Ask An Atheist: Why do people believe in God?

This is a wonderful question. It’s part of a broader issue: how and why do people believe or think anything, not just God beliefs. Gods are supernatural personal entities, so the brain systems that tend to interpolate unseen forces appear to be interacting with the brain systems that attribute things to intentional agents rather than natural ones. Human beings tend to think teleologically (inferring purpose) at the drop of a hat (the tree fell across my car because someone or something wanted it that way), and it would be a big surprise if that tendency didn’t spill over into how people relate to the stories of gods they grew up with in their culture. In that respect religious beliefs are not only perfectly natural things for human brains to do, but probably inevitable ones (no natural human culture appears to lack religious believers).

Now the individual content of religions brings in the dynamics of individuals (charismatic and persuasive personalities — think not only Jesus or the Buddha, but St. Paul, Joseph Smith, or even L. Ron Hubbard, while we’re about it) as well as the particular nature of the societies in which they are being presented (the utility of particular religious beliefs to begin with, but eventually the institutional inertia of religions once they have been around awhile, the degree to which people remain attached to the religion of their culture or group by force of habit even when no overt concern over retribution over apostasy is involved).  These factors are independent of whether the religion happens to be true (and remember, whatever religion you happen to believe in, most of the people on Earth now or in the past didn’t share that faith).

Cognitive research has isolated a few brain systems that crop up in certain religious areas (the brain parts that light up during “religious ecstasy” in people as diverse as Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks turn out to be the same ones that react during sexual arousal, so ecstasy is probably the right word).  here may be other networks in the brain that function as “god modules,” but odds are they will be composed of areas that do other things too.

You notice I didn’t attribute religious belief to obvious single issue candidates like “fear of death” or “social control” (things various people have suggested as the drivers of religion). Marx’s “religion is the opiate of the people” is one from the political side. While those factors play a part for some people and some societies, to be sure, I’ll put my bets on religious belief going much deeper than that, to fundamental cognitive systems that generate religious convictions along with things as diverse as sports team identification and political affiliations.