Why do people believe in God?

Follow the causal chain from top to bottom.

The answer to the question “Why do people believe in God?” is that we have evolved to be susceptible to the idea that God exists.

7.4.5. And God? [God Is Okay, but He Is No Substitute for the Real Thing]
“We must make an idol of our fear and call it God”
The Seventh Seal screenplay, Ingmar Bergman (1918 – 2007)

If only God existed, we would not have to go to all of the trouble of making him up. But God does not exist. Probably. At least the evidence for his existence is so lacking that the rational course of action is to assume that he does not exist (replacing the mystery of the existence of the universe with the mystery of God is intellectually lazy, and simply swaps one complex system with a more complex one, violating Occam’s razor). Even if God did exist, he reputedly influences us in such mysterious ways, such unfathomable, unpredictable ways, that it would still probably be sensible to live our lives as if he did not. While some might argue that the world is a better place for religious belief, few would claim that it does not cause a lot of problems, as many bloody conflicts around the world have demonstrated (100 p. 21). And yet most of the people on the planet are religious. In the US, for instance, 96% of people believe in God or a similar spiritual entity (373)). Is it just that we are all playing it safe, believing in God just in case , or is there more to it than that? Did religion somehow help us in our Pleistocene battle for sex and survival? Or, as Dawkins suggests, did it not help us in itself, but was it actually just a byproduct of some other helpful behavioral characteristic (87)? If so, then a good candidate for this other helpful behavioral characteristic is Insecurity.

7.4.5.1. Jesus Loves You [Is Religion a Byproduct of Insecurity?]
“Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion”
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)

Our Insecurity was, and is, a beneficial characteristic, indeed it seems to be an essential part of being human. Religion can simply be seen as a response to that essential characteristic. Humanity has probably developed religious belief as a balm for our Insecurities. For instance, our Environment Insecurity is soothed because religion stops us worrying about how the world works; God explains it all. All of that scary uncertainty goes straight out of the window; the seasons change, the sun moves in the sky, the volcano erupts, the business collapses, the war is won, the leader gets sick and dies, all because God wills it. There is a prime mover; we just have to try and understand how his or her mind works. We want to believe that there is an explanation, that there is a plan, because we are genetically programmed to always look for reasons. And, because our brains are designed to operate in our social world, to interpret how people operate, we assume that the plan comes from someone that looks a bit like us (374; 375) (an example of our tendency to anthropomorphize ). If we recast momentous, unpredictable events as the actions of someone with human traits, someone that we can appeal to, then the world seems a little less scary, which appeals to our Illusion of Control. From this anthropomorphic Assumption came the profusion of primitive deities: if the river dries up with no obvious cause, then it must be a god’s doing: start praying.

Belief in God reduces our Insecurity in many other ways too. Our Faction Insecurity is helped by being surrounded by group members that loudly proclaim that they share our beliefs and that God is on our side. Our Authority Insecurity is soothed by believing that our faith is correct and that others are misguided (the hidden Assumption being that when resources get scarce, you will get them, and they will not). Our Self Insecurity is also reduced by religion because it promises a path to success in life (40 p. 556), the hope of affecting the world to our benefit through prayer: “I can do anything with God at my side.” What is more, religions, almost without exception, come with the comforting promise of some sort of afterlife. “Don’t worry!” they tell us “If you have failed to get your genes into a vast brood of strapping and fecund children as the end approaches, it is not the end of your story.” We want to believe in an afterlife because we are genetically programmed to want to live as long as we can (and forever sounds good to us). Even the God who does all of the wrath stuff is comforting because we are just children, and like children, we like to have clear guidelines for how to behave. So, of course, we want to believe in God; Insecurity is one of our strongest drivers, and God is the universal Insecurity salve (376 p. 12; 87 p. 193).

It is possible that there is something more complex going on, though. Erik Ellis speculates that a function of religion is to increase our Insecurity as well as decrease it, and, indeed, the religions that make us most afraid, the ones that manipulate our Insecurity most effectively, are the ones that catch on (the ones whose memes transmit most readily). They outcompete other religious memes by finding a viral fit with the genetic Insecurity that natural selection has instilled in us. They maximize our Insecurity (guilt, retribution, the end of the world, an omniscient God, eternal damnation), then they offer us comfort (a loving God, redemption, eternal life in paradise). It is the Fear-based religions (Catholicism, Islam) that spread more effectively than those based on comfort alone (Buddhism, for instance) (377).

Of course, religion has, at its core, one central Insecurity; does God actually exist? The vehemence with which some people defend their religious views may well be a symptom of this Insecurity. We are never more aggressive than when our position is weak, and religious fervor can be very aggressive.

7.4.5.2. Religion Comes with the Package [Is Religion a Byproduct of Something Else?]
Religion may also be a byproduct of adaptations (traits that increase our fitness) other than Insecurity (374). For instance, religion might be a byproduct of our desire to find authority figures (158 p. 184; 5 p. 179); as part of our need to be in a strong tribe, we want to find strong leaders, and the strongest leader is God.

Religion might also be a natural consequence of our neoteny (our early birth) and our need to learn from the world around us. We have grown up surrounded by creatures that seem to us to be all-powerful gods: our parents and other adults. As our internal models develop it is hardly surprising that built into them is a strong (but misleading) intuition that inexplicable, spontaneous events are usually caused by a being far more powerful than us, and indeed that sometimes we can influence that being to act in ways that appear to our partially formed minds to be miraculous (such as food mysteriously appearing in front of us if we cry loud enough). Prayers, then, may simply be the adult equivalent of childish bawling, the left-over behavior caused by the programs that developed as we learned how to influence those who control our world.

Other adaptive traits that might contribute to our propensity for religious belief are our tendencies: to believe what we are told; to form theories of other minds; to form groups, to seek purpose and explanations; to see an intelligent agent as the cause of an event (378). In each case, the urge is useful to us as a species, but as a byproduct predisposes us to believe in a God or gods. And that belief in God is protected by our capacity for self-deception (100 p. 174), which makes us resistant to evidence that contradicts our internal model.

Clearly, there are many behaviors that natural selection has encouraged that could have made us want to believe in God purely as a byproduct, with our Insecurity being the most obvious. Perhaps they all contribute, but it is also possible that, even though there is in all likelihood no God, a belief that he exists might have directly helped our genes.

7.4.5.3. Have Faith! [Does Religious Belief Help Us to Have Grandchildren?]
There is some evidence that our tendency towards religious belief could be adaptive; it could help us to have grandchildren. For example, some studies suggest that faith can make you healthier (such as the study that showed that religious belief correlated with better health outcomes for aids (379)), perhaps because of the reduced stress and communal support that religion might offer. Countering that, though, even back in the 19th Century, scientists (most notably Francis Galton, none other than Darwin’s cousin) were demonstrating, statistically, that prayer did not make people healthier or live longer (376 p. 40; 380), and recent studies on patients recovering from heart operations showed that, if anything, knowing that you were being prayed for increased the chances of complications (perhaps because of some form of performance anxiety) (381). So, it is by no means certain that if faith helps our genes it is by making us healthier (376 p. 150).

Hamer, who provided evidence for a genetic component of spirituality (382) (in other words belief in a God, as distinct from religion, which is just going to church) in his book “The God Gene,” offered some other ways that belief in a higher power might help our genes: it might make us more optimistic, it might increase tribal cohesiveness (383), or it might strengthen the all-important human pair bond. (376 p. 12).

Another argument for the benefits of religious belief suggests that a religious tribe will thrive at the expense of a non-religious one. If there are two tribes, one Godless, and one God-fearing, coming into conflict, or just Competing for resources, the religious one may dominate (382) because of:

The Stick: God is the biggest of big sticks with which to enforce a moral code, and thus increase group cohesion and effectiveness. Being continually observed by an invisible agent who judges our every action is a perfect way of keeping selfish people in line.

The Carrot: Religion offers an afterlife that is more than an incentive to join the religion and a salve for our Self Insecurity; it also profoundly affects the way that we behave. It is far easier, for instance, to convince suicide bombers to give their lives for a cause if they believe that they will immediately be transported to paradise as a result. A Godless tribe might have been totally outclassed when faced with an army of religious zealots, unafraid of death. Being right that there was no God would, presumably, have offered little satisfaction to any slaughtered atheists.

Religion may, thus, have offered benefits at the tribal level, with religious tribes eventually dominating the population.
Belief in an afterlife, too, has a very clear advantage for society since it promises inevitable rewards and inescapable retributions beyond our lifespan; it is worth continuing to be good, even as death approaches; you can never get away with your crimes. The concept of an omniscient God encourages an ordered society; we have an incentive to be good even when no-one is watching. Religion makes following an ethical code a selfish pursuit; it prevents the sabotage of group selection traits (traits like those above that strengthen the group at the expense of the individual) by providing a selfish motive (going to Heaven) for seemingly selfless acts (giving our lives for the cause). We have to be a little careful here, though, because genetic tendencies will only spread through the population via natural selection if they benefit the individual, rather than the group (the argument against group selection covered earlier). The arguments above are, therefore, not sufficient for explaining any natural genetic propensity for religious belief. Instead, they are arguments for why the meme of religion can spread throughout a population. This distinction is an important one because it addresses a concern that some readers might have: if Insecurity is a beneficial characteristic for our genes, and religion reduces our Insecurity, then religious tendencies, by reducing that benefit to our genes, would be reduced in the gene pool through natural selection. The argument against this challenge touches again on the fundamental difference in the natures of our Insecurity and our mask. Our inner Insecurity, our Fear, is a fundamental characteristic programmed into all of us over many millions of years that helps us to interact safely with the world, a characteristic that is strengthening with the increasing complexity of our environment. The Facade is a more superficial response to that Insecurity and is made up of a number of coping strategies (the meme of religion being one) that allow us to combat, or rather paper over, our Insecurity and, in so doing help us in our competition for mates. Natural selection is thus driving us towards Fear while giving us the latitude to come up with ways of dealing with it.

There is an argument that the very popularity of religion is a sign that God must exist. But popularity does not indicate correctness. The discussion above suggests that religion is a byproduct of Insecurity, and, this being the case, the ubiquity of a belief in God does not mean that there is a God, it simply means that religious belief is linked to a characteristic that helped our genes so much that it is omnipresent in the population.

Whatever the combination of factors that contribute to our need to believe in a God, it is clear that we are programmed to want to invent a God, and this could be the best argument against his existence (beyond the complete lack of evidence for him ). We so fervently want to believe there to be a God that we do anything that we can to avoid facing the awful fact that he does not exist: we say that he guides us in ways that we cannot understand; we say that he will not give us proof of his existence because he requires faith; we shout loudly about how real and powerful he is, as if to convert others, but really just to convince ourselves. After millennia of easily disprovable myths (such as gods living on Mount Olympus) falling by the wayside, the tendency now is towards explanations of Gods and their actions that allow for no way of proving or disproving their existence. This is not just a coincidence.