The psychologist Paul Bloom, another advocate of the
'religion is a by-product' view, points out that children have a
natural tendency towards a dualistic theory of mind. Religion, for
him, is a by-product of such instinctive dualism. We humans, he
suggests, and especially children, are natural born dualists.
A dualist acknowledges a fundamental distinction between
matter and mind. A monist, by contrast, believes that mind is a
manifestation of matter - material in a brain or perhaps a computer
- and cannot exist apart from matter. A dualist believes the mind is
some kind of disembodied spirit that inhabits the body and therefore
conceivably could leave the body and exist somewhere else.
Dualists readily interpret mental illness as 'possession by devils',
those devils being spirits whose residence in the body is temporary,
such that they might be 'cast out'. Dualists personify inanimate
physical objects at the slightest opportunity, seeing spirits and
demons even in waterfalls and clouds.
F. Anstey's 1882 novel Vice Versa makes sense to a dualist, but
strictly should be incomprehensible to a dyed-in-the-wool monist
like me. Mr Bultitude and his son mysteriously find that they have
swapped bodies. The father, much to the son's glee, is obliged to go
to school in the son's body; while the son, in the father's body,
almost ruins the father's business through his immature decisions.
A similar plotline was used by P. G. Wodehouse in Laughing Gas,
where the Earl of Havershot and a child movie star go under the
anaesthetic at the same moment in neighbouring dentist's chairs,
and wake up in each other's bodies. Once again, the plot makes
sense only to a dualist. There has to be something corresponding to
Lord Havershot which is no part of his body, otherwise how could
he wake up in the body of a child actor?
Like most scientists, I am not a dualist, but I am nevertheless
easily capable of enjoying Vice Versa and Laughing Gas. Paul
Bloom would say this is because, even though I have learned to
be an intellectual monist, I am a human animal and therefore
evolved as an instinctive dualist. The idea that there is a me
perched somewhere behind my eyes and capable, at least in fiction,
of migrating into somebody else's head, is deeply ingrained in
me and in every other human being, whatever our intellectual
pretensions to monism. Bloom supports his contention with experimental
evidence that children are even more likely to be dualists
than adults are, especially extremely young children. This suggests
that a tendency to dualism is built into the brain and, according
to Bloom, provides a natural predisposition to embrace religious
ideas.
Bloom also suggests that we are innately predisposed to be
creationists. Natural