God of Gaps & The Ice Bucket Challenge

I am reading from my rough scribbled notes. I made, them in the semi-dark, during an impressive and paradigm shifting lecture.

'Sh*t happens, The Misery Index and does suffering cause belief in God?'

I am reading from my rough scribbled notes. I made, them in the semi-dark, during an impressive and paradigm shifting lecture.

Well it wasn’t a lecture really, more the most amazing and remarkable way to transfer scientific knowledge through the medium of story telling, performance and poetry. Well rap actually. Before you get too dissociated and judgmental, the rapper was an astute scholar (a friend of Darwin (thank you god) and notable MC) not only delivering some sick rhymes, but transferring to the audience newly synthesised information from distinguished peer reviewed scientists.

This new mode of delivery is perhaps more ancient than you might think. From Chaucer to Aboriginal Native Australians (whom I spend 6 months with learning their stories and Dream Time, as part of theWinston Churchill Scholarship) – there are lots of precedent to this lyrical exposition.

MC Brinkman introduced us to some ground breaking and new research by Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner(assistant professor of psychology, University of Maryland) that apparently indicates that suffering plays an important role in belief in God. He distilled their argument, about how human suffering and God are cozy bedfellows, because of our evolved brain systems. People, as a whole, are not happy with ‘bad stuff happens’ type of explanations (that is to say, reality). Since we are deeply social species, when bad things happen to us we immediately launch a search for the responsible human party. Who did that thing?

Well let us picture a young family (let’s call them the Millers) enjoying a nice picnic somewhere in a peaceful remote valley. The birds are chirping, the sun is out and there is a lovely summer breeze. It’s positively idyllic. The family dog (Rover) is leaping about, playfully.

Suddenly, an evil meth-head dam worker (probably a rapper) a mile upstream, jealous of the family’s happiness, pushes the big red button and unleashes a massive torrent of raging water. The whole family (including the pet dog) drown in the valley that day.

Question then: did God cause the family to drown?

Most of the participants who read this version of this story in Gray and Wegner’s original study, said of course not. The evil lesser-spotted rap-dam worker did it –case closed.

Something very interesting happened when the authors stripped the story of any mention of the human agent (the evil person). Half of the participants read the same story without the Eminem-like dam worker. In other words, they learned only that the water level suddenly rose and drowned the whole family; and as you might expect, these people were significantly more likely to attribute the event to God than were those in the evil dam worker scenario.

When the there was no death or injury (and Rover survived, the lunch got ruined, but the family was fine) then God wasn’t to blame. The classic ice bucket challenge is not God's work.

That makes sense they when someone punches us in the face, steals from us or sleeps with our girlfriend; but when our misfortune is more abstract (think cancer or a tsunami) and there’s no obvious single human agent to blame, we see the hand of God (not the Argentinian maestro Maradona).

In an really clever development, Gray and Wegner created a U.S .state-by-statesuffering index and found a positive correlation between a U.S. state’s relative misery (compared to the rest of the country) and its population’s belief in God. MC Brinkman put this on a giant screen and I sketched the notes for my later research. I was awestruck.

So what they had to do was to create a truly objective measure of such relative misery. They used some pretty grim data from the 2008 United Health Foundation’s comprehensive Health Index. Among other manifestations of human misery, this regularly compiled index includes rates of infant mortality, cancer deaths, infectious disease, violent crime and environmental pathogens.

Scatterplot of U.S. states: Mean belief in God by suffering index .

What Gray and Wegner appear to have come across was that suffering and belief in God were highly correlated, even after controlling for income and education. In other words, belief in God is especially high in places like Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina – and so is misery.

And that, say the authors, is no wild coincidence.

(By the way, they seem very much aware of the logical counter argument that God is of course also invoked for explanations of positive events. The authors don’t deny this fact, but nevertheless they argue that God is especially likely to crop up in people’s heads in response to life’s really bad things).

We are born with what some psychologists call an explanatory drive. I must know. Hence my drive to find out what my notes really meant. You give a baby a strange object or something that doesn’t make sense and she will become instantly absorbed; using all her abilities — taste, smell, force — to figure out how it fits in with the world. What about suffering makes people believe? 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.

What could God be thinking? Even people who hold no belief in the supernatural can sometimes puzzle over this question, wondering what could be going on in the mind of God. The tendency to anthropomorphize God leads many to surmise that if a God exists He or She must have a mind somewhat like ours. This theory links mind perception to morality and accounts for how people perceive the minds of a range of moral players—villains, victims, martyrs, self-harmers, despots, benefactors, demons, saviours, beneficiaries, heroes, and, yes, even God almighty—in terms of the general distinction between moral agents and moral patients.

At some point in MC Brinkman’s excellent performance / lecture, there was a beautiful slide about the God of Gaps (I think this was it). This metaphor is used historically to explain any phenomenon that science cannot explain. It suggests that God may be more accurately characterised as God of the Moral Gaps, a supernatural mind. Seen in this light, it is understandable why some religions discourage their members from seeking orthodox medical treatment, the more harm that comes to them and their family, the more they believe.

It also makes sense of why religions might encourage moralistic explanations for disasters. The mind of God would seem to thrive under such circumstances. For example, faiths that send missionaries to dangerous locations can capitalise on the fact that people who live in harm’s way should already be predisposed to believing in God. Perhaps the most interesting implication of having a God of the moral gaps is that His continued perception depends on the continued experience of suffering in need of an agent.

It seems misery loves supernatural explanations…and I love rap / science ones. I hope that made some sense of my notes.

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