The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (6 page)

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A LIFE WITHOUT PURPOSE

M
UCH TO THE
chagrin of those faithful evolutionists who like to think they’ve cast off the lodestone of God altogether, the father of evolutionary theory himself, Charles Darwin, was a far cry from the full-blooded scientific atheist he is often portrayed to be. In trying to conceptualize the natural world without God, Darwin repeatedly stumbled over a major psychological hurdle. His writings hint at a mysterious Creator that had purposefully geared up the apparatus of natural selection. In his 1876 autobiography, Darwin does more than just allude to these godly leanings. He admits that while writing
On the Origin of Species
(1859), he experienced

Actually, given this description, and knowing what we do of his other ideas, Darwin might properly be called a “deist,” someone who believes that an intelligent God created the world but exerts no causal influence over natural phenomena. But Darwin didn’t know about theory of mind. It would be another century still before the researchers we met in the previous chapter would first identify theory of mind as an evolved cognitive capacity, a psychological specialization of the human brain. So, what if Darwin’s inability to conceptualize such mindless origins was due not to some inexorable truth of an intelligent First Cause, but instead to the distorting forces of the evolved cognitive apparatus by which he perceived the universe—his own theory of mind? That is to say, perhaps it was only through the lens of his theory of mind that all the heavens and earth, including human existence, appeared purposeful and meaningful, as the product of intelligent design.

Curiously enough, a very non-evolutionary-minded thinker came a lot closer than Darwin ever did to unraveling our species’ insuperable tendency to reflect on God’s creative intentions. Just behind the old stone wall encircling Montparnasse Cemetery in the north end of Paris, not far from the main entrance, lie the bodies of Jean-Paul Sartre and his longtime companion, Simone de Beauvoir. Here, under a conspicuously frugal headstone, this famous duo cannot see the many mourners who trudge daily through rain and snow or shield their eyes from the heavy French sun to leave offerings of flowers, business cards, and, of course, cigarettes, to which Sartre suffered an unabashed addiction.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, this affable genius—a prolific philosopher, writer, and playwright—made his living as the world’s most notorious (and arguably its most beloved) atheist. Sartre was a true public intellectual. When he died in 1980 at the age of seventy-four, thousands thronged the already congested streets of Paris’s fourteenth arrondissement to march in solidarity with his casket during the two-hour funeral cortege from the hospital where he had expired. Simone de Beauvoir, whom Sartre affectionately called “The Beaver,” was a leading thinker in her own right, still regarded by many as the grand dame of modern feminism.

In his autobiography
The Words
(1964), Sartre writes about his alleged falling out with God while still a very young child:

If we are to believe Sartre’s autobiographical reflections, then he held a precocious and unflinching atheistic worldview. Indeed, he first rejected God around the same time his classmates were just learning their basic arithmetic.
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And what Sartre came to dislike most about God was what he saw as the crippling notion that God created man for His own selfish ends. Sartre later railed against the infectious complacence of the middle class in its accepting as fact the erroneous premise that God creates the individual person with a specific purpose in mind, thus delimiting one to a particular function—or, in Sartre’s view, a burden—in life.

It was during a 1945 lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris that Sartre first offered the following useful metaphor of this lay concept of God the Creator—one he repeated often:

This is nonsense, said Sartre. In reality, we simply come to exist as individuals, just as beads of condensation form on a glass of water or spores of mold appear on old bread. And if there is no God, as Sartre believed, then metaphysical meaning—applied to the individual’s raison d’être, as well as to life itself—is only a mirage. But Sartre cautions us not to fall into the Christian trap of seeing this startling truth of God’s nonexistence as being reason to experience a crumbling sense of despair. Rather, says Sartre, we should rejoice in this divine absence, because now we are free to define ourselves as we please. That is to say, because God hasn’t fettered any of us with a particular function in mind, selfishly obligating us to preordained tasks in this fleeting existence of ours, we’ve no legitimate grounds to stew over our incorrigible and immovable fates. Instead, our purpose is entirely our own affair:
we
decide who we are, not God. Indeed, this latter point was enough to persuade Sartre that his humanistic principles would apply even if God did exist.

Sartre believed that if people truly appreciated this logic, and were true to their “authentic selves” rather than to what others thought they ought to be, then they would ultimately choose good over evil. This rather optimistic view of atheism was the theme of Sartre’s famous essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946), but even in his earlier, very dense, philosophical treatise
Being and Nothingness
(1943), we can begin to hear the unarticulated rumblings of Sartre’s simple and powerful mantra:
l’existence précède l’essence
(“existence precedes essence”). This rather tidy proposition neatly turned the church on its head, capturing Sartre’s explosive logic that individual human nature is a product of the human mind, not of God’s. God doesn’t endow each man with an “essence”—or prewritten, underlying purpose—said Sartre. Purpose is a human construct.

As an admirer, it pains me to say this, but Sartre’s version of affairs wasn’t entirely accurate either. He downplayed the role of biology in the evolution and development of human behavior and decision making. One person may indeed be freer than another to be “good” instead of “evil,” given their inherited individual differences (such as in temperament and general intelligence) in combination with their prior experiences. In reality, we’re only as free as our genes are pliable in the slosh of our developmental milieus.
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Still, as a secular humanist, in his day, Sartre almost succeeded in single-handedly shooing the faithful out of their pews in the French cathedrals. Unfortunately for him, this notion of God the Creator is nearly as rampant in the world today as it was when the first prophet sat down to put words in God’s mouth. For example, although scientists and skeptics might scoff and rankle at the unprecedented commercial success of pastor Rick Warren’s “spiritual manual,”
The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?
(2002), the author’s central message—that God created you, and you alone, to serve a special function for His intended desires—resonates deeply with hordes of readers from all walks of life. Warren tells his (mostly Christian) audience,

In fact, it is only Warren’s evolved theory of mind that enables him to preach to us about the contents of God’s mind. And in reality, you exist largely because a particular spermatozoon—one of approximately forty million others contained in just one of your father’s ejaculations—shouldered its way past its sibling sperm and, in the wake of a photo finish win with thousands of other competing cells, burrowed headfirst into your mother’s fertile ovum. Consider that even the slightest, virtually imperceptible tic on this particular occasion of your parents’ act of coitus—say, an immeasurable lag in the duration of that final pelvic thrust, or a distracting thought interfering with your father’s arousal—would have reduced the probability of your having been conceived to next to nil by perturbing the seminal alchemy. You may well owe your exquisitely singular existence to the fact that one of your father’s testicles happened to descend some midsummer’s evening by a hairsbreadth, or that your mother had a sudden cramp in her calf and changed her position in the few milliseconds leading up to your conception.

But why do we attribute more to our particular being than such sundry reproductive facts? Warren’s theistic answer is almost certainly a fairy tale but, again, it strikes a strangely common chord with most people. And it’s a chord that we can hear only with our evolved theory of mind: What did God have in mind when creating us?

Whereas Sartre refuted such traditional “arguments” on the basis of his existential philosophy, the zeitgeist of today’s atheists is science. And, usually, this means that they turn to the mechanistic principles of evolution when countering the religious majority, principles that can silence the strong tendency to invoke God—or rather God’s mind—in explaining origins.

In his best seller
The God Delusion
(2006), evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins attacks everyday creationist ideas, such as those of Rick Warren, with great verve and clarity. Dawkins and other scientific atheists aren’t claiming that science presents us with an alternative way of deciphering the mysterious purpose of life; rather, they argue that, in fully comprehending Darwin’s basic idea of natural selection, we can begin to understand why there’s really no riddle at all. In an interview with
Salon
magazine conducted shortly after the release of his book, Dawkins was asked, “What is our purpose in life?” He responded,

Dawkins clearly believes that there isn’t an answer to the purpose-of-life question, because the question implies, unnecessarily, an intelligent Creator that had a
purpose in mind.
Natural selection, as Dawkins tells us, is indeed “blind.” But we can also begin to see here how theory of mind becomes directly relevant to our species’ ability to reason about its own origins. Without it, this type of purpose-of-life question couldn’t even be entertained, not to mention obsessed over.

We would be justified in disagreeing with Dawkins on one crucial point, however, which is that this ubiquitous and timeless nonquestion does deserve an answer, or at least a closer look. The theory of natural selection should have vanquished God (or at least a God concerned with human affairs), just as Dawkins so elegantly shows us in his works time and again—except it hasn’t, even among those who claim to understand it deeply.
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In philosophical terms, asking about the purpose of life may indeed be analogous to asking why unicorns are hollow. But in psychological terms, that’s an anemic comparison. People aren’t normally very preoccupied with uncovering the secret attributes of unicorns; we accept that unicorns don’t exist and, as a consequence, whether they’re hollow or solid doesn’t exactly weigh on our thoughts. The same doesn’t necessarily hold true for God, however. Many people don’t believe in God, yet they still ask themselves about the purpose of life and can’t easily shake their curiosity about this seemingly grand and obscure mystery. Even though we know our biological facts and have managed to emotionally disencumber ourselves from the strappings of the Cross, or flung off our yarmulkes, turned our hijabs into throws, and all the rest, the question of why we’re here still occasionally rises up in our thoughts like a case of hives—and it’s an itchy rash that science just can’t seem to scratch. So the real mystery lies not in why we are here on this earth, each as distinct individuals; instead, the real mystery is why this purpose-of-life question is so seductive and recalcitrant in the face of logical science.