Introduction
A question often posed to atheists is some form of “Why do people believe?”
Sometimes the atheist generates the question inwardly, as I did when evaluating my own loss of faith. It was a huge moment of self-doubt, wondering if I could be missing something incredibly important as I knowingly moved from the believing majority into an oft-marginalized minority. Clearly, most people on the planet believe in God or gods; what did they see that I didn’t?
Sometimes it’s a question posed to the atheist, asked by a believer. Often it’s intended rhetorically rather than literally, though I think sometimes it’s a genuine question on the believer’s part, either from their own self-doubt or as an attempt to sway the atheist back into the fold. “If you’re so convinced God isn’t real, then why do you think so many people believe in God?” Often, it’s accompanied by an example of some famous scientist or other smart person who is a believer (such as prominent scientist Francis Collins).
Why, indeed, do so many humans — even highly educated, extremely intelligent ones — believe in God? Given my position that there is almost certainly no god, shouldn’t it logically follow no one with an ounce of sense would ever believe in such a thing? Yet most do. Some percentage of apologists think this is an argument in favor of God’s existence. (This is closely related to the argument from common consent, a particular form of the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad populum.)
The answer at which we (atheists) usually arrive is “indoctrination”. (Believers, perhaps obviously, arrive at different answers.) One reason we arrive at this conclusion is because that’s how it happened for many of us: many (if not most) atheists were once believers.
Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, floats a few theories about why ancient humans originally invented and believed in magical myths. For all I know he’s correct that there’s a natural tendency — reinforced by natural selection — for children to trust and believe their parents, caretakers, teachers, and other elders. If so, this would help the indoctrination to take hold.
Indoctrination
Indoctrination has negative connotations for a reason, but it’s also a neutral word that means “the process of inculcating (instilling by persistent instruction) ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies...” (from Wikipedia).
(See other definitions: Cambridge, Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com.)
“Persistent instruction” is the key.
It comes from parents, extended family, the church, education (in some instances), government (in some countries), public figures, and friends. I don’t think it’s always intentional or systematic, though surely it sometimes is. Day after day, week after week, the same platitudes and concepts are repeated. In the early formative months and years, even as a child is learning to understand language, speak on her own, read, and write, the words and concepts of the locally dominant religion are pressed on them. Obviously, I must generalize here, to keep the page short. Every family, church, school, government, and circle of friends will be somewhat different.
Even when parents or other relatives aren’t participating in full-bore Christian teaching, they at least normalize it, make it clear by words and deeds that this belief is the correct, acceptable one. I don’t think I need to list any examples here; even my apologist readers will admit this occurs and reinforces the intended belief system.
But the indoctrination conduit that many people don’t think about is the broader pop culture. It’s the one that surprised me the most, the one I didn’t notice until after I became an atheist.
The family and churches I grew up in taught us to shun and fear secular art and media; we were warned of the “atheist agenda” at work in Hollywood and major TV studios. But once I had completely broken free of religion and began to see the so-called “secular” culture with fresh eyes, what I found was the opposite.
I realized that even a child raised in a non-believing home, who had never attended church, who was educated at public schools that didn’t promote religion, and who had somehow avoided all the government/political references to gods and magic — that child would still be indoctrinated by our society at large, which surrounds us with the worldview that gods are real, that there is an afterlife, that evidence isn’t necessary for belief, and so on.
Realizing this was like escaping from an aquarium only to find that the aquarium had been floating in the ocean the whole time.
All the complaints by fundamental Christians, which I’d heard my entire life, now seem absurd. All the time and effort they wasted worrying that movies and music and TV were turning people away from the church turned out to be wasted. I’m now convinced that the opposite is true; it’s impossible to live in today’s world without hearing or seeing the god idea.
To be clear, I have not conducted a scientific study, counting references to gods or spirits in movies, TV shows, pop songs, or books. (I would be very curious about the results if someone did conduct such a study.) All I have here is my anecdotal experience, as a person who formerly identified as a “radical Christian”, having switched to atheism in my 40s, who noticed a surprising amount of religious references in allegedly non-religious media.
Movies
In movies, I see not only god ideas, but all kinds of “spiritual” claptrap — ghosts, true love, destiny, magic, the Force — whatever. It’s in kids’ movies, teen films, and mainstream blockbusters. I know many pious religious people who see it from the other side, believing that these depictions/mentions are harmful, untrue, or whatever. But from the paradigm of the unreligious, it all serves the same end — convincing people that there’s something more than observable reality, that when something happens that you’re unable to explain, it must be something spiritual, supernatural.
TV
In television, I noticed it in, for example, The Big Bang Theory, which I happened to watch regularly around the time I was coming to grips with my atheism. The show was supposed to be about four young scientists/engineers, but there were fairly regular conversations about God. The primary character is an atheist, which is rare on TV, but he’s also presented as a socially-awkward jerk, the butt of many of the show’s jokes. His mother is a devout Christian, also the butt of several jokes, though she’s not a main character. Another is a Hindu and another is a Jew. I think it’s an improvement that they’re showing people of different faiths getting along, and I don’t think it’s wrong to include characters with faith in these shows. My point is only to show that even if a child was not indoctrinated at home or in church, they would still be deluged with the god idea via pop culture.
Later, I noticed The Flash and Supergirl each had at least one season strongly devoted to faith. One was more focused on the idea of faith rather than a particular religion, though the characters were shown inside a Christian church. It was presented as admirable to believe without evidence. The other depicted a religion from another planet, though at least those people actually had powers, which (to me) actually counts as evidence. The show Luke Cage had similar themes — Luke’s father is a pastor who constantly talks about how his faith strengthens him. In Daredevil, the main character is a devoted Catholic who regularly visits a priest for confession or advice. (Spoiler alert: he later learns his mother is a nun.) Some episode titles: “Speak Of The Devil”, “The Path Of The Righteous”, “Guilty As Sin”, and “Resurrection”.
Books
Books aren’t much different. Even my favorite genres — science fiction and history — rarely avoid the god question. History, by necessity, must mention the incredible influence of religion over history, and often delves into doctrinal disputes between religious characters — because upon these disputes hinge great moments in history. Science fiction also mentions it regularly; it’s assumed that religions will continue to affect society in the future. The fantasy genre, of course, depends on the “something more” — including magic, bent or broken laws of physics, unseen-yet-conscious forces outside the observable, measurable thing we know as the physical universe. Other genres very often mention God or gods, magic, ghosts, or other supernatural phenomenon, even if only in conversations among characters about their beliefs.
And it’s not only new books. I was as surprised as anyone to learn that Dracula (see my review) was less a horror story and more Christian propaganda. The entire Gospel message was clearly laid out on multiple occasions.
Music
While the most popular music of my lifetime is often about love and relationships, the ideas of religion remain prevalent. While a conservative white Christian might shun the music of rapper DMX, for example, he might also be surprised to learn that DMX is a Christian and claims to read the Bible daily. Many of his songs contain overtly Christian lyrics. Musical artists regularly give credit to “the Lord” (Jesus), either during casual conversation or at awards shows.
The News
The news might be the worst offender, since it’s supposed to be true. But every single day, in major secular newspapers and websites, I see theistic language being thrown around as if there is no doubt.
Screenshot of a tweet from CNN’s official account.
CNN tweeted: “Julianna, 5, is dying — and she’s chosen to go to heaven rather than go back to the hospital”. A news organization should have written “chosen to die”, but instead they used “Heaven” without quotation marks or attribution. Even the story linked from the tweet never attributed the idea to the family’s particular religion or explained that the little dying girl was simply parroting what her parents had told her. The story repeats that she “chose heaven over the hospital” and that if she didn’t continue treatment she would go to Heaven. As if it’s true.
The New York Times, often considered the flagship newspaper of the United States, regularly uses “holy site”, “sacred book”, “prophet”, and other words — all without attribution and without explanation, as if they’re just true.
These are simply examples from news stories. If you check the opinion pages, the religious themes are much more common.
Sports
Sports as entertainment is a huge business in the United States, and religion is often closely intertwined. When I was young, it was common to see the “John 3:16” posters while watching televised football games. When I played football (at a public school), our coach led us in the Lord’s Prayer at the end of every practice and before every game (and I’ve been told this is a common practice). On TV, professional athletes are regularly broadcast in various poses of prayer; at the end of games they regularly “thank God” for one thing or another.
Clarification
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not attempting to argue that these references should be removed or that purveyors of pop culture should avoid them. As a humanist, I think people have a right to their beliefs (and any non-harmful practices associated therewith). I am attempting to show that even if a child isn’t told about religion by her parents, even if she isn’t taken to church, and even if she attends a secular public school, she will still be inundated by religious ideas, themes, and even instruction that is persistent — which is the very defintion of indoctrination.
The Evolutionary Tendency To Believe
Other than indoctrination, many people, even some famous atheists, conjecture that humans have a tendency, a “want to” if you will, to believe in these outrageous stories. This is conjecture (though many will state it as fact). I’ve never seen any proof of this, nor any evidence that can’t be explained away by the lifelong indoctrination that most of us go through.
I’ve long thought that the only way to know for certain would be some kind of illegal experiment in which human babies are raised in an entirely religion-free environment — perhaps by robots — where all references to religion, magic, and other superstitions are entirely censored. (I was surprised to see something just like this mentioned when I recently read Arthur C. Clarke’s The Songs Of Distant Earth.) If a human child were raised in such a way, all the way to adulthood — which would of course, require cutting out great swaths of history and eliminating huge chunks of language, literary references, and pop music — and then the resulting adult was presented with stories like The Bible or Koran, would that human believe the assertions of religion? I’m convinced they wouldn’t, but again it’s conjecture.
As mentioned above, vocal and strident atheist Dawkins spent many pages in The God Delusion trying to explain, via the mechanics of natural selection, how humans might have evolved a tendency to believe. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist by trade, so I cannot hope to argue with him on the facts of that field of study, but I believe he’s missing the more obvious — how powerful indoctrination can be.
When he gets to the part about natural selection favoring the tendency to trust authority figures, that part makes sense of course. A parent tells a child to stay back from the river; if the child obeys, he surives, but if he doesn’t listen then he drowns. But this only means we’re more likely to believe the indoctrination, not that we necessarily want or need to believe in fairy tales.
Little babies, as far as we know, can’t conceive of gods or the supernatural, but most of them are soon told about it as soon as they’re old enough to understand the language around them. Even thinking of my own childhood, if I remove the family Bible studies, thrice-weekly church attendance, prayer meetings with family and friends, and the religion-themed children’s books I owned — even without all that, I was still awash in magical thinking from the broader culture.
If a person grows up seeing the magic of Superman/Supergirl, the “force” in Star Wars, magic in Disney films, and constant references to life after death, and then is told the particulars of religious belief, it doesn’t seem quite as fantastic. Because the mind has already been set up to receive the type of magical thinking required to believe a god claim.
There is no requirement that one must have been bred to believe, as Dawkins and others assume, just that one was prepared to believe.
(Note: There have actually been studies, like the one mentioned here, which purport that humans are “born believers”, though I strongly question the methodology.)
How Easy Is It To Throw Off Indoctrination?
It’s fairly well accepted that people (generally) remain in the religion they were born into. Though Pew Research Center reports that “Americans change religious affiliation early and often”, a closer look at the statistics on that page show almost all of these “switches” are from Christianity to... Christianity (merely a different branch of it). People raised without religion tend to remain without religion. Christians tend to remain Christians. Muslims tend to remain Muslims.
But some of us do actually switch from the religion of our childhood to another, entirely different religion — or to no religion at all (as I did). Some of us do this in defiance of the surrounding culture (as I did), while others make the switch toward the dominant religion in their culture.
I would be very curious in a study that looked at the percentages of actual religion-switching (the Pew study mentioned above is almost entirely about Catholics switching to Protestant or Protestants switching from one denomination to the other, all of which have the same core Christian beliefs). I want to know which is more common, being raised without religion and later becoming religious, or being raised religious and later switching to without it — and how common is either. It would also be relevant to know the context: is the person’s family still in the same group? What is the religious belief of the surrounding culture? For example, I would expect the numbers to be different in the U.S. (where Christianity is dominant) than in, say, Pakistan (where Islam dominates) or Iceland (where non-belief is very common).
Conclusion
To me, having believed in God much of my life, it’s fairly obvious why people believe.
And further, I think it’s fairly obvious why people continue to believe — they’ve been taught to (1) not question their faith, because there are consequences for questioning, and (2) to use poor logic when they do question. We religious folk are taught early things like: “the universe exists, so someone must have created it” and many of us never learn to ask: if the creator can exist without having been created, then why can’t the universe exist without having been created?
I do understand why someone raised without faith might not understand this, which is why I’ve attempted to explain it.
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