Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (36 page)

Then why do the study? Had the results shown unequivocally that prayer asking for divine intercession into the fortunes of surgical patients actually increased their chances for recovery, there would be no shortage of religious leaders quoting the data. Suddenly science would become the friend of religion, which would tout its virtues in finally answering a great spiritual question. But when the data offer no such support, the religious community lets fly with everything from methodological critiques to denying the possibility that science might ever address questions about the power of prayer. Once again, the game has been rigged so that only positive evidence is relevant.

Churches may be a major component of culture, but they also depend upon cultural things to sustain themselves. The American South is a case in point. Churches compete for attention every bit as much as car dealerships and long-distance telephone companies. Like these businesses, churches resort to billboard advertising that ranges from professional to extremely amateurish. Sometimes they border on mean-spirited. A sign posted outside the Cleveland Avenue Church of Christ in Long Beach, Mississippi, placed there by the Reverend Dan Huggins, read, “There is one God and His name is not Allah.”
¹³
The sign was displayed on September 11, 2002. According to Rev. Huggins, this was not a barb aimed at his Muslim neighbors on the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. “I do these signs to provoke thought. This was never meant to be antagonistic.” Nevertheless, the sign was changed within four days, “but not because of the negative publicity it generated,” claimed the minister.

Focusing on the sign’s theology rather than its politics, Sabree Rashid, a spokesman for the Biloxi Islamic Center noted, “If you look up ‘Allah’ in the dictionary you’ll see that ‘Al’ translates as ‘The’ and ‘Ilah’ means ‘God.’ A clear translation means ‘The God.’ The prophet Mohammed comes from the same line as Abraham. Our scripture tells us our God is one and the same. Christians who speak an Arabic language call God ‘Allah.’ The French call him ‘Dieu.’ Is [Reverend Huggins] going to say his is a different God because the language is different? To say they are not the same God is crass ignorance.”

If the name of God divides people, you can imagine the results of putting a face to the deity. Andrew Sullivan’s book
The Conservative Soul
stresses the fact that we cannot know the face or the mind of God. Yet, for many believers, this would be a deal-breaker. A God who is not personalized and understandable in human terms is no God at all.

Humans evolved to understand and deal successfully with other humans. It remains the sine qua non of social life. Not surprisingly, our gods conform to what we see in and expect from other humans. Thus, gods the world over get “angry,” are “pleased,” grant favors, demand something in return, and so on. They are essentially powerful humans in supernatural suits. It is what we can understand and—more cynically—what we are likely to invent.

The belief that “God created man in His own image” is exactly backward. Voltaire put it even more bluntly when he wrote, “If God made us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.” There is more to this than clever wordplay. Along with well-documented sex differences in the perception of God, there is no clearer evidence of just how many versions of God seem to be out there than Stephen Prothero’s book
American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon
.
¹⁴
Turning to popular culture, Prothero examined the many faces Jesus wears to his believers. It turns out that rather than embracing a common deity, followers of Christ seem to invent or define their God in terms that reflect their values, priorities, and cultural preferences.

Putting the case mildly, Jesus is many things to many people. He is variously conceived not only as the Son of God, but also as a Hindu avatar, a Muslim prophet, a Jewish rabbi, a warrior, a pacifist, and a black Moses. In the words of journalist Tricia Brick, Jesus is variously viewed as “an enlightened sage, in the fashion of Thomas Jefferson, a macho wielder of Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick, . . . a brother, a confidant, a soldier, a CEO, a yogi and a feminist.” And let’s not forget Jesus Christ, Superstar. In short, he is all things to all people. He is, in the language of psychoanalysis, a projective test. What do you need him to be? Whatever your answer, that’s what he will be to you.

As Brick notes, Americans have a long and colorful history of making Jesus over in their own image. This flexibility would seem to tell us more about the mind of the believer than the properties of the deity. The “many faces” approach puts believers in the odd position of sharing a God in name only. American Christians may call Jesus by the same name but make few of the same assumptions about who he is, what he wants, how he operates, and, not trivially, how he looks. This latter point is particularly telling. Prothero’s book is replete with illustrations that reveal just how differently Jesus is perceived. In some, Jesus is white; in others, he is black. In still others, he is Asian. His demeanor ranges from beatific to corporate. In Stephen Sawyer’s painting
Undefeated
(
www.ART4GOD.com
), Jesus is a muscular, long-haired prize fighter.

As we have repeatedly seen, the human mind brings its own agenda, even to seemingly neutral situations. The perception of Jesus reflects much about the mind of our species, but it also reflects individual cultural differences as well. Jesus is, again, a deified projective test, waiting for us to complete the painting with a canvas that best meets our needs and expectations. As Prothero’s book points out, this flexibility in how we perceive Jesus is particularly telling since, compared to many deities, Jesus Christ comes with a fairly standardized image. But, like the childhood game of telephone—in which a message is relayed around a table until it bears little resemblance to the way it started—Jesus, too, is shaped and softened to fit individual and cultural needs. If there is such plasticity surrounding a physical entity like Jesus, one can only imagine how many variations there are in the perception of a far more abstract figure like the father of Jesus.

When a pastor puts a sign in front of his church saying, “There is only one God and Allah is not His name,” he is revealing more than just his opinion. A “my God is better than your God” attitude is probably responsible for more human suffering and death than any other single cause in history with the exception of microscopic pathogens. And like the pathogenic foes that have tormented our species, we have natural selection to blame for the large- and small-scale religious wars we have waged upon ourselves.

The teaching of specific rights and wrongs is hardly the stuff of neutrality. I might believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that an invisible garden gnome controls my destiny and, without fear of him and prayer directed to him, events in my life may turn really sour. Were I to hold such a view, it might be possible to lead a satisfying life and not bring harm or distress to others. The problem arises when I start wearing Gnome Power t-shirts and riding through the countryside killing those who don’t share my beliefs. If my Gnome cult were to grow in strength, Gnomers might be able to field an army and afford weapons of mass destruction. I would probably never be as passionate or convinced of my righteousness as when I slaughtered my neighbors who didn’t share my Gnomic beliefs. The more of us there were, the less we would question our actions. Certainty is a powerful force. Some would even say “attractive.” Citizens often value such certainty in their leaders. From that point of view, one who questions or reevaluates his or her beliefs may be seen as “soft” or indecisive. Perhaps lacking “the courage of his convictions.”

There are two ways that religious indoctrination hurts us all. The first is by its divisive effect. You need look no further than the sign in front of that Mississippi church. In extreme cases, when a “convert or die” mentality becomes the order of the day, religion may also provide the means to wage horribly successful holy wars. It is this second point that has been brought to public consciousness by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. That religious belief might not have such a salubrious effect on our species has rarely been a topic for polite discourse. Eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume probably endeared himself to few when he wrote, “The greatest crimes are compatible with a superstitious piety and devotion. . . . Those who undertake the most criminal and dangerous enterprises are commonly the most superstitious.”
¹⁵
In like manner, Dawkins has argued that whatever benefits religion may once have conferred upon our species, it is time to recognize the harm that also results.

The tragic events of 9/11 have been written about in precisely the xenophobic terms that contributed to those events in the first place. Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, noted publicly that the people who flew planes into buildings weren’t Protestants. His message can be summarized in terms even a caveman might grasp:
Protestants good. Muslims bad
. Graham failed to note another possible conclusion: the people who flew planes into buildings weren’t atheists.

In a September 14, 2001, editorial in the (UK)
Guardian
, Dawkins attempted to “call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite—or too devout—to notice: religion.” Dawkins was specifically concerned with “the devaluing effect that religion has on human life” by teaching “the dangerous nonsense” that death is not the end. By removing death as an endpoint, Dawkins argues that the possibility of rational discourse between, say, hijacker and victim becomes useless. If we are in a standoff with loaded guns aimed at each other, but only I believe that death is final, there is no longer a level playing field for reconciling our differences. Without equal acceptance of the finality of death, armed conflicts or even threats of war lose their meaning.

Every species of animal life on the planet acts as if it had a “survival instinct.” Mice may not hold a deeper understanding of their own life cycle, but even in the absence of such knowledge they behave in precisely the ways they need to in order to maximize their reproductive success. Humans, on the other hand, are capable of abstract understanding of conception, birth, and death. But what has it gained us? We are the only species capable of reading and writing biology books, but we are also the only species who engages in belief systems that can subvert the instinct to survive and reproduce.

Many people are intimidated by science; they revere it but they also mistrust it. Mainly, they just don’t get it. If you tell them that
you’re
a scientist, they look kind of oddly at you. You’re no longer one of them. It’s like telling someone you’re a psychologist. I’ve done that enough times to have a practiced set of skills to deal with the social fallout.

Scientists are often perceived as being odd people. They are called by endearing terms like “pencilneck,” “egghead,” or “geek.” They are seen as social misfits, obsessed with arcane matters and lacking the social skills that might land them a date with the prom queen or one of the cheerleaders. They seem to understand things that most normal people cannot; that alone makes them objects of fear and mistrust. We need scientists to invent things or keep us safe, but we’d rather not be around them.

In
Border Phantom
, a 1936 Republic western, one character says to another, “Those scientific eggs are a screwy lot.” His pal replies, “Screwy is right!” Nashville-based songwriter John D. Loudermilk wrote and recorded a satirical song in 1962 called “He’s Just a Scientist, That’s All.”
¹⁶
The song decries our fascination with athletes and rock stars, while disregarding the scientists who labor in anonymity to increase understanding and make our lives better.

Despite Loudermilk’s enlightened attitude, the simple truth is that average people are fearful of others who are
too smart
. Maybe they have a begrudging respect for them and their accomplishments, but there is also an element of concern. These people may
know
things we don’t, and who’s to say they won’t use those things against us? They can ruin our world with weird things like gene splicing and stem cells and cloning and nanotechnology. God knows (literally) what they’re doing because it’s a cinch that we don’t. Even if they tried to tell us, we probably wouldn’t understand them. Somehow, we’ve got to keep them on a short leash before they turn the whole world into one big immoral, 1950s science fiction mess.

This is why we want our leaders (who are no smarter than we are) to have strong moral values. At least government will keep these crazy scientists from going too far. Former US senator William Proxmire used to be a regular guest on late-night TV shows, where he would announce his “Golden Fleece” Awards, which often targeted publicly funded research about topics the average person neither cared about nor understood. Proxmire took glee in reporting the exotic-sounding titles of NSF or NIH grants in his best populist, know-nothing fashion, saying in essence, “Can you believe the way they waste our tax dollars? Who cares about this stuff other than some silly eggheads?”

You don’t have to look far to find where some of that misunderstanding and distrust come from. Hollywood, indeed American entertainment in general, has done a wonderful job of stereotyping and misrepresenting both science and scientists. It isn’t just a recent problem. In the 1920s, the great silent film
The Lost World
portrays Professor Challenger as a feisty, cantankerous adventurer who is constantly at war with
real
scientists, portrayed as mild-mannered fops, wearing thick glasses and tsk-tsking him for his transgressions. Just a decade later, the film version of Baron Henry Frankenstein became the prototype of the scientist gone wild—ostracized from his profession for outrageous ideas and for going where God-fearing man was not meant to go. He—indeed most scientists of his ilk—is usually portrayed as highly intelligent and obsessive. His social skills suffer. His fiancée becomes worried, then disenchanted. He is not
himself
anymore. He has lost all perspective. He is taking his work
too far
.