Our Brains Strive To See Only the Good, Leading Some to Flying Spaghetti Monster
Let me tell you a little, slightly embarrassing bit about me: I’m a doofus. Really, it’s reached a nearly clinical maturity. I know this because, well, because I am quite learned in the ways of the doofa. Take, for example, my habit of making some kind of gesture when I expect a door to shut behind me, a gesture only I note and recognize, and a gesture which I take—primally—to show that I am in touch with the Universe and can, therefore, sense when the door will latch shut though I can’t see it. I’m embarrassed to recount this, but there you have it: I’m a doofus. I still don’t believe in God, though.
I picked up the October 28th issue of the Wall Street Journal, and came across the Science Journal “section”. The title of the article, “Our Brains Strive To See Only the Good, Leading Some to God”, caught my eye. Seems, judging by the results of a study conducted by Lund University, published in Science, that “brains have a remarkable talent for reframing suboptimal outcomes to see setbacks in the best possible light”. Okay, well, yeah, utterly astonishing there. It gets better.
The article sets out to build the case that the human brain, so wired to bend its cerebrochemical processing to find the silver lining, just about wants to find God. You have your Swedish subjects of the aforementioned study who were to choose one person among a pool of folks who was the most attractive, or the most likable and trustworthy, and further to provide their reasoning for that choice. Thing is, the subjects were supposedly easily duped into believing that they had chosen someone they hadn’t actually chosen, and went so far as to provide the reasoning for that choice which they hadn’t actually made. I know: it’s a little tortuous, but Science doesn’t print junk, so forgive me not producing a full methodological analysis.
Our erstwhile science journalist, one Sharon Begley, starts piecing together her thesis of God being the progeny of a biased cognition.
‘People don’t know how good they are at finding something desirable in almost any outcome,’ [Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard] says. ‘So, when there is a good outcome, they’re surprised, and they conclude that someone else has engineered their fate’—a lab’s subliminal message or, in real life, God.’
This builds directly on Dr. Gilbert’s earlier-cited assertion that “Belief in God…is compelled by the way our brains work.”
Cranky as it seems, there is some logic there. If you pursue evidence of God—wait: I’ll probably make an assertion there that I can’t necessarily support. So, let me say this: when I have pursued evidence of God, I have at best found some kind of nebulous smoke which gives no indication of the nature of it’s generating fire; and I have at worst found a sort of memetic, sociological illusion passed from one generation to the next almost congenitally (pardon the somewhat obscure quasi-pun there). So I’m given to expecting that there is some agency of and not beyond the human being which gives God his voice and power. If we can find evidence of scientific merit which might locate this agency within the patterns of cells and neuron activity which (seem to) give rise to consciousness, hats off.
However, there are some things about the article and its premise which I find a bit on the flaky side:
- Yeah, I know it’s part-and-parcel of the psychology experiment to present a facet of the human psyche which shocks us, which we find objectionable enough to take notice and possibly inspect ourselves more closely to figure out why we’d administer electric shocks of sufficient intensity to kill the person in the next room (Milgram). Knowing this, though, doesn’t keep me from wondering what kind of fucking trepanation advocate signed up for the Swedish “study”. Consider: you’re to pick from two women’s photos which is the more attractive (yes, Sharon, you use the comparative and not the superlative when you’re comparing only two entities). You pick Beth, but the sly experimenter slides Grizelda’s photo face down across the table to you, and asks you why you picked her. Do you look at Grizelda and not notice that IT’S NOT BETH? I thought we had all these sorts of people gainfully employed in Siberia or Arkansas somewhere.
- How often on a given, let’s say, Monday, do you think to yourself, “Wow, if I hadn’t clumsily sawed off my right leg, I wouldn’t have met that cute candystriper who wants to hump my prosthesis?” You don’t. You bitch, just like I do, and just like the people who work with you do when you’re bitching about everything. I might be mixing apples and horseshoes here, but that just doesn’t clear so simply for me.
- Let’s say they’re right. Let’s say that our brains are wired to find the good in things even if they’re mostly bad. That’s a long way from saying that God doesn’t exist as anything but an emergence from positively misinterpreted experiences. That’s of the same caliber (poor) as the inevitable response to the article stating, roughly, that of course our brains are built to find God in toothpaste and Peak Oil—why would God make it otherwise? Weak.
So, what do I think? I think there’s anecdotal and intuitive indication that, yeah, sometimes we want to believe the best of a thing even in the face of its poverty of goodness. I think there’s anecdotal and intuitive indication that even the most skeptical of us has our incongruous wish for, if not belief in, something more than the reductionist’s conclusion. I think we’re all doofuses after a fashion. And I don’t think that has anything to do with God.
Check out what she has to say about this.
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