Religion as a figment of human imagination?

Ever wondered why animals don't practice religion? It's a fair question, especially when considering the multitude of beliefs humans have held. The answer, according to economist Maurice Bloch is that animals didn't evolve the proper mechanics to imagine a universal order.

That leaves hanging a really strange chicken-and-egg question about creation and evolution, but it's worth reading Bloch's essay, published here in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and discussed in this article on NewScientist.com. As you may have surmised from Bloch's background, his article is based more conjecture than lab work:

Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

"What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," Bloch writes.

"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it," says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, "whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead."

Modern-day religions still embrace this idea of communities bound with the living and the dead, such as the Christian notion of followers being "one body with Christ", or the Islamic "Ummah" uniting Muslims.

No animals, not even our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, can do this, argues Bloch. Instead, he says, they're restricted to the mundane and Machiavellian social interactions of everyday life, of sparring every day with contemporaries for status and resources.

And the reason is that they can't imagine beyond this immediate social circle, or backwards and forwards in time, in the same way that humans can.

Bloch believes our ancestors developed the necessary neural architecture to imagine before or around 40-50,000 years ago, at a time called the Upper Palaeological Revolution, the final sub-division of the Stone Age.

At around the same time, tools that had been monotonously primitive since the earliest examples appeared 100,000 years earlier suddenly exploded in sophistication, art began appearing on cave walls, and burials began to include artefacts, suggesting belief in an afterlife, and by implication the "transcendental social".

Once humans had crossed this divide, there was no going back.

The New Nostradamus predicts the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Imagine you could predict the future. With precision. And all you were doing was using a beefed up version of John Nash's game theory formula. Well, GOOD magazine (whose founder I profiled for an article in next week's JJ) has a cover story on a guy who can.

His name is a mouthful -- Bruce Bueno de Mesquita -- and he's being hailed as the New Nostradamus, making this lead quote oh-so fitting: "Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack."

The chairman of NYU's department of politics, Bueno de Mesquita (mmm, I'm hungry) has been more accurate in his predictions than the CIA.

“We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

His method is more psychology than foreign policy. He determines the motivations of the players involved in a specific issue, applies those to a "rational-choice" model, which uses game theory as its backbone, and arrives at an expected outcome. He's had a lot of amazing gets, but this was my favorite mentioned in the article:

His model predicted that upon Khomeini’s death, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khamenei and an obscure junior cleric named Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would emerge to lead the country together. At the time, Rafsanjani was so little known that his name had yet to appear in the New York Times. Even more improbably, Khomeini had already designated his successor, and it was neither Ayatollah Khamenei nor Rafsanjani. Khomeini’s stature among Iran’s ruling clerics made it inconceivable that they would defy their leader’s choice. At the APSA meeting subsequent to the article’s publication, Bueno de Mesquita was roundly denounced as a quack by the Iran experts—a charlatan peddling voodoo mathematics. “They said I was an idiot, basically. They said my work was evil, offensive, that it should be suppressed,” he recalls. “It was a very difficult time in my career.” Five years later, when Khomeini died, lo and behold, Iran’s fractious ruling clerics chose Ayatollah Khamenei and Hashemi Rafsanjani to jointly lead the country.

Anyway, with the much-anticipated peace forum at Annapolis coming up between Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, New Nostradamus offered this model for achieving piece in the most contested -- and holiest -- strip of land in the Middle East.

“In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”

Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

God's not dead, but is religion?

My copy of UCLA Magazine, with my story about the intersection of God and grades on the cover, finally arrived in the mail today. Flipping through my story -- the first thing all journalists do is turn to their story -- I noticed a nugget from a sidebar that was worth discussion.

"The prediction made by some intellectuals at the end of the Second World War that by the year 2000 religion will have withered and only be a matter of personal interest to some folks -- like some folks are Dodger fans and others are Orthodox Jews -- that hypothesis has been thoroughly falsified," claims Scott Bartchy, UCLA history professor and director of the College of Letters & Science's interdepartmental Center for the Study of Religion. "The role of religion is enormous in current events."

Forty-plus years ago, Time magazine asked whether God is dead? As Sun-Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani noted three years ago in an award-winning story that pre-dated the divine presidential election of 2004, the answer has been a resounding no.

Standing around the watercooler or in line at Starbucks these days, conversation is just as likely to turn to early Christianity and whether the apostles spoke "street Aramaic" or a more formal version of the near-dead language, as it is to whether Tony and Carmella Soprano can repair their failing marriage.

A few channels away from HBO -- on CNN, FoxNews or even Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" -- and in the newspaper each morning, competing factions wrestle with some of life's most basic questions, including what a family is, what marriage is, what it means to be "under God," and whether life may be manufactured artificially. In one way or another, God's name is invoked in the battle to answer each of those questions.

God is in high-demand -- in politics, music, court, film, books, even to a certain extent in fashion with "What Would Jesus Wear?" accessories, and the increasingly popular "Jesus is My Homeboy" T-shirts. About 40 percent of Americans today say they have attended services at a house of worship in the last week.

Well, I'll forgive her for neglecting to mention the popularity and influence of The God Blog (three years before it went live) but, certainly, it seems that Nietzsche was wrong. Do you agree?

Jesus the social philosopher

One would imagine that two millennia would provide ample occasion for exhaustive study of Jesus of Nazareth, and yet somehow every generation seems to find some new way to think about him. Our own age is no exception. For more than a century now, believers and skeptics alike have tried to strip theology from biography, to rediscover the man, Jesus, who lived before the faith, Christianity.

At its best, this modern approach to Jesus combines nuanced interpretation with thought-provoking argument. At its worst, it pretends to discern, say, what Jesus might consider the optimal rate of taxation or how he might direct American policy in the Middle East. Happily, Tod Lindberg's "The Political Teachings of Jesus" belongs among the smart, sophisticated writings on the topic. Mr. Lindberg does not study Jesus' political teachings with an eye toward public policy or partisan advantage. His interest, in fact, inclines to social philosophy. He treats Jesus as a profound thinker, a man with great insight into the enduring question of how we may best live together.

Stop. That's what I did at this point in the Wall Street Journal book review. I stopped and thought, Haven't I heard this before?

Actually, I hear this all the time. "Jesus was a great teacher;" "he was a charismatic rabbi;" "he was a rebel." There is some truth to these descriptors, but they are ridiculous to use unless -- and this is a big unless, because most often I hear these statements from non-Christians -- you believe Jesus was who he said he was. Because, as C.S. Lewis reminds us, Jesus was either "lord, lunatic or liar."