requiem

March 24, 2024 4:23 PM

My gut says that having the capacity for faith/belief/spirituality is as born in as being gay or right handed. Have there been any studies on this?
posted by phunniemee to Science & Nature (33 answers total)

The book called “the god gene”

I am not smart enough to tell if it’s science or pseudoscience.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 4:42 PM on March 24 [1 favorite]

You might enjoy this essay that sets out to address your question.
posted by telegraph at 4:55 PM on March 24 [2 favorites]

There have been lots of histories of religious movements (take the various Great Awakenings in US history), as well as the reverse, secularisation in societies over time, particularly the UK (take the Death of Christian Britain for example). In Britain the history of it is to the point that you can talk about a 'secularisation debate' over what exactly the decline of institutional religion means, and what has caused it.

To your gut I'd observe that, there are very strong differences between societies, with the United States an outlier in terms of its strong religiousness (and non-religious spirituality), which suggests that whatever makes people faithful, their society influences it.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:07 PM on March 24 [6 favorites]

There are a fair number of books that deal with evolution and religion, the wikipedia page is actually a pretty good summary. I believe the current consensus is that there are some genetic differences that can increase basic feelings of awe/divinity/religious presence (that god gene article discusses this) and those definitely increase spirituality in a person. But there are many people who are very spiritual and religious without having that emotional/physical connection and religion has gone through extensive cultural evolution so I don't know if I would say that the "capacity" is genetic. I have seen some studies claiming that Neanderthals did not have the capacity for religion, and that the homo sapien capacity for religion helped with encouraging cooperation at a large scale. Because larger groups of humans tended to win out over smaller groups, there's a good chance our ancestors were more religious than the average humans at the time.
posted by JZig at 5:15 PM on March 24 [1 favorite]

There are evolutionary biologists who have asked if superstition is a result of our genetically-innate pattern recognition skills, where we mistake cause and effect (cite).

As another example, B. F. Skinner looked at superstitious behavior in pigeons, where the birds would repeat certain behaviors with expectation of a reward, even though that reward outcome remained random. So this evolutionary phenomenon may not even necessarily be limited to humans.

I don't know enough to say that this research ties back to specific genes. For variants, it might be worthwhile looking through SNP or CNV databases to see if any phenotypes or records relate to pattern recognition or related terms. It may also be helpful to look at highly-cited papers on the subject in evolutionary biology and dig into the articles that cite them.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:32 PM on March 24 [3 favorites]

There is probably some truth to that in that there's probably also a set of genetic reasons some people are prone to authoritarianism, but given the fairly rapid decline in religious beliefs in the past decades, I'd suggest it's far from the primary factor. There's been no shift over that period of time that would explain it, if it were simply a genetic thing.

Childhood indoctrination and lack of access to information seem to be much larger causes.
posted by Candleman at 6:21 PM on March 24 [12 favorites]

I saw this on a fictional television show once, but it makes a kind of sense. I can't exactly quote it, so understand this is a paraphrase:

The reason we have so many believers is due to evolution. The ancestors who came down from the trees, and that didn't believe that the slight motion in the tall grass was a predator, got eaten. Those who believed did not.
posted by TimHare at 9:25 PM on March 24

Faith emerges among lots of folks, as does its absence, in a way that feels “natural”, but actually at a point many years into incredibly complex lives that are full of rich human relationships, intense emotions, power dynamics, cultural systems, and other environmental influences. I’m personally inclined to attribute the development of religious feeling to the influence of those complex systems, rather than genes alone.

Candleman, your point about the pace of decline in religiosity is excellent - thank you for sharing it.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:41 PM on March 24 [1 favorite]

Be cautious with popular reportage on genetics, much of which has been misunderstood and/or misreported badly enough to suggest conclusions antithetical to the studies themselves.
posted by flabdablet at 11:41 PM on March 24 [5 favorites]

I wonder if the prevalence of religious belief in a society might be significantly influenced by the degree to which people's basic needs for security, support, and understanding are met through other means.

In societies with robust social safety nets, widespread education, and open discourse, individuals may feel more existentially secure and have more avenues for grappling with life's big questions beyond religious explanations.
posted by ben30 at 12:12 AM on March 25 [5 favorites]

Not sure how much the statistics about declining religiosity say about the number of people that can feel deep spirituality and truly believe. There are strong societal forces, traditions, keeping up appearances, other perceived benefits, and plain inertia that I’ve seen that keeps people in an organized religion and identify as a member. Not everyone even questions their belief, growing up in an organized religion can make belief an unquestioned given.

(My gut agrees with yours; I sometimes think it would be nice to have that capacity for belief, it must be really comforting to feel that there’s a higher being specifically looking out for you.)
posted by meijusa at 1:40 AM on March 25 [1 favorite]

Sorry to basically not answer the question as written BUT if you're interested in a philosophical take on this then you might enjoy Civilization and its Discontents by Freud.
posted by saladin at 4:25 AM on March 25 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Societal pressures have certainly meant there have been "less gay people" at times throughout history, but it didn't make those people any less gay.

Folks should note I didn't say anything about genetics. That's been other commenters.
posted by phunniemee at 4:57 AM on March 25

How does "faith" or "belief" intersect with religious practice? Are you supposing the former is a prerequisite for the latter? (It's obviously not, some people are just going through the motions, but set them aside.) I'm failing at googling, but there have definitely been explorations of the idea that belief is born of practice and ritual. Likewise, reconstructionist Judaism confronts the "what and we doing and why" question head on in a way that, to my understanding, doesn't suppose "because G-d said so" as the answer. You can certainly find people in probably any religion who are doing it for more complicated reasons than "I believe it's true". (In high school, I went on a quest to find someone who actually believed in transubstantiation and, while I didn't ask a priest, found no takers.)
posted by hoyland at 4:58 AM on March 25 [2 favorites]

There's a good book that gets into this, The God Part of the Brain, by Matthew Alper. It's from 1999 but probably addresses a good amount of the information available to answer your question (Alper was a guest lecturer when I was in university and I read his book back then).
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 5:18 AM on March 25 [1 favorite]

Folks should note I didn't say anything about genetics. That's been other commenters.

Could you clarify what you meant by "born in"?
posted by dobbs at 5:47 AM on March 25 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Could you clarify what you meant by "born in"?

I'm pretty sure there was an understanding of handedness long before the genome was sequenced. And we all generally accept that people are born this way despite the gay gene being stuff of science fiction. It's Lady Gaga not Dr Gaga, last I checked.

I'm not a sociologist but I think people do people based research that is separate from biology and genetics.
posted by phunniemee at 6:14 AM on March 25

Can you expand a little more on what a modern study on factors derived from birth would involve, if it excluded genetics?
posted by zamboni at 6:24 AM on March 25 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: No. If I knew how to ask the question I'm asking better than how I'm asking it I would have gone to google. Sorry.
posted by phunniemee at 6:30 AM on March 25

Response by poster: (Also, a lot of the answers here are interesting and perfectly fine, thank you for those! I'm trying to head off the inevitable "gently, the way you are asking this question is a slippery slope into eugenics" or some other unpleasant hallmark of metafilter commentary that social/genetics conversations always seem to pick up when that's extremely not my goal.)
posted by phunniemee at 6:34 AM on March 25 [2 favorites]

Since you're steering away from a genetics focus I won't go too far into this, but one of the standard ways of getting at nature vs nurture stuff is twin studies, and at a quick search there are some twin studies of religiosity and spirituality out there. If I wanted to go down this road I might start with trying to track down some of the work discussed in this article, which promisingly seems to address multiple countries and so might steer away from some of the ways in which anything U.S.-centric involving faith gets Intensely Weird sometimes.
posted by Stacey at 7:00 AM on March 25 [2 favorites]

Here's a Scientific American article that gives a lay summary of the research in this area: "Are We Born to be Religious?" It's from 2012, but the term "religiosity" might help you find more recent studies.
posted by unknowncommand at 7:09 AM on March 25

I’ve often had similar wonderings. I think it’s hard to study because the “belief” part of the brain doesn’t always latch onto whatever religious movement is popular in the local society. To me, my Christian mom and my astrology-believing friend are experiencing similar mental phenomena.

I have a fuzzy recollection of hearing stories about how head injuries can drastically change a person’s spiritual orientation, so I googled a few phrases related to that and turned up a paper on Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism that may be of interest to you.
posted by itesser at 8:03 AM on March 25

More on-the-ground practical vs in-the-abstract studied, but there are tools and practices that help with meaning-making and tapping into spirituality (not religion -- a general sense that we are part of something larger than ourselves, which could be "the universe" or humanity as a whole), and it's something I see in certain therapy spaces. Definitely often shows in grief work, but also existential and social-justice oriented work. It moves pathology out of an individual brain a bit.

So if tools exist to help people access that, it seems probable it's not just an on/off setting.
posted by lapis at 8:05 AM on March 25

What I've heard is a personality-based theory about authoritarian-leaning people being more prone to practice religion. Having a more law-and-order mindset leads some people to religion because of the attraction to a system of belief with rules and dictates from an external source. Sort of like, some people are more likely to want to be told what to do, rather than muck around in gray areas. So religion gives them that structure... if one follows the rules, one will be a "good person" and be rewarded.

Further reading:
The Cultural Psychology of Religiosity, Spirituality, and Secularism in Adolescence
Basic Religious Beliefs and Personality Traits
Why Authoritatians Love Religion
Religion and Social Control
Religious lies, conmen and coercive control
posted by acridrabbit at 2:27 PM on March 25 [3 favorites]

My gut says that having the capacity for faith/belief/spirituality is as born in as being gay or right handed.

Could you clarify what you mean by "having the capacity for faith/belief/spirituality"? I still don't understand what you're getting at with the gay or handedness comparators, since neither the body plans of people to whom one experiences attraction nor the hand whose fine motor control is easier to develop reflect a capacity to experience attraction nor to exert fine motor control.

Would also appreciate clarification on whether "faith/belief/spirituality" is a lumping-together of those things in order to allude to some kind of nameless characteristic common to all three, or whether you're actually after separate studies looking at capacities for faith, capacities for belief, and capacities for spirituality.

The reason I'm struggling so hard to parse your question is that I don't think of any of faith, belief nor spirituality as achievements in the sense of things that a person would just naturally do if they had a capacity to. The way I look at it, all three of those are attitudes that people adopt to various extents in response to experience.

And sure, there are attitudes that people do in practice adopt, and some of these will presumably be matters more of temperament than training. But I'm still left confused about the purpose of your question.

Are you in fact seeking to understand how likely an individual is to succeed at modifying their own faith, belief and/or spiritualty, or whether doing so is likely to fail as badly and produce as awful a cascade of side effects as gay conversion "therapy" or forcing a left-handed kid to write right-handed?
posted by flabdablet at 6:23 PM on March 25

I don't have any studies, but I do like the qoute,

"Isn't it amazing that no matter what culture you are born into, it's always the one with the one true religion."
posted by ITravelMontana at 8:58 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

Gently, the way you and others here define 'faith' 'belief' and 'spirituality' seem so broad as to be useless for actually identifying what it is about how people interact with the world that's numinous. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union officially, and more or less successfully, made Russia, much of eastern Europe, a good deal of central Asia, and the lives of its foreign socialist followers, atheist. But does that kind of totally atheist Marxism-Leninism also count as a 'faith'? Where do we stand with movements that have the trappings of science, like Scientology, or bitcoin manias?

To me, my Christian mom and my astrology-believing friend are experiencing similar mental phenomena

And this is where I would argue the history of these things really does matter. There have always been right- and left-handed people, it's innate to us. There have always been people who desire and love people of a variety of genders, likewise. I imagine there are people who've always found numinous meaning in the stars. But in the whole of human history there were no Christians before the life of Jesus Christ, just as there were no Muslims before Muhammad; these are contingent religious and social phenomena, which are by definition environmental.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:02 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

I do think some definitions would help - are you referring to people claiming to have had direct contact with a supernatural entity/mystical experiences (this happens to some people with temporal lobe epilepsy), people who have unexamined background beliefs about their place in the world and morality that might be more cultural and historical, people whose characters are rigidly ethical?
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:50 PM on March 25

Response by poster: To me, my Christian mom and my astrology-believing friend are experiencing similar mental phenomena.

itesser nailed it, essentially. That is what I mean.

I'm coming from the perspective of a person who has, for all of my 38 years on this planet, had no capacity for faith, belief, or spirituality of any flavor. Not for religion, not for any search for meaning, not for any higher power beyond humans and the things that they do. I'm not even a joiner; I've never felt some kind of way about a sport team, a fandom, a political leader, or even trends. I think there is some part of my brain, cognitively or whatever, that lacks the ability to get swept up in the spirit, for lack of a better way to say that.

And because I strongly believe (lol) that I am not special or unique in any way, I have to assume there are plenty of other people out in the world who also lack this capacity for [insert whatever word would satisfy flabdablet] besides me. And so my question is, I think this is a thing, does anyone who studies populations professionally also think this is a thing, and what have they written about that?
posted by phunniemee at 5:41 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

Here's discussion of a bunch of MRIs of a small group of believers and nonbelievers. It's just one study, and a small one. Dunno if it's useful (I found it difficult to interpret as a person who doesn't read scientific studies), but it seems to address your question in part and it has fun images of brain scans.
posted by kensington314 at 11:37 AM on March 26

I think it's Nurture: St Ignatius of Loyola said "Give me a child till he is seven years old, and I will show you the man."

A Google cites neuropsych research that agrees with this. Ofc it's up for ongoing debate, but those early years are influential in a way that's not easily changed.
posted by k3ninho at 11:39 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

Freud called it the "oceanic sensation" and said he had never felt it himself. I also think the movie I Love Huckabees tackled this question. In terms of a resounding scientific consensus on this issue, I have no idea but to me the idea that our emotional landscape is formed in early childhood seems like a better explanation than genetic predisposition to be able to feel certain way. If we're going for gut feelings about big philosophical questions that is.
posted by winterportage at 7:14 AM on March 28