The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering

picketing event was at the memorial service of twenty-year-old Army Specialist Brushaun Anderson from Columbus, Georgia, who had died of non-combat-related injuries in Baghdad on the first day of 2010. “These soldiers are dying for the homosexual and other sins of America,” read a Westboro Baptist flyer announcing their “peaceful” protest at Anderson’s funeral. “God is now America’s enemy, and God Himself is fighting against America.” Church members proudly held up signs reading “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “Fags Doom Nations” only yards away from the young man’s casket. In their minds, God is kindly sending us not-so-subtle messages, warning us through natural disasters to stop supporting the gay rights movement, or else it’s going to get much, much worse. God hurts because He loves. 26
    Most of us, of course, believe that Westboro Baptist Church members have lost something in translation. Yet, recent findings by University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley and his colleagues reveal that, wherever our attitudes happen to lie on certain hot-button issues, most of us are overwhelmingly certain that God also shares our opinion. This means that, whether we fall left or right in a political sense, we believe that God is on our side on everything from gay marriage to embryonic stem cell research to prayer in public schools to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. And when we genuinely change our minds about these things after hearing persuasive counterarguments, we’re convinced that God—but not other people—has changed His mind as well (or at least we become convinced that our own revised stances on these touchy subjects reflected His real attitudes all along). Epley and his group didn’t explore people’s opinions about the devil’s personal beliefs, but perhaps it’s his job to lead us astray, coaxing us into making bad decisions with misleading signs in the guise of natural events.
    In any event, the important take-home point is that natural events outside the head are filtered through our evolved theory of mind and interpreted subjectively inside the head. And our reasoning about anything outside of our own skulls does not necessarily reflect any intrinsic reality about what we perceive.
    As an analogy, consider how we make sense of odor, a perceived cue that’s much more mundane than meaning. You may be surprised to learn, but it’s worth pointing out, that there really is no such thing as an intrinsically “bad smell.” Rather, there are only olfactory stimuli; and how we perceive them is largely an artifact of our particularly human evolutionary heritage. To say that rotting flesh is disgusting is similar to saying that the sunset is beautiful: There’s no “beautiful-ness” quality intrinsic to the sunset, just as there’s no “disgusting-ness” intrinsic to rotting flesh. Rather, rotting flesh and sunsets are only perceived this way by the human mind; as phenomenological qualities, adjectives such as “beautiful” and “disgusting” and “wonderful” merely describe how we subjectively experience the natural world. I can assure you that whatever particular scents you find repulsive, my dog, Gulliver, would likely perceive as irresistibly appealing. And I mean rotting flesh and just about anything else you can think of, with the exception perhaps of skunk odor and his own feces, for which I can only hope you’d share a mutual disdain. Neither you nor Gulliver is “correctly perceiving” these smells; you’re both simply sensing and translating them through perception according to your species’ evolved dispositions.
    Likewise, just because we humans see, feel, and experience meaning doesn’t make meaning inherently so.
     
     
    When I moved to my current house in a small village in Northern Ireland in late 2007, there was still quite a bit of work to be done, including laying flooring in an intolerably small, outdated bathroom in the garage. So for