God as a form of pressure control
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It's been almost a year since I read Dan Dennett's Breaking The Spell, in which he offers up a variety of possible explanations for how religion could have naturally arisen and evolved over time, and I found many of his ideas interesting to think about. I think I might have arrived at another hypothesis, though, that I don't remember Dennett mentioning in his book. I'll be sure to check this week, if I can remember, but if anyone knows immediately if he said something similar to this, please say so. I don't want to beat a dead horse here.
I'll preface the idea by explaining the context that got me thinking. The idea occurred to me earlier tonight as I was listening to Elizabeth Gilbert---author of Eat, Pray, Love---talking about the pressure of "genius". She described how the concept of "genius" has changed over time. Only since the Renaissance have we referred to people as being "geniuses". Before that time, we would have said they had been visited by a genius, which was a sort of transcendent power, like a muse. In ancient Greece, she said, these powers would have been called "daemons".
She explained that the modern notion that the best artists are tragic souls, or people who have suffered in their lives, or that must experience some kind of trial to inspire great art is a product of internalizing the concept of "genius". It used to be the case that genius was outside of us, which was a great way of thinking, because it prevented narcissism, and more importantly, whenever an artist produced a great work, he didn't have to worry that his life's best work might already be behind him. After all, HE WAS NOT THE GENIUS.
But as soon as we started making OURSELVES the geniuses, we inherited the pressure to be divine. Creativity was now completely up to us as individuals, and from that point on, when writer's block kicked in, we could no longer say "maybe a muse will visit me tomorrow", but now were more likely to say, "I'm washed up as an artist". And thus we get the stereotypical brilliant author who does his best work at 4am while smashed.
But I didn't convert this whole talk to a possible god hypothesis until she relayed a story that Tom Waits had told her once. He said that there was a time when he was driving around L.A. and a song came to him. He could just hear it in his head, and he loved it, and he wanted to write it down, but he couldn't, because he was driving. And he remembered getting really frustrated, because he knew that he wasn't going to be able to take the song down, and he was going to lose it. But then, he arrived at a psychological mechanism to control that feeling. Instead of getting angry at himself, he looked to the sky and said, "Hey. Can't you see that I'm driving? If you wanna come back later, I'll see what I can do. Otherwise, go bother someone else."
By externalizing creativity, Tom Waits took all the pressure off of himself. He no longer had to be the solution to his problem. He was just a guy. His muse, or his daemon, or his external genius in the sky, was to blame for his success or failure. He was doing his job. He needed the "genius" to do its job as well.
So I wondered: Is it possible that what Tom Waits did in this situation was not as novel as Elizabeth Gilbert thought it was? Is it possible that this is a naturally arising form of pressure control that might be an explanation for some aspect of the god concept?
It's very easy to see how this could be done once you realize that externalizing some fraction of the responsibility for some task would not only be useful to novelists and musicians. If I'm a primitive farmer, for example, I can externalize some of the responsibility (and therefore pressure) for producing a good yield for my family, and if my yield this season leaves something to be desired, I can tell myself that I did MY part, but that whatever outside force was not doing ITS part. If the outside force was flouting its responsibility intentionally, we have to ask why. Oh, maybe we upset it somehow? If the outside force was flouting its responsibility intentionally, then it must have had a good reason. If only we could know what it was. The important thing here, though, is that I, the farmer, am not to blame.
Maybe it's possible to view the function of prayer in a similar light. Let's suppose that I'm a quarterback on some team in the NFL and that I am about to go to the Super Bowl for the first time. Before the game, I offer some sort of prayer that my team and I are able to perform our absolute best. If I'm a more self-centered religious person, I might even directly pray for success. The reason by now should be obvious. I'm about to enter an EXTREMELY high pressure situation in which millions of people are piling their high expectations on me, and they are counting on success. What if I fail? What if my performance is a quarterback costs us the game? Do I really want all that blame for myself? I probably don't. So I will pray and externalize enough of the responsibility so that I am more psychologically prepared for failure. That way, if I fuck it all up and everyone looks at me, I can shrug it off and say that "it" or "he" simply "wasn't with me today". No fault of mine. I showed up for the job like I was supposed to. It was that other agent I was praying to who failed to show up. I'm still cool.
But notice how especially effective this would be when people started to do it cooperatively. It feels so good to be vindicated when others agree that we're not all to blame.
"But of course," says the receiver to the same quarterback. "I was doing my job, too; but for some reason I kept dropping balls tonight. I guess IT just wasn't with us. You're so right."
"But of course," says the farmer's wife to the farmer. "I keep trying to have that son we want, but I guess IT just isn't working with me." (Bearing in mind she's ignorant of biology.)
So I wonder whether the God concept might have started off as an entity or "force" in the universe that we could blame things on in order to forgive ourselves for failing to meet certain pressures; in that way, relieving ourselves of a great deal of stress.
The irony of course, is that by speculating about WHY this force in the universe sometimes fails to work with us, the reasonable thing to do is to assume that we have somehow done it wrong, and so the lack of cooperation is our own fault, and so now we've merely transformed the stress rather than losing it.
But still, in this form, it is a stress we can work with. A stress that is temporary, with causes that can be found and rooted out. All we have to do is stop doing whatever it is that IT doesn't like, or start doing something that IT does like, and we're probably back on track. If the problem were purely and simply US as farmers or NFL quarterbacks, well then that wouldn't leave as much room for expecting the situation to improve, would it?
This behavior also seems linked to our tendency to personify things. I assume most people are familiar with the situation where they are trying to do something delicate with their hands, such as threading a needle, and find themselves talking to the objects they are holding, saying things like, "Come on... get in there...". Or there is the situation where we stub our toes on the couch and instead of cursing at ourselves for not watching where we were walking, we curse at the couch as if it deliberately moved into the path of our foot, just for a laugh. Usually I would explain that kind of behavior by pointing out our history as social creatures, which might still be a factor, but the responsibility-sharing explanation seems interesting to me all of a sudden. (Or maybe responsibility-sharing is a byproduct of that social history?)
So that is the hypothesis: God is a way of sharing responsibility and deferring blame. The benefit is stress relief. (And since stress can effect health, perhaps health benefits and therefore survival benefits. A psychological crutch from the get-go.
Free beer to anyone who was nice enough to read my whole meandering post!
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.
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I have never read anything on the subject but it seems plausable.
It is very possible and I somewhat belive that is how it started, It seems it may be inter related with people trying to understand what they couldn't control or didn't have the knowledge of. It seems like a reasonable idea to me. I think we just don't like taking the blame for our stuff ups so the idea that we might not be at fault may of been very appealing. It is very possible that is how it started but I think that was an early application of religon rather than the start.
I personally think the concept comes from our hunter gatherer stage. I can easily see animals becoming the insperation for gods. they kill an animal so it becomes the food giver (they give thanks to the animal for giving up its life so they could eat, early praying? Or jesus anyone? replace eat with sin and there you go). A mighty prediter comes along and kills a few of them it becomes the symble of strength and it goes on and on. That expands overtime and continues when the domestication of plants and animals comes along it is so built in to them It doesn't drop away completely. Instead it morphes to something closer to what we have today. A more human based religion. Ofcourse thats just an arb thought...a guess. I see no evolutionary benifit here more the begin of an early moral system, is it moral to kill?
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.
Thanks for the offer, but beer tastes yucky!
I really like the idea of identifying all the positives about religion that have caused people to keep it around over time and figuring out how to arrive at the same positives another way. This is a good one to add to that list. Thanks.
"I am that I am." - Proof that the writers of the bible were beyond stoned.
I know I've had that experience ... And who here has been so annoyed with prayer before the Super Bowl or Daytona 500. Man that is so f--- annoying. How many of the fans in the bleachers actually want to hear that crap?
Nice observations, Archaeopteryx. For me it boils down to something even simpler. To a theist, God is a word that encompasses The Unknown. The Unknown is something we naturally fear. In fact, you might call it the most primal fear, from which all other fears are reflections. When a person slaps the word 'god' on an unknown, they feel like they have gained some control over The Unknown; it eases their fears. This is directly analogous to what you're saying about relieving pressure.
"I don't know where this creative urge comes from, so I'll call it 'god', and that word gives me a handle on it that I can now grasp and manage The Unknown Creativity." That's how it works, subconsciously.
God is often linked with genius, creativity, etc. Some New Age types assert that there is a fundamental creative force in the universe, and this is what they call God.
I agree with you that this is a way of relieving oneself from responsibility for things. But I would just simplify it by saying that it's yet another way of relieving the fear of The Unknown. It's not just creativity, it's more a general anxiety about the future. Can I perform? Will my child survive this illness? Will people appreciate my work? When will the suffering end? The future is a major source of unknowns. By shifting all that worry onto another 'person' (god), the person can relieve a major source of fear.
God is The Unknown.
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This idea actually dovetails well with an idea I have been kicking around for a while - consider split brain subjects - people who have their corpus collosum cut.
the left hemisphere is verbal, linear, "rational" and bounded by time and space in the way that it understands the world. I appears to be in charge of all of those functions that we tend to associate with "conscious awareness" - for example, I don't know about you, but I think in words - this is a left brain phenomena. It also tends to be atheist BTW.
The right hemisphere is in charge of non-linear processing. - it has no sense of time and space, it sees patterns and interconnectedness without necessarily understanding cause and effect - it understands how we are deeply interconnected with all things, and it relates with the world as a source of infinite possibility - it is infinite and timeless - kind of sounds like god doesn't it?
Note that both sides are equally intelligent - they both have the same amount of processing power.
In these split brain experiments they have found that the person shows all the signs of having two people in the same head.
Now I'm a counselor, and I have had NUMEROUS situations where a client reported that they were in an untenable situation and they became more and more frustrated and more and more dispairing until they ended up feeling suicidal. At this point, they "felt the presence of god" and they knew everything would be all right. In fact, they have even reported that they could feel god getting annoyed with them when they started questioning the message of comfort.
So what I think happens here is that the conscious part of the brain, the "self" if you will, is mostly living on the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is recessive, but it still feeds info to the self in the form of creativity, inspiration and "Divine presence." When the client gets frustrated, they enter a sort of "brain lock" where the left hemisphere is diminished in it's dominant status. At this point, the right hemisphere is able to assert itself and it is experienced by the person as an external presence - a consciousness outside of the self.
This is the "presence of god."
Now I would like to point out that I have no-where near enough solid evidence to support this theory, but it is an area that I am researching when I find the time. Note how consistent this is with the OP's point - the "genius" is the external consciousness of the right hemisphere that is applying it's non-linear, creative, pattern-seeking resources to the task that the left hemisphere has delineated.
Viola! The creative process is explained! The whole brain kicks in, and you have better than normal output and synthesis of both linear and creative processes. This also explains the universal stories about divine and supernatural entities since we all have a right hemisphere.
*edit* for something closer to clarity */edit*
I agree, but I realize we're in the minority on this one.
Well, yes. I don't think I disagree that it's another way of showing that God is a name given to the unknown things we fear. But I worry that simplifying it that way isn't specific enough.
If we only say that God is fear of the unknown, then we're not necessarily talking about the same category of things. For example, I might be afraid that one of my children is going to catch the black plague. I can't be certain that such a thing WON'T happen, and so that uncertainty is terrifying.
This also falls under the umbrella of fear of the unknown, but it's different from the types of fear I was describing.
You might say that one is fear that results from uncertainty about natural events, while the other is fear that results from uncertainty about personal performance (i.e. our ability to fulfill some responsibility), especially when others are counting on us.
When it comes to uncertainty about natural events, God is an obvious solution since he provides us with some explanation. In other words, he takes all the terror out of the unknown by converting it into the known. Cue the annoying condolances at funerals about how god just decided it was their time to go!
When it comes to uncertainty about personal performance, God is useful in sort of the opposite direction. Without God, we might have to KNOW that we just aren't very good farmers, and so we'll never be very good at providing for our family. But when we invent a God to share responsibility with, we're no longer tied to our shortcomings. In other words, he takes all the discomfort out of something known by converting it into something uncertain. Cue the New Year's resolutions!
In short: Denying your own ignorance can be comforting. Doesn't that sound suspiciously theist to you?
Also, denying what is inconveniently true about reality can be comforting. Doesn't that sound suspiciously theist to you?
And it's all thanks to our favorite loophole: God!
Doesn't that sound sus... okay, you get the idea.
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.
This reminded me of a frustrating speaker I saw once. I can't remember the woman's name, but she was some kind of psychologist and she was talking about how she was lucky enough to experience a stroke. She had been studying the brain her whole life and could only speculate about what a stroke would be like, but then she was lucky enough to actually have one. She explained how it was beautiful, how all the lines the brain draws that destinguish one solid object from another melted away. Everything was connected to everything else and she was at first overwhelmed by how alien everything felt. She was lost and confused. But then she was overcome with a sense of beauty and a very real and tangible feeling that she was connected to everything. She was having Walt Whitman's wet dream.
And then she had the audacity to say that her experience convinced her that she had a creator. And I thought WHAT. THE. FUCK. Seriously? If I'm a person who has been studying the brain all my life, and then something happens to my brain that causes me to see the world in a new and funky way, then no matter how pleasurable that new funkiness is, do you know what I'm going to say? Oh, something cool happened with my brain. That was fucking sweet.
But apparently she just selectively overlooked that part? I mean, it really blew my mind. Even thinking about it now, I'm dumbfounded. Really? Really?!
*sigh*
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.
Identifying God as The Unknown allows you to see the unity in the theists' beliefs, but it doesn't mean you have to lump all beliefs into one uniform bucket.
See, the thing about The Unknown is that it is real. There are real things about the universe that are unknown to us. But those things themselves are real. And they are not all the same. The more you learn about them, the more you can distinguish them as independent entities.
For example, before we understood disease, we thought disease was caused by spirits and demons and whatnot. These are, like god, representations of the unknown. People thought demons were the cause of mental illness too. They thought they could possess you. They thought they could kill livestock and poison wells. They thought they could do all sorts of things. This one word, spirit, was a catch-all bucket for all of these separate phenomena. Some of the phenomena were real, some were imagined. They were all 'unknown'.
But, as we learned more, we discovered that some of these 'unknowns' were different from others. For example, bodily illness is different from mental illness. Doctors could treat some bodily illnesses, so that diminished their 'unknown' quality. They no longer appeared as 'spirits' to most people. But perhaps (and I'm making shit up for the sake of an example) mental illness was still not understood, and so people still believed that they were caused by 'spirits'.
Or, in a slightly different scenario, you could imagine that people realized that physical and mental illnesses were similar, but different enough to be distinguished, and so imagined them as two distinct kinds of spirits, mind spirits and body spirits, for example.
So, you start out with one catch-all bucket of 'the unknown'. You slap one label on it. Then, as you learn more, as 'the unknown' becomes more known, you start to see that instead of being one thing, it's really two. Then you distinguish it with two labels. Still later, as the unknown becomes mostly known, the need to make up imaginary labels disappears, and 'spirits' just become 'cancer' and 'schizophrenia'.
So, you see, the unknown only *appears* to be one formless bucket. But really people have lesser or greater distinctions about the unknown that they start to form vague conceptions about it.
That's why 'god' is 'the moral lawgiver' to some, and 'love' to others. And to still others, god is both, or neither, or something totally different. But all of these different 'unknowns' get pulled together into one somewhat formed, yet still vague, concept of 'god'.
That is why I start to attach qualifiers to The Unknown when I'm talking about a *specific* aspect of The Unknown. For example, The Unknown Creativity, or The Unknown Moral Authority, or The Unknown Death. There are many different things that are unknown, but they are all The Unknown. Identifying this unity does not over-simplify, because I'm not saying all unknowns are the same. I'm saying all unknowns are unknown. They share a common psychological root concept, even if they are truly distinct natural phenomena.
For example, in another post I explained my idea of God the Machine. This is shorthand for the longer phrase God the Unknown Machine. The idea of this concept is that what some people call 'god' is really the phenomenon of humans organizing in groups based on a common belief or purpose which can achieve some 'superhuman' feats, such as winning a war, or comforting the masses, or whatever group activity might be. To the 'god' believer, this appears to be a manifestation of a supernatural mind, which he calls 'God'. But really, it's an unknown. And it's a specific unknown. It is the unknown emergent organization of human activity. It is a 'machine' in the sense that it is built out of our human minds, culture, and artifacts. And so, when I speak of this phenomenon, exalted to 'supernatural' status by a believer, I call it God the Unknown Machine, or more simply and menacingly, God the Machine. God exists, and It is a Machine. Allah really exists, and It flew planes into the Twin Towers. Jesus really exists, and It blew up abortion clinics. The Trinity really exists, and It is spreading AIDS in Africa with anti-condom propaganda. These are all manifestations of God the Machine. If WWIII happens, I'm sure God the Machine will have played a part in bringing it about.
Of course, there are other 'gods'. But the thing that unifies them all, the thing that justifies us applying the label 'god', is the fact that they are unknown and in some way feared by those that exalt them to 'god' status.
God the Unknown Disaster, the sender of hurricanes and tsunamis for punishment (combined with God the Unknown Moral Enforcement).
I disagree with your interpretation. He doesn't turn certainty into uncertainty. That would cause more fear. In this case, what is feared is not the *knowledge* that you're no good, but the lack of knowledge of what that implies. If I'm a no good farmer, who cares? But if I'm a no good farmer, and I need to farm to survive, then how will I take care of my family (unknown)? What if I die (unknown)? Will my lack of ability cause me to be judged inadequate by a moral judge in the afterlife (unknown)?
If I'm rich or have other skills, who cares if I can't farm? I personally can't farm, and it doesn't bother me one bit. It would, however, if that lack made my future uncertain.
So, God in this case is again The Unknown. Depending on the person, he might be different varieties: The Unknown Death, the Unknown Judge the Unknown Future, etc.
Only if by that denial can you deny a bigger unknown.
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Again, this fits the theory though doesn't it? She had a left-brain stroke, which means that her right brain is now stronger - this is the theistic part of the mind. Since her left hemisphere is now injured, it only makes sense that her right hemisphere is exerting more control of her experience of conciousness.
Ah, I see how you're framing this now. I was thinking that generalizing all the possible conceptions of God into one category, "The Unknown", seemed like it might lead to neglecting important details about specific conceptions of God/The Unknown. But what I wasn't taking into account, and what I hear you saying, is that this kind of generalizing is important in understanding how theists assemble their God, because they can link different kinds of unknowns by their common thread (general unknowness) to build them into a God that is more all-encompassing.
I might make an analogy by replacing the word "God" with the word "dog". By my earlier post, I would have been arguing that we can't just say "dog" because it ignores details about specific dogs. But I only arrive at that argument if I fail to think like a theist. If we take the word "dog" and make it an entity that encompasses all possible conceptions of dog-like things, gracefully overlooking the identity problems this would create, we arrive at a more robust, more useful, more powerful conception of Dog, with a capital D.
It just wouldn't occur to me to try and lump the different unknowns into a single Unknown with a capital U, the same way it wouldn't occur to me to lump all dogs into a single Dog with a capital D. Maybe that's why I'm not a theist.
Forgive me if I'm overlooking an important nuance of your idea.
You and your bastard logic! You've ruined my clever rhetorical device!
*sob*
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.