Is religious belief inevitable? Is it useful?

A belief is a mental attitude of acceptance, or a conviction that some proposition, idea, or premise is true or real, regardless of whether it is supported by objective evidence; it acts as a lens for interpreting the world and influencing behavior, perception, and decision-making. 

I do not believe in the existence of an omniscient or omnipotent deity or creator. I believe: 

• The cosmos is indifferent to us. It was not designed, let alone designed for us. 
• There is no ultimate Truth or universal meaning to existence.
• We each have the option to find or create meaning in our lives. 

I find myself inexplicably situated here in a tiny corner of the awesome infinitude of the cosmos. For no reason I can find, I am here. I live and breathe. I see, hear, and taste. I love, fear, anticipate, and remember. This splendid experience of a finite life within the infinite mystery of spacetime demands of me my full attention and engagement. This is not a dress rehearsal. I feel an obligation - to myself - not to waste my unique and precious life. I prefer the awesome though often uncomfortable mystery born of uncertainty over the lazy acceptance of fictional answers invented to avoid facing our ignorance, insignificance, and mortality. I choose the challenge of autonomy rather than the comforting role of believer.

My profoundly personal approach serves me well despite its often disquieting ramifications, but it is not for everyone.

Several years ago, when my youngest sister was diagnosed with late stage and incurable throat cancer, I struggled with anger, sadness, and doubts about the point of living in a universe where bad things happen to good people. I shared my distress with a long time friend whose perspective and counsel I have come to value and trust.  He told me that his belief in God and the support he received from his faith community had been invaluable after the death decades earlier of his teen-age son, and expressed both sorrow and concern that I did not have a faith I could draw upon. 

I was both surprised and puzzled by his deep religious faith. Surprised because he had never mentioned religion, or the importance of faith in his life, and puzzled because I had assumed that his career in science would lead him to skepticism about the existence of a God. 

Over several decades, my readings about belief and conversations with believers have generated a list of seven reasons that people offer when asked why they believe in a Deity. (My friend cited #1 and #6 as the reasons he believed.)

1. They were raised in a religious environment and never seriously questioned the existence of God. 
2. They had experienced a spiritual epiphany at a time of stress, something that felt too extraordinary to be part of the regular order of the universe.
3. Everything they experience in the world has a beginning and a cause, so there must be a beginning and original cause behind our universe.
4. The universe too complicated and well designed (and too perfectly fit for humans) to be an accident. 
5. Religion and belief in a Deity offers a set of rules, adherence to which leads to personal salvation and societal thriving. 
6. Materialism is insufficient to explain things like love, beauty, joy, art, consciousness. Religion provides answers to the big questions that science does not answer.
7. Belief in a God (or multiple Gods) is universal across time and cultures, implying that a Creator instilled in us the ability to believe.

These are attractive but not probative post hoc rationales for belief, not logical or evidence-supported reasons to believe. The fact that mythologies, religions, and the belief in a Deity are so universal suggests that evolution has predisposed both individuals and societies to believe. 

Our brains are prediction machines, using information about the outside world collected by our senses combined with stored information from previous experience to construct a model of reality. The brain then uses that model to predict likelihoods of what will happen next, contingent on what we do. There are at least seven known overlapping and interrelated innate behavioral and neurocognitive processes that play a role in the human predisposition to belief: teleological thinking, Hyper Active Agency Detection (HAAD), the theory of mind and intuitive mind-body dualism, the power of narrative cognition, the drive to mitigate both uncertainty and cognitive threats, and evolutionary pragmatism. Each of these is worth a deeper dive.

Teleological thinking.  One result of the brain’s functioning as a prediction engine is the phenomenon of teleological thinking, a cognitive bias where humans naturally tend to see purpose, design, and intention in things that do not have them.  This bias is dominant in young children. Deborah Kelemen coined the term promiscuous teleology in the 1990s to describe the tendency of children to look at things like natural objects, weather, or animals and assume they exist for a reason, or were made for a specific goal. We are predisposed to think of the world as a collection of tools made for a purpose: wind exists to spread seeds, night exists to make it easier to rest and sleep, clouds exist so it can rain, bad things happen to force us to behave properly.  In adulthood we still often default to assuming that natural objects and experienced events were purposefully designed. Teleological thinking underlies our predisposition to attribute natural phenomena, weather, or weird occurrences to unseen spiritual or supernatural agents. It underlies modern forms of anthropomorphism, where we perceive human-like minds, intentions, and agency in animals, inanimate objects, or artificial intelligence systems like LLMs. Teleological thinking is also a cognitive energy saving device: our false ideas of purpose and intent are inevitably much simpler than reality, with all its detail and nuance.

Hyper Active Agency Detection. This cognitive bias, sometimes referred to as agent spotting, enhanced evolutionary fitness: for most of human history there was great survival value for guessing that a sound in the tall grass or a moving bush meant a hidden predator or potential prey. A false positive costs little; a false negative can be fatal. We remain innately predisposed to assume an actor or intent behind random events. HAAD is characterized by a hair-trigger mechanism, with a low threshold, detecting patterns and intentionality even from scant or unreliable sensory data. 

Theory of mind and mind-body dualism. Between the ages of 3 and 5, children gradually develop what psychologists call a Theory of Mind, understanding that the multiple individuals in their environment can have diverse desires and beliefs, may not all have access to the same information, may have false beliefs and/or false information, and have internal and hidden cognitive processes and feelings. In effect, this amounts to inferring independent agency and being to an external object. This makes it easy for children to accept various forms of dualism: physical objects can have a non-physical aspect. If bodies and minds are separate, it is easy to accept the existence of agency (mind, spirit, intention) that is independent of material bodies. A Deity, for example. 

The Power of Narratives.  The brain does not simply notice and store events. It converts data about experiences or events into collections. This makes memory storage and recall more powerful and efficient: it is easier to remember a patterned numerical series like 2-4-6-8-10 than an unpatterned numerical series like 4-6-2-10-8. Narrative cognition stores information about an event in a format like: agent -> intention -> action -> consequence -> meaning. This mirrors the core structure of many myths. For example, a storm is not merely atmospheric turbulence but is converted by narrative cognition to:  someone caused the storm → for a reason → because something happened → therefore we should respond in a particular way. In addition to improving memory by providing coherence, it can invent or infer comforting meaning: a tragic event is part of God’s greater plan, moral trial, punishment, cosmic struggle, reincarnation cycle, or journey to another world. The resulting explanation may make scientifically valid explanations unnecessary (and too much effort) while being psychologically extremely satisfying, because it transforms randomness into intelligible structure.

Mitigating cognitive threats. Both concrete or perceived real-world danger and cognitive dissonance trigger the brain’s threat response and impair decision making. Part of the prediction model constructed by our brain is a ‘conscious self’ that monitors our experience.  Thanks to this consciousness and self-awareness, humans are alone among living creatures in recognizing their mortality. This is a profoundly uncomfortable truth, and when the human brain confronts an uncomfortable truth, it relies on a variety of innate mental coping strategies. These include the ostrich effect (ignoring negative data), confirmation bias (seeking only supporting facts), resolving cognitive dissonance (discarding information to decrease the mental stress of holding conflicting or unpleasant views), and selective perception (altering how you perceive something to make it fit with your perspective). Belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator who provides an afterlife is a way to resolve the distress caused by contemplating one’s mortality and ultimate insignificance.

Uncertainty. Uncertainty occurs when the predictive function of our brain cannot create a useful or coherent model because of conflicting or inadequate information. This triggers the threat response and impairs rational (System 2) decision making. In response to the uncertainty generated by our inability to answer The Big Questions or to explain horrible and random events, we are predisposed to inventing a comforting answer. This was was poetically described by Barry Taylor: “God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.” There are a host of well-described and deeply researched cognitive biases and errors of logic that humans use to resolve the cognitive dissonance generated by an inconsistent or incoherent information set.

Pragmatism. Humans have sense organs for temperature, hunger, thirst, pain, pressure, light, color, sound, and more. We have no sense organ for truth. Being wrong feels EXACTLY THE SAME as being right. Pragmatism is more important to evolutionary fitness than truth, so the predictive function of the human brain looks for what works, not what is true. There is a robust literature exploring why humans are so susceptible to believing gossip and rumors, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. This literature applies well to myths and religions. 

At the group or societal level, mythology and religion can provide significant benefits. 

Religion and mythologies are overlapping categories, defined as “collections of standard and often sacred narratives belonging to and deeply embedded in culture and used to explain natural phenomena, world or universe origins, and human behavior. They often involve deities and heroes.” Common themes include creation stories (cosmogony), deities (theogony), the afterlife, quests, epic struggles (order versus chaos, good versus evil), divine intervention, metamorphosis and transformation. They are universal, seen in all human cultures and societies. They provide potentially significant benefits for societies.

• They provide a foundation for cultural identity with a common and shared history
• They can provide a framework for morality, standards of behavior, and methods to enforce pro-social behavior.
• They can contribute to the creation and reinforcement of social order and hierarchy. (It is noteworthy that highly religious societies are more susceptible to authoritarianism than less religious societies.). 
• They often serve an explanatory functions, de-mystifying the unexplainable and providing meaning where meaning is not obvious or does not exist. 
• They often provide rituals, which have been shown to be beneficial for societies and cultures. 
• They provide social connections,  reinforce community cohesion, and contribute to social identity. They often provide practical support to individuals through spiritual communities and religious rules. 
• They provide a mechanism for strong interpersonal bonds and social cohesion, important for trust, cooperation, and sharing. 
• They can reduce cheating and antisocial behavior, avoiding punishment by a watchful deity.
• They can serve as an organizing mechanism for human cooperation in large groups.

In short, individual humans and human societies have evolved a collection of powerful innate neurocognitive and social processes that predispose us to believe. Humans consistently default to some form of belief. As both individuals and societies, we cannot choose whether or not it is in our nature to believe. We can only examine our beliefs, their origins and impacts, and then make decisions about what we choose to believe and how we choose to let it impact our lives. 

To paraphrase Socrates, the unexamined faith is not worth believing.