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Adults’ Imaginary Friends?
Adults’ Imaginary Friends?
More than fifty years later, my older brother loves to regale the younger members of our family with stories about me as a preschooler with my troop of imaginary friends. I can to this day recall the names of at least eight of my imaginary companions. My parents and my brother recounted numerous circumstances, in which I insisted that various accommodations should be made for my make-believe chums, including, apparently, asking everyone to wait for them to get through doorways, since, for a period at least, some of them accompanied us on family outings.
This is all fairly standard stuff in the lives of what researchers have ascertained is a majority of preschoolers, but I was intrigued by T. M. Luhrmann’s report in her Op-Ed piece in last Sunday’s New York Times, entitled “Addicted to Prayer,” that at least some adults are deliberately conjuring up imaginary gods. Luhrmann reported on an individual, Sigfried Gold, who, although an atheist, “created a god he doesn’t believe exists,” in order to meet one of the requirements of a 12-step weight loss program to turn participants’ problems over to a higher power, that is, to something or someone bigger than themselves. Luhrmann reports that Mr. Gold “dropped to his knees to pray” to his imaginary god on a daily basis and that he successfully lost the excess weight and gave up smoking.
Imaginary Friends Are People Too!
Luhrmann’s larger concern was with the beneficial and, sometimes, not-so-beneficial consequences of routine prayer, including what can seem to be the addictive character of “intense imaginative immersion” in such activities as prayer and video games. By contrast, I want to look at a different feature of Mr. Gold’s creation.
Very nearly everything about the theories and findings of the cognitive science of religion suggests that such an assignment would likely result in the creation of an imaginary person, and that is just what Mr. Gold did. When charged with coming up with a higher power, Mr. Gold created a someone rather than something bigger than himself. Even though in more conventional situations, plenty of people look to communities or institutions, such as nations, universities, or philanthropies, as things bigger than themselves in which they can play a part that they find personally meaningful and on which they can, at least in part, rely, human minds are poised to search for, detect, and invent other minds.
I have argued elsewhere that humans are naturally inclined to look to agents, their states of mind, and their actions as the bases for explanations. Such inclinations of mind importantly contribute to the attraction of religions and to the attraction of religious explanations – explanations not only of matters of social and psychological import but of the origins and foundational principles of the cosmos.
Conflict with Science
It is this penchant of human minds, which, over the long haul, will generate what, I suspect, will prove to be the deepest conflicts between future science and religion. Religions and folk psychology, more generally, traffic in explanations that invoke agents and their minds, their intentions, and their actions. By contrast, one way of characterizing the history of modern science is as a story of producing increasing restrictions on the domains in which we take reliance on agent causality as a plausible basis for explanations.
The entire cosmos was once animate -- not just the heavenly bodies but the winds, the oceans, the mountains and more. Certainly, for explanatory purposes the triumphs of modern physical science have rendered such conceptions redundant, at best, and they have basically fallen out of favor. Over the past century and a half, with the rise of the theory of biological evolution by natural selection, biological scientists no longer refer to designers or vital spirits in their explanations. The focus of modern biological research is overwhelmingly on the operations of the mechanisms that underlie biological phenomena.
Although not typically recognized as such, the emergence of the cognitive and brain sciences over the past fifty years marks the beginning of on-going scientific enterprises that often eschew explanatory appeals to agency and intentionality in us! This is not to suggest that contemporary social, cognitive, or even brain science has ceased to refer to agents and their mental states, but only to say that the broader trend is clear within these sciences and within modern science more generally.
Critics of religion have usually underestimated the cleverness and creativity with which new generations of theologians have managed scientific challenges, but the historical pattern to which I am pointing may signal far greater challenges ahead. Accommodationist theologies that abandon all reference to agents are unlikely to have much popular appeal.
