God Soul Mind Brain

guitar string can vibrate at different stable frequencies, so the religious culture might vibrate in different equilibrium states—conservative and liberal. (Conservative and liberal politics, at least in the United States, seem to be mainly carried over from conservative and liberal religious beliefs.)

    As an atheist, I guess I am supposed to be anti-religious. Some commentators favor the complete eradication of religion, any religion, all of them, whatever the particular story of creation, or the particular name given to a deity or deities, or the particular set of rituals involved. The most common argument for exterminating religion is that it promotes brutality and intolerance. In startling contradiction, one of the most common arguments for spreading religion is that it promotes moral behavior. I find this question extremely interesting. Should we, as a rational scientific society in the information age, work to eliminate superstition and religion, or work to spread it further? Let the culture wars rage.

    To be honest, I am not sure that religiosity is statistically correlated with brutality or decency. I tend to think that people are brutal and decent, selfish and incredibly generous, whatever level of religiosity they may practice. Yes, wars have been fought in the name of religion, but the Soviet Union also did a good job of violent mayhem with an atheistic premise. I remain utterly unconvinced by either argument. I am a scientist and to me the controlled experiments have never been done and the data do not support either contention. As far as I can tell, religion neither causes nor prevents violence, though it tends to come along for the ride either way, and may tend to intensify the emotions. There certainly are examples of religious splinter groups that advocate violence and those that advocate peace.

    My main problem with the view that a rational society should eliminate religion, however, has nothing to do with the dangers or merits of religions. I simply think that eradicating religion is not possible. It is a fallacy that ignores the specs of the human machine. We are not rational entities. Religion, like all culture, grows on the social machinery in our brains. To function socially, we must understand each other’s minds; therefore we are built to mirror each other’s mind states; therefore beliefs and customs spread by imitation from person to person; therefore a cultural competition among beliefs emerges; therefore belief systems evolve to be especially good at promoting themselves. Therefore religion. For that matter, therefore politics. Therefore entertainment. Therefore business. Therefore all of human culture. If religion is profoundly irrational, so is the rest of human culture. Culture is by nature a complicated, bizarre, irrational, fantastic, addictive pleasure, sometimes brutal, sometimes incredibly generous. People being who we are, masters of inconsistency, we are able to be irrational and at the same time intellectually aware of it. We can study the human mind from a scientific point of view and come to a logical understanding of its intrinsically bizarre illogic. To me, that contradiction is one of the most marvelous properties that we humans possess.

Suggested further reading:

    Baron-Cohen, S. (2008) Autism and Asperger Syndrome: The Facts . Oxford University Press.

    Blackmore, S. (2003) Consciousness: An Introduction. Oxford University Press.

    Churchland, P. (1988) Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of the Mind. MIT Press.

    Crick, F. (1995) The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Scribner.

    Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.

    Dennett, D. (1992) Consciousness Explained. Back Bay Books.

    Graziano, M. S. A. (2008) The Intelligent Movement Machine. Oxford University Press.

    Gross, C. G. (2008) Single neuron studies of inferior temporal cortex. Neuropsychologia, vol. 46, pp. 841-852.

    Humphreys, N. (2006) Seeing Red—a study in consciousness. Harvard University Press. Johnson-Laird, P. (1983) Mental Models. Cambridge University Press.

    Kanwisher, N., Yovel, G. (2006) The fusiform face area: a cortical region specialized for the perception of faces. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. , vol. 361, pp. 2109-2128.

    Koch C. (2004) The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Roberts and Company Publishers.

    Lynch, A. (1998) Thought Contagion. Basic Books.

    Perrett, D. I.,