Customer Reviews

The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief: Searching for Angels and the Parent-God

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Religion doesn't work because it's true," said William James, "but is true because it works." The reason it works, according to MD Faber, is because religious notions tap into our deepest feeling-state, which is the symbiotic relationship we had with our primary caregiver during infancy. As he says in the middle of the book, "we turn to God as a child in distress turns to its mother." While he acknowledges Freud's insights about the connection between infancy and the religious impulse, he advances Freud's basic argument by highlighting the role of the primary caregiver (usually the mother) and by fruitfully linking psychology and neuroscience.

Drawing upon such close observers of infant behavior as DW Winnicott and Margaret Mahler, Faber leads us carefully through the developmental phases of early childhood, with the goal of tying the affective states of this life period to the feelings induced by religious rituals. Infancy is a period when we go through thousands of instances where we want something and someone provides what we need. During the earliest phases of life, we don't distinguish our self from the caregiver; later we see our self and our caregiver as a symbiotic team, working with one purpose and one all powerful will. We may not be "wired for God" as the famous phrase has it, but since "repeated patterns strengthen synaptic connections'" our brains are wired for asking and receiving from a caregiver who appears omnipotent to our childish eyes.

Then, amazingly, we forget this powerful formative experience, a process labeled infantile amnesia. (That we can't recall infant experiences is corroborated by imaging studies that demonstrate that the structures needed to form memories aren't functioning in babies.) Prayer and religious ritual become means of getting back to a preverbal sense of primal dualism - just us and our caregiver, in complete accord. Belief in God allows us to return to the state of bliss we had as infants, when we lived under the hallucinatory impression that an omnipotent caregiver could divine our every need and minister to our every want, just because we wished it to be so.

Once the toddler begins to separate in earnest from the caregiver, joy in his increasing powers is mitigated by feelings that he's losing his tight connection with the caregiver. The anxiety caused by separation from the parent can linger for a lifetime, and Faber posits the inner tussle between separation and connection as a major source of adult stress. Religion pours balm on this stress by allowing us to be ourselves but be under the care of an all-powerful, all-knowing protector. Other psychological aspects of early childhood get tied to religious practices. For example, infants and children are able to evoke imaginary companions to share in their behaviors and discoveries. As Edward Taylor says, animism - belief in unseen forces such as ghosts, souls, fairies and angels - is part of every religion in every culture in the world.

Assuming you're open to a natural as opposed to supernatural explanation of why our brains take so readily to religious ideas, Faber's arguments are cogently presented. There are, however, other paths along this track that beg to be explored. For instance, while he touches on inconsistent parenting (which causes the infant to create a good mother/bad mother paradigm) he doesn't dig in to the effect of erratic or non-existent parenting on religious impulses. Do people who had bad infant experiences yearn more or less for God than normals? Knowing the answer to this would be a good way of deepening Faber's thesis. Also, Faber focuses on the connection between the religious impulse and affective states of dependency and bliss achieved during infancy. But as the Hindus say, there are many paths to God. How do these stonier, thornier paths - self-denial, flagellation, rational thought, physical self-sacrifice, cannibalism, voodoo - tie in to attachment theory? Finally, religion is a social as well as personal practice - a way of separating people you can trust from people you can't, for example, or a way of organizing and motivating people to achieve specific political ends. How does the psychological pull of group dynamics tie back to the primary affective source of religious belief?

The pleasure one can take in Faber's well-reasoned arguments is somewhat marred by the writing style. The main problem is an overuse of quotations, which clogs the narrative flow. Some chapters, such as Prayer and Faith and Angelic Encounters, are so dense with quotes that the sense of an authorial voice nearly disappears altogether. But if you can work through that, you'll find a stimulating and provocative theory: we never stop wanting that state of perfect connection with an all-powerful caregiver we imagined we had as infants; religion is the magic castle we've constructed so we can return again and again to that lost state of symbiotic bliss.

If you've been wondering why, in these scientifically enlightened times, belief in God, angels and saints is so common and so persistent, Faber goes a long way toward answering your question. His explanation is based on the development of the human infant's brain. I'll condense his explanation into my own words.

An infant's neocortex has billions of `seedling' neurons searching for stimuli which shape the way these neurons grow; the way its brain get `wired'. And the way the neurons grow conditions their response to future stimuli. The infant's initial experiences are with its caregivers (usually its mother). Initially the infant doesn't distinguish between itself and its caregiver; to it they're one omnipotent organism. The nurturing, warmth and comforting it receives in response to its whimpers and cries are seemingly self-induced -- the neurons in its neocortex initially get `wired' so that the infant unconsciously believes it induces it own nurturing.

As the infant grows it learns to distinguish itself from its caregivers. But the early `wiring' is still in its brain available to be re-stimulated eventho' new patterns continue to be laid down along with the initial `wiring'. Until the child reaches its third year, it has no conscious memory (infantile amnesia). But the unconscious memories are still there in its brain available to be re-stimulated. As the child separates itself from its caregivers, it may compensate with an imaginary companion (such as a doll or blanket) that it can turn to for comfort.

If at this age the child is taught about supernatural companions -- its putative Father in Heaven, Baby Jesus, Mother Mary and/or Guardian Angel -- these can re-stimulate its brain's initial `wiring' to unconsciously resonate with the child's infantile desires. It can self-induce its own comforting unbeknown to its conscious mind which believes the projected comforting is coming from a supernatural entity Who seems very real. And thru-out its life, the person can induce comforting by praying to its imagined omnipotent `caregiver'. Faber does a much better job of explaining and documenting all this, so if my description stirs your interest, get Faber's new book. He shows the dire consequences of subjecting children to religious stories.

However what Faber doesn't explain is how some of us managed to escape the influence of our brain's early `wiring' so that we're no longer (or never were) religious. We can't all have had bad mothering so that our infant brain never got thus `wired', and many of us were subjected to early religious indoctrination. Faber briefly raised and answers the question on page 34 ("... other neural connections arise as we mature ...") and on pages 43, 103 ("moving on") and 121. But he alludes to what I believe is a better explanation when he says on page 215 "... the unconscious is working to locate for us sources of attachment and security as we undertake our separate, dangerous journeys through the world." I believe there's a rudimentary Urge to Life in us humans (and in all organisms) which propels growth and maturation to "undertake our journeys in the world." We may sometimes grow weary and seek respite, but a healthy person is in touch with their Life Urge and tries to eschew infantile regression. Even so there's still another hazard that the person disown their Life Urge and instead project it out onto an imagined 'god'. If these ideas intrigue you, take a look at Amazon's detail pages on my book "Concepts: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics."

Nonetheless I highly recommend Faber's book. He helped me better understand why religious beliefs are so common and persistent. Be forewarned tho' - I found myself getting impatient with his writing style. As a professor of English apparently he enjoys finding just the right words and using all of them, saying the same thing several ways. Moreover he's not adverse to long sentences and long paragraphs. And he skillfully strings together series of quotes into well constructed sentences. So rather than get impatient, I slowed down and tried to savor his writing.

This book finally solved the deeply personal conundrum of why I have been so deeply drawn to religion despite my intellectual many objections. The draw was so strong in me and I had several religious experiences so intense that I was being convinced by experience that there was a level of knowing far deeper than the intellect. Having no explanation that fully satisfied for the intensity and shape of this yearning and these experiences was the last remaining very sturdy thread that religious belief or at least being convinced there was something very real to this stuff hung by.

Now I understand. The missing long sought piece to the puzzle has been found. The fit is perfect. I can't thank the author enough.

Experts from diverse fields are forever trying to understand the connection between religious belief and human life. For example, Alexis de Tocqueville says: "At the time when Christianity appeared on Earth, Providence, which no doubt was preparing the world for its reception, had united a great part of mankind, like an immense flock, under the Caesars. ... One must recognize that this new and singular condition of humanity disposed men to receive the general truths preached by Christianity, and this serves to explain the quick and easy way in which it then penetrated the human spirit."

And in "The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy and the American Future," Joshua Mitchell gives this gloss on Tocqueville's meaning: "The real-life condition of the Romans `disposed' the people toward a religious idea that recapitulates what their lived experience already avowed. They could easily come to think Christianity because the life they lived already evinced the Christian pattern. Being precedes consciousness; real-life conditions ... dispose thought to accept certain religious notions."

Nowhere is the idea that, "being precedes consciousness" and disposes thought to accept certain religious notions more clear and powerfully expressed than in the fascinating book, "The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief: Searching for Angels and the Parent-God," by M.D. Faber.

The idea that gods, goddesses and even great leaders like the Caesars influence us as parent substitutes is nothing new, but Faber bases his argument on the new "intertwining perspectives of neuroscience and developmental psychology," which traces belief not to our connection to great and powerful leaders, as Tocqueville suggested, but to our relationship - lost to memory but hard-wired into our brains - with our first care-takers, the people who magically showed up when, in our distress, we cried out for them.

To keep this review at a manageable length, let's fly past the psychological studies and cut to the core of Faber's thesis: "We may perceive here, I believe, the answer to a fascinating, fundamental question: Why do millions upon millions of people require a Parent-God to feel centered in themselves, to feel secure, attached, happy, joyous? Why cannot the self derive these emotional benefits simply by communing with itself, self to self, mind to mind, subjectivity to subjectivity? Why must a Parent-Deity be there at all? The solution goes like this: Our foundational oneness (or selfhood or integration) turns out to be a twoness, the twoness that characterizes our early development as we attune with our creative provider, the one who not only gives us life but who is fated to be internalized into our mind-brains at the synaptic level such that we cannot feel (or experience) ourselves without feeling (or experiencing) the other. ... Our Parent-God is a facet of our brain function, a facet that becomes integrally tied to our longing for security and attachment in ourselves. Thus, our religious narratives and rituals with the Parent-God at the center (prayer and the Eucharist above all) continue the style of communion, or connection, that defines" us as human beings.

Faber, who seems not only brilliant but wonderfully reasonable, realizes this neither settles all theological questions nor disproves the existence of some actual deity, Cosmic force or "Unmoved Mover." And he realizes words in a book are not immediately going to override the deep-rooted, synaptic connections developed over years of constant care-giving, lost in the mists of "infantile amnesia." Faber simply believes that a strong case can be made that belief is powerfully psychological.

Faber understands our resistance to such ideas, but he also sees that current events make it harder than ever to hide out from new realizations.

"As I will endeavor to demonstrate ... weaning ourselves away from our person-centered universe embodied in our person-centered religious narratives marks a gigantic and problematical step in our evolution as a form of life, for it engages simultaneously two of our most rooted evolutional urges, namely the urge to feel attached and secure (or free of anxiety) as we strive to cope with a difficult and sometimes hostile environment, and the urge to perceive the world around us accurately, to rely on impersonal analysis, to set aside our soothing fantasies. The time in which we live just happens to be the time when these potentially antithetical evolutional tendencies run directly into one another - producing a clash of titans, if there ever was one."

You know about the power of belief and the clash of customs from your daily newspaper and the network news. Indeed, remember that little event called 9/11? Now you can get "the back story" from Faber's terrific book. Highly recommended.

Read more about Faber's book on www.fobes.net

The essential point of this book is that the experience of a higher power is perceptually normal in human beings because of the way they interact with caregivers during normal development. Religions then build on that existing "implicit" psychological structure, rather than creating a mythical or supernatural world from whole cloth. The theory rings very plausible, but for me was ultimately unsatisfying because of the negative associations I have with psychoanalytic theory.

The book was difficult for me because of its heavy psychodynamic focus, a modern version of Freudian themes which reject some aspects of Freud and build on others. Separating out the good ideas from the untestable ones in psychodynamic theory has always been difficult. While I am among those who are heavily skeptical of most of the Freudian framework for its non-empirical formulation, I also harbor doubts that the cognitive and behavioral neurosciences can entirely capture the complex dynamics of human behavior. Especially in critical areas like "attachment" and "projection" which form the foundation for theories like this one. There seems to be something to these ideas, but can they be salvaged from their murky psychoanalytic roots to create a crisp, testable psychology of religion, or anything else?

While Faber does an admirable job trying to tie analytic concepts with neuroscience and behavioral science, that is a major undertaking in itself in addition to explaining the psychology of religion. I couldn't quite bring myself to buy into the analytic concepts far enough to find value in the theory or imagine a testable empirical form of it. But that's not to say Faber isn't on to something important. Lacking a better language for describing the non-verbal experiential world of the developing infant, this is perhaps as good a description as I can imagine for the way in which the human mind is prepared to accept the supernatural so easily.

Well written with the general public in mind. The author touches on the deep psychological underpinings of religious belief.