The Religious Instinct: Fact, Fiction, and Plato

Anamnesis is a key feature of Platonic philosophy. It means “to remember.” Plato thought that eternal truths concerning justice, truth, and beauty were present in the human soul and that we had experienced these Form/Ideas in some previous spiritual and heavenly existence. This contains the pleasing idea that we come from the divine and we return to a transcendent realm upon death, as Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” also implies. Plato thought that imperfect versions of justice, truth, and beauty could be experienced in the course of earthly existence and they could remind us of the true archetypes that exist in the mind of God, to interpolate Christianity into the description.

Evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton points out that there is a ubiquitous human instinct to believe in spirits, the gods, and God. Every single human society has proved as much. It can be anticipated with certainty that when the next hitherto undiscovered Amazonian tribe is encountered, they will believe in God. Belief in a moral God who is collectively worshipped is tremendously adaptive for a society, as is ethnocentrism; a preference for members of your own community and thus a willingness to fight to expel invaders and to defend yourself and your brethren. Belief in a moral God is associated with mental health, physical health, good looks, and fertility. Atheism is correlated with mental illness, poor health, and infertility; voluntary or otherwise. Atheism is maladaptive. This is simply an evolutionary psychological version of my perennial obsession with God or nihilism. Dutton argues that if you are unfortunate enough to be an atheist, you should keep your beliefs to yourself and avoid spreading your nihilism and existential despair to the rest of us, something that I have argued for years concerning nihilist professors. Depression is contagious – even for the otherwise mentally healthy.

There is nothing hypothetical about all this. Feminists, who could be understood as modern “witches,” are explicitly anti-natalist. Traditionally, witches hate children with a vengeance and wish them harm; the abusive and even murderous stepmothers of human society. We know that feminists tend to be childless, unattractive, to be anti-natalist, and mannish, and they have convinced many biologically and mentally healthy young women to adopt their views.

Dutton is himself a part-time theist. He has moments where he believes, but finds the arguments in favor of God’s existence unconvincing. Yet he also knows that atheism is maladaptive and suggests that everyone believe in God if they possibly can.

The religious shall inherit the earth in fairly short order because the religiously conservative are the only ones having children as a group at or above replacement level. So feminists are not long for this world and good riddance to them. Perhaps this is why they have gotten more militant in recent decades.

Regarding the instinct to believe in God several things can be said. One is that it matches Plato’s contention that matters of the most profound spiritual significance are embedded in our souls, just waiting to be remembered. Maybe someone has to prod this remembrance – you might need to be taken to church, or see to a crucifix; at least read or hear some reference to the divine. This then resonates with one’s inner depths and produces a resounding, “Yes.” This might be accompanied by a fear of God and a realization that the quality of one’s life is a matter of cosmic importance and not just a private affair.

A belief in eternal values makes having children and familial continuity seem more attractive and reasonable. So, too; with the continued existence of society in which those children will have to live. Being made in the image of God makes of the human something of intrinsic spiritual worth and significance, providing the basis for a thoroughgoing moral realism. And, on the existence of the transcendent frees us from the implication of determinism, which eliminates agency, love, and moral responsibility.

Descartes argues that since the effect cannot be greater than its cause, the idea of God, considered as an effect, must have been caused by God Himself, since we fallen men would be in no position to dream up such magnificence and perfection. On this view, the instinct to believe is God-given. Descartes’ argument, when put into this larger rhetorical and evolutionary context, namely, the instinct to believe found in all human societies, seems more compelling than when read in isolation. The related notion of “intuition” is perhaps preferable to “instinct” because an intuition is the name we give to an ability we have that we are unable to articulate, whereas “instinct” implies a certain animal brutishness and dumbness. Women intuit that a certain man means to do her harm. We intuit emotions expressed by the human face without knowing how we do it. We intuit that Spider Man, were he to actually exist, would not swing between buildings in the clumsy manner depicted in movies. Though we have never seen such a superhumanly strong person, let alone one that can spin spontaneous spider/human webs capable of supporting 160 pounds, we immediately perceive the fakery of the CGI superhero’s movements. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on “production” is unable to fool the human perceptual apparatus and kinesthetic sense.

It takes no genius to understand why a belief in a moral God would be correlated with mental health. The notion that human life is the product of divinity with a holy rationale, though we might at times wonder its ultimate purpose, provides a foundation to human existence. Being the product of blind chance and natural selection is not congenial to a belief in ultimate meaning – though a recognition of the intelligence and agency of living organisms to alter themselves to their environments in real time, including their genes, through transposition, horizontal gene transfer and epigenetics inserts agency back into the evolutionary picture. The fact that religious belief is also associated with good physical health, with its concomitant attractiveness, and fertility, makes it seem especially wonderful.

Plato has a Creator moral God, The Form of the Good, that at the very least gives rise to the Forms which are copied by terrestrial objects and thoughts. For Plato, the human soul contains access to this Origin and Source, at least for the philosopher. Plato accepted Socrates’ desire for an emphasis on ethics, but added that metaphysics is necessary to provide context for ethical striving. Dutton comments that the least religious people are autistic men. Autism, that tendency of the brain with its heavy emphasis on the left hemisphere with its narrow focus, love of logic, analysis, and language, results in a lack of empathy and the inability to sense God’s presence. All such intuitions and abilities are a right hemisphere phenomenon. Religious men remain especially open to intuition. This rings true, phenomenologically.

Plato asks, “What kind of universe do we live in?” Or, if “universe” is anachronistic, “What is the nature of ultimate reality?” It is not material reality; the shadows on the wall of the cave. It seems plausible that having beliefs that do not align with reality will be pathological. Believing that it is a good idea to drink polluted water (the Ganges) or to eat rotten meat will have you exiting the gene pool fairly quickly. Religious belief is false when considered scientifically; when judged by the standards of this world. But science and the standards of the world produce despair, poor health, and infertility just like polluted water and rotten meat. People aspiring to be moral heroes, who “face the horrible truth” and espouse atheism, in the manner of a Nietzsche, in extremis, die or go mad as Nietzsche did in fact do.

Dutton likes theories that are parsimonious. The most parsimonious explanation for why religious belief is consistent with human flourishing is because it is right. Dutton complains that smart people’s Christian apologetics tend to turn into word salad and logic chopping. But then, he is devoted to scientism and materialism, at least in theory. My preference regarding apologetics is for indirect arguments. Assume that God does not exist, and then derive a contradiction. If God and the transcendent do not exist, and all reality is material, then determinism follows. Many determinists acknowledge that no one can actually live by the dictates of determinism (and Dutton is a determinist). We have to assume agency on the part of ourselves and others just to function. Beliefs that are literally pathological, that no one can live by, seem silly, unless they are merely aspirational in the manner of being perfectly moral.

As someone who is hopefully not just self-deluded, and at least a little bit smart (if I may be able to say), and someone who believes in God and has the corresponding high verbal/low quantitative intelligence (normally high verbal intelligence is associated with high quantitative and spatial intelligence – since intelligence is correlated with an efficiently and speedily processing brain) it has always been strange to me that seemingly smart people like Dutton imagine that there is nothing wrong with believing in determinism. Why do I seem to be almost alone in identifying the ridiculously self-contradictory nature of the determinists’ beliefs? Thomas F. Bertonneau pithily described it as the denial of consciousness, which it is. People who teach symbolic logic, and I have been one of those, are happily oblivious to this logical stupidity, and I do not even like logic considered as a separate topic very much.

Dutton is absolutely clear that believing in eternal values is healthy and necessary; and argues that his own agnosticism is not all a good thing; that once the Western world has disintegrated thanks to internecine warfare, lowering intelligence associated with low prosocial tendencies, and low social trust, the religious shall inherit the earth. The religious are prosocial and less individualistic. Conditions in this post-industrial world will be too harsh for the children of welfare recipients to survive. High intelligence people can self-brainwash and convince themselves of Woke dogma for purposes of self-advancement. They can also repress impulsive and instinctive behavior, including the instinct to believe in God, and high intelligence women who are educated are particularly infertile.

This willingness to be pathological is in direct conflict with that other built-in tendency, the survival instinct. Seeing DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) AKA IED (improvised, explosive, device) be implemented even in matters of life and death beggars belief. Apologies in advance for shouting but, FOR GOD’S SAKE, DO NOT EMPLOY DIE CRITERIA IN SELECTED AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS OR PILOTS. DIE surgeons can only kill one patient at a time and, perhaps, after a dozen or so botched and lethal surgeries, they will be struck off – and humanities professors do not directly kill anyone. There is a video you can watch of a trained female firefighter trying and failing to burst through a partially block doorway to save someone in a simulated emergency. An athletic untrained man achieves the goal in one try.

The trouble with reductio ad absurdum arguments is that they do not work if someone is willing to accept the absurd consequence. What could possibly be more absurd than letting people burn to death, for airplanes to crash into each other, and for surgical patients to die in the name of equity, or for people to stop having children en masse? Nothing at all; other than flat out contradictions which these things are not. Since these consequences are accepted, there is no further point in arguing with the Woke.

There has been some talk about developing dichotomous institutions – Woke banking, and base[1] banking. Woke credit card companies, and base credit card companies. Woke social media, and base social media. PayPal, Patreon, and credit card companies will block financial transactions if they do not like your politics – hence the recent promotion of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to get around such things. I would like to suggest base airlines. There would have to be base airports with base air traffic controllers. I am open to suggestions about what to do about Woke air traffic controllers sending their airplanes into our base ones. After that, we just need base surgeons. Base elementary, high school and colleges would, of course, be nice too.

NOTES:

[1] Not caring what others think of you, and unwoke. It also implies noting facts and figures even when not expedient for Woke political agendas – in fact, especially when not so expedient.

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