Paul Bloom: The “god-shaped hole” is a myth

I’ve posted many times about the “God-shaped hole” (GSH) that all of us are supposed to have. In case you’ve been in, say, Alma-Ata, you will know what it is: it’s the longing for religious faith that nearly all of us are supposed to harbor, a lacuna that, unless filled by belief in God, leaves us miserable and unsatisfied with life.

Of course the GSH is bogus: many of us are atheists and don’t feel any longing for religion. Further, if you’re a nonbeliever, it’s very hard if not impossible to force yourself to believe the pablum shoved down our throats by the faithful—or those who, nonbelievers themselves, like the NYT’s Lauren Jackson, see belief as the spackle we need to fill America’s GSH.  As I’ve written several times, the GSH is touted these days as the force behind America’s so-called “return to religion”, which is not an increase in faith but a temporary pause in a long-term drop in faith.

In his essay “What if false beliefs make you happy?“, my philosopher friend Maarten Boudry (also an atheist) criticizes the view that we should believe things even if they’re dubious, so long as they comfort us. An excerpt:

But such a project of self-deception cannot tolerate too much in the way of self-reflection. You don’t just have to bring yourself to believe in God; you must also – and simultaneously – forget that this is in fact what you’re doing. As long as you remain aware that you’re engaging in a project of self-deception, I doubt that Pascal’s advice will achieve the desired effect. At the very least, there will always be some nagging doubt at the back of your mind about why you embarked on this whole church-going and hymn-singing project in the first place. And remember that you can only reap the benefits of your beneficial misbelief if you truly and sincerely believe it.

After being astounded that some of his friends would indeed take a pill that, overnight, would make you truly believe in an afterlife (and forget you took that pill), Boudry says this:

Is such a life of voluntary delusion really what you should want? Even if you don’t have any objections against untruthfulness per se, how can you foresee all of the consequences and ramifications of your false belief in an afterlife, or in any other comforting fiction? If you were absolutely convinced that your personal death (or that of other people) doesn’t really matter, because there’s another life after this one, you might end up doing some crazy and reckless things. [JAC: like flying airplanes into the World Trade Center.] And if you genuinely believe that you are wonderfully talented, that your health is perfectly fine or that your spouse is not cheating on you (despite extensive evidence to the contrary), you may still be “mugged by reality” later on. Reality, as the writer Philip K. Dick argued, is that which, after you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

In an essay on his Substack column (click the screenshot below to read for free), psychologist Paul Bloom denies that we even have a GSH:

A couple of excerpts: He starts by explaining what the GSH is and then says why he doesn’t think it’s ubiquitous:

There was always reason to be skeptical. For one thing, the idea of inborn spiritual yearning never made much evolutionary sense. There are plausible enough accounts of how we could evolve other appetites, including basic ones like hunger and thirst, and fancier ones such as a desire for respect and a curiosity about the world around us. But why would evolution lead us to be wired up for spiritual yearning? How would that lead to increased survival and reproduction? Perhaps it’s a by-product of other evolved appetites, but I’ve never seen an account of this that’s even close to convincing.

I know the theistic response here: So much the worse for biological evolution! Some theists would argue that the universal yearning for the transcendent is evidence for divine intervention during the evolutionary process. They would endorse Francis Collins’ proposal that God stepped in at some point after we separated from other primates and wired up the hominid brain to endow us with various transcendental features, such as an enlightened morality and a spiritual yearning for the Almighty.

I think there are a lot of problems with this view (see here for my critical response to Collins’ proposal), but the main one I want to focus on here is that it’s explaining a phenomenon that doesn’t exist. There is no good evidence that spiritual yearning is part of human nature. Children are certainly receptive to the religious ideas that their parents and the rest of society throw at them (they are very good at acquiring all forms of culture), but I’ve seen no support for the view that they spontaneously express a spiritual yearning that isn’t modeled for them. Children raised by secular parents tend to be thoroughly secular.

Bloom then criticizes the “milder” view that we might not be born with a drive to seek God, but experience of the world will eventually force the “reflective person” to seek the transcendent. The factors said to promote this drive are things we don’t like, especially “death, injustice, the seeming randomness of tragedy and good fortune, and so on.”  But I don’t see that, either.  In fact, the more reflective you are, the more likely you should be to believe things based on a mental Bayesian process: believing things more firmly when there’s more evidence supporting them. And only those with a bent for spirituality in the first place would think that injustice or death would raise the prior probability that there’s a God. As I’ve said, I always dowgrade my opinion of someone’s ability to reason when I find they’re believers in God. (I don’t do this so often with people in the distant past, when many phenomena were imputed to God that we now know have a scientific explanation.)

Bloom dismissed this milder form of the GSH hypothesis when he returned from a Templeton-run conference in which theologian Tony Jones was on a panel called “Yearning and Meaning,” and all the panelists were asked what finding of their work was most surprising. (As you see below, Jones has written about this at greater length.) The bolding is Bloom’s

 I used to think this was plausible enough, but I just came back from a conference where I heard Tony Jones talk about this work with Ryan Burge. Jones and Burge are the principal investigators of a Templeton-funded project studying Americans who claim to be not affiliated with any religion. There are a lot of these “Nones”—about 30% of Americans, with the proportion rising to 45% when you look at Gen Z.

Jones was on a panel called “Yearning and Meaning,” and the conference organizer went around to each panelist and asked what their most surprising finding was. Rather than try to quote Jones from memory, I’ll draw on his Substack post where he talked about this finding. (This post is also where I got the Pascal quotation I used above.)

His finding concerned a specific subgroup of “Nones”. As Jones and Burge find, not all the self-described “Nones” really reject the transcendent. Some of them are indistinguishable from religious people—they just don’t like to call themselves “religious”—others fall into the category of “spiritual-but-not-religious”. The interesting finding concerns those Nones who are totally secular.

Another large group — 33 million Americans — we classify as the Dones, or the Disengaged. Ninety-nine percent of them report praying “seldom or never.” Same for how often they attend a religious service. They’re not going to get married or buried in a church. They’re not going to let their kids go to Young Life camp.

And here’s the finding.

And they don’t have a God-shaped hole. They don’t long for religion, and they don’t miss it. You might say they’re filling that hole with other things (travelling soccer teams, mushrooms, Crossfit), but that doesn’t show up in the data. Their mental health and well-being indicators are a couple points lower than the Nones who look more religious, but it’s not a massive chasm. They aren’t religious or spiritual, and they’re just fine, thank you very much.

The title of his post is: Pascal Was Wrong: There (Probably) Is No God-Shaped Hole.

It shouldn’t come as no surprise that the theory of a universal GSH is wrong. Religion in America is waning, and it’s been nearly gone in Europe for several centuries. You don’t see the Swedes or Danes yearning and pining for the transcendent. Like many of us, they find enough meaning in life without going beyond life; they find meaning in their work, their families, their friends, and their avocations.

Now Bloom admits that some people have a God-shaped hole:  we know from what they aver that this is the case. But the GSH is far from universal, and, as we know, you can’t force yourself to believe what you don’t believe. Further, arguments that the GSH evolved are bogus: there’s no clear connection between reproductive output and spirituality, and at any rate, the waning of religion is much faster than we would expect if it represents a reversed form of biological evolution. Two more quotes:

Bloom:

As Robert Wright points out in The Evolution of God, the claim that religion is about morality, spirituality, or the answers to “deep questions” is only true of more recent religions. These are not features of religion more generally. In a review of Wright’s book, I described early deities as “doofus gods”.

Boudry:

What if some supernatural misbeliefs have been carefully ‘designed’ by natural selection for our benefit? Even if God doesn’t exist, it was necessary for evolution to invent him. The problem is that, even if you think such evolutionary accounts are plausible, natural selection (whether in the biological or cultural realm) does not really care about our happiness. According to scholars like Ara Norenzayan and Joe Henrich, belief in moralizing Big Gods has fostered pro-sociality and enabled large-scale human cooperation. That sounds beautiful and uplifting, but if you look a little closer, it turns out that it’s mostly the nasty, vengeful, punishing gods that bring pro-social benefits. The sticks works better than the carrot. Which raises the question: is belief in a wrathful god who will torture you in hell if you disobey him really good for you, even if we assume that it has helped to scale up human cooperation?

At the end, Bloom admits two more things about evolution beyond saying that yes, some people have a GSH. These are the two:

Second, I do think that religion is in some sense a natural outgrowth of the human mind. If you dropped children on a desert island and waited a few dozen generations to see the society that they came up with, my bet is that this society would include religion.

I disagree. The existence of “nones”, as well as the waning of religion, disprove the idea that faith is a “natural outgrowth of the human mind”.  Until the suggested experiment is done, I reject that claim.

Third, I agree that we are drawn towards meaning; this was a central theme of my book The Sweet Spot. But, along the same lines as what I just said about religion, the sort of meaning that we are drawn to isn’t inherently spiritual or transcendental. Meaningfulness encompasses such secular activities such as deep, satisfying relationships and difficult pursuits that make a difference in the world. Some people do find meaning in religion, but this is just one source among many.

I disagree again, but only mildly.  What we’re drawn to are things that give us pleasure and fulfillment. If you want to call that “meaning”, fine.  Yes, people are social and seek the company of others; and that’s likely a result of how we evolved. But does that suggest that we are drawn to other people to fill a meaning-shaped hole? No more than we’re drawn to eat because we have a “food-shaped hole.”

A while back I asked readers to tell us what they thought gave their life “meaning and purpose.” There were 373 answers, more than I’ve gotten for any other post on this site. And, almost without exception, they said that whatever meaning and purpose they found in life was simply the meaning and purpose they brought to it—without God.  I would go further and say that meaning and purpose (like our feeling of “agency”) are not usually there in advance and that we strive to fulfill them, but more often are post facto rationalizations of the things we discovered that bring us happiness and joy. (Yes, there are some people who decide to be priests or nuns in advance, but I claim most people, even secular ones, don’t set out to fill a “meaning-shaped hole” in their being.)  They discover what they like to do, and then do it. That becomes “purpose and meaning.”

In short, the God-shaped hole is a crock.

h/t: Robert