means at some point natural selection will get left behind (which is not the same as negating it) and the necessary group dynamics relevant to the particular hierarchical level of emergent complexity will be brought in.

To put it another way, evolutionary psychologists cannot afford the luxury of thinking they are analogous to chess analysts — who actually can explain the infinite diversity of chess positions by always going back to the fundamental, invariant rules of chess. They forget they are not dealing with only one level of explanatory principle — such as chess, arithmetic or geometry — when they attempt (following Darwin) to trace natural selection all the way up to human subjectivity. That they are instead dealing with a multiplicity of emergent phenomena and a diversity of conceptual frameworks. Imagine what it takes, for example, to learn particle physics. Then think of what is entailed in order to master cosmic evolution. To go across a span of billions of years, from clouds of gas to organic matter; from cell biology to organic chemistry; to physiology; to neurology; to anthropology; to psychology. Viewed this way, how can evolutionary psychologists be sure they know the fundamental principles by which we evolved from our primitive ancestors to our present heights of subjective awareness? How do they know there may not be numerous levels of emergent phenomena, yet to be discovered, each requiring its own hierarchical conceptualization? It is one of the great merits of the psychodynamic approach that its fundamental orientation, from the outset, is interdisciplinary.

Pascal Boyer, however, hardly makes use of this psychodynamic element. He dismisses, for example, outright the prevailing insight that the primary function of religion is to offer consolation for life’s inevitable tragedies. He notes instead that we live in the most affluent, the most comfortable age ever, yet religion continues to be widespread. That contemporary man does not believe in God or the afterlife in the same sense that a medieval person did, when one would no more question the existence of God than one would question the existence of a mountain or the sky.

It is here, as I point out (in God and Therapy) that Pascal Boyer misses the psychodynamic point. It is because of the undeniably attenuated belief in the afterlife, that the existential dread of death, and possible non-existence, is so much greater than it was, for example, in medieval times. And that alone can explain much of our need for religion of some kind, even if it is religion on an as-needed basis. We may be more affluent than at any time in history, but — as any psychotherapist can attest — we are prone to great feelings of helplessness. As cognitive psychologists often do, Boyer underestimates just how profound and widespread mental illness is; how modern high-tech medicine — as Elizabeth Kübler Ross famously said — is predicated on an obsessive denial of death, rendering us all the more vulnerable when it does come.

Pascal Boyer, in short, is searching for an egalitarian, foundational principle that can explain all religion. He has selected, as his three cornerstones, evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. His unit of cultural transmission is our cognitive machinery. To achieve this, it is necessary to minimize the obvious and profound differences in degree of sophistication between Western religion and almost all other primitive religions. That difference — not only in the quality of its literature but in the subtlety of its theology — seems to me to be as vast as the difference between Western physics and, as Boyer points out, the intuitive physics which all people share.

There are other differences. You would never know, for example, from Pascal Boyer’s admittedly wonderful, comprehensive treatment of the roots of religious phenomena — that there was such a thing as a dynamic unconscious, a psychodynamic approach, a concept of a primary process and a secondary one. You might think that the last word on the mind is that of the (very recently arrived) evolutionary psychologist. Or that the idea of modularity in the brain and the model of computational, information processing and problem solving is universally accepted and essentially uncontroversial. Which is hardly the case.

By contrast, what the psychodynamic method offers could not be more different from that of the computer model. It encompasses both the cognitive and evolutionary approaches. It does not exclude the experimental method nor does it avoid quantitative evaluation, but it does not rely solely on it. It does not present a toy model of reality and then struggle to prove that it is similar in principle to the real world. It recognizes that you cannot posit an arbitrary, one-dimensional, artificial model based on a game-like situation — prove some underlying, dynamic principle which seemingly illuminates the structure of the setup — and then claim you have thereby proved the same thing about the realistic situation it supposedly mirrors. (But which is immeasurably more messy, open-ended, uncontrollable and, especially, multi-dimensional.)

It follows, the psychodynamic method will not try to explain almost everything with just one or two disciplines. For example, Pascal Boyer explains the long sought-after unit of cultural transmission of religious concepts with the single idea of what he terms cognitive relevance. This is the ability of certain kinds of supernatural concepts to most easily and efficiently tap into basic evolutionary needs. What Boyer means is that supernatural concepts are unconsciously selected in order to satisfy what we imagine we need to survive. Thus, those entities or beings elected to play a supernatural role in our lives invariably, according to Boyer, tend to be “full strategic agents. If some information is strategic to your inference systems, they have access to it.” In other words, if you live in a culture where your survival depends on knowing who are your friends and who are your enemies, you can be sure that the supernatural beings (or agents) in your particular religion will know everything there is to know about the subject. Boyer goes on to add, “Such agents are so much easier to represent and so much richer in possible inferences that they enjoy a great advantage in cultural transmission.” He notes, by way of counterexample: thus the idea of a “divine brute,” a god that is a useless know-nothing “has little religious future.”

Pascal Boyer is so ingenious and judicious in his exhaustive cognitive analysis of the roots of religion that it is hard to disagree with anything he says at a certain level. It is not what he says that is the problem so much as what he does not say. It is hard to imagine that his masterful account — which has undeniable appeal for the anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist and clinical psychologist — would resonate with the non-professional but earnest lay person (the typical religious candidate) who is trying to make sense of his or her place in the cosmos. Take, for example, Boyer’s concept of decoupling: the ability of human beings from early age on to separate imagining the consequences of an intended action from the need to enact it (accounting, according to Boyer, for the widespread phenomenon of “the imaginary companion” in children). It is this ability to decouple two things which normally belong together that allows such ideas — as that of supernatural agents watching us — to be recruited over and over again.

Before religion, according to Pascal Boyer, there are complicated, evolved social systems. Religion, which is parasitical, attaches itself to inference systems of the mind which explain sudden misfortune and are based on the existing social or change system with its distinctive strategies for cheater detection and cooperation. The supernatural agents that come to be believed in, will have full access to all the strategic information. Moral intuitions therefore come first and will precede religious values. Boyer gives as an example the prevalence of witches and persons with the evil eye: they are supernatural projections of the paranoid fear that there are certain people who deeply envy what you have and, unless they are thwarted, will put all of their energy into cheating and stealing something from you. The unstated cognitive inference system assumes the gods have a personal relationship. They care about what their supplicants do or don’t do and react accordingly: if, for example, there are insufficient sacrifices the god may well send a famine. It is important, says Boyer, that people, including religious leaders, do not seem to mind how such supernatural powers are used — they are deliberately “foggy” on that score — only that the particular gods care enough to become involved.

Building on these cognitive insights, Boyer goes on to ask — why then rituals? His answer — because they are “social gadgets” — constructions which combine a number of innate inference systems, some of which are related to religion and some of which are not. So if religious rituals are “add-ons” — (the presence of supernatural agents at especially sacred religious ceremonies being fairly commonplace) — they are thereby that much more compelling. Thus, rituals can serve as initiation rites (with or without God being present). But if He is present — e.g., at a marriage ceremony in the West, with God as your witness — then it is that much more powerful.

Pascal Boyer, therefore, does not find the enduring presence of rituals to be mysterious. They tend to be based on what he terms “naive sociology”. They are meant to address the explanatory gap in people’s understanding of why rituals seem to create manifest, transformative change. Their answer is that they add agency. They accept this answer, says Boyer, because they do not understand that their mental inference system is really based on evolutionary psychology; that a major change in social status — e.g., marriage — has a lasting effect on the social exchange system and therefore needs the coordination of all members to be there at the same time in order to ratify it. The purpose of the wedding ritual is to make this necessary social change salient and easily memorable. Not understanding this, people tend to think that the magical-seeming transformative effect they see stems from the ritual itself. They do not see, says Boyer, that it is the need for salience that creates the add-on of ritual (the ritual, in his view, being the effect, not the cause, of an underlying, social and evolutionary strategy).

At this point, I cannot help noting how much Pascal Boyer sounds like the great sociologist, Erving Goffman, who would explain the most meaningful patterns of behavior as the manifestation of unconscious social strategies. To me, the flaw in Pascal Boyer’s thinking — the elephant in the room that is not being addressed — is the profound difference between a religion that sacrifices a goat to a spirit god, and Western religion. Why is it, for instance, that the primitive religions that preceded ours (and in some cases survive) are so mired in animism? Why is it that in all the religious tribes that Boyer describes, except ours, there do not seem to be any tribal skeptics, let alone atheists? To equate primitive beliefs with ours is like saying that because you can show a similarity between the intuitive physics of primitive tribes and that of the Western world — you have thereby explained why contemporary physics has reached its present dizzying heights.

Anthropological evolutionists like Pascal Boyer assume that they are studying the building blocks of the origin of religion. Yet, obviously, for whatever reasons, these are building blocks that were never developed to anything approaching the level of our contemporary sophistication. How, one wonders, can these anthropologists be sure that the reason that these primitive tribes did not advance to our level was because they did not possess the necessary building blocks to begin with; and that if they really want to understand our Judaic-Christian religion, they have to look elsewhere? Or, to put it another way, since these primitive tribes and our Judaic-Christian civilization wound up in such indisputably different places, how can anthropologists know that they started out at a roughly comparable level?

In short, brilliant as it is, there is nothing psychodynamic about Boyer’s explanation. While he does talk about the unconscious — he calls it the “basement” — it is clearly the cognitive, information-processing, computational unconscious he is referring to. His methodology, as he frankly says, is that of the social scientist, someone trying to explain vast trends in humanity; someone, by definition, who will bypass the individual in the hunt for general truths. Thus, concludes Boyer, there is no one God, no one religion, only a certain evolutionarily shaped, cognitive template predisposing people everywhere to culturally tailored religious behavior. He can be therefore masterful when he points out the often tragic conflict between the insistence of institutionalized religion on uniform doctrine and the insistence of local culture on particularity. He can offer a wonderful explanation of why it makes a difference whether you adopt your parent’s or your culture’s religion or a foreign one. To wit: religion is valuable because it offers a storehouse of social, coalitional information pertaining to a broad, relevant network of trustworthy peers and intuitively it does not make sense to trade that in for an intriguing but untested system of beliefs that can offer no such benefits. To put it another way, it is much easier and time-saving to stay with what you know than to make a late-in-life switch (like struggling to learn and speak a new language when there is no particular advantage in doing so).

In short, I do not think Pascal Boyer realizes that there is a similar tension between the social scientist’s insistence on statistically precise group explanations and the individual’s need for a custom-made life narrative making sense only to him or her. It is here that the experienced clinician, immersed in the disciplined study of the limitless range of human subjectivity, with the full array of a century of psychodynamic insights at his or her disposal, can make a singular contribution.

GERALD ALPER

AUTHOR

God and Therapy

What We Believe

When No One Is Watching