Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World (Clay Routledge)
OVERVIEW
Clay Routledge’s hypothesis in Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World is this: death anxiety underlies supernatural thinking. The belief in God and souls and afterlives? Death anxiety. Ghosts, fate, destiny? Also death anxiety. The back half of the book may be a repeat for atheists (why supernatural beliefs can benefit people psychologically, the dark side of those beliefs, etc.), but the connective thread between existential threat and supernatural belief is fun and fresh and takes some unexpected twists.
The threat of mortality
Our evolutionary advantage has long been our big brains, which give us an advanced awareness of self, the ability to ruminate on the past and imagine ourselves in abstract futures. Sometimes, this blessing is a curse: the awareness of self is also a temporal awareness, one with an obvious limit: death. Elsewhere in the ecosystem, animals face acute threats, which cause acute distress. But the threat of death for the human animal is chronic, it’s inescapable. For a deer or rabbit, predation is an intermittent danger. For humans, the predation is constant – our mortality a relentless, stalking terror. Threats like this – unassailable, persistent – can only be overcome with creative mental maneuvering. Our favourite cognitive tactic is denial. And when it comes to the threat of death, this tactic takes the form of supernatural thinking.
Here’s mortality-driven magic in action:
· Souls: Belief in souls and afterlives may be our earliest form of supernatural thinking, with ritualistic burial dated as far back as 100,000 years; starting 30,000 years ago we find cave drawings suggesting our ancestors believed dead people went to other realms. Humans have physical bodies, and bodies die. The obvious solution is to grant ourselves a non-physical essence that transcends death, that goes somewhere else. To solve the problem of mortality, we imbue ourselves with incorporeality.
· God: As babies/children, our caregivers serve as existential anxiety regulators. We turn to them for physical and psychological security. But once we realize Mom and Dad are not invulnerable, that they too are threatened by fragility and finitude, this is where some people transfer their attachment to a supernatural parental agent: God. God replaces our parents as the protector from existential threat.
· Meaning: Then there’s our desire for a grand meaning to life. By meaning here we mean ultimate, cosmic, pre-ordained meaning (not meaning in the ordinary, every-day sense). Our lives are small and finite and this makes us desperately want to be part of something more. We yearn for a meaning of life because that suggests there is some grand, unifying purpose or intention to the cosmos. If you can convince yourself that there’s a reason you exist, then you open the door for an intelligent super-creator and the possibility that there’s more to life than our physical reality. There’s fate, there’s destiny, there’s a purpose to existence – you’re not alone in the cosmos, you’re special – there’s more to life than passing into oblivion.
Religion, then, is the historical architecture that fits our proclivities for these kinds of supernatural thinking. Any belief that there’s more to life than physical reality is a balm to our existential anxiety. Not only does it assuage our frank terror of death, it gives us cosmic significance and meaning.
Supernatural thinking – the non-believer’s edition
But wait! Believers aren’t the only ones who fall prey to supernatural security blankets… many studies show that atheists are prone to supernatural thinking too, especially if there’s no opportunity for them to engage the rational side of their brain (i.e., if they are forced to make quick, intuitive decisions).
Clever experiments show that increasing death awareness (giving “mortality primers”) tugs atheists toward the supernatural. How do you measure this? Maybe you have atheist participants quickly sort categories of words into “real” or “imaginary.” Especially when thinking about personal annihilation, atheists take longer to sort words like “God” or “soul” into the “imaginary” category (their rational beliefs chafe against the unconscious need for existential security). Or you measure physiological responses like skin conductance. Atheists will tell you that they don’t believe in God, but when asked to verbally invite God to harm them, they sweat and stress just like the believers do (even though they self-report feeling no anxiety). Atheists also fall prey to teleological errors, perceiving purpose or design where there is no evidence for it. Even secular scientists under certain experimental conditions will agree, for example, that the purpose of the ozone layer is to protect us from UV light. But there is no purpose to the ozone layer. And even self-proclaimed atheists will say things like “I guess I wasn’t meant to get that job” or “that relationship just wasn’t meant to be,” treating the universe as if it were guided by invisible forces.
In short, we all fall prey to supernatural thinking from time to time. And if supernatural thinking is a bulwark against existential anxiety, then ramping up death awareness should in turn ramp up our belief in God, angels, souls, afterlives, fate, destiny, and our propensity toward teleological explanations for phenomena – and this is exactly what we see experimentally.
(If you are an atheist reading this and thinking “no, that’s not me,” then check out this book next. You’ve never felt sentimental about a family heirloom? You’ve never had a pre-game ritual? You don’t feel disgust at the idea of wearing a sweater owned by a serial killer? That’s magical thinking too).
A common humanity
Routledge’s hope is that the universal inclination toward supernatural interest may be one of the ways believers and non-believers close the gap, one of the ways they find a common humanity. While I think it’s reasonable to expect this may encourage some atheists to be more compassionate with theists, the hope perhaps overreaches. If our collective coming together hinges on atheists sentimentally reflecting on their own inclination to irrationality, we may not get far. Routledge describes Ernest Becker’s theories about death denial, and I would turn to Becker here as well. Becker believed (with good reason, as evidenced by Terror Management Theory) that when faced with mortality we double down on our identities, on our ego and the features of self-esteem. If the atheist identity is rational, intelligent, objective, analytical… wouldn’t telling atheists that their self-concept is flawed and that their secret fear of death makes them irrational, push them to chafe and deny? To cling more tightly to the identity they think they embody? What a terribly delightful circle: the rational atheist is experimentally irrational in the face of death, but telling them this reminds them that they will die… which inspires them to ignore scientific evidence, deny irrationality, and recommit to their rational atheist persona.
Checkmate, atheists!
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
I would say pay close attention to death reminders and how they may sway you to supernatural interest and teleological errors of reasoning, but one of the suggestions this and other books make is that some amount of supernatural thinking is healthy (and, critically, unavoidable)… so I have no advice other than find the humour in this and be kind to everyone (after all, humans are just anxious primates trying their best not to think about dying forever).
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes, but like The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking and The Belief Instinct it will anger many atheists I’m sure.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? How death anxiety underlies supernatural thinking.
Who should read this book? Atheists and theists (so we can all be enraged together but for different reasons. Maybe that’s the true way we come together ;)