I was reading this morning about Bill Maher's new documentary, Religulous, when I came upon this intriguing tidbit:

[E]ven among disbelievers, 21 percent of atheists and 55 percent of agnostics [polled by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life] said they believed in God.

Now, what do you make of that?  Of the disbelievers, 21 percent believe.  What does it mean for an atheist to believe in God anyway?

Maher himself says “I believe in ‘I don’t know.’ I’m not troubled by the giant questions I know I will never find out the answer to as long as I’m alive.”

Hmm.  As long as he's alive.  Is Maher hinting that he may get "the answer" in some other state?

That's what religion does to you, innit?  Even atheists and agnostics often find themselves framing life, the universe, and everything as a giant Q&A.  Job asks "why?"  and we're off!  But what if there really isn't an answer to Maher's "giant questions," to The Big Why?  What if the peculiarities of our species' evolution and the exigencies of our particular form of existence simply predispose us to frame our experience this way?  Don't get me wrong, asking questions and seeking answers has been a successful strategy for our species, and it's fun to boot, but knowing when to say "when" is demonstrably not one of humankind's strong-points. 

There are plenty of atheists and agnostics who can see the point of religion for believers, while maintaining that religion itself isn't needed to address religious needs.  We all have them, apparently.  In fact, William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience is still piquant, thinks atheists and Methodists might have more in common than either would like to admit. "If we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."

More recently scientists have been looking for God not in the liver, but in the human genome.  Molecular Geneticist Dean Hamer, famous for finding evidence of the biological basis of homosexuality, claims in his book The God Gene "that spirituality has a biological mechanism akin to birdsong."  Evolutionary biologists suggest that religious sentiment, which is universal, must be the result of natural selection.  And that, therefore, it must have obvious benefits to the species.

Harvard's own Steven Pinker begs to differ.  He says: "religious psychology is a by-product of many parts of the mind that evolved for other purposes." In a pithy little speech given at at a 2004 meeting of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which was presenting him with their Emperor's New Clothes Award, Pinker reminded his audience...

A crucial corollary of the theory of evolution is that conflicts of interests among organisms, of different species or of the same species, lead to the biological equivalent of an arms race. An organism evolves more clever or lethal weapons, another organism evolves even more ingenious defenses....

At any given stage in an arms race, a feature can be adaptive for one organism but not for its adversaries, as long as the first is overcoming the defenses of the second.... What's adaptive for the lion is not so adaptive for the lamb.

So a way of rephrasing the question “Why is religious belief so pervasive?” is to ask, Who benefits?... One must distinguish the possible benefits of religion to the producers of religious belief ... from the benefits to the consumers of religion.... The answer might be different for the two cases. 

Social control is obviously one of the "practical benefits," especially for those who wish to encourage religious belief in others.  And it can explain religious belief without resorting to a specific biological adaptation for religion. The inculcation of religious belief, Pinker explains, could be a byproduct of other, baser, motives.

Believers, on the other hand, are victims of "intuitive psychology" (the necessary attribution of feelings and minds to other people, whom we can never really know have either feelings or minds) run amok. "If you are prone to attributing an invisible entity called 'the mind' to other people’s bodies," Pinker argues, "it's a short step to imagining minds that exist independently of bodies."

Whether we really need it or not, we seem to be stuck with religion.  Personally, I think it happened like this (more or less):  Everyone in the village believed in the fierce god of Destruction, Yum Kimil.  Except for Bill, who was just into kind of exploring his own spirituality and doing his own thing — got the nipples pierced, a little tramp stamp, sporting the fauxhawk — just marching to the beat of his own little drum.  This annoyed some fellow villagers, and, to be fair, Bill was kind of annoying, beating his drum whenever the mood struck him.  So one day, the village got together, chopped Bill into little pieces, and fed him to the god Yum Kimil.  The End. 

I was talking to a friend of mine, an old Harvard professor, about politics, when, surprise: Sarah Palin came up.  He took it for granted, as many with no experience of evangelicalism do, that it's religious, but I think it has less to do with the religious urge than simple group affiliation.  What I hear loud and clear coming from evangelicals is not a coherent moral philosophy with which their behavior is consistent so much as the provincial counterpart to urban elitism. 

"You East Coast elites have your Ivy league schools and hoity-toity clubs.  Well, we've got a little club of our own.  And when Cambridge, Mass, and New Haven, Connecticut are swallowed up in flames by the Seven-Headed Bitch of the Apocalypse, we'll be looking down from Jesus U., where we don't even have to study, because we already know everything, laughing our asses off at you!"

Rising from the isolation of life in the exurbs in our uprooted age, it's not the need to express religious sentiment that evangelicalism largely expoits, but longing for the kind of group affiliation society at large no longer openly sanctions. I mean, come on, Most churches in the U.S. remain largely segregated.  You get what I'm saying?

Church has, in many ways, replaced "small town America," in the exurbs, where isolation is the price you pay for your sense of security. Whether there is depth of longing for spiritual exploration or not, many "Independent Bible Churches," like the one Sarah Palin belongs to, provide childcare and K-12 education, state of the art entertainment and sports facilities, a safe place for the elderly to gather, all-ages leisure activities, university scholarships, travel agencies, and low-interest loans to members.  It's basically a village.  With no Bills.

Even a nonbeliever can see that membership has its privileges. Which may, if you stop to think about it, help explain the riddle of the atheist believer...