Hood, Bruce - Supersense

Consider the first explanation. Children believe what they are told by adults. We love to tell them about fantasy figures like Santa Claus, the ‘Tooth Fairy’, and even the ‘Bogeyman’ if they are misbehaving: ‘If you are good, Santa will bring you that PlayStation’ or ‘If you misbehave, the Bogeyman will take you.’ Fairy tales have been around for a long time as a way of teaching our children how to behave. All of the characters in these stories are magical – cats that can talk, witches that can fly, and so on. Characters with supernatural powers are understood to be special and thus are more easily remembered. Because they are so unusual, they work. Isn’t it ironic that we immerse our children in make-believe as pre-schoolers, only to tell them to put away such foolish ideas and ‘grow up’ when they reach school age?

The psychologist Stuart Vyse argues that culture is most important when it comes to the supernatural: ‘We are not born knocking on wood; we learn to do so. We are not innate believers in astrology; we become believers.’ 9I agree in part. Many rituals are passed on as customs and traditions. Some of them are so old that we have forgotten why we do them. Every year in the West, children take part in the archaic ceremonies and rituals associated with Halloween and Christmas, mostly unaware of their true origins. 10On All Hallows’ Eve, the practice of dressing up in scary costumes was intended to banish evil village demons. Kissing under the mistletoe and lighting the Yule log were originally pagan fertility rites that became incorporated into Christmas activities. Today we observe these rituals because they have become traditions handed down to us through our culture. But a purely cultural explanation is missing an important point. Why are we so inclined to engage in ceremony and rituals? People may treat these festivals as a bit of fun, but many still believe in real supernatural phenomena. Why would a person accept the supernatural in the first place?

The obvious answer is that there is a real benefit to believing what others tell you. Communicating and sharing ideas with others expands your knowledge so that you don’t have to discover everything by yourself. And who best to learn from but older and wiser members of the tribe? If they say that certain plants have healing powers or that some caves are dangerous, it is sensible to believe what they say. In this way, beliefs can easily pass from one generation to the next. If culture and society spread belief, then we should be careful what we tell our children. If this is the root of supernatural thinking, then perhaps we should be held responsible for informing the naive and the young who do not yet know.

This is why the biologist Richard Dawkins thinks that religion is a form of child abuse. He wants a world without God, religion, or any form of supernaturalism. There is only room for science, he asserts, when it comes to understanding nature. Dawkins accuses the churches of indoctrinating our youth with superstitious beliefs. Children are ‘information caterpillars’ with ‘wide open ears and eyes, and gaping, trusting minds for sucking up language and other knowledge’. They gullibly gobble up any facts because of an evolved predisposition to trust whatever their parents and elders tell them. 11

This brings me to the second explanation for beliefs that I want to draw to your attention. The problem with the gullibility view is that most researchers who study the development of the mind do not regard humans as blank slates for any idea or belief. Rather, the bulk of the work on young children’s thinking shows that, before they are capable of instruction, pre-school children are already deeply committed to a number of misconceptions. I think that these misconceptions are the true origin of adults’ supernatural beliefs. Yes, culture and church play a role in supernatural belief, but they do not act alone. Rather, they provide the framework to make sense of our own beliefs that we come up with by ourselves.

Even if ideas are transmitted by culture, we still have to answer two fundamental questions: Where did the first supernatural ideas originate? And why do so many isolated cultures share the same basic misconceptions? The common types of belief and reasoning shared by distant cultures, long separated in time and far distant geographically, suggest something intrinsic to the way humans think. For example, almost all cultures have creation myths to explain the origins of the world and the diversity of life that usually involve gods. Gods and spiritual agents are also held responsible for unforeseen events. Whenever we find such universal beliefs and behaviours, we should start looking for reasons why these explanations of origins and events are similar. Like the instinct for language found in every society since the beginnings of civilization, is it possible that a supersense is also part of the human endowment? Do we all start off with a natural inclination to the supernatural that only some of us can overcome? Why is it so damned hard for people to become scientific in their thinking?

I think supernatural beliefs work so well because they seem plausible. And they seem plausible because they fit with what we want to believe and already think is possible. They also make sense of all the weird and uncanny events that pepper our lives. Ideas and beliefs may be transmitted, but only those that resonate with what we think is possible take hold and make sense. This is a really important point that is often overlooked. We either accept ideas or reject them, but seldom do we consider why. Ideas have to fit with what we already know. Otherwise, they do not make sense.

To prove this, let me give you a new idea I want you to believe in. It’s not a supernatural one, but it makes the point about how ideas work. If I told you that ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’, would you believe me? Think about it for a moment and try to take the idea on board. At first it sounds okay, but eventually you see that the idea is meaningless. The statement is actually a famous sentence among scientists who study language and thinking. In 1957 the linguist Noam Chomsky constructed this perfectly grammatical but completely meaningless phrase to demonstrate that sentence structure alone is not enough to convey ideas. 12The content of the sentence follows all the rules of language, but as a sentence it does not compute in our minds. It is meaningless because of what we already know about colour, ideas, sleep, and anger. Something cannot be both green and colourless. Ideas do not sleep. Sleep is not normally furious. These are concepts that already exist in our minds and, because they contradict each other, they dictate that Chomsky’s statement makes no sense. So any new idea has to fit into existing frameworks of knowledge. This is why some ideas can be so difficult to grasp. Science, for example, is full of ideas that seem bizarre simply because we are not used to them. It’s not that people are being stupid when it comes to science. Rather, many scientific ideas are just too difficult for many of us to get our heads around. On the other hand, folk beliefs about the supernatural seem quite possible. That’s why it is easier to imagine a ghost than a light wave made up of photons. We have seen neither, but ghosts seem plausible, whereas the structure of light is not something we can easily consider. 13

MIND DESIGN

Mind design is the reason why certain ideas are obvious while others are obscure. By mind design I mean the organized way in which our brains are configured to understand and interpret the world. The brain, like every other part of the human body, has evolved over millions of years. Your hands have been designed to manipulate objects. Your legs have been designed for bipedal locomotion. Your liver has been designed to do all sorts of jobs. Likewise, your brain has been designed in certain ways through the process of evolution. Most scientists agree that the brain has many specialized, built-in mechanisms that equip us to process the world of experience. These mechanisms are not learned or taught by others. They form the package of mental tools that each of us is equipped with as part of our mind design. But this design does not need a designer. You don’t need a god to explain where the design came from. It’s simply the way gradual adaptation of biological systems through the process of evolution has produced a complex problem-solver. Natural selection is our designer.