Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Cognitive Science of Religion Series)

Rating:
Summary: --"natural" -- please....don't make me laugh...
Review: The basic thesis of this book is this: people believe in God because it is natural to do so. It is in-born, innate, and simply a result of how human minds are made. Got that?

The author argues that people believe in god because it is how our minds are structured (p.viii), it is the way our minds operate (p.30), it is a result of our mental tools (p.17), and simply the result of the sort of minds we are "born with" (p.91).

Oh, and just to be clear -- people who don't believe in god are unnatural. In fact, as he concludes, atheism is an indulgence of the "elite."

The author sadly ignores the fact that between 500 million and 740 million humans on this earth right now DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD (see Cambridge Companion to Atheism edited by Michale Martin -- should be out late 2005). How "natural" can God belief be with such staggering numbers of people who reject such a belief? Please...

Consider the fact that 50% of Czechs don't believe in God, 80% of Swedes, 65% of the Japanese, 43% of the French, 45% of Germans, well over 70% of the Vietnamese, 45% of South Koreans, 50% of Estonias, 44% of the Dutch, 35% of Hungarians, 30% of Israelis, 25% of Canadians, 25% of Taiwanese, - and millions upon millions more all over the world! (by the way, this data come from numerous souces, including the work of Ronald Inglehart, Pippa Norris, Andrew Greeley, Grace Davie, Phil Zuckerman, Ulla Bondeson, etc.)

To suggest that belief in God is an in-born, "natural" part of our mids, and to simply write off millions and millions of atheists as "unnatural" elitists is absurd. It is actually beyond absurd -- it is intellectually indefensible. Shame on this author for ignoring the millions and millions of humans on this planet who don't believe in God.

The poverty of this book's thesis becomes even clearer when we compare rates of belief among nations. Let's compare Czech Repu. ro Poland. Over 50% of Czechs are atheists, but only 3% of Poles are atheists. Compare Ireland and Great Britain. The latter has only 4% atheists, the former has arounf 40%. Or compare Japan to the Philippines in terms of belief in God; the former has over 65% rejecting belief in God, the latter less than 2%. How would this author explain this glaring differences? Is it a result of deformed brains? deformed minds? No - I've got it -- elitism! Yeah, that;'s the ticket!!]]

This book gets an "A" for effort (always fun to see academic theists bend over backwards to try and prove that their belief in God is rational/sound). butan "F" for content, data analysis, and evidence.


Rating:
Summary: i suppose
Review: As of August 29, this book has neither a description nor any reviews, but I wanted to read some before considering buying it. I found this description from the webpage of the publisher, Altamira Press:


Why Would Anyone Believe in God?

Because of the design of our minds. That is Justin Barrett's simple answer to the question of his title. With rich evidence from cognitive science but without technical language, psychologist Barrett shows that belief in God is an almost inevitable consequence of the kind of minds we have. Most of what we believe comes from mental tools working below our conscious awareness. And what we believe consciously is in large part driven by these unconscious beliefs. Barrett demonstrates that beliefs in gods match up well with these automatic assumptions; beliefs in an all-knowing, all-powerful God match up even better. Barrett goes on to explain why beliefs like religious beliefs are so widespread and why it is very difficult for our minds to think without them. Anyone who wants a concise, clear, and scientific explanation of why anyone would believe in God should pick up Barrett's book.

About The Author
After completing his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at Cornell University, Justin Barrett served on the psychology faculties of Calvin College (Michigan) and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and as a research fellow of the Institute for Social Research. Recently, he was the Associate Director for the International Culture and Cognition Consortium and an editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture. His cross-cultural, developmental, and experimental research on religious concepts has appeared in numerous books and scholarly journals. Dr. Barrett currently provides consulting on numerous research and evaluation projects for academic and non-profit groups, especially concerning the interface of science and religion.




OK, it's Pilgrim Jolamon One Shot again. According to the preface, he argues that people all over the world have similar minds, so similar concepts tend to spread throughout human socities. Once belief in an omniscient god is introduced, it tends to spread. In chapter one, he discusses why anyone believes anything in general, not god in particular. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 argue that our minds are interested in "agents" which have a limited number of superhuman properties. In chapter 5 he argues that various kinds of rituals affect the spread of religious ideas. Chapter six moves on from belief in supernatural agents in general to belief in "God" in particular. He says that children's minds in particular easily acquire belief in "superpowerful, superknowing, superperceiving and immortal" god. In chapter 7 he argues that belief in god is as natural as the belief that other people have minds. In chapter 8 he considers why atheism occurs and under what circumstances, and in chapter 9 he tries to deal with remaining questions.

Rating:
Summary: Accessible, yet chock-full of relevant theories
Review: I would recommend Barrett's book to anyone, academic or no, who has an interest in getting a concise and accessible cognitive explanation for religious belief. Throughout his book, Barrett manages to integrate a variety of current cognitive approaches, some of which were originally intended specifically for explanation of religious belief and some of which have been adapted (in ways that I do not think would be objectionable to their original authors) to this field. In particular, those familiar with the cognitive sciences will recognize elements of Cosmides and Tooby's theory of mental modularity, Pascal Boyer's theories on the signifiance of counter-intuitive agents and agency detection, and Harvey Whitehouse's concept of imagistic and doctrinal modes in religious ritual. But those of you who are unfamiliar with these theorizers, have no fear-- everything you need to understand this book is within the book itself.

Barrett's basic thesis is that belief in God (or gods) is a natural byproduct stemming from two particular capacities of the human mind which have served us well in a variety of contexts throughout the evolution of the species. These capacities he calls Hyper Active Agency Detection, or HADD, and Theory of Mind, or ToM. Chapter by chapter, he explains how these capacities work in formulating beliefs generally, in what contexts (or people) they may be strengthened or weakened, and even how people in which they both function quite normally may still end up not believing in deities for one reason or another. Barrett argues that the mental equipment we as homo sapiens have evolved for myriad purposes ranging from detecting predators to romantic relationships to finding food actually end up working together in a fashion that causes us to find the existence of supernatural agents entirely plausible-- and not just plausible, but necessary.

Of course, one's immediate response may be, "Well, that is all very good...but if that is the case, how do some of us end up not believing in gods?" And Barrett expects this objection. His penultimate chapter is entitled "Why Would Anyone Not Believe in God?" and in it he explains why even though religious belief may be natural, it is not inevitable in all of us. Personally, I feel that the book lets us down a bit at this point-- Barrett's answer is basically that atheists are generally people who have frequent occasion to challenge their own perceptions, specifically the ones that cause us to suspect that there are agents present when we can't be sure, or to attribute agency where there may actually be none. He surmises that this is most likely to occur in academic circles and/or in western, affluent societies, specifically urban areas, where the common understanding is that the environment is designed by humans, not supernatural entities, and intentionality may very well be ascribed not to deity but to more abstract entities such as the government, the market, or society. He describes atheism as seeming natural to some who "enjoy an environment especially designed to short-circuit intuitive judgments tied to natural day-to-day demands and experiences." (118) This is fair enough, but deserves quite a bit more analysis, and in my assessment does not warrent Barrett's conclusion that atheism is therefore "unnatural." Abnormal? Certainly. But it is quite possible to make an effective argument for the naturalness of a belief without maintaining that those who do not have it fall into the category of "unnatural." My suspicion is that Barrett overstates his position a bit in defiance of academics he describes as stating unabashedly that theistic belief is absurd and unworthy of rational-thinking people. But this does not detract from the very worthy points made throughout the book up to this point.

By and large, the book could have been written by theist or non-theist-- its goal is emphatically not to make an argument for or against the existence of God. Rather, it is to explain how each of us enter the world pre-equipped with minds containing a legacy of engineering which has served us in the goal of surviving through the ages, and how this equipment has made belief in the supernatural an entirely natural part of that world...for better or for worse.