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By Daniel Mocsny at 11/26/2023
Quick summary: atheism is easier than religious faith, and people are lazy, so why does anybody bother with the hard option? Why don’t human brains seek a kind of lowest-energy state, by analogy with dynamical systems that tend to run downhill? This post explores, rather speculatively, whether the human brain on faith gets stuck in a kind of higher-energy state, and becomes unable to get to the bottom, similar to what many dynamical systems actually do.
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Faith is not merely a belief for many persons of faith, but also a practice. Faith appears to be something that most people have to work at. Regular church attendance, participation in group ritual, being dazzled by professional religious stagecraft and affected styles of preaching, prayer, bible reading (of the devotional, rather than the critical variety), basking in the social proof from a crowd of fellow believers – these are familiar activities for the devoted Christian. They’re considered reliable markers of Christians who mean business. These activities might even be necessary for the believer – stop doing them, and faith slowly atrophies, like an unused muscle. The vast amount of money that believers spend on regularly topping up their faith tanks does not seem to be an accident.
It also casts doubt on the so-called sensus divinitatis. If believers really possessed an innate ability to sense God, they shouldn’t need expensive churches to activate it nor professional orators to explain it to them. For comparison, if you have working eyeballs, they function as soon as you open your eyelids every day, and keep working until you close them. You don’t have to do anything fancy to get them to work. Usually, you don’t need someone else to tell you what you’re seeing. And nobody can charge you money by letting you use the eyes you already have. Churches look to me like a strong argument that the sensus divinitatis either doesn’t exist at all outside of the churchy environment of psychological suggestion, or it doesn’t extend far beyond a small percentage of “adepts“. Some of whom might be on a psychosis spectrum.
To the extent that a believer’s faith results from religious practice, there’s no straightforward way to package that practice into arguments. Thus when an atheist, who approaches claims from the standpoint of reason, argues with a theist, who arrives at beliefs from practice, their arguments may go right past each other. The difficulty is compounded by the believer carrying on as if his or her faith exists in the argument space. This might be an instance of confabulation, a psychological phenomenon whereby the speaking part of a person’s brain acts as an unreliable narrator, concocting explanations for what the other parts of the brain are doing independently of the speaking part, and without letting the speaking part know. Even though the religious believer goes to church at least weekly to have his or her beliefs instilled and reinforced, the believer might honestly think he or she came by the beliefs via a process of reasoning, and so can explain them in terms of reasons. (William Lane Craig elevates this charade to high art, even labeling it with the oxymoron “Reasonable Faith”. If faith is “reasonable” i.e. derived from reasons, then it doesn’t require practice. If faith cannot survive without practice, then it does not derive from reasons.) For the believer to really “explain” his or her beliefs, the believer needs to take the atheist to church, and hope that the atheist will have the same emotional reaction to the goings-on as the believer has.
Occasionally someone is honest about how this works. I recall a political discussion in which a Trump supporter basically admitted that he couldn’t adequately explain his views in terms of reasons, but rather he said you need to go to a Trump rally! It’s like getting your medical advice from an old-timey medicine show rather than from those boring peer-reviewed medical studies. The studies are boring by design: they’re trying to remove emotion from the belief-formation game to the degree possible. The medicine show, in contrast, relies on emotion where facts are lacking, which is early and often.
The religious believer’s need for constant faith replenishment is in sharp contrast to the atheist, especially the atheist of a scientific bent. The atheist doesn’t have to keep going back to school every week to be re-persuaded to accept, for example, the Periodic Table of the Elements. Once a person understands the scientific world view, after that it’s automatically self-reinforcing. You don’t need group rituals, professional stagecraft, or billions of dollars in church infrastructure to keep you believing in science. The whole universe keeps you believing in science. As does the constant parade of ever-improving technologies made possible by science. Unlike prayer, which never produces results distinguishable from random chance, never mind improving over time, your smartphone does tend to work, routinely doing things that would have gobsmacked the folks who wrote the bible. And every few years when you shop for a new one, you find they’ve improved again. While Moore’s law (the name for this improving trend of digital electronics) appears to have slowed of late, it may still have considerable room to run.
Modern science has been around for about 400 years, with Galileo’s career often taken to mark its start. In that time, scientists have performed millions of experiments and observations, with ever-increasing power and sensitivity, and they keep finding no evidence of any gods doing anything anywhere. They also find that no religion guessed correctly about the nature of things – what matter is, where the Earth came from, how we got here, where the Sun goes at night, and the realities that lie beyond the power of our natural senses (from the microbial to the astronomical). No religion had anything to say about massively important phenomena such as viruses and radioactivity. Until just a few decades ago, nobody had an inkling that we inhabit a world shot through with them. In some parts of the ocean, there can be roughly as many virus particles (called virions) in a liter of seawater as there are humans on the planet. Fortunately for us, almost all of those viruses attack other forms of life. But plenty of viruses do attack humans, sometimes moving in permanently. Some geneticists estimate that up to 8% of our DNA consists of endogenous retroviruses. For some reason, neither of the contradictory creation accounts in the Book of Genesis mention God putting all that viral DNA into us.
For the atheist there’s no Problem of Pain, either, beyond the discomfort of experiencing it. There’s nothing scientists can detect about the universe that would lead anyone to suspect it is even aware of humans, let alone benevolent toward us, and forget about omni-benevolence. We live in a galaxy having from 100 billion to 400 billion stars, each one following a random unplanned orbit around the galactic barycenter. Stellar collisions are rare, but possible. Near misses are still rare, but more likely than collisions. At any time, a wandering star could swing by our Solar System and perturb the orbits of our familiar planets. Earth could be shoved too close to the Sun, and boil, or too far away, and freeze. Earth could be ejected from the Solar System altogether and drift through interstellar space as a dark frozen rogue planet. We know from geological evidence on Earth that a perturbation of this severity hasn’t happened to our Solar System in over 4 billion years, but there’s nothing to prevent it. Astronomers can look through telescopes and see galaxies exploding (technically, galaxies having active nuclei emitting “significant” amounts of radiation, and sometimes plasma jets shooting out for thousands of light-years). Bard doesn’t know whether life can evolve in such a boisterous galaxy, but if any has, it might be less likely to dream up a god who loves it.
If faith is so much work, and getting steadily harder as science continues to outstrip religion, why would anyone bother? Perhaps faith shares features (even if just by analogy) with metastable systems in physics and chemistry. Per the English Wikipedia:
“… metastability denotes an intermediate energetic state within a dynamical system other than the system’s state of least energy. A ball resting in a hollow on a slope is a simple example of metastability. If the ball is only slightly pushed, it will settle back into its hollow, but a stronger push may start the ball rolling down the slope. Bowling pins show similar metastability by either merely wobbling for a moment or tipping over completely. A common example of metastability in science is isomerisation. Higher energy isomers are long lived because they are prevented from rearranging to their preferred ground state by (possibly large) barriers in the potential energy.”
Glass, both man-made and volcanic, is another example of metastability. Glass may form from some molten minerals that cool rapidly, such as when magma from a volcano emerges underwater to form volcanic glass (obsidian). As J. A. Zalasiewicz explains in Rocks: A Very Short Introduction (2016), obsidian is metastable: its atoms were trapped in a higher-energy state by cooling so rapidly that they couldn’t reach the lower-energy state of forming crystals. But even after the glass has cooled, the atoms in the glass are still being bounced by thermal energy. Occasionally an atom bounces enough to escape its energy “well” and migrate to a position of lower energy by linking up with the growing surface of a crystal. Over time – sometimes millions of years – this causes the volcanic glass to devitrify and become cloudy.
At the risk of straining this analogy beyond all recognition, I can’t help but notice how volcanic glass forms by cooling rapidly. Why, it’s a lot like the religious believer who believes the first lie they’re told, before properly investigating all the competing religious lies, much less what the voices of reason have to say.
There is a kind of metastability in the brain studied by computational neuroscientists. I see that it’s been applied to a theory of social coordination dynamics, and religion in practice is inherently social. But here I’m just thinking about a rough analogy between the actual metastability of dynamical systems and a kind of figurative metastability of religious belief. Instead of seeking the easiest and most stable belief, which would be materialism, the basis of science, the religious brain insists on remaining higher on the slope, where things are harder. More evidence has to be ignored, more discrepancies need to be explained away, and if you can think logically at all, you have to waste your time on the endless sophistry of apologetics. At no point can you ever verify your beliefs with a test. That is, your belief can never attain the status of fact, such that you might meet a scientific or legal standard of proof.
For the religious brain to remain high on that slope, it must be blocked by walls from rolling farther down. These consist of strategies to prevent the believer from grasping the obvious – that the absence of evidence for any god is the same as the absence of evidence for rocks that think. Few sane people would ever suspect rocks of thinking, not because we can actively prove that rocks don’t think, but because we can observe lots of things that do think (e.g. people, and many animals). Things that think are unable to imitate rocks for very long, and no rock has ever imitated anything that thinks. Everything that thinks has a physical brain, and perhaps in the near future things with electronic brains will behave much as if they are thinking. But rocks lack the internal complexity, and an energy source, that are common to everything that demonstrably thinks. Thinking is a metabolically expensive activity, so anything which can think is going to justify the expenditure by doing it. We are familiar with things that think, and how they behave, and rocks are nothing like them. Thus no sane person offers the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” argument for thinking rocks. Minds are even less likely to come from empty space, because there is nothing about empty space that begins to resemble things we know that think. There is no evidence for thinking rocks, or for thinking empty space, beyond someone’s loud insistence that invisible, undetectable minds are really there.
So what good is this metastability model? Well, it might tell us something about how rocks that are stuck high on a slope might roll down the slope. In the physical system of balls on a slope, you might free a trapped ball by chipping away at the wall that traps it. Or you might impart energy to the ball, or wait for something like an earthquake to shake the entire slope. If the ball starts rattling around in its well, it might roll high enough to get over the wall, and roll down to the real bottom.
Factors that can chip away at the wall might include new facts that assail it. Darwin’s theory of evolution by mutation and natural selection seems to have done the trick for many. It changed the whole landscape, as it were. Before Darwin, there was no satisfying natural explanation for biodiversity. Back then, the landscape may have been tilted, with the religious “well” being actually lower than the atheist “well.” And indeed, atheism didn’t have much of a history before Darwin. Even though pre-Darwinian skeptics recognized the crazy train that religion is, they had a hard time imagining a world that God didn’t create. So they compromised with Deism – the belief that God set everything in motion, and then had no more to do with his creation. Either he left, or he died.
After Darwin tilted the slope, the position of religion became more precarious.
Factors that can impart energy to the ball include anything that triggers a “crisis of faith” such as a personal tragedy, or a tragedy affecting others that is hard to ignore. The fact that felt tragedies often trigger crises of faith suggests that the faithful somehow got the idea that their faith makes them immune to such things. When tragedies happen anyway, the resulting shattered expectations give rise to cognitive dissonance. That’s the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it.
Both history and the present day are full of tragedies, but most people don’t really care about most of it. A million people could die on the other side of the world tomorrow, as happened in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 (scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi deaths), and most people not directly affected would probably just go about their business. This kind of studied indifference doesn’t seem right for the Christian, who should view all of God’s children equally. But in practice, Christians are about as indifferent to strangers as anybody else is. A tragedy usually has to hit close to home to grab the Christian’s attention and start rattling that ball.
For example, Seth Andrews’ deconversion memoir (Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason) mentions the tragic death of Rich Mullins in 1997 as having triggered his own crisis of faith, which proved decisive. Mullins died shortly after the Rwandan genocide, but there’s no mention of the vastly larger and more distant tragedy in the book. Insofar as dislodging faith is concerned, often the tragedy has to hit the believer or someone they’re close to.
Occasionally an atheist bounces back up the hill to faith. Admittedly that’s a difficulty for my conceptual model. Evidently the slope and shape of the hill aren’t the same for everybody. While I myself noticed a considerable removal of burden once I abandoned superstition for reason, perhaps for some people the entire slope tips the opposite way. They continue to have a deep need for what religion has to offer them, which certainly isn’t evidence. Some people don’t seem to find facts as inherently satisfying as I do. They need reality to be something other than what it is, and getting back on the religion treadmill gives that to them. Not an actually different reality, but the external reinforcement necessary to pretend.
As always, the less a person knows about science, or scholarship generally, the easier it is to stay up in the religion well. Fewer inconvenient facts will intrude to disturb the faith and chip at the wall. Thus a religious person who leaves faith as a result of personal tragedy, and learns nothing else, may be prone to bounce back into faith. That’s why I think it’s important for the atheist to learn the other reasons for atheism besides the first one that convinced him or her. That one reason on its own may or may not prove to be durable. Many deconversion memoirs mention how the newly minted atheist undertook a program of book-reading, to catch up on what he or she wasn’t allowed to read before.
Richard L. Fricks 