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| Excerpted from "The World Until Yesterday" |
salon | Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to
that religion. That is, a religion’s adherents firmly hold beliefs that
conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural
world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of
that particular religion. For example, Hindus believe there is a monkey
god who travels thousands of kilometers at a single somersault.
Catholics believe a woman who had not yet been fertilized by a man
became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, whose body eventually
after his death was carried up to a place called heaven, often
represented as being located in the sky. The Jewish faith believes that a
supernatural being gave a chunk of desert in the Middle East to the
being’s favorite people, as their home forever.
No other feature
of religion creates a bigger divide between religious believers and
modern secular people, to whom it staggers the imagination that anyone
could entertain such beliefs. No other feature creates a bigger divide
between believers in two different religions, each of whom firmly
believes its own beliefs but considers it absurd that the other
religion’s believers believe those other beliefs. Why, nevertheless, are
supernatural beliefs such universal features of religions?
One
suggested answer is that supernatural religious beliefs are just
ignorant superstitions similar to supernatural non-religious beliefs,
illustrating only that the human brain is capable of deceiving itself
into believing anything. We can all think of supernatural non-religious
beliefs whose implausibility should be obvious. Many Europeans believe
that the sight of a black cat heralds misfortune, but black cats are
actually rather common. By repeatedly tallying whether or not a one-hour
period following or not following your observation of a black cat in an
area with high cat density did or did not bring you some specified
level of misfortune, and by applying the statistician’s chi-square test,
you can quickly convince yourself that the black-cat hypothesis has a
probability of less than 1 out of 1,000 of being true. Some groups of
New Guinea lowlanders believe that hearing the beautiful whistled song
of the little bird known as the Lowland Mouse-Babbler warns us that
someone has recently died, but this bird is among the most common
species and most frequent singers in New Guinea lowland forests. If the
belief about it were true, the local human population would be dead
within a few days, yet my New Guinea friends are as convinced of the
babbler’s ill omens as Europeans are afraid of black cats.
A
more striking non-religious superstition, because people today
still invest money in their mistaken belief, is water-witching, also
variously known as dowsing, divining, or rhabdomancy. Already
established in Europe over 400 years ago and possibly also reported
before the time of Christ, this belief maintains that rotation of a
forked twig carried by a practitioner called a dowser, walking over
terrain whose owner wants to know where to dig a well, indicates the
location and sometimes the depth of an invisible underground water
supply. Control tests show that dowsers’ success at locating underground
water is no better than random, but many land-owners in areas where
geologists also have difficulty at predicting the location of
underground water nevertheless pay dowsers for their search, then spend
even more money to dig a well unlikely to yield water. The psychology
behind such beliefs is that we remember the hits and forget the misses,
so that whatever superstitious beliefs we hold become confirmed by even
the flimsiest of evidence through the remembered hits. Such anecdotal
thinking comes naturally; controlled experiments and scientific methods
to distinguish between random and non-random phenomena are
counterintuitive and unnatural, and thus not found in traditional
societies.
Perhaps, then, religious superstitions are just further
evidence of human fallibility, like belief in black cats and other
non-religious superstitions. But it’s suspicious that costly commitments
to belief in implausible-to-others religious superstitions are such a
consistent feature of religions. The investments that many religious
adherents make to their beliefs are far more burdensome, time-consuming,
and heavy in consequences to them than are the actions of
black-cat-phobics in occasionally avoiding black cats. This suggests
that religious superstitions aren’t just an accidental by-product of
human reasoning powers but possess some deeper meaning. What might that
be?
