One of the things I always find striking after a major natural disaster such as the recent earthquake in Haiti is how religious believers and non-believers quickly reach diametrically opposing conclusions about the implications of the disaster. For non-believers, natural disasters are evidence that God does not exist — for what kind of benevolent, just or omnipotent figure would cause wanton harm to so many thousands of innocent people?
Invariably, however, believers usually experience a strengthening in their faith after a disaster. There may be a time of questioning, and some believers may see their faith shaken deeply, but for most, tragedy brings greater commitment to religious faith, not less.
In a new paper in Personality and Social Psychology Review, Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner suggest that suffering may cause religious believers to believe even more strongly in God than they did before because our minds are designed to seek explanations for the phenomena we see around us. When we hear a crashing sound, we expect to see a falling tree, for example. When phenomena are both unexpected and unexplainable — such as the suffering wrought by an earthquake — religious believers conclude the only agent who can cause such an event to occur must be God. (This doesn’t have to be a conscious deduction; it could well be an unconscious algorithm in the hidden brain.)
Gray and Wegner write, “We suggest that people see God when they are harmed— or helped—but can find no human agent to account for their suffering or salvation. In other words, although God may be the ultimate agent, it may be that He is specifically the ultimate moral agent, the entity who accepts blame and praise for moral outcomes, whether bad or good.”
If you think this research, or science in general, can settle ultimate questions about whether God exists, think again. I don’t think this research says much about the existence or non-existence of God. Non-believers may think that finding evidence of unconscious mental mechanisms that strengthen faith in God after a disaster means that faith is “only” in people’s heads; believers, of course, feel that a God who created the human mind would design it to behave in precisely such a way.
The religious wars are actually a distraction. The marvelous thing here is the endless complexity of the human mind. One interesting question Gray and Wegner ask is whether those religious orders that regularly place believers in harm’s way — sending missionaries to dangerous places or asking followers to decline medical treatment, for example — do so because at some conscious or unconscious level they recognize that increasing suffering also increases faith.
What do you think?
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