PHILOSOPHY & POLITY

According to a recent study, decisions reached while thinking in a “foreign” i.e. non-native language are more likely to be rational.

From the abstract:

Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

For those unaware, the framing effect is a cognitive bias in psychology wherein a person’s choice or response to a question changes depending on how the same question is worded. This is often the case when one framing highlights losses and another highlights gains. This article over at Wired describes the above study as well as an experiment in which exemplifies the framing effect.

Read more…

Check out this post at Mind Hacks that discusses a new group which will be attempting to replicate a slew of cognitive science studies from 2008. Below is an excerpt from the Chronicles of Higher Education article the post is reporting on:

If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals:Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be bunk.”

Heard of a study whose findings are now in question? Leave a link in the comment section!

"I don't write about naturalism often, but when I do I write about wheat in California." (Frank Norris)

Lately it is beginning to appear as though Naturalism is experiencing a backlash in certain intellectual circles. Take Timothy Williamson’s recent article in the New York Times regarding, essentially, why he is not a Naturalist. Or the recent discussion, which I wrote about last year, of fMRI studies and the responses from some contemporary philosophers over at Flickers of Freedom. The conclusion of many there was that clearly these studies jumped the gun in claiming to have abolished the possibility of metaphysical freedom (a conclusion with which I agree) and that there are many varied approaches to theory of mind that include both determinist elements as well as new conceptions of the self that mitigate concerns of an absence of freedom. Read more…

"But if nonreduction is true then we would never have Maple Syrup." Photo courtesy of Smittenkitchen.com.

In Part I of this two-part post I introduced an extended dialogue between Timothy O’Connor and Derk Pereboom that spans physicalism, reductionism, agency theory, and quantum physics. O’Connor posits a purely physicalist theory of agency based on the formation of macroproperties which instantiate in sets of microproperties which reach a certain threshold level of complexity. Once this level is reached, an emergent macroproperty, constituted as an agent causal power, can then enact downward causal influence over its microproperties without being subject to upward causation or determination from its constituent microproperties. Pereboom takes O’Connor to task for failing to account for the influence of distal causes, which nevertheless determine the behavior of the agent causal power, but to counter the invocation of an emergent property, Pereboom alleges that even in a statistical model rather than a deterministic one, we are still left with distal causes as the ultimate originator of action. In the comment section of a previous post, Aaron Kenna rightly makes mention of this, viz. that statistical, indeterministic, and deterministic worldviews all fail to provide the freedom required by agency theories/moral responsibility. In a future post I shall discuss this point further, using Strawson’s “basic argument” as an example. But for now, let’s turn to four points of analysis on the conversation between O’Connor and Pereboom to see what we can make of it. Read more…

"To reduce, or not to reduce - that is the question."

I have recently come to believe that the crux of disagreements in contemporary discussions on physicalism and agency is the seemingly impassable divide between reductionist and non-reductionist positions. Perhaps one of the clearest examples of this disconnect can be seen in a dialogue between Derk Pereboom and Timothy O’Connor regarding the plausibility of a certain type of physicalist agency theory. The conversation is multi-faceted and invokes emergent agent causal powers (which I have mentioned here before, though only in passing) as well as quantum indeterminism. In this post I would like to introduce the reduction/non-reduction divide by unfolding the conversation between Pereboom and O’Connor. Part I will be heavily exegetical, but in Part II I offer up four points of analysis on the dialogue at large and the theories therein. Read more…

I have previously written on some common misconceptions regarding determinism and its implications, spurred by a post over at what is now Reasons for God, a Christian apologist blog. While updating a redirected hyperlink, I noticed a post that had previously escaped my attention. Entitled, “Atheism and the Denial of Freedom” which posits that atheists, due to the nature of their beliefs, cannot in good faith (no pun intended) believe in free will.  In this post I would like to once again correct a specious argument that unfairly saddles atheists with a belief in determinism.

I should first like to take to task the manner in which the author stacks his conclusions. I will ignore the particular definition of atheism the author utilizes, as it does not truly matter in this instance, and instead highlight the problematic nature of the assumptions he makes. This argument demonstrates not only the sophomoric approach applied, but also a failure to understand the robust discussion concerning the metaphysics of the universe that continues to this day in professional philosophy.

Read more…

Welcome to the January 30^th, 2012 edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival! The goal of the Carnival is to highlight the best and most engaging blog posts in the area of philosophy – we have a lot of great submissions, so let’s dig in.

Epistemology

Clayton over at Think Tonk brings us a pithy post on a lack of evidence for evidentialism. Clayton argues that there exist instances wherein a person could in good faith believe she has good reason to believe that she is warranted in believing p all the while lacking sufficient evidence for believing p. There is also a valuable exchange in the comments section of the post. An excerpt from the main post:

Here, now, is my anti-evidentialist argument. William has sufficient justification to believe that he permissibly believes that he permissibly believes God exists. William, however, does not have sufficient evidence to believe that God exists. So, according to [the positive accessibility thesis], it is permissible to believe without sufficient evidence. According to the evidentialist, it is never permissible to believe without sufficient evidence. Thus, the evidentialist view is mistaken.

Following in the vein of beliefs, Jim over at Agent Intellect presents an explication on the differences between traditional Global Skepticism ala Descartes and Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism. While he admits there is a measure of truth in likening the EAAN to Global Skepticism, he claims they differ substantial ways:

Plantinga’s EAAN is significantly different from classical global skepticism. First, we do not have to have a reason for a belief if it is properly basic, and such a belief can constitute knowledge even if we don’t know that we know it. We are justified, or our beliefs are warranted, up until the point where we have a reason for thinking them to be false. The EAAN provides just such a reason: if naturalism is true, then it is improbable or inscrutable that any given belief would be true. After this, the EAAN has the same effect as the more traditional global skeptical arguments: any reason you can give for a particular belief is itself subject to the EAAN and is therefore not trustworthy. There is no stopping the rot once it’s started. Indeed, part of the genius of Plantinga’s argument is that it amounts to a global skeptical argument that arises from within externalism.

Injecting a little bit of Hume into the mix, Maryann from the Examiner discusses the is-ought distinction, arguing that for an ought statement to be true there must exist some being to which that statement corresponds/describes, but which does not justify the statement. An excerpt from the piece:

Translating from epistemology back over to ethics, there needs to be a real ought in order for there to be moral knowledge, but 1) the real ought is not justified by its correspondence to reality—that would be saying its correspondence justifies its correspondence (begging in a circle) and 2) a particular ought is not made to correspond by its justification—that would be like saying that the act of believing made something real to believe in (also begging in a circle). No, there must be ‘both’ justification ‘and’ correspondence. If one or both is lacking (by depending on the other, or for some other reason), knowledge is lacking.

Metaphysics

Occasional Philosophy has an interesting re-imagining of Tegmark’s Quantum Suicide thought experiment, which traditionally limits hypothetical conclusions to the experimenter only. Instead, the author proposes the Quantum Homicide thought experiment, which allegedly allows outside observers to draw conclusions about many-worlds vs. Copenhagen interpretations of quantum mechanics. A snippet of the proposed tweak:

The Quantum Homicide thought experiment proposes a modification to the gun used in the experiment. In this case, if the particle is measured as spin up then the gun fires and kills the experimenter, just as before (in fact, the killing of the experimenter isn’t necessary for the experiment to work but I prefer the aesthetics of the continuity between the quantum suicide and quantum homicide cases). On the other hand, if the particle is measured as spin down then the gun fires a time travel ray, sending the experimenter one day into the past.

Noah Greenstein, the eponymous curator of Blog of Noah Greenstein, discusses the role emotional states play in hindering our reasoning. Based on this, he introduces the Future Rationality Cone, which attempts to include emotion and thought in predicting the relative rationality of future beliefs by way of their distance, as it were, from other beliefs:

Considering a person’s consciousness at some point, we can map what we consider rational and irrational based upon the potential mood and thought changes. Any possible future belief (a combination of thought and mood) will be a combination of changes in prior moods and thoughts. Beliefs that require too great a change in both thought or mood may be outside the realm of rationality for a person, while beliefs that require little effort will fall within the realm of rationality. Hence, the rationality cone.

Lewis from the group blog The Mod Squad tackles Leibniz’s views on the worth of “blind thought” i.e. cognition concerning signifiers absent an apparent regard for the signified, offering up a contrast between Locke, Berkeley, and Hume concerning blind thought:

This discussion, in which Leibniz first introduces blind thought, occurs in the midst of Leibniz’s commentary on Locke’s views on power and freedom. Specifically, it appears that Leibniz introduces the notion in response to Locke’s view that the main determinant of the will is not the prospect of a greater good, but instead, some strong present unease…As suggested by the initial illustration of algebraic reasoning, Leibniz’s stance on blind thought is not that it is always problematic. In a later discussion, relating to the purpose and origins of language, Leibniz suggests that blind thought can be of great utility.

Ethics

Switching gears ever so slightly, Greg at Cognitive Philosophy expounds on the potential threat to ethics posed by genetic modification (given a biologically contingent definition of ethics).

Changing the types of biological organisms that we are could conceivably change what is or is not right to do in any particular situation. It might change the very people that we should be striving to be. Yes, it’s unlikely we’ll change ourselves to the point where harming others is a good thing (though not impossible), but to what degree our systems of ethics will have to change is not something we can predict in advance. Now, let me be clear. I’m not making the naturalistic fallacy (or at least I’m not trying to). My point is that facts about our biology and psychology are going to *constrain* our ethical theories, not wholly *determine* them. Ethics is tricky business. Philosophers have been arguing about it for thousands of years, and while we all have some intuitive notions of what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, we’re certainly not anywhere close to having all the answers. Changing who we are as human beings will cause us to have to rethink some problematic notions.

Richard from Philosophy, et cetera discusses what he views as major lacunas in a recent argument against immigration that attempts to use environmental concerns to justify its position. He argues that general increases in human welfare outweigh any alleged damage to American wages, and similarly that if anything, mass immigration highlights rather than hides fundamental issues in countries facing an exodus:

Stepping back: If we want to get the most welfare “bang” for our ecological “buck”, barring the global poor access to economic opportunities is surely not the way to go. (It’s less extreme than outright killing them, but I think ultimately misguided for fundamentally similar reasons.) We should strive for improved efficiency in less humanly damaging ways: emissions taxes, reduced animal (esp. cattle) farming, increased urban density / efficient transit, etc. Not to mention investing in scientific research to uncover new solutions — investments which are more easily made by a wealthier, better educated populace.

Assorted Topics: Logic, and our lack of Kants

On the Logic side of philosophy, Tristan at Sprachlogic serves up a new notation for propositional modal operators. He seeks to answer the following by way of introducing a new notational method:

It is common to see the following list of four modal operators presented, sometimes as though it were exhaustive: possibility, necessity, contingency and impossibility. But reflect again that, of these four modalities, possibility is an odd one out, since it is non-commital on truth-value. Also, note that systems have been developed where other operators, e.g. one for non-contingency, are taken as primitive. This can give rise to an uneasy, lost feeling. Are the usual four modal operators just a hodge-podge? What modal operators are there (could there be)? Is there a systematic way of producing them all? And is there then a systematic way of determining logical relations between them?

Concerning philosophers themselves, Eric at Splintered Mind discusses the charge that specialization in contemporary philosophy signals the demise of interdisciplinary giants, using Kant as an example. An excerpt:

Consider by century: It seems plausible that no philosopher of at least the past 60 years has achieved the kind of huge, broad impact of Locke, Hume, or Kant. Lewis, Quine, Rawls, and Foucault had huge impacts in clusters of areas but not across as broad a range of areas. Others like McDowell and Rorty have had substantial impact in a broad range of areas but not impact of near-Kantian magnitude. Going back another several decades we get perhaps some near misses, including Wittgenstein, Russell, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, who worked ambitiously in a wide range of areas but whose impact across that range was uneven. Going back two centuries brings in Hegel, Mill, Marx, and Comte about whom historical judgment seems to be highly spatiotemporally variable. In contrast, Locke, Hume, and Kant span a bit over a century between them. But still, three within about hundred years followed by a 200 year break with some near misses isn’t really anomalous if we’re comparing a peak against an ordinary run.

Philosophy News

-I regret to say that Common Sense Atheism is closing its digital doors, as it were. The site will remain as an archive, and the site’s author, Luke Muehlhauser, will be continuing his work in the area of artificial intelligence.

-Peter Ludlow discusses the implications of a hypothetical dissolution of the APA, courtesy of the Leiter Report.

-Gary Gutting, frequent contributor to the New York Times, discusses the purpose of philosophy in our current climate. I highlight this Stone article in particular because I don’t imagine there is a single reader who has not had to brave such questioning!

-Neal Tognazzini at Flickers of Freedom celebrates the 50^th anniversary of P.F. Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment. The College of William & Mary will be hosting a two-day conference examining themes across his work.

-Daniel Dennett has been awarded the Erasmus Prize 2012. The 2012 award celebrates those who have promoted “the cultural meaning of the natural sciences.”

-Matthew Mullins at Prosblogion posts on the John Templeton Foundation’s open online submission cycle for funding inquiries. The areas of focus are philosophy and theology.

In Primates and Philosophers, Frans de Waal writes:

Social contract theory, and Western civilization with it, seems saturated with the assumption that we are asocial, even nasty creatures rather than the zoon politikon that Aristotle saw in us. Hobbes explicitly rejected the Aristotelian view by proposing that our ancestors started out autonomous and combative, establishing community life only when the cost of strife became unbearable. According to Hobbes, social life never came naturally to us. He saw it as a step we took reluctantly and ‘by covenant only, which is artificial.’ More recently, Rawls proposed a milder version of the same view, adding that humanity’s move toward sociality hinged on conditions of fairness, that is, the prospect of mutually advantageous cooperation among equals.

These ideas about the origin of the well-ordered society remain popular even though the underlying assumption of a rational decision by inherently asocial creatures is untenable in light of what we know about the volution of our species. Hobbes and Ralws create the illusion of human society as a voluntary arrangemwnt with self-imposed rules assented to by free and equal agents. Yet, there never was a point at which we became social: descended from highly social ancestors – a long line of monkeys and apes –we have been group-living forever. Free and equal people never existed. Humans started out – if a starting point is discernible at all – as interdependent, bonded, and unequal. We come from a long lineage of hierarchical animals for which life in groups is not an option but a survival strategy. Any zoologist would classify our species as obligatorily gregarious.

This passage very nearly opens de Waal’s piece “Morally Evolved” in Primates and Philosophers, and serves more as a stepping stone toward a discussion of morality rooted in social behaviors than it does a fully fleshed out critique of modern social contract theory. That being said, this passage gave me great pause as I read; how could it be that evolutionary theory is so at odds with social contract theory, when both so heavily pervade our scientific and political frameworks? Special thanks to Aaron Kenna for lending his expertise and his ideas in this pithy guest post. Enjoy!

The history of social contract theory shows a remarkable story of success: the very foundations of western liberal democracies rest upon the contractarian ideas of Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Social contract theory, however, often meets with the criticism that it somehow fails to account for the essential social nature of humans. Take, for example, Frans de Waal. In Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, de Waal claims that social contract theory is ‘saturated with the assumption that we are asocial, even nasty creatures rather than the zoon politikon that Aristotle saw in us’ (de Waal p 3)[1]. Hobbes, the paradigmatic contractarian, in particular is criticized by de Waal for supposedly asserting in his state of nature analysis that humans historically rarely maintained social ties until the individuals costs of social non-cooperation made asocial behavior unattractive.

However, Hobbes never intended that his state of nature analysis be taken as an historical description of mankind, and asserts as much explicitly in Leviathan chapter 13, paragraph 11. Moreover, through his criticism of Hobbes de Waal ipso facto conflates the political with the social.  That is, Hobbes argues that political arrangements qua political arrangements are artifices (more on this below), but he recognizes the social nature of humans. Throughout the Leviathan, but in particular chapters 11 – 13, Hobbes identifies the primary causes of conflict in the absence of a civil authority:  “So that in the nature of man, we find three principall causes of quarrel. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory” (L 13.6). If, as de Waal contends, Hobbes intended to proffer an asocial account of human nature, why did Hobbes identify glory as a primary motivating factor of conflict? It is meaningful to seek glory amongst your fellows only if one is firmly placed within a context which conduces to the development of such desires, viz., a social context.

For Hobbes (and more so for Grotius, Locke, and Rousseau) any political arrangement is a construction of our own creation, but social relations are not. Certainly this is true, now more than ever: nation-states rise and fall, are reformed, borders redrawn, and individuals migrate, but yet people do not cease to maintain social relations. Hobbes nowhere denies this; rather, he argues that social relations would lead to significantly less happiness if there were no constraints on individual action. One ought not to criticize social contract theory unless one understands social contract theory, and de Waal reveals a profound ignorance concerning social contract theory in general, and Hobbes’ work in particular.  To be sure, there are legitimate criticisms to be made against both social contract theory and the work of Hobbes, but de Waal has not made any.

-Aaron Kenna.

Having but a lowly undergraduate’s degree from a SLAC, I recognize all too often that my knowledge of many philosophical topics is limited in both breadth and depth, even in those topics in which I feel most read. Despite this, I am no stranger to some of the more developed arguments for and against freedom of the will, and I have recently taken an interest in neurophilosophy and neuroscience. As some readers may note, I offered an extended treatment of the Soon et al. study, and elsewhere I have tried to use studies of this type to argue that emergentist and similar agency theories have significant hurdles to overcome if they are to maintain and prove the conclusions they draw regarding the role of conscious deliberation in human action.

Recently over at Flickers of Freedom, a piece from Nature was featured that allowed a rare rebuttal from some in the philosophy community in response to a 2007 study almost identical in scope and findings to the Soon et al. study. There is still a lively and interesting discussion going on in the comment section of that post that is well worth checking out.

 Despite my depressing lack of knowledge in many of these fields, especially the fact that I have not attended graduate school for philosophy, there still seem to be far more vestiges of agency theory left in the community than I would have thought. I am not such a dyed-in-the-wool determinist that I am not open to re-evaluating how we define freedom; on the contrary, I believe we must reconcile what we know from reason and science with how we perceive the world and the behavior of its inhabitants. That being said, some of the approaches offered by titans like Daniel Dennett (expanding our conception of the self to include our biology) do little, as far as I can understand, for solving the key issue posed by studies like Soon, Libet, and the most recent: how does deliberation enter the picture if predictive antecedent brain activity exists, and even once it has entered the picture, how can it play a causal role without being determined?

In my senior thesis I examined Timothy O’Connor’s theory of emergent agent causation, in particular his claim that emergentism eliminated the problem of interaction. By using Jaegwon Kim’s supervenience argument I demonstrated that O’Connor’s particular theory of emergent downward causation (a form of nonreductive physicalism) results in overdetermination. O’Connor also posits that emergent agent causation is a much simpler explanation for the behavior of human beings than complicated physicalist laws, but I call this into question as well. All of this is to say that, before we even begin to discuss deliberation and the participation of consciousness in our actions, agency theorists must recognize, and reconcile, the findings of studies like these with their theories of agency. Though I clearly cannot claim to know the vast body of O’Connor’s cogent and thought-provoking works, in my research I did not find a response from O’Connor to neurostudies like these. It is well-reasoned  (though flawed) monist and physicalist agency theories like these, not dualist approaches (which surely must have fallen far out of vogue by now) that also must reconcile their positions with these studies. The piece in Nature paints too simplistic of a picture of how these studies can be brushed aside if you are not a mind/body dualist, and I sincerely wonder what theories exist that would prompt statements like: “Nowadays, says Mele, the majority of philosophers are comfortable with the idea that people can make rational decisions in a deterministic universe.” Rational, sure – but free?

I look forward to reading more by folks like Kathleen Vohs, Al Mele (thanks, Nick!), and Adina Roskies in an attempt to better understand exactly which determinist elements are being affirmed and what reason they each give for simultaneously not being surprised by such findings and also urging that clearly free will is not threatened by them. I must have missed the memo!

For what it is worth, below are some concession and postulations about the limitation of current neurostudies as well as what ought to be realistically acceptable for philosophers to begin taking neurostudies seriously rather than treating them like elements of an intellectual turf war. Details of the study can be found in my aformentioned post.

Predictability

Depending on which camp one falls into, the 60% predictability is either impressive or lackluster. Given that, at least in the Soon studies (details can be found here), the choice is between left and right, we automatically expect the probability to hover around 50%, and so a 10% increase is noteworthy, but to some it is not by much.

It ought to go without saying that an increase in the predictive capability of the study would increase the persuasive power of its conclusions regarding free will. But what many often lose sight of is not only the massive gains made by the most recent studies but also the sheer weight of the implications of the concrete facts of the study. For example, in Libet’s studies in the 1980’s there was no way to predict choices – now there is, and such predictions are accurate more than half the time. To reiterate, a computer is connected to an fMRI machine and literally watches and measures human brain activity and uses such activity to predict future actions. I may be on the stodgy side, but given that it was only 25 years ago that we could not predict and we could not map or record rain activity, the technology and the studies have grown by leaps and bounds. Given this, I am confident that as technology improves, so too will the predictive capacity of these studies. The Nature article cited above describes several studies currently in the works or in the stages of publication that seek to mitigate concerns over the role of the subject in the study, timing, scope of measurement, etc. I am particularly excited about the study that seeks to remove the subjective element of the test subject becoming conscious of choice through using a video game set up.

Scope of Claims

I do agree with the spirit of the Nature article and some of the sentiments therein: these studies do not unequivocally disprove the existence of free will as traditionally conceived. Clearly these studies are artificial in nature (as all experiments are) and the nature of choice and subjective human experience as we understand it makes such studies very difficult to parse. For who, except the subject, can tell whether true deliberation took place? Who, if anyone, can say whether the 40% of the time the computer strikes out represents true freedom or a limitation in our technology?

All of this is not to discount the role philosophers have and have not had in this process. Though I do not doubt that some have risen to the occasion and addressed these studies proactively and head-on (or conducted them!) there remains an underlying impression that any engagement is reluctant and occurs only once science has ‘overstepped its bounds’ as it were. We are at a point in our development as a species that science and philosophy can no longer avoid one another. Social contract theory is threatened by evolutionary evidence that our ancestors were always social creatures. Religion and faith are under assault be scientific evidence that many evolutionary triggers explain the mass appeal of religious belief. So, too, is the traditional conception of ourselves as wholly free agents under attack by scientific evidence that our brains do more behind the scenes than we previously thought. The rise in neurophilosophy gives me hope that more and more thinkers are becoming willing to incorporate these findings in their philosophical considerations, though I do wonder about the ‘old-guard.’ Are we witnessing a backlash against science’s role in the intellectual and philosophical world, or do the sentiments in the Nature article represent genuine and appropriate hesitation to read too much into these studies, or to explain away the complicated workings of the human brain? Time will elucidate this question, but I wonder if it will it ever provide an answer.

On the eve of the 10^th anniversary of the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11^th, I would like to write this review in memoriam of the lives lost, both in that attack and the subsequent series of ongoing wars fought in the name of religion as well as  alleged political freedom.  I hope someday our world will better reflect the measured voices of reason over those of the extreme and the depraved, and that tragedies of this scope will cease to be perpetuated by states and individuals alike. I heartily believe the first step in fashioning such a change is to address, head on, the challenge that religious fundamentalism poses to rationality and peaceful human relations.

Birthed from that very same tragedy, the foundational research of J. Anderson Thomson’s Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith sought to answer a fundamental and important question in the wake of this national tragedy: what drives those inclined to suicide terrorism? The resulting research lead to a series of lectures in 2009 that has since been published thanks in part to funding from the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. The product is a 144-page primer on the scientific underpinning for why we are inclined to believe in the unseen, and how evolutionary mechanisms promote religiosity in the same way evolutionary mechanisms promote our addiction to fast food.

Though the introduction and first chapter might lead the reader to believe that all religious beliefs stand accused, the chapter titles (gems such as Our Daily Bread: Craving a Caretaker), general tone, and outright admission by Thomson reveal the target of this missive to be the Judeo-Christian conception of God. This is slightly curious, given that Islamic extremism launched the basis of the book yet is rarely mentioned outside of the introduction. Each chapter is tight, concisely written and unflinching – chapter 4 is barely three full pages. Yet this very same admirable quality that allows the book to be consumed in an hour is also its downfall; the clear research upon which it is based takes a backseat to readability. More academically inclined readers will likely find themselves combing the Notes section for more on the fascinating studies and articles that are not even footnoted in the main text. A veritable treasure trove, these notes are shamefully secluded in the back of what could have easily been a book two or three times its published length.

That being said, this book is perfect for what it is: an introduction. Its manageable size makes it the perfect gift for dilettantes only tentatively interested in science or faith, and a good doorway for amateur and established philosophers alike who are just entering the fray. And yet for all of the cutting language and unabashed affirmation that religion is all in our heads, Why We Believe in God(s) is no mere tract against the Religious Right. Thomson highlights many non-religious facets of humanity, such as secular ritual, that stem from the very same evolutionary mechanisms as their religious counterparts. Further, Thomson does not deny the usefulness some of these evolutionary by-products (such as the perceived agency mentioned here) may serve even in the modern world. He only establishes for us that regardless of its current role, the genesis of religion lies in our development as a species and not in one revelation or another.