God Soul Mind Brain

world—mind and brain, soul and clay—is directly traceable to a basic truth of the natural environment. The world contains both simple objects and other brains. We are therefore equipped with computational machinery to model both kinds of items. The duality of the experiential world reflects the duality of the natural environment to which the brain is adapted.

God

    Atheistic scientists tend to take a hostile view of God. Among those in the public eye at the moment are Richard Dawkins, who published the extremely well-written book The God Delusion , and Bill Maher, who made the insightful comic movie Religulous . Their view, and the view of many atheists, is that God is an anachronistic and benighted belief, a silly fable, both ignorant and dangerous. My view, the view expressed in this book, is utterly different. Here I am suggesting that a belief in God is a natural extension of the way the human brain is wired.

    What is God but the perception of intentionality on a global scale? It is the perception of a single, unified mind behind every otherwise inexplicable event.

    Indeed, calling God a belief is a misnomer. It is more than a belief; it is more than a theory; it is more than imagination; it is a perception. That is precisely why it feels real to people. It is one of the reasons why atheists and religious people talk at cross purposes. To the religious, God is not really about theories and deductions, reasons for and reasons against. It is not really a cognitive proposition. To those who have the perception, the pervasive universal consciousness feels like external reality. One experiences the love and the anger and the awareness of God. Is God real? In the view described here, God is as real as the color red, also a perceptual construct of the brain.

    The difference between the monotheistic Christian god and a ghost who bangs a drawer shut is only one of scale. The ubergod controls more, does more, decides more. They both fall into the same category—they are perceptions of mind. When unaccountable events occur—babies are born, people die unexpectedly, planes crash, someone survives an accident that ought to have killed him, a lucky number wins the lottery—these events are grist for the social machinery in the brain. Because the events are unlikely or unpredictable, they do not lend themselves to a physical mode of explanation. Instead they inspire social perception—the perception of a mind that must have intended those events.

    A standard and, I think, unnecessarily dismissive scientific explanation is that God is a faulty deduction, an incorrect theory, or the result of wishful imagination. Perhaps so for some people, but I personally doubt that a god that was purely imagined would have so many people fervently convinced, or would have so much cultural universality. The absolute certainty expressed by worshippers suggests to me that underlying the imagination and the speculation and the theorizing and the desire is a genuine percept. I don’t suppose that all monotheistic people have had this perceptual experience, but enough of them have had it to form a critical mass at the core of the religion. Such people at certain moments perceive the presence of God as a tangible emotional and mental warmth—as a consciousness that is physically present.

    Consider the following list of perceived minds. Perceiving—sometimes misperceiving—the intentions of another person. Perceiving a soul in a favorite stuffed animal. Mourning the death of a favorite glass knickknack that used to sit on the mantle shelf. Feeling that a tree has a spirit. Feeling that a ghost is in the room behind you, watching you. The Greek gods who were in control of lightning and the sea and the wind and the fortunes of war. A monotheistic god who orchestrates the world. Obviously not everybody has all of these experiences, and yet they are all examples of the same ubiquitous process. They are perceptions of mind. My central scientific point is that you never do experience another person’s mind. You experience a model that your brain constructs. The spirit world, from God on down, is the product of the machinery for social perception.

    A philosopher might say that if we live in an experiential world made up entirely of simulation, of simulated objects and simulated actions, of simulated minds and simulated intentions, then within the only universe that matters, the universe of our own personal experience, the universe that we