 It's Sunday, March 7th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grofie. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international nonprofit whose mission is to advance critical thinking, mostly about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. My guest this week, I'm very pleased to have Lionel Tiger. He's the best-selling author of Men in Groups, The Imperial Animal, The Pursuit of Pleasure, Optimism, The Biology of Hope, and The Decline of Males. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Harvard Business Review, and Brain and Behavioral Science. He's the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He joins me on For Good Reason to talk about his new book, co-authored with Michael McGuire, God's Brain. Welcome to For Good Reason, Professor Lionel Tiger. I'm happy to be here. Professor, God's Brain, this book is getting quite some attention among critics and in the media. Let's start off with what you mean by God's Brain. Obviously, you're not talking about there being an actual God and seeing evidence of his brain in the universe. The idea is that the brain is God's instrument, and to the extent that there is a representation of God or godliness or piety among human beings, our argument was the most sensible and likely and interesting location for that kind of deity would be the brain. The customary thing has been to talk about the soul or something equivalent to that, which seems to me an unfortunate evasion of the responsibility to look things in the face. And with the brain, we have an immense amount of new data which fall into place as a way of explaining why people are attracted to religious experience, what it means to them conceptually, intellectually, and personally, as well as sexually and morally in every which way. And we thought that it was scientifically responsible and in a human sense, respectful to look at, if you will, where religion takes place. It may take place in churches. It may take place at revival meetings. It may take place in gospel halls, but it always takes place in brains. Religion is especially what the brain does, in other words. Do you remember when you were a kid, there was a toy that involved a little duck sitting on the lip of a glass, and it would dip its beak into the glass and get some water? Right, the barometric pressure thing, yeah. Right. Well, that, I think, is how the brain operates. The brain created religion, and religion feeds the brain, and it's an ever-ending loop, except for people that step out like atheists and others. But that's rather a separate issue from the large issue that, of course, we're talking about now, which is, how do we explain this utterly remarkable behavior? You talked about the small number of people, rather unique people, who step out of it and kind of look at it from the outside. And you appear to me to be one of those folks. You're studying religion from a scientific perspective, not from a perspective of faith. This isn't a book that will bring you closer to God necessarily. Do you think that closes certain experiences off from you? In other words, you're one of those people on the outside looking in, aren't you? No. I was lucky enough to be in the Caribbean a couple of weeks ago, and my host dragged me to an Anglican service in an old Swedish church, which had been built there in 1866 or something like that. I'm not normally somebody that hangs around religious services, but this was delightful, because it had been Caribbeanized, and all the hymns had a lilt and a beat, and people were genuinely enjoying themselves for the act of, first of all, being there, but also because they were doing something rather lovely. And at the end of it, everyone was told to hug the person next to them and all that usual stuff, which they did, and we did. And I have to say that apart from the incomprehensible material in the sermon, the rest of it was a very pleasant way to spend the Sunday morning. Well, I get what you're saying. I've gone to Easter service at St. Paul's Cathedral, been to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. You know, I'm into religion in that way. I love going to church, but as an atheist, I'm still on the outside. In other words, I'm not experiencing it firsthand. And I take it from what you just said. You're not experiencing it firsthand. You're looking at it as a scientist, as a skeptic, but on the other hand, you're not like most scientists or skeptics who turn to religion, say, the new atheists, you know, and that you don't think buying into religion is necessarily a bad thing, that it makes you an idiot. You just talked about, you know, going to church in the Caribbean. For you, religion is a perfectly natural human thing, and you're just aiming to explain it with science, right? I'm a natural scientist, and if you have to agree that 90% at least of human societies, human people experience or display some sort of thing we would call religion, you would have to be either antisocial or statistically challenged to claim that religion was abnormal. And I'm afraid that, for example, Richard Dawkins admire him, even though I do, and we're buddies, we've been on panels together often enough, and he's a wonderful writer, I think that he shouldn't end up somehow implying that 90% of our species is abnormal. That violates all known rules of biology. Well, they're not abnormal in that it's natural. You look at the bell curve, most people are religious, but his point, and I think you're conceding it when you talk about the mumbo jumbo in a sermon, you don't buy that. So they might be naturally religious, but still they're wrong on the facts. This happened to be a particularly bumbly sermon. I'm not a connoisseur of sermons, and I'm not sure I accept the fact that somebody who's been ordained necessarily has the right to tell me the truth without exposure to the evidence. But nonetheless, I have to be humble here, simply because as somebody interested in human biology, I just think a religion is, in fact, amazing. When you think of the buildings you mentioned earlier in your autobiography of the great masses I've heard, then you realize that people built those places. They're still building them. The two largest cathedrals in the world are being built as we speak in the United States of America, in Washington and New York City. Now, why? These are expensive. These are difficult. They require endless fundraising. And you have to somehow stand back and say, well, perhaps there's a point here that has to do with the maintenance of social structure, the maintenance of a sense of community, and that the particular set of ideas is neither here nor there. It's rather like, forgive me for seeming impious here, but it's like going to a musical comedy and you love the music and the action. The plot, well, that's something else. So again, spoken like a religious skeptic, but you're talking about the utility of religion, that it serves real human needs. And in fact, that's one of the points of your book. So let's just get into it. Let's talk about one of your arguments, that one big thing people get out of religion is a feeling of oneness with all of humanity. I'm not saying all religion. Religion when it's good, not when it's destructive. And that fellow feeling, that feeling of oneness, you and I would probably agree that it's not mystical, it's instead neurological. If you're explaining religion with science, with neurology, say, and I'm not suggesting you're explaining it away, then this feeling of oneness coming from religion, actually, you suggest comes down to a neurotransmitter, serotonin. Tell me what you mean by your argument that religious communities are actually serotonin factories. At this service, my famous attendance recently, the people were singing hymns, they were reciting various prayers, which again are not efforts to prove a point scientifically or engineering theorems, they were folk tales about this and that. And the music went on and there was the officiating person who had beautiful clothes on. It was sort of exceptional and sunny tropics to have a guy wearing this very elaborate costume. And he was poised in the center of the room. At the end, the room was quite attractive in a spare Scandinavian way because it was built by Swedes. And then as people went for communion, which is interesting and rather visceral in itself, and then they left and he was at the door smiling, saying hello to everybody, shaking their hand, giving them a hug. And you can be certain that if you were to do a blood assay of what was going on in those parishioners of bloodstreams, you'd find a very decent level of serotonin, oxytocin, all of the juices that accompany affiliation. So if brain juice sloshing around in our nog and helps explain how sociable we are, how well we get on with other people, you're saying religion increases those happy brain juices, right? Saratonin, you mentioned the cuddle drug oxytocin. Can't we get those not only just by popping a pill but having other social institutions that work just as effectively? The question is, why haven't there been such institutions that operate as effectively? When we look at the history of the development of moral systems, which we talk about a little bit in the book, basically they all came during the period of crisis when we moved from hunting and gathering, where we lived in small communities of 200, 300 people and everyone knew that they depended on each other and there was no question about community, community was like itself. Then we moved to agriculture and pastoralism and we started going to a different scale with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people. And that's when you begin getting images like the Lord is my shepherd, which otherwise is very peculiar because it involved that shift to a different scale. And I think that the people that handled that knew something that, for example, the communists didn't. They seem to have had a better theory of human nature than the communists or, if you will, the closest precursors to the kind of social experience you're talking about, the utilitarians. They're not elegant. They don't have good music. They don't have good costumes. They don't have good buildings, really. Somehow there's a difference in the attention paid to warm elegance as a feature of Sunday morning. And again, I'm not saying this in criticism of very serious efforts to create new forms of society, new forms of human community, and new theories of equity and all that. All very important. Definitely, in fact, it explains for you so much of why religion makes sense to people. It's not just the supernatural stuff, but religion helps people come to grips with social inequity, gives them reason to be in community, and even if everything's not fair in the world. If you look at the history of American music, it basically comes from the gospel music. And the gospel music provided a way for people who were really in a fix, who had been given a very poor shake in life, a place where they could shake and they could feel important and they could feel somebody. And if it took Jesus or somebody to give them a citizenship, so be it. They also got some good music out of it. And so one of the features of religious communities is that everyone is equal. That's a Catholic, as a Jew, as a whatever. Now, we know that that's not quite how it works and that the local church has its own hierarchy and et cetera, et cetera. But the theory is that everyone is equal under God. And the fact that the religious impulse has a superior officer, if you will, virtually all the time, Allah, God, whatever, suggests that the removal temporarily, presumably at least, of the implacability of hierarchy is very appealing to people. That actually gets back to the previous topic, though, when we were talking about replacements for religion and can humanism or rationalism muster enough to replace outmoded systems about hierarchy or the meaning of life or what's right and wrong. You're talking about religion, making sense for people, social inequality, because it gives them possibly the illusion of the priesthood of believers or whatever, that we're all equal under God. Can't secular social justice movements help people work against social inequality as well? Or would you consider all social movements of conviction to just be aping religion of sorts? I wouldn't wanna put it that way, but on the other hand, who's stopping people from having as much fun in a meeting of the Democratic Party in Minnesota as at a high mass, you know? It's available to everybody. And the fact is that somehow the political parties, apart from the wobblies and the early lefty union groups, which I remember singing the songs out when I was a kid, they didn't pay so much attention to the active community. Yes, you did have a kind of supranationalism, nationalism as in this land is your land and everyone feels very teary and so on, but then that's divided into parties and contests and so on, very different from the sense of community, which undoubtedly people have of affiliating to a religion by their own behavior. For example, on the corner of my street, there's I guess the man's Pakistani fruit and vegetable vendor and five times a day, he puts his forehead on the concrete and he prays. Now, this is a behavior so aberrant under other circumstances, he'd be regarded as nuts, but it's acceptable because he's taking part in a system that people understand, may not be understandable, but it has a kind of historic legitimacy. One development in the skeptics movement or the rationalist movement, also humanism is the growth of these non-religious communities out there. There's a whole kind of burgeoning, they call it skeptics in the pub, right? Skeptics in the pub groups where people get together once a month or once a week to socialize over their libations at some pub. I guess it doesn't have to be a pub, it could be skeptics in the coffee house, but here are communities growing up where people know each other's not only their names, but their kids' names, they celebrate the passages of life, birthday parties for each other. I mean, it does seem kind of a paltry replacement for movable feasts or something, the high holy calendar or something like that, but it seems to me the first thing is the inner drive to connect in community and religion builds on that. Are you suggesting, otherwise, that religion feeds that, in fact? It's more efficient. What you describe is and obviously can be very heartwarming to the people who take part. It's what a lot of suburban life in North America is like, the tailgate party. Right, bowling leagues or poker nights, not church singing groups. However, communities also have not merely a desire, but they have a kind of need to be efficient. And if you can pass off this issue of community to some people who are specialists in it, then that's very interesting. I think it's important to bear in mind that whatever one thinks about God and theology and so on, religious people did shape up at Katrina, faster than the governments, way faster than the government that we had at the time, and more abolliantly, more heartily, more self-sacrificingly. And that's a fairly common pattern. People in United States still give more money to religions than to anything else. Now, do you have to ask why they're doing it? Is it because they think they're part of the circle of generosity, which they have experienced in their own religious or it's not religious at least, social experience connected with religion? It is true. The numbers show that religious people are more charitable. They give more to charity and not just to religion than secular folks. But on the other hand, and I just feel obligated to say that after the acts of God with not only Katrina but the tsunami a few years ago in East Asia, the secular community raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and even Richard Dawkins Foundation recently for Haiti, I think it was non-believers giving aid. The James Randi Educational Foundation took part in that and raised $350,000 in a matter of, I think it was just days from people who were self-described as non-religious. So I get your point, but I just wanna mention. No, I think I appreciate what you say and it's to be heartily, if I may use the word left. But the fact is that human beings are generous creatures. We're committed to societies. We all understand the tragedy of the kids and those terrible ads with the cleft lip and so on. That's just easy. And you don't have to be religious or an atheist to respond warmly and generously if you're so inclined to that image. However, all I'm suggesting is that given the clumsiness of human arrangements very often and the fear people have about whether their arrangements will sustain themselves, it's interesting and that's all I'm claiming for it. It's interesting that religious organizations have been so skillful at managing this for so long, often against great opposition. And again, usually at some cost. If you look at the cost of tax exemptions and church buildings and all of that stuff, it's very, very expensive business. More expensive even than sports, I would think. I wanna talk about some of the other claims you make in the book, really thought provoking book to me. Many scholars of religion see religion as kind of initial or basic science. As a way to explain the mysteries of the universe, you go up to the big mountain, you have this numinous feeling and there's thunder and so what is it, it's angry gods to explain that as opposed to thunder. So kind of a rudimentary science. That's one explanation of religion. For you, it's also about deep seated social, psychological needs that we, that all of us as homo sapiens especially have to reduce stress and stress especially about death. So religion and death for you are really intertwined. Can you provide me, I'll give you 30 cents if you can, a better marketing device than the idea of the afterlife. Right, you go door to door, you say join us and you don't have to be dead when you're dead and atheist goes door to door, my gosh, that's no sales pitch, join us and by the way, when you're dead, you're dead and we have nothing to give you so no wonder one catches on, that's what you're saying. Well, because humans are maybe not all smart but they're not stupid either and if you have a choice of thinking about an afterlife or thinking about a no life and somehow somebody can convince you that the afterlife notion is remotely plausible even though there isn't a shred of evidence anywhere about it not bestanding that profound lack of evidence people seem to think it's a worthwhile concept if only because and here's what's the important part it helps them orient their current behavior. And so joining a community of fellow believers not only gives you a kind of salve for the pain of thinking about death but it helps you behave in ways that kind of have other psychological payoffs. Again, coming back to the brain the act of conviviality itself produces feelings of the cuddle Jews that sort of thing, produces a sense of life as warm, as expansive, as kind of agreeable and the sense of community is always desirable for most people and we talked earlier about my own position here I'm very fond of Marx Faber's description of himself he wrote three of the most magisterial histories of religion in the world of the three major religions but he called himself religiously unmusical he understood it, he didn't get it and I think that there are many people that get it and don't care to understand it because that's not their job. Right, they hear the tune and they don't need to really understand the music behind it, the notes they don't need to be able to read music in order to know the tune. Well, that's a good way of putting it and I think that again to come back to the original formulation here what concerned Michael McGuire and me was that the idea of religion as a source of community or of explanation and so on had become so hot for reasons which were attractive in publishing terms and in dialectic terms and so on but it just seemed to me that it was time to step back and say, wait a second we've got this huge behavioral syndrome in our species it doesn't come from the elbow it doesn't come from the shoulder clearly it comes from the brain McGuire is an expert on brains and he understood serotonin well before others along with his colleagues and let's make use of that. So in a really measurable way your book is a rejoinder or a response to the new atheists I mean you're an atheist or a skeptic or whatever word you want to use but you're offering what you might imagine to be a corrective to that line that says religion is bad and if you're religious you're dumb. I'm not offering a corrective a helping hand if you're saying religion is dumb Michael McGuire and I are saying well maybe dumb but sassy and happy neurophysiologically and let's examine why and so I think that the life of the skeptic of the atheist, of the firebrand who thinks that any person who believes is some sort of weird dangerous maniac first word is relax if you can not live in a sort of sabbara norola however you pronounce that kind of community like the Spaniards in 1492 if you can as it were choose your community which we can't always do then don't see this as a dire issue because in a curious way if you happen to be opposed to religious people much of their activity is wholly theoretical. It has to do with the nature of God now when it gets to issues about abortion and those kinds of things which are not necessarily religious they may as well be moral just straight moral then you've got a different case but again I somehow felt that the argument had gone out of hand and that we have to get back to a natural science of religion and make use of what we know is the principle instrument of religion both coming and going which is the brain. I'd like to let our listeners know that you can get a copy of God's brain through our website forgoodreason.org Lionel you mentioned maybe offering a helping hand to the new atheists not a corrective but basically saying relax religion is natural let's try to explain it not explain it away but what about the harm that religion causes or do you see that as being overplayed by the new atheists? I'm not only talking fundamentalism and terrorist bombers and that sort of stuff but the harm in white bread American lives when they believe too much of the supernatural. Here I agree with you that it gets to be very tricky as a personal stance how you deal with that at the same time let's assume that any jihadist is crazy and people who live with that metric in their lives clearly are exceptionally dangerous and I have no particular recipe that would be helpful to anyone dealing with some imam somewhere that wants to have death for the infidels for breakfast. That's a separate issue. I'm really talking and it's a limited group to address people of goodwill some literacy who are interested in how and why human beings behave. It seems to me that if you want to change a system it's essential that you understand it first and if you want to have an impact on religious organizations religious behavior understand it first. Don't just as it were criticize it and say you poor sap you don't understand how stupid you really are to believe in the holy trinity. Well you know I come back and I've written about this before probably the most successful religious holiday in the world is Christmas and what is Christmas but a celebration of the fact that a woman who gets pregnant is needy she needs help. She gets help from the community the three wise men and everybody celebrates the core mammalian experience which is mother and child at their best producing or reproducing. Now what's so interesting in terms of the contemporary situation we face with male and female differences and deadbeat dads and the like is the brilliant stroke that because Mary is a virgin Joseph is not a father not the deadbeat dad and the responsibility for welfare goes to the community and the community steps up. Right leaving aside cheeky responses like was God the deadbeat dad there. Exactly all of that but as a story it is universally understandable at some limbic level I don't think anyone would sit down and have a kind of serious logical discussion of this but you can have a biological discussion of it and that's why I think it's so interesting that we understand the reasons for many of these rituals and observations and so on because very often you will find that they correspond to some very basic human needs uncertainties perplexities and skills. So that's basically the big push of this book God's Brain that almost everything religion does for us is something it's kind of a loop it's something both our brains do and our brains need done for our brains right so provides all these social needs meets those. It governs reproductive life which is always turbulent. Well you mentioned abortion a few minutes ago let's talk about sex and religion because religion not only governing the reproductive life but it enters into really every aspect of human sexuality most people think of only fundamentalists focusing on everyone's sex life but you actually see religion of all stripes and all around the world in every culture getting entangled in sex so the question is why is that? Just because it's that basic why does widespread supernatural belief about life after death or God taking care of us always seem to actually come around to personal matters of sexuality. Because sex is so powerful it's so attractive so much fun. Men and women are wired for it practically until they die certainly until they're 50 or 60 and you have a group of humans, females who spend a great deal of time, energy and change on their appearance and it's not just pride but it is part of the whole reproductive game and they know that. Yeah it's mating rituals all that. All that. And so it's a very important process and religious organizations try to intervene at every stage birth, communion, bar mitzvah, marriage and so on death finally. But the reason is I think because they're too difficult I think to work out entirely on one's own and the dream of the sort of psychologically renaissance person who can figure out every ritual, every move in life, every obligation and every right that's very hard to do. It takes a huge amount of effort. Berkman Russell was very unusual and people like him are very unusual. Most people haven't got the time they're running for a bus. Most people don't have what it takes to invent oneself kind of make one's life a work of art instead you need institutions to fit into you're saying. It's easier and that's why but again we have a chapter on primates that's what primates do. If you're a self-willed, self-controlled primate you're doomed. You can't make it alone. You've gotta be in a group and the stories we tell about how primates interact in a way that is almost like a religious service is to me somewhat convincing or actually very convincing of the fact that they too understand the importance of communities. So just now and I don't wanna get off track cause I wanna stay on religion or at least get back to religion but right now it seemed like you were using the term community and the term religion interchangeably. Yes, but not conceptually. It's just that they tend to go together empirically. If you look at an institutional structure of a community very often it's the churches that have a role to play more than garages say in organized terms. Understood, I wanna get back to sex one of my favorite topics. Religion is really, I know nothing more fascinating than to study religion but sex is a close second maybe. Even liberal religions, even religions that you would think would not be interested in human sexuality, they seem to be all kind of worked up about human sexuality as well but on the other side kind of to oppose the puritanical or the fundamentalist take on human sexuality. So reproductive rights, the liberal churches are all activists in a pro-abortion sort of way. They're all pro-gay rights not just kind of saying to each his own but they're actually advocating for a different take on this specific topic in human sexuality. So it's really across the board. It's not just a sliver of religion that's all wound up about human sexuality. It's all religion in a sense. Yes, but you have also to ask yourself what is the function of a church in affecting reproductive success? I'm talking here in terms of having good, healthy, viable themselves reproductive offspring. Just an interesting case in point. There has been some talk of a male contraceptive that men can take and not the condom. But a chemical. A chemical and so they will not be puritile and it appears that so far there's been a lot of opposition to this from guess who women. And why is that? Because one of the ways men and women get married and get together is people get pregnant. And my last book, The Decline of Males dealt extensively with the consequence of female controlled conception or contraception so that males no longer knew who their children were because women could and I believe should be able to decide themselves what their reproductive status shall be. But this meant that men lost what in biology we call paternity certainty in a rather sharp manner and could no longer really be sure that the child that their woman was bearing was necessarily theirs. And the consequence of that is that a lot of men simply escaped the game or left the game and became, as I put it in my book, they became outlaws rather than in-laws. And so we now find a really new reproductive situation. For example, for the first time in England there are more unmarried women than women. And in France, this kind of goes against the fundamentalist Christian notion in the States that unwed mothers lead to social ills but in France there are more unmarried mothers of children than there are married. I'll have to dig up the exact statistic but this kind of data is marshaled forth to argue against things like gay parenting or single mother parenting, that you need one man, one woman and France hasn't fallen apart. You're just suggesting that everything's changing but so how does religion enter into that? Well, religion essentially I think had been a way to discipline the males. Everyone said that you need religion to keep the girls pure so that there will be virgins on their wedding night. And in some places as you know the bed sheets would have to be draped out over the parapet and there have to be a blood stain signifying virginity but the importance of the religious pattern is to keep the males in line. So have we lost something with religion not keeping the men in line? I wouldn't want to make a comment on that. It's above my pay grade as it were but I think that if you talk to a lot of women in big cities or small cities who are very well educated because they knew they had to take care of themselves and ask them about their reproductive careers to go on about their productive lives, fine. They work at Procter & Gamble and they can do this and that and they can take trips and so on. Ask about their reproductive lives and they turn one and say, well, I wish there was one good man. Well, it does Lionel sound like you're drawing a direct line between the reduction of the impact of religion and this negative social consequence. It really sounds like- No, actually what I'm talking about is the introduction of technology in the form of the birth control bill. And the religions were kind of taken aback by this. I don't think except for the Catholics, none of the other religious groups had any strong opinion about it partly I think because they didn't fully appreciate the enormity of what was going on. The Catholics had some sense and that's why they forbade women to use contraception and advocated the rhythm method and so on haplessly. And they could still keep the men in line. They could, that's right, because the shotgun was always there. And when Susie came home and said, you know, I've got good news for us, I'm pregnant, George said, oh, well, well, wonderful. Now when she came home, she said, I've got good news, we're pregnant. He says, we, and until DNA testing comes along, which changes the rules right again, that was the case. And I think the change in the world has been profound and it hasn't had a great deal to do with religion because I think that finally reproductions is the primary driver of human activity and religions have sought to control that as they will, for example, in fundamentalist Muslim communities. But the fact is that even when you look at the women wearing headscarves or veils or whatever, most people think this is a sign of religious affiliation. It's really a sign to the men that I'm gonna be a decent wife because I'm part of the community. So you can trust me. And there are many, I wouldn't say Westernized, but let's say educated in the Western world, women in Muslim societies who still wear the burkas and considerate kind of pro-women to do so. It's very mysterious to many of us from outside that culture, but it's quite understandable given the fact that sex is such a volatile issue. I had a student who did a doctorate with me at Rutgers University, she was an Austrian English woman, very, very bright, who married an Iranian. And they lived in the countryside and she told me that, she studied mate selection in rural Iran and she told me that if you're walking down the street in Iran and you're a guy and you happen to just hit a woman by mistake, it's a crowded area and you touch her, it's suddenly a big matter for families because you violated her sanctity somehow. And it's very, very tension-provoking. However, when she was pregnant, strange men would come up and pat her belly and say, wonderful, wonderful, because she was clearly already pregnant and the issue of paternity didn't arise. Well, that's an extreme case, but on the other hand, it did happen and it probably still happens. And that illustrates that there are complex social factors going into this. It's not just the tyranny of religion making women wear burkas. Well, I would be very upset if all people in my community were required to wear burkas. On the other hand, I can understand that in communities with limited resources, very strict hierarchies of politics that this may have developed. And the other thing that Paula, my student, told me was that in Iranian rural life, there's supposed to be a very puritanical social existence. But she said, go upstairs to the sleeping alcoves and you'll see the walls plastered with Playboy bunnies, all kinds of raunchy material because nice girls just wanna have fun. Right, within the confines of nice society or something like that. That's right, that's right. So I think again that the idea of religion as a sort of portmanteau damper of all fun and exuberance and sexuality may be right in many communities. When we talk in our book about James Joyce's portrait of an artist as a young man and you see the strenuousness and difficulty of his movement from being a pious Catholic to becoming a kind of writer that he was. Very painful. And most people don't go through that. They just either treat the entire matter less seriously than Joyce did. Or they accept it and they say fine, this is, we have certain traffic rules and stop when you come to a octagonal sign. Professor, we were speaking earlier about replacing religion if it could be done. Religion seems like it's here to stay, it's hardwired or it's a function of the brain. That's your take. At the turn of last century, leading social thinkers, they all predicted the impending demise of religion. They talked about how society would continue to become secular, supernatural religion would be replaced with a, in quotes, religion of humanity. Yet supernatural religion persists. I think that there is a growing skeptics movement, atheist movement, something like that. So my question is, what accounts for that growing even as religions here to stay? One of the important principles of biology is variation and skillful communities enhance variation. I've often thought, for example, one of the reasons that societies like North Korea or East Germany were and are so boring is because they don't have freedom of communication. And in a kind of primate community or a small scale human community, we need everybody. We can't afford to shut somebody up. You might have somebody who's diabetic, who's getting up early in the morning and saying, we've got to get some food today. Let's go hunting right now. Half the community says, oh, I just want to turn over and go back to sleep. No, no, no, says this unusual figure and they go out and they get something or they don't. But basically my point is that trying to restrict the nature of communities, either as 1492 Spain or 2010 North Korea or any other of these exceptionally rigid communities, if you're going to do that, you might well lose out. And when people are highly regimented, they lose fertility of imagination, a sense of nimbleness, a sense of experiment and so on. And so I can be perfectly happy seeing a skeptic's meeting on the fallacies of the Holy Trinity and a church called the Holy Trinity. That doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother me now, it used to. When I was younger and I had grown up in Montreal, which has more churches per capita than almost anywhere else in North America and also incidentally the highest ratio of rental as opposed to owned homes. As an aside, yeah. That was a community where religion was very, very important. And as a Jewish kid, I was always getting beat up because I had done this terrible thing to Jesus, which escaped my notice, but it was tough. And so I've always been very suspicious of religious zealots and uniform views on what you're supposed to think and what you're supposed to believe. At the same time, we now live in a world where people are constantly moving. Everyone's inside, everyone else is skull with the internet and cell phones and every which way. And I think we have to adapt to a new velocity of interaction with people not like you and me or him and her. But that velocity of interaction, are you suggesting that at the same time the non-religious will be growing even as religion will persist and will never go away? I can't say. First of all, for groups to grow, they have to reproduce. And I don't know about the birth rates of the skeptic movement, for example. The secular left have a lower birth rate, say, than fundamentalist Christians, that's for darn sure. And that's non-trivial. Yeah, I see. And it's the same with orthodox Jews who have seven or eight children. Or Mormons, et cetera. Exactly. And so one wants to look at numbers. How many divisions does the Pope have? Napoleon asked once. Numbers are non-trivial. And in places like India, Pakistan, where there are these religious divides, birth rates are important. So I think that's one measure. And you're quite a student being able to drag up that fact about secular left and birth rates because that's very important. It might well be that if you're a very thoughtful individual on the secular left, you spend a lot of your time and energy concerned with environmental issues. Overpopulation, you don't have kids, but therefore you're going to be bred out of the race. Exactly. And not that everybody has an irreplaceable brilliant gene that they will be lost forever. But we're talking now about very large groups and the very large groups in the world currently, the most influential and possibly dangerous are the religious ones. Remember, we used to fight over communism and capitalism. Was it better to own a store or to have a government-controlled monopoly? Well, who cares about that now? And now you find people lining up on grounds of what's called Western society, which is essentially Christian, I guess today a Christian, or Islamic society. And in the middle you have Europe with a measure of bafflement about its inability to deal with its own complexity as we're currently seeing in Greece. And somehow, though I wrote a book on optimism, The Biology of Hope, which is why I was interested in what religion did, I'm not sufficiently optimistic about any set of arrangements to think that they are irrevocably going to increase and improve. The opposite may well be true. Well, on that optimistic note, professor, thank you for joining me for our discussion. Very much appreciated it. Well, I enjoyed it myself and I wouldn't mind going on about it, but I know everyone has their limits, including your audience. No, no, I know, at least I think I know my audience, they'd be up for hours more, so we'll have you back on the show to be sure. Thank you. Thank you. And now, again, this week is the honest liar. Here's Jamie Ian-Swiss. Hey, sports fans, what's the most deceptive American sport? Major League Baseball regards 1869 as the year baseball was officially born as a professional sport. And research shows that the transmission of secret signals across the baseball diamond began the very same year. An element of the game that is not only crucial to its workings and very nature, but that is therefore as old as the game itself. Inspired by semaphores, Morse code and the use of military signaling in the Civil War, baseball signals are a complex craft, one that players, pitchers, catchers, hitters, fielders, not to mention managers and a multitude of coaches must master in order to be successful. And yet it is an element of the game that is invisible to most casual fans. If most of what you know about baseball is summed up by three strikes and you're out, four balls and you walk, well then baseball might just appear on the surface to be the world's slowest and least interesting sport. But not unlike the movie Microcosmos, which revealed the hidden world of insect life that is invisible to most casual observers, the game of baseball is also dense with secrets, deceptions and strategies that shift and change with literally every single pitch of the ball. Indeed, probably a thousand such secret signals are communicated in a typical baseball game, not only among the defense, that is from catcher to pitcher on each and every pitch, but on the offensive side as well, from the manager and coaches in the dugout, out to the coaches on the field, posted near first and third base, and who in turn relay those signals to the hitter preparing to swing at the next pitch. This silent cacophony of signals without noise renders the game for many fans like myself, a gripping and endlessly fascinating drama, as dense and duplicitous as a John Le Carré spy novel. And indeed, it is the relaxed pace of the game of baseball that enables this subterranean channel to even exist, since a faster game would not permit the elaborate coded sequences used to communicate countless strategic decisions that managers communicate to players, including the steal, double steals, the hit and run, directing hitters when to take a pitch, such as on a three and O count, or when to lay down the bunt, or that glory of the game made famous by Jackie Robinson stealing home. And like any good code, these signals must be difficult to crack in order to prevent the opposing team from secretly stealing your signs and using that information to their advantage. In fact, stealing signs is also as old as the game itself, since there were references to a team being caught stealing signs in the early 1870s, a practice that continues to this very day. According to a 2001 article in The Wall Street Journal, in the legendary 1951 playoff game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Giants were allegedly stealing signs with a telescope. So in the game that eventually ended with Bobby Thompson's legendary shot heard round the world home run, Thompson might just have known what was coming. Now the code itself, a sequence of gestures, can render a coach appearing as if he has been beset by a cloud of mosquitoes, or a sudden case of indigestion, tapping and touching his chin, chest, nose, ears, hat, or belt buckle in a dizzyingly rapid sequence. And yet, even when all that is done, it might just be a single sign, the first or the last gesture, for example, that actually communicates the critical information. Of course, if the team that is hitting has a runner on second base, then the other team must be prepared to change their signs so as to prevent the runner from stealing them and signaling the next pitch's location to the hitter. How does he do that? Well, one possibility is that as the runner leans forward preparing to run, he touches a knee with one of his hands. Left hand means one side of the plate, right hand means the other, and now his teammate, the batter, is ready for the location of the next pitch, a potentially devastating advantage. But what about the rules, you ask? Well, there actually is no rule against stealing signs because signaling is such a fundamental element of the game. However, in recent years, management has indicated that they will frown on the use of electronic or mechanical equipment beyond the use of the human eye and hand. And thus, the battle between signs and sign stealers continues evermore. Now, as the honest liar, I am interested in the countless ways that deception enters our daily lives. But perhaps in fairness, I should acknowledge a differentiation between deception and subterfuge. Most of signaling perhaps falls more in the category of subterfuge, whereas outright deception would be, for example, when the pitcher tries to keep the runner's guessing by faking a throw toward first base, then fakes another throw toward third, or in the rare but lovely case of a fielder faking a throw and hiding the ball for a moment from the runner in order to induce a runner to expose himself to a tag or a throw on the base path. So what American sport is most laden with deception? Well, this fan would suggest that it's probably baseball, not because of the crudely concealed use of steroids, a disgraceful but fortunately passing phase in the great game's history, but rather thanks to the beautiful coated deceptions that flash across the diamond before every pitch, invisible to all but the combatants and their fascinated fans. Could it be that this very element of elegant deception is what really makes baseball America's pastime? This is Jamie Ian Swiss, and I am the honest liar. Let's go Yankees. Thank you for listening to this episode of For Good Reason. To get involved with an online conversation about this episode, join our discussion at forgoodreason.org. Views expressed on For Good Reason aren't necessarily the views of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Questions and comments on today's show can be sent to info at forgoodreason.org. For Good Reason is produced by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri. Our music is composed for us by Emmy Award-nominated Gary Stockdale. Contributors to today's show included Jamie Ian Swiss and Christina Stevens. I'm your host, DJ Grophy.