20/03/2006

Duncan McMillan considers whether religion is hard-wired.

C. P. Snow's famous "Two Cultures" speech suggested there was a critical breakdown in communication between science and art. Nearly half a century later, the debate is less about science versus art and more about science versus belief. There is a crisis of rationality, a fear that the secular project of science is crumbling under the weight of religious fundamentalism and philosophical relativism.

All the big cheeses of popular science have entered the debate: Richard Dawkins' Channel 4 series, Robert Winston's Story of God and Kathy Sykes' look at alternative medicine. Fellow of both the Royal Society and Imperial College, Lewis Wolpert has now also weighed in on the issue of belief with this new book.

Wolpert is an arch-empiricist; for him, science is the best, possibly the only, explanation. But unlike Dawkins, he does not see religion as the enemy at the gates, battering down the edifice of reason. Wolpert argues that belief is the logical endpoint of the evolutionary developments that made us expert tool-makers and tool-users. He admits that his thesis isn't particularly well-supported and is effectively asking the reader to just believe in the evolutionary origin of belief. It seems a little perverse however to trumpet the virtues of empiricism with an argument that relies heavily on belief.

His first premise is that the primary function of a brain is to control bodily movement. (A significant number of philosophers, theologians and social scientists would part company with Wolpert here.) From this, the human brain has evolved around tool use and manufacture (rather than, say, social structures and language), and through that we have developed causal beliefs. Wolpert might have called his book The Belief Instinct because we are primed to develop the concept of cause as an integral part of understanding our actions. Higher thought follows from the constructions of 'strong' causal explanations of the world – "explanation is to cognition what orgasm is to reproduction". Apes have only the slightest ability to understand causality and are separated from us by the development of technology.

Malfunctions of the mental 'belief engine' give rise to delusional beliefs, which underpin most psychiatric disorders, from schizophrenia to depression. The fact that hypnosis can also engender such delusional beliefs is a feature of Wolpert's criticism of psychoanalysis, his personal bête noire. For him, the psychoanalytic treatment of mental illness is equivalent to witchcraft, relying on faulty causal beliefs that nevertheless have their origins in a correctly-functioning belief engine. And here is the kicker in Wolpert's argument, that there is adaptive value in a belief engine which gives rise to organised religion – 'delusion' on the grandest scale. Conversely, scientific beliefs are utterly unnatural; he points out how common-sense views of the world are invariably scientifically false. It is this unnatural quality of science that leaves so many non-scientists cold.

I was with Wolpert's argument almost all of the way – the brain and its outputs (including religion) can be explained in functionalist terms. But at one point he asks: "If religion is hard-wired, why do so many people get along fine without it?" It is a revealing question, because his bottom-up approach neglects the possibility that some higher thought could be an emergent feature of evolved brain structures, rather than a direct result of them. Maybe people get along fine without religion because it isn't hard-wired and depends on the fuzzier process of consciousness – something Wolpert deliberately avoids discussing. Despite this, Six Impossible Things to do before Breakfast is a good read – a wide-ranging and provoking analysis of the origins of belief that reveals as much about Wolpert the individual as it does about Homo sapiens the species.