An Inside Look at Religion

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Cause and Effect, Information Processing, and the Brain

Our brain creates a framework of cause and effect (e.g. Gopnik et al., 1999). The brain must process internal and external stimuli and create organization and priorities for behavior and action.

Very early in a child’s development, one can clearly see the child try to make sense of things, to find cause-and-effect. If a young child trips and hurts herself, she will often get up crying—and mad. And—often mad at you, the caregiver. Now, part of this is because of how feelings work—the pain has led to distress, excessive distress, and anger. But then the child will direct the anger at you—you were the cause of the hurt. The child is doing two interesting things here: First, she is automatically trying to make sense out of what happened, i.e. establish cause and effect; and, second, she is finding the causative agent, the reason for the fall, outside of herself.

So, there are psychological tendencies to search for causes and to externalize these causes. There are also tendencies to personify these causes—i.e. god is anthropomorphized, turned into a somewhat human form. The attributes of the god may be more positive or more punitive, depending on the character structure of the individual or religion. That is, if the positive affects have been more accentuated during development, the god image tends to be more positive; if negative affects have predominated, then a more punishing, angry, fear- and shame-inducing god is more likely.

Now, what does our tendency for causal explanations and our looking outside of ourselves for these causes have to do with religion? Let’s go back and take a look at medical history and disease—and our friend Leeuwenhoek (developer of powerful microscopes in the late 1600s) (Snyder, 2015). Before a germ theory of disease, much of illness was attributed to an outside force, namely, “God.” The phrases, “God sent a plague” and “God wanted her in heaven with him,” show efforts to find cause and effect relationships when the underlying biological systems are not yet understood.

Why is this important? It was not all that long ago that many of the causes of illness, disease, and death were not understood. It took until the 1600s that we began to develop a germ theory of disease. The word “bacteria” was not used until the 1800s, and antibiotics were not available until the 1930s. The word “dinosaur” was coined in 1841, and evolution was only beginning to be understood with Darwin’s work in the mid-to-late 1800s. With no known causes of much of disease and loss and death, many people and organizations resorted to an external system of god as causing this or that fortune or misfortune for whatever reason.

Consider life a mere 200 years ago. There was no coherent understanding of evolution. Therefore, in most minds, god was responsible for creating man and the variety of species which exist. There was no germ theory of disease—no understanding of bacteria, viruses, antibiotics, and so on. So, the course of illness was often externalized—”God’s Will,” bad luck, some bad deed which caused the punishment of disease.

With advances in development and other sciences, we now understand much of what causes human beings so much pain and suffering—especially disease and loss. We no longer have to be superstitious in our dealing with much of life—we understand much more about cause and effect in our lives. This includes not only disease, but also war and the psychology of individuals, leaders, and group behavior. While the terrorism of our era is awful, the world wars of the 20th century were so much worse—e.g. over 60 million people dying in World War II. We have begun to understand prejudice, paranoia, projection, and how to contain sadistic, psychotic dictators and their governments. Again, with these understandings we are in less need of turning to god and religious ideologies to make sense, to explain, much of what goes on in our lives. Freud noted:

“…in the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable… it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life.“ (1927, pp. 54-55).

Even earlier, the findings of science were creating tension with religious beliefs, as seen in the response to Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. With the brain’s framework of cause/effect and organizing stimuli, previous questions answered by “God’s Will” were now understood in terms of reality and reason—e.g. bodily function, disease, evolution, and so on. Darwin struggled mightily with how overtly to articulate this conflict, as his biographer, Janet Browne, notes:

“Where, in the final lines of the first edition of the Origin of Species, he had written of life being breathed into a few primordial forms, he now altered it to read ‘the breath of the Creator,’ a concession that he later regretted.” (2002, p. 96).