RELIGION ALL IN THE MIND, SUGGESTS STEVEN PINKER

According to Steven Pinker, there are several emotional reasons for projecting a spiritual dimension into the world (he lists them in a lecture given before a meeting of the Freedom From Religion Foundation), but, he says, “… there also are cognitive predispositions, ways in which we intellectually analyze the world, which have been very skillfully explored by the anthropologists Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, and Scott Atrans. Anyone who is interested in the evolutionary psychology of religion would enjoy Pascal Boyer's RELIGION EXPLAINED and Scott Atran's IN GODS WE TRUST. Hamer's THE GOD GENE is also good, but I am more sympathetic to Boyer and Atran.

“The starting point is a faculty of human reason that psychologists call intuitive psychology or the ‘theory of mind module’—‘theory’ here not referring to a theory of the scientist but rather to the intuitive theory that people unconsciously deploy in making sense of other people's behavior. When I try to figure out what someone is going to do, I don't treat them as just a robot or a wind-up doll responding to physical stimuli in the world. Rather, I impute minds to those people.

“I can't literally know what someone else is thinking or feeling, but I assume that they're thinking or feeling something, that they have a mind, and I explain their behavior in terms of their beliefs and their desires. That's intuitive psychology. There is evidence that intuitive psychology is a distinct part of our psychological makeup. It seems to be knocked out in a condition called autism: autistic people can be prodigious in mathematics, art, language, and music, but they have a terrible time attributing minds to other people. They really do treat other people as if they were wind-up dolls. There's also a concerted effort underway to see where intuitive psychology is computed in the brain. Part of it seems to be concentrated in the ventromedial and orbital frontal cortex, the parts of the brain that kind of sit above the eyeballs, as well as the superior temporal sulcus farther back.

“Perhaps the ubiquitous belief in spirits, souls, gods, angels, and so on consists of our intuitive psychology running amok. If you are prone to attributing an invisible entity called "the mind'' to other people's bodies, it's a short step to imagining minds that exist independently of bodies. After all, it's not as it you could reach out and touch someone else's mind; you are always making an inferential leap. It's just one extra inferential step to say that a mind is not invariably housed in a body.” (From a Pinker speech recorded in the Jan/Feb 2005 issue of FREETHOUGHT TODAY newspaper, page 8)


MORALITY—A GAME OF ONE-UPS-MAN-SHIP, ANOTHER HOUSE OF CARDS???

So if the spiritual world is nothing more than a trick of intuition, perhaps morals might be nothing more than another psychological mechanism for keeping the pecking order in play in the supposedly rational herd of humankind. My reading in Dawes’s HOUSE OF CARDS (p. 208) brought me across the idea of “spatial paralogic” which is the habit of the human mind to make abstract hierarchies within the mind out of non-material values and concepts. People speak of improving themselves, getting better (according to what concrete standard, we should ask?). People speak of growing mentally and spiritually. What concrete yardstick are they putting themselves up against to measure their spiritual growth? That’s “spatial paralogic” in action—to imagine a hierarchy of value in the mind for abstract qualities that don’t have physical dimensions.

The human mind seems prone to create these hierarchies of values and life qualities in order to judge or evaluate itself and others. This, of course, enmeshes the self in the life of the culture against which one tests himself and his friends and acquaintances. I see evolution in this, our biological nature expressed as we try to find our place in the cultural hierarchy so that we can make allies and find mates. Values, judging and self-judging, and the resulting status in our minds and the minds of our acquaintances, are a human’s way of placing himself in relation to others. Thus we can’t help judging one another and ourselves because we are animals seeking a higher place among our fellows. We scramble among ourselves, pretending to be better than the other monkeys in the group, testing our moral strengths against one another. Let me try another way of saying it: spatial paralogic is a human psychological mechanism for seeking our and other’s values (i.e. “ranking) in the pecking order of the human herd.
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"If the shoe fits, you're not allowing for growth." —Robert N. Coons