'Does it arise culturally, or does the structure of our brains predispose us towards religious experiences?'

As a reader and writer of science fiction (SF), I’ve got used to my trains of thought taking obscure branch lines and depositing me at strange, and often unmarked, destinations. This column consists of one such detour.

Last month’s musings on vampires started me wondering: if there were aliens who had no capacity for religious faith – as seen in various SF stories and briefly mentioned in another of my earlier columns – then would their lack of religious symbols leave them vulnerable to vampire attacks?

If vampires were in fact a common threat, would this create evolutionary pressure on a sentient species to invent or discover a divine power to protect them?

Fortunately I’m writing an ‘Aliens vs Vampires’ story at the moment, so this is all fruitful reflection, rather than the lunatic wittering it probably would be coming from anybody else.

Slightly more sanely, it reminded me of a news story from earlier this year, about a research project set up to study the nature and basis of religious belief in the vampire-free real world, from the viewpoint of cognitive science.

Supernature vs Supernurture

Why, this project seeks to discover, do human beings believe? Is faith – as it often seems to be, and as the palaeontological evidence seems to suggest – a natural, perhaps inevitable part of being human?

If so, does it arise culturally, or does the structure of our brains predispose us towards religious experiences? In either case, what evolutionary imperatives underlie our urge to be religious?

The project also seeks to understand the philosophical and theological implications of its research, and asks: if religious belief is ‘natural’ in some scientifically demonstrable way, then what does this tell us about the beliefs themselves?

Would proof that religion came about for biological reasons invalidate a belief in God?

To many people – though not, I suspect, most Surefish readers – the obvious answer will be ‘yes’. Many atheists are understandably troubled by the proliferation of religion, and pleased to see it explained as a feature of the material world.

Some see faith as a consensual buffer against the communal fear of death, or a tool invented cynically by tyrannical authorities. Others, including some prominent scientific pundits, talk of memeplexes, temporal lobe events and over-sensitive predator warning mechanisms as explanations for belief in supernatural forces.

This Is Your Church on Drugs

Rationally speaking, though, an explanation for a belief has no effect on the abstract validity of that belief. Even strict behaviourists consider their behaviourist views to be ‘true’, rather than a meaningless quirk of their brain functions.

Some discoveries, of course, will lead individual believers to change their minds and become atheists.

Conversely, there are elements within all faiths that react to scientific revelations with denial maintaining that religious sources tell us all we need to know about the universe.

What we in the UK think of as mainstream Christianity is well used to adapting to new scientific knowledge.

If faith is conclusively proven to be a material phenomenon, I suspect that many Anglicans will embrace the revelation – as in Paul Cornell’s remarkable SF novel Something More, where the members of the 23rd-century ‘Reformed Church of England’ routinely commune with God using electromagnetic fields and entheogenic drugs.

As ever, my feeling is that for us to learn more about the workings of God’s creation – ourselves included – can only bring us closer to God.

Indeed, I sometimes try to imagine a scientific discovery which would persuade me that my faith was spurious. As yet I’ve come up with nothing. I’m very glad, though, to have that conviction constantly put to the test by a world in which scientific knowledge is forever increasing.

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