Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS REVEALING RELIGION TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Andrew Brown Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Hugh Levinson BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 20.03.08 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 23.03.08 2130-2200 CD Number: Duration: 27’ 43” Taking part in order of appearance: Scott Atran Director of Research in Anthropology, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNS) Professor of Psychology and Public Policy, University of Michigan Justin Barrett Senior Researcher in Anthropology, Oxford University Fraser Watts Psychologist, Cambridge University Eileen Barker Professor Emeritus of Sociology, London School of Economics A.C. Grayling Professor of Philosophy, Birkbeck College, London Baroness Shirley Williams Professor Margaret Spufford, historian BROWN: Once upon a time, it all seemed very easy. Believers had faith, scientists sneered at them. End of conversation. But can we, today, set aside the question of what science can tell us about the truth of religious belief. Instead, let’s consider the things that science now can tell us about the fact of religious belief. Scientists have of course to believe that God won’t interfere in their experiments. But that is all they are bound to believe about him by their science. And an influential school of anthropologists and psychologists has come to a new understanding of the ways in which belief in the supernatural arose quite naturally from the normal workings of our earthly minds. Some of these scientists are themselves believers; some are atheists, like Scott Atran, a professor of psychology in Michigan, and of Anthropology in Paris: ATRAN: We have bodiless gods that have emotions, for example. We know that that’s false. Or we’ve got inanimate objects that have feelings and emotions and are thinking things. That also is something children innately know anywhere in the world to be crazy. But why isn’t it crazy? If an individual held these beliefs isolated from other individuals, he’d be considered a lunatic or a nutcase. Think of Abraham, for example. Here’s a guy who waited his entire life to have a son and then he goes out and takes his beloved son and is going to slit his throat because he hears a voice no-one else has ever heard. Now is he condemned for child abuse or attempted murder? No, he’s the greatest cultural hero in the history of the world. Now that’s preposterous. BROWN: There's an idea that might shock anyone who subscribes to the great Abrahamic faiths. Yet Atran agrees about the central mechanisms of belief with Christians like Justin Barrett, a psychologist at Oxford. His research team has just been awarded nearly two million pounds to study what kinds of belief come most naturally to us. BARRETT: Ghosts or ancestor spirits are probably the most widespread cross culturally recurrent form of supernatural belief and they seem to really play on the way that human minds naturally develop. BROWN: What is it exactly that makes us receptive to believing in the afterlife? BARRETT: Well there’s a little disagreement in the field over this, but at least one popular version right now that we have some evidence for is that human minds have two different mechanisms, if you will: one that handles physical objects such as human bodies; and another device that deals with human psychology - beliefs, desires, actions, motivations and so forth. And these two different systems with two different evolutionary histories, solving two different kinds of problems, have to come together to figure out and predict human behaviour because we’re both psychological beings and physical objects. At death, these two aspects of being human become disjointed, which leads to a bit of a conflict, you can think of it that way, between these two systems. There’s one that continues to generate inferences about beliefs, desires, what the deceased would like, what they would be thinking about, what they might be perceiving; and the other system that says yeah but the body is done, it’s not moving, it’s inactive. Segue: ATRAN: Human beings have almost two tracks in their ways of thinking and dealing with the world. BROWN: Scott Atran One is a sort of evidence based, reason based way of looking at things in the world and reacting accordingly and achieving goals and using means commensurate with achieving those goals. ... But we have this other track... which seems almost absurd from an evolutionary point of view, which is we build these counter intuitive worlds - that is worlds which violate the basic principles of reason upon which our judgements are based BROWN: But in the view of the new school, the principles of reason were themselves built by evolution. Our brains didn't just spring into existence to help us think. They are descended from brains that helped our ancestors solve practical problems and they are still good at answering questions that any animal must face in the world: is that thing alive? Is it going to eat me? It may be in such existential questions that the unconscious roots of the supernatural are to be found. Justin Barrett: BARRETT: Even in the first few months of life, babies seem to have fairly rich appreciation for properties of physical objects, on the one hand, and things that might be called agents on the other - that is those things that move themselves around and violate those normal physical laws. Detecting those kinds of beings and reason about them in our ancestral past probably led to selection pressure to be very sensitive to detecting them because if you miss signs of a tiger, you become tiger chow. So better to think that the rustling in the bush is a tiger or some other agent - maybe another human, for instance - than to miss that signal. And it’s been suggested that that kind of device maybe leads us to giving very little information to postulate the presence of these other agents around - maybe ghosts, maybe spirits. BROWN: Might this be an explanation for why God so frequently appears in deserts where you can imagine the agent detecting system going into overdrive because there isn’t really anything to detect out there? BARRETT: That could be and it also goes along with the old adage there are no atheists in foxholes as it were because under those conditions of survival urgency, there’s reason to believe this system would be hypersensitive. BROWN: So, is it possible that we have discovered a way out of the dreary trench warfare and the apparently endless name-calling that seems to characterise the relationship between science and religion? Could this research come to a more firmly based, scientific understanding of the common humanity of believers and unbelievers? Yes, but: moving the argument on doesn’t end it. Psychology cannot tell us whether God or Gods exist and there is a limit to what it can tell us about religion. Fraser Watts is a psychologist at Cambridge University, not just a Christian, but an Anglican priest as well. WATTS: One of the things that the current wave of cognitive science interest in religion has got wrong is really trying to reduce religion to just a matter of belief. Most sociologists of religion recognise that there are many aspects of religion of which belief is only one. There’s also practice, experience, various other things. Religion is a much broader thing than just belief. A lot of the mystics of the world have talked about the ineffability of their mystical experiences; really that these are things you can’t describe. They then go on to write books about them. You can translate them into the kind of code you can articulate, but you miss something in the process. BROWN: So essentially religious belief primarily happens in parts of our brains to which we have not very good access? It’s presented to our conscious minds rather than discovered by them? WATTS: That’s exactly right. I think I’d just prefer to say: religious cognition arises at those levels of the mind to which we don’t have good access and so assent is a different kind of matter. Religious belief is in any case as much a matter of trust in a person as it is assent to propositions. BROWN: It’s not what you know: it’s whom you can convince. Believers want to convey their faith to other people,and this brings up a very important fact about religious belief. It isn't something purely individual. It couldn't be. It's not just the stories that we tell ourselves about the world. It is also the stories that we tell each other. So any science of religion couldn't just be a matter of psychology. It is also a matter for anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. Eileen Barker is professor Emeritus of sociology at the London School of Economics, who has studied new religious movements all her working life: BARKER: A After forty years of observing different religions, I’m not sure there’s very much that people don’t believe or not believe. I’m continually amazed at man and occasionally women’s capacity to think up the most extraordinary things. Every time I try and think of something that people believe, that everybody might believe, you can find people who don’t. There are lots of people who say well it’s natural to believe this or people need to believe that, but natural and need seem to me the wrong sorts of words because then a whole lot of people are unnatural or a whole lot of people manage without fulfilling that need. P eople brought up in India are more likely to have experiences of rebirth and interpret this through ideas about reincarnation, whereas somebody brought up in a Catholic country is more likely to have a vision of the blessed Virgin Mary. I don’t think there are many young Hindu boys who have visions of the blessed Virgin Mary. BARRETT: Or if you worship a cow in India, you’re perfectly normal; and if you do so in Letchworth, you’re a cultist. BARKER: Absolutely, yes. BROWN: Perhaps some forms of religious experience are like language: any normal child is born with the capacity to learn a language, but which language it ends up speaking is entirely a matter of where and how it is bought up. No language lasts for ever. Some die out with their last speakers; others simply change over time and imperceptibly until they become unintelligible. We can't understand Chaucer without a dictionary. Something similar may be happening to traditional religions in Europe. A.C. Grayling is the professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College in London, a secularist who believes that all religions are doomed to shrivel and fade: GRAYLING: It seems a most extraordinary claim to make given every appearance of resurgence. For me the appearance of resurgence is mainly an appearance of extra amplification and this is because with what’s happened in the course of the last decade with the atrocities of 9/11 and 7/7 and Madrid, the debate has become very polarized. Globalisation of the West is impinging on traditional societies and traditional religious beliefs in a way which has become unsustainable for those more traditional constituencies. And when there is genuine friction, when two cultures like the culture of the West - reductive and secularist and money orientated - meets a point in the development of another culture, which feels that that goes too far, then you get this result and a lot of screeching and creaking and groaning and bashing, noises emanate from the conflict between the two. That’s what we’re hearing, that’s what people think is religious revival, but it’s the sound of change. BROWN: But it's not obvious why it can't be both. If someone claims to be acting from their religious convictions, and then acts in accordance with them, perhaps they are in fact religiously motivated. Secularists like Professor Grayling object to religion on the grounds that it is fanatical. But the question about fanaticism is not whether it is bad for reasonable and tolerant people, but whether it is good for the fanatics. Obviously sometimes it is. Here too, we return to the evolutionary roots of human nature. In all known hunter gatherer societies, the biggest predator of humans is man. In that world, unreasonable, unconditional loyalty becomes a weapon far more powerful than sticks and stones. So our modern willingness to fight, and die, and kill, for an idea, grew out of a willingness to fight, and die, for the tribe. Emotionally, and for almost everyone, it is still the same thing. Religious warfare isn't just about ideas. It's about ideas as tribal markers, which are seen as much more important than anything else. This isn't the same as being unreasonable about everything all the time, but then few people are entirely consistent, as Eileen Barker has discovered: BROWN: When people tell you they believe something, do you believe that they actually believe it? BARKER: I believe that they believe they believe it. (laughs) I don’t think they’re lying necessarily. Of course some people do lie, but what’s slightly more interesting is that they believe things which contradict other things that they believe or in another situation you’ll find that they don’t believe that but they’ll draw on another resource, another kind of belief to deal with that situation. So I wouldn’t say they don’t believe it. I think they think they believe it and in a sense do believe it at that time for that purpose. BROWN: Belief emerges form the deepest parts of our minds, far below conscious control; but once it has done so, we can turn it to our own purposes – and we do, even when we don't know that we're doing so. In politics, where it is notoriously hard to tell who is really sincere, Tony Blair didn’t do God with the media. But it turns out, now that he has left office and become a Roman Catholic, that he was doing a great deal of God in private; indeed he will start lecturing on the subject later this year in America. His fellow Catholic, Shirley Williams has found faith makes convictions stronger. It doesn’t tell her what they are. WILLIAMS: Even in politics your religious views are going to be fairly deep down. I think I think of it as an anchor more than anything else. The ship sets off. It’s got a direction which is largely determined by one’s own view about politics and one’s political beliefs, but there’s this anchor which at a certain point stops the ship moving in that direction if you deeply believe that where you’re going is wrong. It’s what in a sense instills people into rebelling against our own interests because they simply cannot take it any more. The Iraq War was an example of that. In fact the interesting thing about the Iraq War, just taking a recent example from politics but one with huge moral repercussions, is that it was a matter of conscience on both sides. I don’t question that it was a matter of conscience for the Prime Minister - Tony Blair at that time. I think he twisted a lot of things to make it look more convincing in factual terms and strategic terms than it was, but that he believed what he was doing was right I don’t question. I think he probably did. I think the rest of us who opposed very strongly what he did equally passionately believed it was not right. BROWN: The immediate counter to that is to ask what kind of knowledge you might expect your Christian conscience to supply you with if, in the case of the Iraq War, it tells you not to and it tells Tony Blair to do so? WILLIAMS: A good question. I don’t expect my Christian conscience to provide the knowledge. I expect my not particularly one way or the other brain to provide the knowledge. I have a very, very strong commitment, which I’ve believed all my life - largely I think inherited from my father - which is that somebody who is a Christian, or for that matter a Jew or a Muslim, has absolutely no right to fall back on faith until the ultimate intellectual argument has been gone through. I think you have no right to do with the lazy business of giving up your intellect in order to rest heavily on the rock of faith. I think that does huge damage. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that the last step was the step of faith, but he meant that all the previous steps were steps of intellect and I think that’s absolutely right. BROWN: As any good economist – or bookie, or advertising executive – will tell you, human beings are much less rational than they suppose themselves to be. But is there anything special about religious irrationality which means that it will fall into dust like a vampire when it is brought under the glare of enlightenment? Has this already happened among people like A C Grayling: GRAYLING: I don’t think there are very many children in England today who instinctively feel that trees and streams are inhabited by their own spirit; whereas there are animistic communities in Africa and perhaps in antiquity which did think that they were animated by spirits. And why not? Why is it the case that a child brought up in a secular household, like my own children for example, don’t move from thinking that their mothers (and it should be their fathers of course) are omniscient to thinking that there is an omniscient being in the universe because mine didn’t? BROWN: But I think if you took your nice, secular, urban children and dumped them in a pine forest at midnight, they would have no trouble in apprehending that there might be some dark, sinister presence out there. GRAYLING: Well that would be very … it would be cruel but interesting to do it, wouldn’t it because then one would ask them what it was that they thought was present there? And here you would get the phenomenon familiar from people who have near death experiences. They have a near death experience and they say that they’ve gone through the tunnel and they’ve met a being and you know there’s a familiar pattern of stories. And yet in each case it is a being from their own religious tradition or a place associated with their own religious tradition. In other words, there is something highly acculturated about those beliefs and responses, which makes me wonder whether it isn’t really a fact of social acquisition. BROWN: The idea that religion is something we can hope to grow out of has been something of an orthodoxy for the last fifty years, even among historians. But not all of them agree. Professor Margaret Spufford is a historian of the seventeenth century, a time when there may have been no atheists at all in Europe and when everything was understood in a religious light. She remembers a conversation with a colleague who thought it obvious that we must grow out of a belief in magic, and so in Gods: SPUFFORD: He stood on my hearth and pontificated somewhat and he said, “We have no comprehension of the world in which they lived” and his world and my world, 17th century worlds were the same, “because we don’t any longer understand the nature of acute pain, which they lived in all the time.” He didn’t know I did. That was hidden from him and I kept it so. And also they had invented fire insurance and so they were delivered from this constant fear of the building going up in flames around them. And I thought no, really, this doesn’t do. There is no reason why those two changes should also mean that one no longer has any need of religious faith. BROWN: Whatever the preconscious roots of doctrine, by the time it becomes a conscious, and articulated set of beliefs held by thousands, or millions of people, it cannot be entirely childish. It has to deal with the awful and in some ways unbearable facts of life. The historian Margaret Spufford is herself a Christian and a lay member of a religious community. Nothing makes her angrier than the idea that God will protect those he loves, as someone once told her when she was about to preach: SPUFFORD: I stood there raging and saying, “God is not an insurance policy. Because you believe in God, it doesn’t mean that you won’t have cancer, that your wife won’t have cancer, that your children won’t die. It doesn’t mean any of those things. It means that you have a belief that out of these deaths and profoundnesses will come some good that you cannot at present imagine.” BROWN: A bit more than nothing good coming out of them? SPUFFORD: Oh certainly a bit more than nothing good coming out of them. BROWN: But not in the least bit diminishing their evil? SPUFFORD: No. You must never when you’re in the company of somebody who is suffering deeply make gentle, soothing noises, which suggest that this is only temporary and that it isn’t really suffering and that when they have had a good night’s sleep and two paracetamol, they won’t feel much better about it. No. Evil is evil and I think it’s very important to keep a grip on the fact that it is evil and that it won’t necessarily diminish in pain as you move further from the event. BROWN: So, religious belief, religious practice, is in part a record of anguish. These are not just pretty stories. They are the sort of claims about the world to which we cling in personal despair, when we are quite beyond the reach of reason. Religion is a means to understand all the extremes of human experience, delight as much as terror and anguish. Here again, the new school of anthropologists and psychologists would argue that reason misses the essential point. We can hope to understand our own irrationality, and even to predict it; but we can't escape it. We can only live through it. In this, faith has something in common with love. Justin Barrett argues that calculation is sometimes less truthful than emotion. BARRETT: I believe that my wife loves me. I’m an optimist about scientific progress. I think some day we’ll have a really good maybe neurological explanation for what’s going on in my brain when I believe that my wife loves me and we’ll have an evolutionary story of why I believe my wife loves me, but I think I’d be on rather thin ice and couldn’t go home tonight if then I decided that well then I don’t believe it any more. Segue: ATRAN: You can’t whisper in your honey’s ear, “Hey darling, you’re the best thing my fitness calculator has come up, up to now.” See what happens. BROWN: Scott Atran ATRAN: No, you have this irrational, sort of crazed attitude, which all of your experience and inductive knowledge will tell you is false - namely that this is going to be some eternal bonding that’s going to maintain the same level of effervescence for your entire lives and beyond. Now again inductively that’s nuts and all outsiders will tell you it’s nuts, but for themselves they won’t; they’ll believe it. And in fact your honey won’t go with you and be your eternal love unless both of you believe it sincerely. So in a sense love, the emotion of love and the perfume of love - by perfume of love I mean the manipulation of love, just like people manipulate our sentiments of faith and religion - trumps any calculation of alliance. And it works. BROWN: For Scott Atran, the evolutionary justification of faith – for he is not a believer – arises from the simple fact that we can’t know enough to make considered decisions about the most important things of life; yet we have to make them anyway, and to live with them once made. ATRAN: There are other existential anxieties that reason can’t deal with and because we’re thinking creatures there’s a sort of tragedy of cognition that includes loneliness, injustice, disease and catastrophe and death. Our antennas are out; everything we do is an attempt to avoid such things. Yet we can’t, we know we can’t. Reason tells us we can’t, evidence tells us there’s no way we’re going to avoid any of this stuff. This creates, I think, an emotional bind for human beings that’s almost impossible to overcome. It is impossible to overcome, with reason. Segue: SPUFFORD: After our daughter died, we were all absolutely astonished. BROWN: Margaret Spufford: Up until now, we have been talking about the theories of belief: the reasons that people may react religiously to the world. But when you are plunged inside it, as Margaret Spufford was, there is another kind of immediacy, which communicates itself directly and which cannot be understood from the outside, but only experienced. SPUFFORD: She was twenty-two when she died. We had known since she was one that she was going to die as a child. There were no secrets, there was nothing hidden. And after she died, I fell to bits. It was extraordinary. I had no notion that I was going to fall to bits. I mean I knew the answers, didn’t I? I knew what was going to happen. And yet I fell to bits. I really couldn’t cope. And this went on for oh a long time - April to November. In November, I was going on an eight day Ignatian retreat. After two, three days of this, I had really one of the nastiest nightmares I’ve ever had, I think. I was looking for Bridget, our daughter. I was looking everywhere. I was looking in the galaxies and looking in the stars. I was looking everywhere in the universe and she was not. And God was not either. It was one of the more shattering things that’s ever happened to me. Two days later, we were all gathered together for the Eucharist, as we always were gathered together for the Eucharist, and just before the host was handed to me, I was aware that my daughter was standing in front of me and that behind her stood the Lord. And he looked down at her with such a delight in her. It was amazing. It was also vivifying like electricity. He was so dramatically alive. And then she came and hugged me and then somebody handed me the host. And that was all. But it was enough. That was the end of my agony. I went on missing her, of course - I still do - but I was not any longer unhinged, and I think I had been pretty well unhinged. So it was an extraordinary experience and it’s never happened to me again and I don’t expect it to. But, on the other hand, I did feel that I knew rather more what the disciples felt when they met the Lord after the Resurrection - that it was a very real experience. And its reality seemed very basic. Not spooky, not spirits, not frilly nonsense. BROWN: Not spooky, not spirits. Not any sort of nonsense. Margaret Spufford's account makes it clear that whether or not we can explain religious experience, we cannot explain it away. Neither belief nor unbelief seem an adequate response to her. Both are in fact presumptuous. The words of that old atheist Karl Marx come to mind: philosophers have up to now only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. We remember that Marx called religion the opium of the people, but even if the opium is false the pain it is supposed to cure is real. So long as the pain and tragedies of life endure, which is to say forever, science now tells us that religious belief will also endure. Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist who is one of the founders of the new school, was once asked whether its discoveries mean that a child brought up without any contact with myth would invent its own religion. He replied that if there were only one child, he did not know. But if there were two children on a desert island, then they would certainly find, or found, their own religion.