The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (16 page)

Like our attribution of mental states to the brainless dead, this tendency to think of the invisible soul as flitting off into another, unseen world can also be explained by cognitive factors. Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people don’t cease to exist simply because you can’t see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept:
person permanence.
Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this sentence in Belfast, for example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband—things that I know she does routinely.

The relevance of person permanence thinking for our tendency to imagine the afterlife as a
place,
in which the soul is thought to abound elsewhere, is something that several unfortunate Boca Raton, Florida, families know about all too well. One hot, mid-July afternoon in 1979, ten teenagers crammed into a gold-colored Dodge van and, probably along with a few cases of beer, left for a beach party in the nearby city of Hallandale. Afterward, some of the teens “got a wild idea” to go on a road trip,
²³
perhaps taking Florida’s Turnpike 150 miles north to Melbourne. Five dissenters refused to go along with this hasty plan and disembarked near a highway exit in Boca Raton. The other five—four boys and a girl—sped off in the van into the meridian sunset and would never be seen or heard from again, or so it seemed for a very long time.

For almost two decades, the families of these five young people could only speculate about what had become of them. Missing-person reports were filed, and rumors began floating around that the group had joined a hippy commune somewhere out West. A few years after their disappearance, someone even called in to the
Phil Donahue Show
to say that the missing girl was alive and well in California, where she and one of the missing boys had gotten married and were happily raising two children together. The sobering truth of that mysterious night, however, came to light in February 1997, when a fisherman wearing a pair of polarized sunglasses happened to spot the metallic glint of an immense gold object twenty feet below his boat, resting on the floor of a murky Boca Raton drainage canal. Inside the ancient van, caked with algae and encrusted with mud, were the skeletal remains of the five missing teenagers. But would knowing that their loved ones died that night have stopped the family members from imagining the teens as being “out there” somewhere anyway? Probably not. “I’m glad to know that [he’s] been with God the last seventeen years,” said one of the dead boy’s sisters on learning of the discovery.
²⁴
The afterlife, too, is a place.

Human cognition is not equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person permanence thinking just because someone has died. This cognitive inability becomes especially relevant, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of our sight. The central character of John Fowles’s cult classic
The Magus
(1966) finds himself trying to get his head around precisely this problem of person permanence when his lover unexpectedly dies:

For those who believe in the afterlife, person permanence thinking also relates to how the dead are mentally represented, or envisioned in our minds, in real time. In some sense, cleaving apart bodies and souls in the dualistic manner we’ve just discussed doesn’t seem to match our everyday pondering of particular dead people in the afterlife—namely, our loved ones. According to Queen’s University Belfast philosopher Mitch Hodge, if you were to conduct a poll on the street asking people to define the soul, most would likely say that it’s something that survives bodily death, shedding our miserable corpses and so on. But the truth is, Hodge argues, it’s impossible for us to imagine all those souls clamoring about in the afterlife without also picturing them as being embodied in some form.
²⁶

Dualism is very much a this-worldly concept, then, failing to extend itself to our representation of souls in the afterlife. For example, when you think of your dead grandmother in heaven (or hell, as the case may be), she must look like something of substance, even if it’s just a wispy spirit or a nebulous shadow. She probably looks to you much like you remember her in life. What’s more, she’s probably not naked—at least, I hope not—but wearing clothes of some kind. Just think: if the soul were truly as ethereal as we tend to say it is, a merciless tongue of fire couldn’t lap the sinner’s skin, and the martyr couldn’t find bliss in the fleshy bosom of his promised seventy-two virgins, nor could familiar faces of those that have gone before flash us a warm, toothy grin as we “entered the light.”

In other words, the gist of Hodge’s argument is that when we think of the dead, and ourselves as being dead, commonsense dualism isn’t easily applied in practice; it’s actually more commonsensical for us to think of the soul as a sort of physical body—just elsewhere. When Richard Stockton College psychologist David Lester and his colleagues probed undergraduate students’ ideas about the afterlife for a 2002 article in the journal
Omega
, they found this same apparent contradiction between the students’ explicit beliefs about heaven and their practical reasoning about the bodiless souls therein:

How to locate your loved ones in the afterlife isn’t a problem we can solve here. But it’s clear that when combined with the simulation constraints of our theory of mind, person permanence is another cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more natural to imagine them as existing in some exotic, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives.

The science of soul beliefs is a fascinating affair, and it’s one that cognitive scientists have only just started to investigate properly using experimental methods and controlled procedures. The findings to date cast considerable doubt on the everyday assumption that belief in the afterlife can be explained away by a hand-waving “wish fulfillment” theory—one positing that we believe because we wish it to be true. Although the fear of death is undoubtedly an important motivator in people’s clinging tenaciously to the illusion of immortality once it arises, it fails to account sufficiently for the illusion in the first place. After all, there are many things you may wish to be true—that on December 21, 2016, the clouds will gather and rain chocolate gloriously down upon you; that you will live to see your five hundredth birthday, healthy and fit as a thirty-year-old but wise as a biblical sage; or that tomorrow at noon, and every day thereafter for twenty minutes a day, you’ll turn into a beautiful butterfly. That these examples strike us as pleasant or desirable but still patently absurd, while the equally bizarre idea that your mental life can exist independently of your physical brain sounds completely reasonable to most intelligent and perfectly sane people, speaks directly to the cognitively seductive power of a theory of mind misplaced.

Indeed, it’s only through intellectual labor, and after countless millennia of thinking intuitively otherwise, that today we can arrive at the most obvious of all possible syllogisms:
The mind is what the brain does; the brain stops working at death; therefore, the subjective feeling that the mind survives death is a psychological illusion operating in the brains of the living.
Can the answer to the question of what happens to us after death, such a profound mystery, really be this simple? To argue otherwise would require demonstrating that either of the two premises in the logical argument is in any way false, thus leading to a false conclusion.

So far, we have seen how evolved human cognition—in particular, our theory of mind—is directly responsible for the illusions of purpose and destiny, for the feeling that otherworldly communicative messages are encrypted in the occurrence of natural events, and, finally, for our intuitions that our mental lives will persist in the wake of our complete neurological death. But one thing we haven’t yet seen is how these three fundamental illusions come together in a single mind to ground the self in a meaningful world, particularly when it comes to our moral reasoning. In the next chapter we will explore this link between the illusions of purpose, signs, and the afterlife by revisiting the old theological question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” And, again, theory of mind can help us understand and interpret the hidden assumptions in this timeless question in a very new light.

5
WHEN GOD THROWS PEOPLE OFF BRIDGES

W
E’LL PROBABLY NEVER
know the strange confluence of thoughts that converged in the head of William Cooke, proprietor of Cooke’s Circus, in the spring of 1845, compelling him to float down the River Bure as “Nelson the Clown” in a bathtub pulled by four straining geese. But news of the much-anticipated stunt certainly got the good people of Great Yarmouth—a busy seaside community in the Norfolk Broads of eastern England—talking. On the second of May, Cooke and his feathered crew were ready to set sail from the British resort town’s quays; and by five o’clock that evening, hundreds of people, mostly eager, wide-eyed schoolchildren who had seen Cooke’s colorful circus handbills plastered around the district, gathered anxiously on an eighty-foot iron suspension bridge waiting for a glimpse of the comic scene. No one seemed to notice the confederate rowboat, which was pulling the bathtub along by a hidden cable just below the surface of the water. But wishing to maximize his exposure to the audience overhead, on approaching the town Cooke signaled to the rower to adjust course ever so slightly, thus guaranteeing a direct pass under the bridge and causing the giggling throng of onlookers above to rush en masse to its center of gravity.

The rest is, alas, an unfortunate history. “There arose a dreadful cry: a loud unearthly shriek,” reported the
Norfolk Chronicle
a few days after the tragedy. “And in an instant, those who were a moment earlier full of ‘lusty life,’ with hearts beating in joyous excitement were launched into eternity.”
¹
Reports vary as to the precise number of townsfolk who lost their lives that notorious day, but about a hundred people perished, among them some sixty children. Around midnight, the boatmen pulled from the water the body of a woman with a small infant still clutched to her breast, her four-year-old daughter’s hand still in her own. “She had kept hold of both even in death, and her grasp was so tight that the bodies were not easily separated.” Meanwhile, says the reporter, “many children were found with their heads fast in the railing of the bridge, and were extricated with difficulty, some with broken arms and legs.”
²

Nelson the Clown survived the accident thoroughly intact. Following the official inquest, he fled the city of Great Yarmouth with his infamous geese, this time in tow, with neither appearing again in the annals of historical clownery. The jury concluded that the bridge had collapsed because of a welding defect and inferior workmanship and held one William Cory, owner of the construction company that originally built the bridge, mostly responsible.

Apart from some other rather trivial details, little else is known about the Yarmouth suspension bridge disaster of 1845, but from the solemn inquest reports we can imagine the pedestrian’s view of the somber scene: sodden, limp bodies of drowned toddlers plucked from the river and rushed frantically to the candlelit terraced houses near the bridge; feverishly whispered prayers heard in the darkened cobblestone alleyways; young siblings torn suddenly and forever asunder by steel and water; and wearied boatmen casting their oars listlessly about the still water for newly risen corpses of the innocents.

Little is reported about the townspeople’s desperate attempts in the days, months, and years ahead to find meaning in an event of such tragic proportions. Yet, being human, and knowing what we do about our species’ theory of mind, we can be sure that such a search was taking place. Records show that more than one church sermon the following Sundays belabored the ineffability of God’s intelligence and grand design, admonishing parishioners to place their trust in He who does not explain Himself. Convinced that the bridge collapse was an act of divine punishment for the townspeople’s sins, one local cleric, the Reverend Henry MacKenzie, delivered an especially popular series of sermons on this topic. Reverend MacKenzie felt it was especially urgent for the community to reflect “on the necessity of repentance and humiliation, faith and amendment of life.”
³
Today, if you wander through the old churchyard of the reverend’s former stomping grounds at St. Nicholas Parish Church, you may well stumble over the broken headstones of those who drowned that sad day—all, according to the head-shaking MacKenzie, because of a few profligate females, drunken excesses, fistfights, gambling, gossip, and all the rest of the standard coterie of human vice.

Far from being an old-fashioned psychological anomaly of God-saturated Victorian times, such thinking strikes at the heart of human nature. Life isn’t fair. But it isn’t unfair either. It just is. The very asking of the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” presupposes an intelligent, morally concerned agent, or at least a mindful instigator, behind the scenes. It’s as though we’re searching for an answer on top of an answer. When something bad befalls us, we very often know perfectly well
how
it happened; yet we’re still left asking
why
it happened—more specifically, why it happened
to us.
This is where causal reasoning intersects with thinking about one’s unique and individual place in the natural world, one of the most important, yet under-studied, areas in modern cognitive science. And curiously, the subject of doomed bridges, along with the people unlucky enough to find themselves on them at the moment of their demise, brings this psychological phenomenon into sharp relief. The statistical probability of finding a particular person, among sometimes millions of possible others, on an otherwise sturdy bridge precisely at the moment in time it comes crashing down is so infinitesimally small that it challenges us not to feel as though the person had been singled out by an unfathomable and deliberate fate.

The working-class people occupying the Norfolk Broads of nineteenth-century England wouldn’t seem to have much in common with present-day eastern Oklahomans, but the two demographics are marred by a similar black spot in their histories. On the morning of May 26, 2002, an overly tired tugboat captain with a heart condition blacked out while maneuvering his vessel beneath an interstate bridge in Webbers Falls, causing his ship to collide with a central bridge support. Gail Shanahan and Maggie Green, who were getting an early start home after attending an equestrian show in Arkansas and had their horses with them in the hitched trailer behind their truck, died along with fourteen others—including a three-year-old girl out for the day with her grandparents—when their vehicle plunged into the river below as the bridge collapsed. A year later, Shanahan’s sister gave voice to what many of those left behind were probably also asking themselves: “I’ve questioned why here, why was she on that bridge at that particular moment? I guess you’ve got to trust in God and get through it.”
⁴

In his classic book on children’s moral development,
The Moral Judgment of the Child
(1932), Jean Piaget tells how a colleague of his, a mysterious sounding “Mlle Rambert,” administered to a large group of Swiss schoolchildren a series of stories like this one:

Consistent with Piaget’s belief that young children are artificialists (tending to see objects in the world as acting in collusion with disciplinary adults), those under eight years of age answered in the negative, saying that the bridge had collapsed only because the child had stolen the apples. Older children saw what Rambert was getting at. They answered in terms of “mechanical chance,” as Piaget used the term. The worn planks would have given way, they said, no matter who was on the bridge. But, as we saw in Chapter 2 regarding his suspicions about “semi-educated” adults who happily endorsed teleo-functional statements for nature (for example, “the sun is there to give us light”), Piaget didn’t entirely trust these types of rational answers. Rather, he believed that instinctual superstitious thinking is often “justified by a cloak of words” in science-savvy children and adults. One of the reasons Piaget suspected this was that some of the older children told Rambert that of course it was simply coincidence that the boy had fallen into the river after stealing the apples; they couldn’t help themselves from adding, however, that all the same, it was punishment for what he had done.

Another person interested in the strange naturalness of viewing the collapse of a bridge as a sort of wrathful comeuppance was American novelist Thornton Wilder. In
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(1927), the story opens with a centuries-old rope bridge snapping over the gorges of the Peruvian Andes, sending five people plummeting to their deaths below. Seeing the disaster as an opportunity for “theology [to] take its place among the exact sciences,”
⁶
the town’s resident monk, Brother Juniper, investigates why God settled on those particular five people to be on the bridge at that exact moment. “Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like flies that the boys kill on a summer day,” he muses, “and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”
⁷

A scientist at heart, Brother Juniper begins sifting through old bank ledgers, diaries, and love letters of the dead for evidence they had done something deserving of such a horrible end. Yet for all his frustrated efforts to detect the mind of a just and rational God in such carefully assembled biographical tidbits, “the thing was more difficult than he had foreseen.”
⁸
What’s more, the failed experiment causes the church fathers, who can’t accept that God acts arbitrarily in matters of life and death, to label Brother Juniper an instrument of the devil. It also sees to the theologian-cum-scientist’s own swift denouement at a burning stake.

In writing this story, Wilder knew that there was something about unexpected tragedies that jump-starts people’s reasoning about morality. In one passage, he describes the emotional aftermath among the rattled townspeople of Lima, near where the bridge of San Luis Rey fell:

Wilder was onto something quite important here. As we saw in Chapter 3, our tendency to see communicative messages in natural events rests soundly on our evolved theory of mind. But this sign-reading tendency has a distinct and clear relationship with morality. When it comes to unexpected heartache and tragedy, our appetite for unraveling the meaning of these ambiguous “messages” can become ravenous. Misfortunes appear cryptic, symbolic; they seem clearly to be
about
our behaviors. Our minds restlessly gather up bits of the past as if they were important clues to what just happened. And no stone goes unturned. Nothing is too mundane or trivial; anything to settle our peripatetic thoughts from arriving at the unthinkable truth that there is no answer because there is no riddle, that life is life and that is that. It’s relatively easy to say this in some breezy general way, of course, but a different thing altogether when we’re applying it convincingly to our own lives.

Wisdom and age wouldn’t seem to invalidate our personal moralistic contract with God either. I’ve been a diabetic since I was in high school, and as a result I’ve found myself hospitalized on a few occasions over the years, usually because of an accidental overdose of birthday cake or some other stupid miscalculation I’ve made in the strange alchemy of glucose and insulin. But what I’ve noticed from these semiregular excursions to my local area hospitals (whether in the suburbs of Fort Lauderdale, the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, or civil war–ravaged Belfast) is that the endocrinology wing where diabetics are tended to often shares a floor with the geriatric unit. Because diabetes is common among the elderly, this makes sense of course. But an interesting consequence of this practical arrangement is that my hospital roommates are very often octogenarians and, sadly, they’re also very often alone and in a lot of pain. During those long, insipid days when the only sources of entertainment are the buzzing of dying flies caught in windowpanes, muted game show applause, and the sound of trapped air escaping from ancient anuses, one can be forgiven for eavesdropping. And I must confess that I’ve listened in a few times to these elderly patients as they filed some of their last grievances with God. One old man wanted to know what he and his wife, both succumbing quickly to the ravages of age, could possibly have done wrong to deserve this tragic end. More than one pleaded for mercy. An eighty-four-year-old devout Irish Catholic woman once leaned over and confided in me that God should see fit to give her her health back because, after all, she was still a virgin.

In fact, recent evidence shows that God has a special affinity for suffering. In a 2010 article in the
Personality and Social Psychology Review
, Harvard psychologists Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner argue that human suffering and God go hand in hand because our evolved cognitive systems are inherently unsatisfied with the amoral vicissitudes of life. The gist of their argument is that, because we’re such a deeply social species, when bad things happen to us we immediately launch a search for the responsible human party. In being morally vigilant this way—in seeking to identify the culpable party—we can effectively punish blameworthy, antisocial people, thus preserving our group’s functional cohesion and each individual’s genetic interests. That’s all fine and dandy, say Gray and Wegner, when someone punches us in the face, steals from us, or sleeps with our girlfriend, but when our misfortune is more abstract (think cancer, tsunamis, earthquakes) and there’s no obvious single human agent to blame, we see the hand of God.