Why Gods Persist

A Scientific Approach to Religion

Robert A. Hinde, Robert Hinde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415497619
• eBook ISBN: 9781135252786
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is it about religion that appeals to people? Why do religions and religious beliefs persist in the face of increasing secularisation, harsh criticism and even political persecution? Robert Hinde argues that it is not enough simply to criticize religion, we must understand it - not only how it causes so much conflict, but also how it brings comfort to many.

Hinde, a distinguished scientist, draws on a wide range of psychological, developmental and evolutionary research to explore this fascinating question. This second edition of Why Gods Persist is designed for everyone interested in the subject, either as a student of psychology and anthropology of religion or as a follower of the current controversies over the value of religious belief.

Chapter 1
Religion and science

The questions

Throughout human history, religions have played a major role in the lives of individuals and in the integration of societies. This is still true even in post-Darwinian Western Europe, where religious truth and scientific truth are often seen as opposed. Many of our institutions have religious roots and, in spite of the obvious contradictions between modern science and literal interpretations of religious texts, many people still attend places of worship or claim religious faith. Why should this be so? One possible answer lies in the fact that religious observance results from pan-cultural human psychological characteristics which, in the context of human societies, have shaped religious systems in all their diversity. This is certainly not a new idea, but recent advances in psychology, biology and the social sciences permit it to be evaluated more precisely.

This chapter considers first the prevalence of religious involvement, with special reference to the western world. Then, accepting that many religious beliefs are absolutely incompatible with both an everyday and a scientific view of the world, I suggest that that is an inadequate reason for simply writing off religion at this time: we first need more understanding of what religion is. The widespread influence of religious systems provides what are perhaps the most exciting problems in the behavioural sciences.

Incidence of religion in the West

Stability and change

Religious teaching has purveyed a view of the world that, if taken literally, is clearly false. Yet religious beliefs have helped individuals to face injustice, suffering, pain and death. They have supported values of love and respect for others that have been fundamental to the smooth running of societies. But religions have also been used to perpetuate inequities, and religious differences have been used to justify torture and horrific religious wars. Religions have provided people with a sense of purpose – though sometimes that sense of purpose has led believers to destroy the ways of life of those who thought differently from themselves. Religions have provided a medium for many, perhaps most, of the great artistic, musical and literary creations of human history. They have provided answers, emotionally satisfying to some, to the fundamental questions of ‘Where did we come from?’ and ‘Where are we going?’–yet those answers have stemmed from systems of beliefs that have always been unverifiable and which, at least if taken literally, can now be seen as wrong in many respects (Dawkins, 2006; Dennett, 2006).

The truth-value of religious beliefs must have been a matter of debate throughout the history of each one of the current world religious systems. In the modern world many, perhaps most, people prefer scientific explanations for natural events to theistic ones. Furthermore, adherence to a religious system has always brought costs. Whether it is tithes, donations to the priests, burnt offerings, pilgrimages, the building of shrines, erecting monuments to the dead or even just giving up time, religion can be a costly business. In our own society, religion no longer performs many of its former services for society: religious institutions are no longer the main controllers of education, charity or healthcare; and Friendly Societies, earlier responsible for much social support and organised locally by individuals who knew each other, have been superseded. Rationality and bureaucracy have led both to a search for more efficient ways of managing our affairs and to scepticism about the possibility of supernatural intervention in human lives (Davies, 1994).

Yet religions have persisted in almost every society in the world. Why?

The present state

In Europe, the scope of religious beliefs was diminished by the Enlightenment, itself made possible only because some independence of the religious from the everyday world was already accepted (Tambiah, 1990). The debate came to a head in the nineteenth century with the publication of The Origin of Species. Subsequently the Rationalist Press, the Thinker’s Library and other publication ventures recruited some of the best minds of the time to criticise religious doctrine, and religions continued to lose some of their influence up to at least the middle of the twentieth century.

How far this decline in religious observance has continued in recent decades is less clear (Presser and Chaves, 2007). This is in large part because diverse measures of religious involvement have been used. For instance, to many ‘being a Christian’ means, not church membership or holding Christian beliefs, but attempting to live up to a certain moral code. However, church membership is a convenient measure, and its use shows that religion has declined in the United Kingdom. For instance, the data indicate that between 1900 and 1990 the membership of Episcopalian churches declined from 2.09 million to 1.71 million, Presbyterian from 1.25 to 1.01 million, Methodist from 0.77 to 0.43 million, while Catholics increased from 1.22 to 1.67 million. Allowing for an increase in the population of individuals over 15 years of age from 24.68 to 45.11 million, the data suggest a decline in church membership from 25.6 per cent to 13.99 per cent (Bruce, 1995; see also Crockett and Voas, 2006). However, such conclusions have been criticised because they neglect the increase in non-Christian religious groups; because of the extent to which children were included; and because so much depends on the precise measure used. A Gallup poll in 1981 indicated that 73 per cent said that they believed in God, and 36 per cent in a personal god (Webb and Wybrow, 1982), though of course a much smaller percentage attended places of worship. In addition, not all Christian denominations have shown a decrease: some, like the Pentecostalists, have shown an increase (Hood et al., 1996). In the 1991 British Social Attitudes Survey only about 10 per cent said they had no religion (Bruce, 1996). In the Netherlands the decline in church attendance has been ascribed to the growth of moral individualisation (Houtman and Mascini, 2002).

Societal differences are often profound: the high percentage of atheists in East Germany (25.4 per cent, compared with USA 1.1 per cent) has been ascribed to socialist intervention. In Soviet Russia atheism fell from c.25 per cent to 5 per cent with the fall of Communism (Froese and Pfaff, 2005). With the collapse of Communism the Church has again become a potent force in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

The proportion of people with a religious inclination in the USA has been consistently higher than in the UK: an analysis of the ‘General Social Surveys’ from 1973 to 1991 indicated that 84 per cent of Protestants, 76 per cent of Catholics, 30 per cent of Jews and 48 per cent of those who claimed no religion said that they believed in life after death. These levels remained virtually constant over the two decades, though that for Jews showed a slight upward trend (Harley and Firebaugh, 1993). Even among scientists, surveys in 1916 and 1996 showed that the proportion who believed in a personal god who heard prayers and could grant immortality remained steady at about 40 per cent (Larson and Witham, 1997). In recent years fundamentalism, involving acceptance of the literal truth of the Bible, has become the dominant approach in parts of the USA.

Just what such figures mean is another matter: a 1954 Gallup poll showed that over three-quarters of United States Protestants and Catholics could not name a single Old Testament prophet, and more than two-thirds did not know who preached the Sermon on the Mount (Stark and Glock, 1968). It has also been argued that, although Americans seem to be more attached to their churches than Europeans, the churches have changed: ‘Radical sects have become denominations. The mainstream denominations have become tolerant and ecumenical. The gospel itself has been rewritten to remove much of the specifically supernatural’ (Bruce, 1996:164). At least in some areas of the USA, Christian fundamentalism is widespread. As just one example, the ‘Brownsville Assembly of God’ drew over 3,000 people most nights of the week, members of almost every conceivable religious denomination, to hear that Christ is ‘coming back with a sword in his hand and vengeance on his mind’.

The conflict between science and religion

Any number of critics have pointed out that the basic beliefs of Christian doctrine, taken literally, are simply unacceptable to most twentieth-century minds (e.g. Dawkins, 1993, 2006; Dennett, 2006). But churchgoers are still told about the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and Ascension, miracles, even Heaven and Hell. In Britain, schoolteachers may still be required to lecture on specific gravity in one lesson and discuss the Gospel story of Jesus walking on water in the next. That it is impossible to accept such stories in their literal form has been demonstrated many times, and I have no intention of going over that ground again. In any case, many, perhaps most, Christians do not take them literally. But their counterintuitive nature does raise an important problem: if the basic beliefs and narratives of the Christian or any other religion are not to be taken literally, why are religions so persistent? To point out inconsistencies with everyday common sense or to demonstrate that much religious dogma is incompatible with modern scientific knowledge is, I suggest, not enough.

Christianity has been under attack since its earliest days. There have even been times when it was outlawed by national governments. And yet it has survived. Why? What makes it important to so many? Some people claim that they gain a great deal of comfort from their religious beliefs. Concentration camp inmates, prisoners and citizens under stress who have religious or political views providing a meaning that points towards a future seem to do better than those without them (e.g. Frankl, 1975; Levi, 1989). A religious approach is claimed sometimes to be valuable in psychotherapy. Those who adhere to one faith or another would surely not do so if it did not sustain them or satisfy some need, and there must be some reason for religious revivals. Reviewing the more recent literature, Hood et al. (1996:436–37) conclude that ‘[i]n most instances … faith buttresses people’s sense of control and self-esteem, offers meanings that oppose anxiety, provides hope, sanctions socially facilitating behavior, enhances personal well-being, and promotes social integration’.

Furthermore, in many societies the religious system is intimately intertwined with aspects of the social and group ideology and with the social structure: while crime and lawlessness have many causes, the Christian churches used to be the principal purveyors of values in the western world, so some have argued that the decrease in communal responsibility which seems to have occurred in the second half of the twentieth century may be related to a decline in the churches’ influence. In the nineteenth century church adherence and attendance served to express and affirm respectability. Even those who did not attend churches were receptive to religion-purveyed social morality (Davies, 1994).

Thus the very ubiquity of religious systems suggests that they are, or have been, seen as valuable by many people (Campbell, 1991). But how can this be with a religious system that depends on beliefs that are incompatible with a commonsense view of the world; when religious observance is so costly to individual believers; and when beliefs have been responsible for much suffering and have so often been divisive?

Is belief in the dogma only part of the issue? Although Christians give it primacy, belief is by no means all there is to religion. In Judaism, structural beliefs (see p. 10) are less important than the historical narrative. Hinduism does not necessarily imply any doctrinal agreement except in so far as it influences conduct: the Hindu may pursue work, or meditation and knowledge, or devotion. For Buddhist teachers, values and experience come first, and there is much less emphasis on belief. Many, though not all, Buddhist sects do not rely on reverence for superhuman beings. The early Buddhist teaching emphasised salvation by self-discipline and good works: faith became an issue only in the Lotus Sutra, written centuries after Buddha’s death, though purporting to be his last testament (Firth, 1996). Confucius was primarily concerned with how humans could create and maintain an ordered world. In many small-scale religions in pre-literate societies, belief in deities was unimportant.

Clearly there are problems here: it is not enough to say that most religious beliefs are incompatible with what we know about the world. Of course science can do a better job in helping us to understand our origins than can Genesis or any comparable myth. And of course science is more help than religion in understanding the relation between cause and consequence in everyday life. Although we must never lose sight of the fact that nearly all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, involves belief and that even scientists use metaphor, scientific belief is very different from religious belief, for when they use metaphors scientists seek to cash them out in non-metaphorical terms. We need to know much more about how religions relate to life as it is lived, and much more about why it is that human nature seems so often to have been satisfied by religious systems over the millennia. We need to recognise that most religious systems involve several interrelated components, of which belief in dogma is only one: the beliefs are closely associated with codes of proper behaviour, with ritual and with the social system, and therefore require a more subtle and analytical approach. We need to know how individuals become religious, how religions relate to social systems, how they change with time, how they come to affect attitudes and behaviour. These are exciting problems and require input not only from psychology but also from other natural and social sciences, from history and from other humanities. Simply to point out inconsistencies between religion and what we know about the world sidesteps what could be seen as the ultimate challenge to Darwinism. Of course I am not able to offer final solutions to all these problems: my aim is to survey present knowledge (but not to review comprehensively the vast liter...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Religion and science
• Chapter 2 Some background issues
• Chapter 3 What does it mean to say ‘I believe’?
• Chapter 4 What are gods like?
• Chapter 5 The development of beliefs
• Chapter 6 Why do people believe in gods?
• Chapter 7 The dynamics of belief and its relation to the social system
• Chapter 8 Narratives
• Chapter 9 Ritual
• Chapter 10 The form and sequence of ritual
• Chapter 11 The motivation and consequences of ritual
• Chapter 12 Moral codes
• Chapter 13 Prosocial behaviour and reciprocity
• Chapter 14 Other moral precepts
• Chapter 15 Religious experience
• Chapter 16 Social aspects of religious systems
• Chapter 17 Why do religious systems persist?
• Chapter 18 Where do we go from here?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index