Imagine There’s No Heaven…

In my inaugural blog, I stated that the value of religion has been put to serious question. In the past couple of decades, this trial has focused on scientific attempts at explaining religion “as a natural phenomenon”. (For the best texts in this regard, see “Breaking the Spell” by Daniel C. Dennett, “Darwin’s Cathedral” by David Sloan Wilson, and “Religion Explained” by Pascal Boyer).

Those who practice religion claim to do so in response to an experience(s) of a real divine presence. Therefore, if evidence and arguments can be amassed that religion is a natural human feature, continuous and consistent with the rest of what we know about our biological nature and evolutionary history, then the claims of religion to have a supernatural source or orientation have been severely discredited.

In the most recent issue of Scientific American MIND, Jesse Bering of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast has taken an evolutionary psychological approach to the widespread belief in the afterlife.

Against the notion that the approach to death as a doorway rather than a dead-end is “an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road”, Bering sets his evolutionary thesis that

our ancestors sufered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have […] inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.

In short, Bering argues that we tend to believe in an afterlife because our brains are built in such a way that we couldn’t imagine ourselves not existing, even if we wanted to.

In arguing for this position, Bering first draws on a fascinating variation on the “thought experiment”, in which one tries to imagine oneself (in the words of the Coroner of Munchkinland) “morally, ethic’ly, physically, spiritually, positively, absolutely, undeniably, and reliably dead”.

Of course, it cannot be done. According to Bering,

in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences – because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.”

In support of the conclusion that the powerful impulse to imagine personalities surviving death is innate rather than learned (e.g., from Sunday School teachers), Bering cites a study showing that younger children are “significantly more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than children from […] older age groups” are.

Pointing out that even 2- and 3-year-olds grasp the notion of biological death, in which the body no longer needs or can use food and water, Bering points out that nevertheless “kids endow the dead with ongoing psychological functions”. He goes on to argue that, while an adequate theory of bodily death would have aided our ancestors in surviving and reproducing, “comprehending the cessation of the mind […] has no survival value and is, in an evolutionary sense, unnecessary.” This, he contends, is why we never learned to think of minds as dying with bodies: there was never any selective pressure to do so.

Having argued that “psychological continuity-reasoning” is a matter of nature, Bering goes on to theorize about the role of nurture:

[E]xposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief.

Here we arrive at the psychologist’s mantra: “Nurture works on what nature endows.”

Finally, to account for the more specific elements of human belief in an afterlife, Bering appeals to what psychologists call “person permanence”:

Back when you were in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to exist simply because you couldn’t see them. [Person permanence] leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something […]. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died.

Bering’s research leaves both the theist and the atheist with some food for thought. To John Lennon’s invocation to “imagine there’s no heaven”, it seems we must reply that we’d love to, but we can’t. And to the theist we must say that it is very likely that you believe in an afterlife not because its existence is revealed to you in Holy Writ, but because your brain cannot seriously entertain the opposite hypothesis.