The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (edition 2010)

I found this book very interesting, though it was a little repetitive. I didn't disagree with much, and I did enjoy learning about the theory of mind. It was well-written, with a nice balance of the personal- not too much, not too little. ( )

The author, Jesse Bering has come up with what could be an important concept on evolution. His ideas involve a psychological evolution of humans that occurred parallel with physical evolution. Specifically, he is convinced that a belief in the supernatural by early humans has had a hugely beneficial affect on humans, so much so that those early humans accepting the idea, predominated over those who did not, eventually coding the belief into our current genetic makeup. He believes we are predisposed to believe in a supernatural being and the predisposition is a result of genetic imprinting formed during prehistoric times.

He has talked on this idea previously and I heard one of his talks on NPR Radio given on August 30th 2010. His idea seemed convincing and when he published a book on his idea, I purchased it to better follow the thought.

I found the book worth reading but less effective than the radio discussion. The writing style is fine but the structure is not optimal. There is no clear statement of the idea anywhere in the first 30 pages of the book, either the acknowledgements, preface, or 1st chapter. This leaves the reader with little interest in continuing through the dialog of seemingly slightly related happenings and previous findings for the next hundred pages.

Finally, at the chapter beginning on page 165 Bering begins to lay out his idea. From then on, the reader follows Bering’s thinking pretty well.

There are psychological tests run mostly on children that Bering covers in the first 165 pages that bear out the scientific basis of his convictions, establishing the idea as science rather than whimsy.

I went back to my copy of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” to compare Darwin’s presentation of physical evolution to Bering’s presentation of psychological evolution. I found that Darwin used a writing style that was clearer. Darwin used what later developed into the style used by all hard science researchers, an organizational style that begins with an abstract, a statement of the idea, a discussion of methods, a discussion of the findings, a conclusion, and a summary.

Bering does not follow this style in the book and I found no reference of a companion scientific style publication by him on this idea. The scientific style would possibly work better on this idea, but be less available to the general public if published in authoritative peer-reviewed scientific publication.

Bering does describe in the book many scientific psychological studies that do back up the fundamentals of his idea and so I think his idea is scientifically well founded and deserves serous consideration.

His idea neither encourages nor discourages an individual to believe in the supernatural but simply discusses how the predisposition to its belief evolved. For this reason, his idea should not be the hot button issue that physical evolution is.

For those who want to delve into how the mind works, and why it functions the way it does, I recommend this book. For those who would like a more concise version of Bering’s idea, the archives of his discussion on National Public Radio “All Things Considered” dated August 30th 2010 are helpful. ( )

This was a surprisingly slow read for a book that I picked up very eagerly. I was first introduced to the connection between religion and current cognitive science in a course on ancient near eastern religion, and I was intrigued. The idea is that the human brain is inclined to believe in some sort of divine agent because that sort of belief was beneficial from an evolutionary perspective. For example, when an event occurs, it's useful to think that that event was caused by an active agent rather than happening by chance; the cost of attributing something to an agent when it was really just a coincidence isn't very high, whereas attributing something to chance when it was actually the work of a deliberate agent could have very negative consequences. To take a very simple example, if some leaves move in the wind, that could be a sign of a predator; ignoring that sort of sign because we took it as meaningless might result in death. On the other hand, if we assumed that someone had moved the leaves and it turned out to be nothing, no harm would be done. So assuming agency behind events is a positive, and we evolved accordingly. This, of course, ties in to whether we perceive God's agency behind various events today. Doing so is in some sense natural.

The issue of God is further elaborated by the idea of "theory of mind". Not only do we assume that some active agent is behind things, but we can actually imagine what that agent might be thinking. This ability is apparently more or less unique to humans, and developed as a way to help us live together in society. Because we can imagine what others are thinking about us, and can therefore imagine the negative response to certain behaviours, we have to show some restraint rather than giving in to all of our urges. Incidentally, we come to imagine the mind of God as well.

I personally find these ideas very interesting, so I wanted to find out more after reading a bit about them for class. Within the week, I happened to come across this popularizing account, so I immediately bought it thinking that it would be an enjoyable read that simultaneously helped me understand the issues better.

The Belief Instinct did turn out to be full of interesting facts and did aid my understanding to a certain extent, but I found that the overall presentation was a bit lacking. There are lots and lots of descriptions of experiments, which were fun to read but sometimes made the book feel a bit disjointed. Worse, I didn't like the "popular" writing style at all. Rather than clarifying the issues, I felt that it sometimes obscured them, and it wasn't consistent. The switches between often fairly low-brow humour and somewhat more technical explanations were a bit jarring; at one point the author made a joke about using a big, scary word (teleo-functional), while at other points using unfamiliar psychological terms freely.

In the end, it took me about six weeks to finish this book because it just wasn't as gripping as I had expected. I do feel like I had learned a lot by the end (though my explanations of the theories should be taken with a big grain of salt), but I had expected so much more. I would cautiously recommend this book to those interested in the topic. ( )