[RC] Latest findings of science: Atheists don't exist

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

Science 2.0
 
 
Scientists discover  that atheists might not exist, and that’s not a joke 

 
By:  Nurri Vittachi  /  July 6, 2014
 
Metaphysical thought processes are more deeply wired than hitherto  
suspected 
WHILE MILITANT ATHEISTS like Richard Dawkins may be convinced God  doesn’t 
exist, God, if he is around, may be amused to find that atheists might  not 
exist. 
Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly  aware that a metaphysical 
outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought  processes that it cannot 
be expunged. 
While this idea may seem outlandish—after all,  it seems easy to decide not 
to believe in God—evidence from several disciplines  indicates that what 
you actually believe is not a decision you make for  yourself. Your 
fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of  consciousness, and 
some may 
well be more or less set in stone.  
This line of thought has led to some scientists  claiming that “atheism is 
psychologically impossible because of the way humans  think,” says Graham 
Lawton, an avowed atheist himself, writing in the New  Scientist. “They point 
to studies showing, for example, that even people who  claim to be committed 
atheists tacitly hold religious beliefs, such as the  existence of an 
immortal soul.” 
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since we are  born believers, not 
atheists, scientists say. Humans are pattern-seekers from  birth, with a belief 
in 
karma, or cosmic justice, as our default setting. “A  slew of cognitive 
traits predisposes us to faith,” writes Pascal Boyer in  Nature, the science 
journal, adding that people “are only aware of some of their  religious ideas”
. 
INTERNAL MONOLOGUES 
Scientists have discovered that “invisible friends” are not something  
reserved for children. We all have them, and encounter them often in the form 
of  interior monologues. As we experience events, we mentally tell a 
non-present  listener about it.  
The imagined listener may be a spouse, it may  be Jesus or Buddha or it may 
be no one in particular. It’s just how the way the  human mind processes 
facts. The identity, tangibility or existence of the  listener is irrelevant. 
“From childhood, people form enduring, stable  and important relationships 
with fictional characters, imaginary friends,  deceased relatives, unseen 
heroes and fantasized mates,” says Boyer of  Washington University, himself an 
atheist. This feeling of having an awareness  of another consciousness 
might simply be the way our natural operating system  works. 
PUZZLING RESPONSES 
These findings may go a long way to explaining a series of puzzles in  
recent social science studies. In the United States, 38% of people who  
identified themselves as atheist or agnostic went on to claim to believe in a  
God 
or a Higher Power (Pew Forum, “Religion and the Unaffiliated”,  2012). 
While the UK is often defined as an irreligious  place, a recent survey by 
Theos, a think tank, found that very few people—only  13 per cent of adults—
agreed with the statement “humans are purely material  beings with no 
spiritual element”. For the vast majority of us, unseen realities  are very 
present. 
When researchers asked people whether they had  taken part in esoteric 
spiritual practices such as having a Reiki session or  having their aura read, 
the results were almost identical (between 38 and 40%)  for people who 
defined themselves as religious, non-religious or  atheist. 
The implication is that we all believe in a not  dissimilar range of 
tangible and intangible realities. Whether a particular  brand of higher 
consciousness is included in that list (“I believe in God”, “I  believe in some 
sort 
of higher force”, “I believe in no higher consciousness”)  is little more 
than a detail.
 
 
EVOLUTIONARY PURPOSES 
If a tendency to believe in the reality of an intangible network is so  
deeply wired into humanity, the implication is that it must have an 
evolutionary  purpose. Social scientists have long believed that the emotional 
depth 
and  complexity of the human mind means that mindful, self-aware people 
necessarily  suffer from deep existential dread. Spiritual beliefs evolved over 
thousands of  years as nature’s way to help us balance this out and go on  
functioning.  
If a loved one dies, even many anti-religious  people usually feel a need 
for a farewell ritual, complete with readings from  old books and intoned 
declarations that are not unlike prayers. In war  situations, commanders 
frequently comment that atheist soldiers pray far more  than they think they 
do. 
Statistics show that the majority of people who  stop being part of 
organized religious groups don’t become committed atheists,  but retain a 
mental 
model in which “The Universe” somehow has a purpose for  humanity. 
In the US, only 20 per cent of people have no  religious affiliation, but 
of these, only one in ten say they are atheists. The  majority are “nothing 
in particular” according to figures published in New  Scientist. 
FEELING OF CONNECTEDNESS 
There are other, more socially-oriented evolutionary purposes, too.  
Religious communities grow faster, since people behave better (referring to the 
 
general majority over the millennia, as opposed to minority extremists  
highlighted by the media on any given day).  
Why is this so? Religious folk attend weekly  lectures on morality, read 
portions of respected books about the subject on a  daily basis and regularly 
discuss the subject in groups, so it would be  inevitable that some of this 
guidance sinks in.  
There is also the notion that the presence of  an invisible moralistic 
presence makes misdemeanors harder to commit. “People  who think they are being 
watched tend to behave themselves and cooperate more,”  says the New 
Scientist’s Lawton. “Societies that chanced on the idea of  supernatural 
surveillance were likely to have been more successful than those  that didn't, 
further spreading religious ideas.” 
This is not simply a matter of religious folk  having a metaphorical angel 
on their shoulder, dispensing advice. It is far  deeper than that—a sense of 
interconnectivity between all things. If I  commit a sin, it is not an 
isolated event but will have appropriate  repercussions. This idea is common to 
all large scale faith groups, whether  it is called karma or simply God 
ensuring that you “reap what you sow”.   
NARRATIVE PRESENCE 
These theories find confirmation from a very different academic  discipline—
the literature department. The present writer, based at the  Creativity Lab 
at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design, has been  looking 
at the manifestation of cosmic justice in fictional narratives—books,  movies 
and games. It is clear that in almost all fictional worlds, God  exists, 
whether the stories are written by people of a religious, atheist or  
indeterminate beliefs. 
It’s not that a deity appears directly in  tales. It is that the 
fundamental basis of stories appears to be the link  between the moral 
decisions made 
by the protagonists and the same characters’  ultimate destiny. The payback 
is always appropriate to the choices  made. An unnamed, unidentified 
mechanism ensures that this is so, and is a  fundamental element of 
stories—perhaps 
the fundamental element of  narratives.  
In children’s stories, this can be very simple:  the good guys win, the bad 
guys lose. In narratives for older readers, the  ending is more complex, 
with some lose ends left dangling, and others ambiguous.  Yet the ultimate 
appropriateness of the ending is rarely in doubt. If a tale  ended with Harry 
Potter being tortured to death and the Dursley family dancing  on his grave, 
the audience would be horrified, of course, but also puzzled:  that’s not 
what happens in stories. Similarly, in a tragedy, we would be  surprised if 
King Lear’s cruelty to Cordelia did not lead to his  demise. 
Indeed, it appears that stories exist to  establish that there exists a 
mechanism or a person—cosmic destiny, karma, God,  fate, Mother Nature—to make 
sure the right thing happens to the right person.  Without this overarching 
moral mechanism, narratives become records of unrelated  arbitrary events, 
and lose much of their entertainment value. In contrast, the  stories which 
become universally popular appear to be carefully composed records  of 
cosmic justice at work.  
WELL-DEFINED PROCESS 
In manuals for writers (see “Screenplay” by Syd Field, for example)  this 
process is often defined in some detail. Would-be screenwriters are taught  
that during the build-up of the story, the villain can sin (take unfair  
advantages) to his or her heart’s content without punishment, but the heroic  
protagonist must be karmically punished for even the slightest deviation from 
 the path of moral rectitude. The hero does eventually win the fight, not 
by  being bigger or stronger, but because of the choices he makes. 
This process is so well-established in  narrative creation that the 
literati have even created a specific category for  the minority of tales which 
fail to follow this pattern. They are known as  “bleak” narratives. An example 
is A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry, in which  the likable central 
characters suffer terrible fates while the horrible faceless  villains triumph 
entirely unmolested. 
While some bleak stories are well-received by  critics, they rarely win 
mass popularity among readers or moviegoers. Stories  without the appropriate 
outcome mechanism feel incomplete. The purveyor of  cosmic justice is not 
just a cast member, but appears to be the hidden heart of  the show. 
ROOTS OF ATHEISM 
But if a belief in cosmic justice is natural and deeply rooted, the  
question arises: where does atheism fit in? Albert Einstein, who had a 
life-long  
fascination with metaphysics, believed atheism came from a mistaken belief 
that  harmful superstition and a general belief in religious or mystical 
experience  were the same thing, missing the fact that evolution would discard 
unhelpful  beliefs and foster the growth of helpful ones. He declared himself 
“not a  ‘Freethinker’ in the usual sense of the word because I find that 
this is in the  main an attitude nourished exclusively by an opposition 
against naive  superstition” (“Einstein on Peace”, page 510). 
Similarly, Charles Darwin, in a meeting with a  campaigner for atheism in 
September 1881, distanced himself from the views of  his guest, finding them 
too “aggressive”. In the latter years of his life, he  offered his premises 
for the use of the local church minister and changed his  family schedule 
to enable his children to attend services. 
SMALL DIFFERENCES 
Of course these findings do not prove that it is impossible to stop  
believing in God. What they do indicate, quite powerfully, is that we may be  
fooling ourselves if we think that we are making the key decisions about what 
we 
 believe, and if we think we know how deeply our views pervade our  
consciousnesses. It further suggests that the difference between the atheist 
and  
the non-atheist viewpoint is much smaller than probably either side 
perceives.  Both groups have consciousnesses which create for themselves 
realities 
which  include very similar tangible and intangible elements. It may simply be 
that  their awareness levels and interpretations of certain surface details 
 differ. 
THE FUTURE 
But as higher levels of education spread, will starry-eyed spirituality  
die out and cooler, drier atheism sweep the field, as some atheism campaigners 
 suggest? Some specialists feel this is unlikely. “If godlessness 
flourishes  where there is stability and prosperity, then climate change and 
environmental  degradation could seriously slow the spread of atheism,” says 
Lawton 
in New  Scientist. 
On a more personal level, we all have loved  ones who will die, and we all 
have a tendency to puzzle about what consciousness  is, whether it is 
separate from the brain, and whether it can survive.  We  will always have 
existential dread with us—at a personal or societal level. So  the need for 
periods 
of contemplative calm in churches or temples or other  places devoted to 
the ineffable and inexplicable will remain. They appear to be  part of who we 
are as humans. 
Furthermore, every time we read a book or watch  a movie, we are 
reinforcing our default belief in the eventual triumph of karma.  While there 
is 
certainly growth in the number of bleak narratives being  produced, it is 
difficult to imagine them becoming the majority form of cultural  
entertainment. 
Most of us will skip Cormac McCarthy’s crushingly depressing “The  Road” in 
favor of the newest Pixar movie. 
POPULATION IMPLICATIONS 
When looking at trends, there’s also population growth to consider.  
Western countries are moving away from the standard family model, and tend to  
obsess over topics such as same-sex marriage and abortion on demand. Whatever  
the rights and wrongs of these issues, in practice they are associated with  
shrinking populations.  Europeans (and the Japanese) are not having enough  
children to replace the adult generation, and are seeing their communities  
shrink on a daily basis.  
Africans and South Asians, on the other hand,  are generally religious and 
retain the traditional model of multi-child  families—which may be 
old-fashioned from a Western point of view, but it’s a  model powerfully 
sanctioned 
by the evolutionary urge to extend the gene  pool.  
“It’s clearly the case that the future will  involve an increase in 
religious populations and a decrease in scepticism,” says  Steve Jones, a 
professor in genetics at University College London, speaking at  the Hay 
Festival in 
the UK recently. 
This may appear as bad news for pro-atheism  campaigners. But for the 
evolutionary life-force which may actually make the  decisions, this may augur 
well for the continued existence of humanity. (An  image of Richard Dawkins 
and his selfish gene having a testy argument over  dinner springs to mind.) 
In the meantime, it might be wise  for religious folks to refrain from 
teasing atheist friends who accidentally say  something about their souls. And 
it might be equally smart for the more militant  of today’s atheists to stop 
teasing religious people at all.  
We might all be a little more  spiritual than we think.

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