Culture | Religion and psychology

In the hands of an angry God

Belief in divine punishment may be inherent and a useful evolutionary adaptation, helping humans overcome selfishness

God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human. By Dominic Johnson. Oxford University Press; 286 pages; $27.95 and £18.99.

MANY people think that religious belief is inherent to human psychology. This does not mean that specific beliefs are wired, but that the brain is predisposed to believe in supernatural agents. Some proponents of this idea argue that supernatural beliefs have hijacked innocent or otherwise useful features of the mind. But Dominic Johnson argues in “God Is Watching You”, belief in God—specifically, in supernatural forces that can punish—is a useful evolutionary adaptation.

Mr Johnson has doctorates both in evolutionary biology, where most of the research in the belief instinct has been done, and political science. He assembles well-known features of the mind in a tidy case. Human brains have a “hyperactive agency-detector device”, seeing agents (spirits, gods and the like) in natural phenomena and random happenings. This is useful. There is little harm if you overreact to something that turns out not to exist. But underestimating a rustling in the undergrowth, which might conceal a predator, could be fatal, leading to evolutionary selection of a tendency to see agents everywhere. The instinct is easily triggered, even in atheists. Even pictures can set it off: in one experiment, an office honour-system to pay for shared coffee got more contributions when someone taped a picture of a pair of eyes on the collecting tin.

Another component in the belief instinct is a belief in justice, the idea that most people get what they deserve. (This may be one reason why even 30% of those Americans unaffiliated with any church nonetheless believe in punishment in hell.) A third factor is the tendency in most people to put greater emphasis on punishment than on reward: losing $100 is far more painful than winning the same amount is pleasing.

Why would belief in an angry god be any use? When humans developed language, they could spread word of cheating, freeriding and the like. Raping your neighbour’s mate might once have made evolutionary sense—spreading your own genes at little cost—but “in a clever and gossiping species, knowledge of selfish actions could spread and come back to haunt us” in the form of a furious husband or a village mob. Since cheating is now costlier, belief in an invisible monitor helps people avoid those costs, and so survive with their reputations intact, and pass on their genes.

So much for the evolutionary biology. Mr Johnson brings his political science into the picture by arguing that societies which punish cheaters are more likely to survive and grow. He quotes John Locke, a 17th-century English philosopher: “Those who deny the existence of the Deity are not to be tolerated at all. Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon or sanctity for an atheist.” Those bonds and covenants allow societies to co-ordinate action and plan for the future.

Mr Johnson’s own research into 186 preindustrial cultures found that moralising religious beliefs were more prevalent in larger and more complex societies; these were more likely to be policed, use money and pay taxes. Others have noticed that religious kibbutzim in Israel are thriving, whereas secular socialist ones are in decline. The fact that moralising religious beliefs are more prevalent in more complex societies does not prove that one caused the other. But the striking number and variety of examples add credence to Mr Johnson’s theory.

This book is not a detailed account of religious belief. Nor does Mr Johnson bother grappling with modern theologians’ subtle and abstract ideas of God and hell. His subject is the mind, not the deity, and he finishes by musing how resilient religious thinking has proved to be in the face of science: “Learning religion is part of human nature. Learning science is a battle against human nature.”

Mr Johnson does not seem a pious man himself. But unlike atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, he is not out to embarrass religious belief and chase its subscribers from the public square. The religious instinct is too deep-seated, he thinks. Instead, critics of superstition are best advised to work with the grain of human psychology rather than against it, finding more benevolent ways to satisfy human yearning for something “out there”. What form such an atheist religion should take, though, God only knows.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "In the hands of an angry God"

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