Humans 'hardwired for religion'

From the London Guardian courtesy of AlterNet:

The battle by scientists against "irrational" beliefs such as creationism is ultimately futile, a leading experimental psychologist said today.

The work of Bruce Hood, a professor at Bristol University, suggests that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force.

"I think it is pointless to think that we can get people to abandon their belief systems because they are operating at such a fundamental level," said Prof Hood. "No amount of rational evidence is going to be taken on board to get people to abandon those ideas."

But get a load of how he figured it out:

Another experiment involves asking subjects to cut up a photograph. When his team then measures their galvanic skin response - ie sweat production, which is what lie-detector tests monitors - there is a jump in the reading. This does not occur when a person destroys an object of less sentimental significance.

Click here for the rest.

Sometimes psychology, with its assumptions and wild logic, drives me as batty as economics. I think it's probably fair to take at face value the notion that human beings tend toward the irrational. After all, we are primates, animals, with a thinking organ in our heads called a brain, rather than a computer. So this psychologist manages to establish our innate irrationality through scientific experimentation, but then concludes something that his experiments didn't tell him, that we are "hard-wired" for religion. No, we're hard-wired for irrationality; we're also hard-wired for the opposite, rationality. That's how humans discovered, you know, fire and the wheel, while at the same time believing that the gods actually did it.

And this guy's also completely wrong when he asserts that we're wasting our time trying to have a more rational society. Martin Luther's protest against the Church in the sixteenth century sparked a direct line of thought and cultural change that led to the Enlightenment. The secular society we enjoy today stands in stark contrast to Professor Hood's belief that it is impossible to battle irrationality. What a cynic!

Look, it may appear these days that we're headed toward some kind of fundamentalist hell, but it is not our destiny. And it's irresponsible to say it is.

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