God Delusion Caused by Subconscious Pattern-Recognition

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Study Suggests Unconscious Learning Underlies Belief in God | Georgetown University Medical Center | Georgetown University

A study by researchers from Georgetown University Medical Centre, a Jesuit University based in Washington DC, USA, has found that religious people who learn to recognise patters in the natural world are more likely to ascribe those patterns to supernatural agency and therefore to believe in a god. The god in question is, of course, normally the locally popular god.

This holds true even when the pattern-recognition is a subconsciously learned ability.

According to the Georgetown University news release:

Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who creates patterns of events in the universe, according to neuroscientists at Georgetown University.

Their research, reported in the journal Nature Communications, is the first to use implicit pattern learning to investigate religious belief. The study spanned two very different cultural and religious groups, one in the U.S. and one in Afghanistan.

Abstract

Most humans believe in a god, but many do not. Differences in belief have profound societal impacts. Anthropological accounts implicate bottom-up perceptual processes in shaping religious belief, suggesting that individual differences in these processes may help explain variation in belief. Here, in findings replicated across socio-religiously disparate samples studied in the U.S. and Afghanistan, implicit learning of patterns/order within visuospatial sequences (IL-pat) in a strongly bottom-up paradigm predict 1) stronger belief in an intervening/ordering god, and 2) increased strength-of-belief from childhood to adulthood, controlling for explicit learning and parental belief. Consistent with research implicating IL-pat as a basis of intuition, and intuition as a basis of belief, mediation models support a hypothesized effect pathway whereby IL-pat leads to intuitions of order which, in turn, lead to belief in ordering gods. The universality and variability of human IL-pat may thus contribute to the global presence and variability of religious belief.

Adam B. Weinberger, Natalie M. Gallagher, Zachary J. Warren, Gwendolyn A. English, Fathali M. Moghaddam and Adam E. Green
Implicit pattern learning predicts individual differences in belief in God in the United States and Afghanistan
Nat Commun 11, 4503 (2020). DOI; 10.1038/s41467-020-18362-3

Copyright: © 2020 The authors. Published by Springer Nature
Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

The news release goes on to explain:

The goal was to test whether implicit pattern learning is a basis of belief and, if so, whether that connection holds across different faiths and cultures. The researchers indeed found that implicit pattern learning appears to offer a key to understanding a variety of religions.

“Belief in a god or gods who intervene in the world to create order is a core element of global religions,” says the study’s senior investigator, Adam Green, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown, and director of the Georgetown Laboratory for Relational Cognition.

“This is not a study about whether God exists, this is a study about why and how brains come to believe in gods. Our hypothesis is that people whose brains are good at subconsciously discerning patterns in their environment may ascribe those patterns to the hand of a higher power,” he adds.

“A really interesting observation was what happened between childhood and adulthood,” explains Green. The data suggest that if children are unconsciously picking up on patterns in the environment, their belief is more likely to increase as they grow up, even if they are in a nonreligious household. Likewise, if they are not unconsciously picking up on patterns around them, their belief is more likely to decrease as they grow up, even in a religious household.

The study used a well-established cognitive test to measure implicit pattern learning. Participants watched as a sequence of dots appeared and disappeared on a computer screen. They pressed a button for each dot. The dots moved quickly, but some participants — the ones with the strongest implicit learning ability — began to subconsciously learn patterns hidden in the sequence, and even press the correct button for the next dot before that dot actually appeared. However, even the best implicit learners did not know that the dots formed patterns, showing that the learning was happening at an unconscious level.

The U.S. section of the study enrolled a predominantly Christian group of 199 participants from Washington, DC. The Afghanistan section of the study enrolled a group of 149 Muslim participants in Kabul. The study’s lead author was Adam Weinberger, a postdoctoral researcher in Green’s lab at Georgetown and at the University of Pennsylvania. Co-authors Zachery Warren and Fathali Moghaddam led a team of local Afghan researchers who collected data in Kabul.

“The most interesting aspect of this study, for me, and also for the Afghan research team, was seeing patterns in cognitive processes and beliefs replicated across these two cultures,” says Warren. “Afghans and Americans may be more alike than different, at least in certain cognitive processes involved in religious belief and making meaning of the world around us. Irrespective of one’s faith, the findings suggest exciting insights into the nature of belief.”

“A brain that is more predisposed to implicit pattern learning may be more inclined to believe in a god no matter where in the world that brain happens to find itself, or in which religious context,” Green adds, though he cautions that further research is necessary.

“Optimistically,” Green concludes, “this evidence might provide some neuro-cognitive common ground at a basic human level between believers of disparate faiths.”

Note that the subject groups used in the study were all self-identified theists, either confirmed Christians or confirmed Moslems. It would have been interesting to see the results of groups of Atheists from each culture. Without Atheist controls, it is impossible to know whether the result comes from a learned and rehearsed tendency to look for 'confirmation' of pre-existing bias in childhood. There appears to be no reason, on the face of it, why Atheists should not also recognise order in nature without concluding that a supernatural agent must have ordered it. Indeed, the desire to understand cause is a major spur to scientific learning and understanding.

The fact that this assumption that patterns have agency holds true across cultures and faiths as different at American Christianity and Afghani Islam, shows that 'implicit pattern learning' is a form of confirmation bias.

We know from previous studies that a teleological mode of thinking is behind this assumption of agency. This study shows how that assumption then acts to reinforce and 'confirm' pre-existing biases to resolve the cognitive dissonance caused by a desire to believe that there is a supernatural entity ordering and organizing the Universe, and the absence of any material evidence for one.

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