Why Everybody Believes in Fairy Tales. - Review - book review

How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science. By Michael Shermer. Freeman, New York, 1999. ISBN 0-7167-3561-X. 302 pp. Hardcover, $24.95.

Writing books on science and religion seems to have been a particularly common enterprise in the late twentieth century. Recent examples range the whole gamut from claims that science confirms every detail of the Bible (G.L. Schroeder's The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom); to theistic science (P. Davies's The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World); to assertions of no conflict between science and religion (S.J. Gould's Rocks of Ages); to genuine skeptics who flirt with fuzzy concepts of spirituality (C. Raymo's Skeptics and True Believers: The Exhilarating Connection Between Science and Religion). Even the Pope has written on the topic with considerable scholarship (John-Paul II. Fides et

Ratio. Vatican Press, available at www.catholicpages.com/documents/fides et_ratio. asp, Vatican City).

If you don't have the time to keep up with all of this and you can read only one book on science and religion, Shermer's is by far the most insightful, original, and entertaining reading of them all, though the book has its limitations. While weaved together as a monothematic effort, it is clear that some of the chapters are essays from the pages of Skeptic magazine written at different times and for slightly different purposes. Yet Shermer patches it together well enough that you'd hardly notice the sutures, and the result is well worth your time.

How We Believe is divided into two parts, one on God and belief, and another on religion and science. The two appendices are also valuable additions to the main volume, detailing the methods and results of a survey by Shermer and social scientist Frank Sulloway on why people (including skeptics) believe or don't believe in God. This effort is a good example of how science can ask hard questions about religion without even considering the problem of the existence of God.

One of the most interesting results of the survey emerges from a comparison of why people believe (or disbelieve) in God and of why they think other people believe (or disbelieve). Let's consider skeptics first. According to this category, the most important reason they believe in God is because of the evidence of design in nature (29 percent). However, this same reason ranks only fifth (9 percent) when the same individuals are asked why other people believe in God; the primary reason given in that case is that people find belief to be comforting. Interestingly, the same is true for a random (i.e., non-skeptic) sample of the population: Most people like to think they believe in God for what we might call "intellectual" reasons, yet they also maintain that other people have the same belief primarily for emotional reasons.

One of Shermer's first observations is that, contrary to proclamations by both Nietzsche and Time magazine, God is not only not dead, but alive and staging a smash comeback tour at the turn of the millennium. The author then focuses on why people believe in supernatural beings, rather than on the usual question of the very existence of such beings. Make no mistake about it, Shermer is as skeptical as they come, and while he officially claims to be an agnostic in the original sense of the word as proposed by Thomas Huxley (i.e., one who doesn't have knowledge of God), he is a nontheist who, by default, doesn't believe any nonsense. In fact, his chapter 6 is about alleged proofs of the existence of God, but these are analyzed for what they tell us about the believer, and not as an investigation into the character of the Almighty.

According to Shermer, one main reason people are so prone to believe all sorts of fantasies is because we are pattern-seeking animals. Throughout the history of primates (and therefore of humans), the ability to recognize nonrandom patterns in nature has meant the difference between finding and not finding food, or between escaping or dying from the jaws of a predator. However, natural selection has not endowed us with a very good way of investigating the causal basis of the patterns we observe. All that is needed for selection to operate is that recognizing the pattern is sufficient to get you out of trouble most of the time. In fact, even making mistakes and identifying patterns that are actually random will not be selected against unless such mistakes prove to be fatal too often. As Shermer puts it, humans have a certain tendency to commit one of two errors: believing a falsehood or rejecting a truth. Given that we are pattern-seeking animals, we tend more often to accept nonexistent patterns as indicatio ns of underlying truths. We are more gullible than skeptical by nature.

In the second part of the book, dealing with the relationship between science and religion, Shermer recapitulates his model of the three possible modes such relationship can take. One can adopt a "same worlds" position, in which science and religion are both exploring the same reality and will converge on the answers. Many theistic scientists certainly believe so, and this view has provided the basis for much Christian apologetics. This position, however, does lead one into rather uncomfortable fits of mental gymnastics, and serious scientists do not usually embrace it. The second possibility is what Shermer terms the "different worlds" model, in which science and religion are like apples and oranges: they deal with very different realms and therefore cannot be in conflict, even in principle. Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould most prominently espouses this point of view. The last possibility is the "conflicting worlds" hypothesis, in which either science or religion is the valid approach to realit y; whenever they disagree, one of the two has to be wrong. Creationists such as Duane Gish and evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins fall into this category.