Faith in lying
A fascinating cover story in the May 2017 edition of National Geographic suggested to me, inadvertently, that we may embrace religious faith for the same reason we tell lies: both tendencies, however ill-advised, appear to be hard-wired into our being. And related.
In the article, “Why We Lie,” writer Yudhijit Bhattacharjee observed: “Our capacity for dishonesty is as fundamental to us as our need to trust others, which ironically makes us terrible at detecting lies.”
This sentence could be fairly reconfigured in a religious context to read, “Our capacity for faith is as fundamental to us as our need to trust the givers of the doctrines of faith, ancient and modern, which ironically makes us terrible at questioning, much less admitting, that these doctrines might be false.”
I spent several years investigating this curious paradox: why nearly all humans believe in invisible beings, even worship them, despite zero material evidence confirming their existence. What I learned in my wide reading always circled back to the same distinct probability: believers believe in chimera because their genes compell them to, not because there is actually something there. Just as our DNA compells us to deceive if it will allow us to avoid painful responsibility or gain an advantage. These behaviors are part of human natre, instinctual, like fight or flight.
The real question regarding the existence of these natural impulses, whose answers could conclusively retire a lot of vital questions about why we behave as we do, is how the the pull to believe and to lie originally insinuated deep in our minds during mankind’s endless primordial past. Or, more importantly, why, for what evolutionarily advantageous reason did mankind slowly become more and more spiritually enthralled and deceitful until these traits became an indivisible part of our nature. The ideas that a god make us this way is simply squishy, wishful thinking, empty of useful data.
The bottom line is that we are woefully vulnerable to both lies and phantasmic imaginings. In his article, Bhattacharjee worries that susceptibility to untruth is especially stark in the new fact-challenged, untruth-saturated social-media universe. Scientific research shows, he notes, that “we’re prone to believe some lies even when they are unambiguously contradicted by clear evidence … Our ability as a society to separate truth from lies is under unprecedented threat.” As dreamy human nature has long short-circuited our ability to discern the supernatural from the real. Aiding and abetting this deficit, particularly in America, is a school system that spectacularly fails to adequately teach critical thinking skills regarding social issues (teaching them mainly in STEM courses), and a religious indoctrination tradition that presents fantasies as facts to children practically from birth.
Part of the problem is in the most primitive lobes of the human brain, where profound emotion—the real ruler of the human universe—reside. What really drives us is the relatively greater excitement when lying to tamp down fear or dominate others, or when imagining deities and their presumed gifts of immortal bliss. Using our brain’s advanced, analytical capacities, rationally and sedately discerning between right and wr0ng, like an accountant, just can’t compete in the charisma department.
So, this National Geographic article reaffirmed for me that we lie and believe in the unbelievable not because deceit is good and omnipotent phantoms actually waft through the cosmos but because, in blunt evolutionary terms, they work. Because surrendering to their primal power unduly excites our artifact reptilian brains.
