In June of 2019, the mighty Caitlin Flanagan, writing for The Atlantic, published a moving appeal for kindness towards the children at the US/Mexico border camps. In Ms. Flanagan’s elegant bravura, she pleaded for mercy for children separated from their parents, children who, “comb out one another’s lice and go to sleep hungry on cold floors under bright lights; the ones who have no one—no one at all, save one another—to comfort them.”
Ms. Flanagan’s article was a request for human decency to rise above the body politic under which it is often smothered. I mention the piece here because of the last lines. “We know exactly where Christ is, because he told us. He’s with the sick and the jailed and the hungry. He’s in those camps with those suffering children. And we need to be there, too.”
If I may… to be certain that god is at the border camps, is to be nearly as certain that god was not at the places so desperately poor and violent it drove families to leave everything behind and flee across an unrelenting, disinterested landscape, carrying what they could of their clothing and bits of food, often borrowing money to pay coyotes to take them, risking their lives and those of their children for a shot at a safer life, only to be victimized again by a criminal pestilence as they moved northward.
Migrants increasingly face threats from criminal gangs who extort them for permission to pass through territory they control, or in some cases, kidnap them and force them to work for the cartels, killing them if they refuse. This metastasizing danger drives up the prices the coyotes charge for safe journeys because, one presumes, god is also absent from the smuggling routes. It’s almost as though the lord hasn’t bothered to venture south of Laredo.
To proclaim god’s presence in one place while failing to see his truancy in another is a subconsciously convenient way to manage one’s perception of a creator’s intentions, or inattention. I don’t doubt Ms. Flanagan’s sincerity. It is her kind heart that drove her to write the piece. But it was her salience bias that allowed her to believe the truth of what she wrote while overlooking the truth on the other side of the coin.
Cognitive Biases
Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts we unwittingly take to help us think about, understand and act upon circumstances with which we are presented. The concept of cognitive biases was born of the work of Nobel-Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his partner, Amos Tversky in the 1970’s. Think of these biases as heuristics that drive our thinking beneath the surface. Tali Sharot, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University College, London and author of The Optimism Bias, once told me that if one is aware of it, it isn’t a bias.
A bias toward what is salient is a tendency to favor that which is emotionally striking. A deployed soldier coming home to surprise his boy at baseball practice, a child rescued from a mine, the crucifixion of a prophet, and the flight of angels, touch the emotional centers of our brains—the amygdala, thalamus and hypothalamus.
I went to Catholic school for 12 years. The nuns told us stories of shepherd children in bucolic, sunlit valleys, children who begged for mercy for the poor and infirmed of their local village—the Fatimizing of the Catholic narrative, suitably deficient in pogroms and pedophilia.
These childhood stories form associative memories that dictate how we perceive subsequent events, shaping our experiences and future recollections.
Does any of this mean Ms. Flanagan was being disingenuous? Of course not. Quite the opposite is true. I imagine she was heartbroken at the plight of those kids and moved by both her mother’s intuition and Catholic faith to write that article. But I think the possibility of the salience bias being a factor in her perspective makes for a good pivot to my hypothesis.
Which is that...
Religion and supernatural divinities benefit from what one could term the prevalence bias, defined as a belief in a thing by virtue of its universality. There is an underlying acceptance of the truth of religion by its frequency in structure, social norms, education, politics, wars, governments and the inculcation of its tenets by the prefects of our childhood, long before the age of reason. Since believers cannot, by the scientific method, prove the existence of god or the certainty of religion, ubiquity becomes a proxy for truth.
Professor Kahneman says that associative memories, unconsciously aroused, require only a weak stimulus to bring someone over the threshold to belief. Once children have been introduced to religion, by way of custom, ritual, legend, culture and, in some cases, fear, it’s easy to move along a rapidly descending path from childhood story to belief to truth. Growing up, there is no discussion of what could be, only what is. Inerrancy is unquestioned not because belief is demanded but simply because parents don’t think to question it.
The Concept of Enough
In discussing how enough information is useful, Sean Carroll, the physicist and cosmologist from Cal-Tech, has said that although we don’t know the position of all the molecules and particles in a given space, as Laplace’s demon would, we don’t need to. We know enough about those molecules to make remarkable predictions about such things as weather.
Enough knowledge is really what helps us navigate the real world. We don’t live in the quantum world, or even understand it, but we know enough about how most forces of nature work to live in this one.
We don’t need the skies to flame over the opening ceremony of the Olympics to believe in god. Although that would certainly prove that some deity exists. Were that deity to be the god of Abraham or Muhammad or Brahma, is for a flight of fancy beyond the scope of this article.
The tens of thousands of churches, temples, shrines, sacred grounds, symbolism, and scripture, are not proof of truth but proof of faith in their respective truths. Evidence of faith in aggregate is enough for us to think god must exist based on the “well, look around you” defense.
We take comfort in doubtless belief. Questioning our convictions could lead us to face potential realities we dare not consider—no life after death, no rekindling of vanquished love, no escaping eternal damnation or that our cult is wrong and the other one has been right all along. Say it ain’t so.
Another cognitive bias that helps religion persist is the illusion of control, in which we tend to overestimate our influence over a given outcome. Favorable results are seen as having been influenced by prayer, while unanswered prayers require us to move the goalposts. Our petitions didn’t spare our loved one from disease, so now we must pray for her soul. Christopher Hitchens said, “The man who prays is one who thinks god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.”
In a 2007 paper published in Nature, professor Tali Sharot wrote, “Our behavioural results suggest that, whereas the past is constrained, the future is open to interpretation allowing subjects to distance themselves from possible negative events and move closer toward positive ones. Across individuals, this tendency was associated with trait optimism.”1
If this statement doesn’t nail religious optimism in the face of historical atrocities, I don’t know what else could.
Time and volume have an accretive effect on what we believe. This is the familiarity principle at play. Most of us—Caitlin Flanagan being an exception by the way, who found her Catholicism later in life—are introduced to religion by the people we love and trust the most. We tend to like things with which we are more familiar, and it therefore becomes difficult to disbelieve something, or someone, we like. The familial bond associated with our faith creates a cognitive dissonance, in which we’ve so thoroughly bought into our religion that we can effectively tune out any contrarian voice as noise.
For the non-orthodox or secular-curious, there is an implicit validation of god and sacred doctrine by virtue of the enormity of religious agency. Even if one were to question her faith, after say, hearing a Sam Harris debate, the looming architecture of religion would persist to create doubt, despite recognizing the logical probabilities that god does not exist, in fact cannot, not in the way he is described in the major religions.
In her 1968 novel, “The Left Hand of Darkness,” Ursula LeGuin wrote, “If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. (No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing) But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion…."
I would edit this to say there would be no need for religion, in either case. If god appeared in your living room, would you reach for your rosary beads or your spice box, or would your legs shake uncontrollably as you fell on your face before the light, wondering if you were about to be lifted up or set ablaze? Religion would, in that instant, be recognized for what it is, an assortment of powerful entities established to validate the truth of some scripture, to hold sway over its disciples, their thoughts, and their money. When god appears, religion atomizes. I ask... why wait?
As a thought experiment, take a man who has begun to doubt his faith after reading yet another revelation of sex abuse by priests. Now, teleport that man to a high mass at St Peter’s in Vatican City, replete with pomp and mysticism in a sea of cardinal red, backed by a glorious choir singing before a star-scape of candlelight, the silent veneration of saints in statuary and mosaic, and see if that man doesn’t feel a renewed reverence for the faith of his father.
There is not one iota of proof in such a theatrical service—or any other rituals performed across the spectrum of religion—of the existence of god or that the adherence to Catholic canon is the only path to redemption yet, undoubtedly, that man would be moved to prayer and likely, moved to donate to the papal crown. This is the great sin of religion and of the Catholic church in particular—the elevation of men to positions of cabalistic royalty, living in the finest cloth, sipping single-malt scotch, padding through the world’s great architecture, privy as no one else to the inviolate light of god’s grace, to be fawned over and bowed before, their slippers kissed as though they were the lavender embodiment of god himself, and threatening eternal hellfire for not buying into it.
The prevalence bias may indeed be unique to faith in deities, but it’s enough. Religion is and has been such a large part of our environment for so many centuries that it surely must shape us in some epigenetic way. It could well be that religion is so prominent in human existence that it has evolved, in a Cartesian if not Darwinian sense, to be innate in our species.
It is for this reason that I must remind myself of how I used to feel about atheists before I let go of my fear of being wrong about my lack of belief in god. I remember a churning in my stomach when I felt mocked, not just for what I believed, but for who I was. What I’m offering here is an academic argument. Despite my sarcasm, I don’t wish to make people feel stupid, but only to offer a different viewpoint.
The fact that I harbor a deep hatred for the Catholic church should not deter me from remembering that sincere people, acting through their church, truly believe they are doing a benevolent god’s work in helping those suffering in the world. They and those who share their stories should be commended for their efforts. We could all use a little more Caitlin Flanagan.
On an individual level, I need to be patient and respectful, to be understanding of people who may be suffering after a devastating loss of dignity or a loved one, and recognize that they may be holding onto whatever they feel is necessary to keep them tethered to this earth, so that they can get on with the living.
Neural mechanisms mediating optimism bias. Tali Sharot, Alison M. Riccardi, Candace M. Raio & Elizabeth A. Phelps https://media.gradebuddy.com/documents/2241357/402269f9-f4b4-465f-8537-f6b7be9e2921.pdf