The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (28 page)

4
.
Shaun Nichols, “Imagination and Immortality: Thinking of Me,”
Synthese
159 (2007), 215–33.

5
.
Cited as “Attributed to Goethe (Johann Peter Eckermann,
Conversations with Goethe,
1852)” in Shaun Nichols, “Imagination and Immortality: Thinking of Me,”
Synthese
159 (2007): 215–33.

6
.
Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” in
Collected Works of C. G. Jung,
ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, vol. 4,
Freud and Psychoanalysis
(London: Hogarth, 1953), 304–5. Originally published in 1913.

7
.
Albert Camus,
The Plague,
trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1991), 119. Originally published in 1947.

8
.
David Cohen and Angèle Consoli, “Production of Supernatural Beliefs during Cotard’s Syndrome, a Rare Psychotic Depression,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
29 (2006): 468–69.

9
.
Jesse M. Bering, “Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Agents’ Minds: The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs as Phenomenological Boundary,”
Journal of Cognition and Culture
2 (2002): 263–308.

10
.
John Gay, “My Own Epitaph,” inscribed on Gay’s monument in Westminster Abbey; also quoted as “I thought so once; but now I know it.”

11
.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
The Wall,
trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions Paperback, 1969), 8. Originally published in 1939.

12
.
Miguel de Unamuno,
Tragic Sense of Life,
trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2007), 71. Originally published in 1912.

13
.
Clark, “Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity” (italics added).

14
.
N. Emmons, “Children’s Beliefs about Themselves as Babies, In Utero and Before They Were Conceived” (unpublished manuscript).

15
.
Gerald P. Koocher, “Childhood, Death, and Cognitive Development,”
Developmental Psychology
9 (1973): 369–75.

16
.
Jesse M. Bering and David F. Bjorklund, “The Natural Emergence of Reasoning about the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity,”
Developmental Psychology
40 (2004): 217–33. Research on children’s understanding and reasoning about the subject of death is, for obvious reasons, methodologically challenging, given the serious ethical considerations. For example, parents are especially wary of experimenters “teaching” their children ideas about what happens after death, so interview scripts must be worded in such a manner that the child makes no insinuations about what is a “correct” or “incorrect” answer. Many parents are concerned that questioning their children about death will prove disturbing or prematurely expose the children to these dark matters of the human condition. The present study—the puppet show with the mouse and alligator—was conducted on the heels of September 11, 2001, so parents were unusually sensitive about having their children encountering the topic of death. But in fact, we found that the children in our studies were overwhelmingly curious about the subject of death and enthusiastically welcomed the opportunity to discuss their views on the issue with attentive adults. Certainly, no children were disturbed by our questioning about the workings of a dead mouse’s mind. Nevertheless, with the exception of fairly innocuous stories, quizzing children about actual dead human beings remains largely off-limits in psychological science, and therefore our full understanding of children’s death concepts remains in a state of methodological limbo.

17
.
H. Clark Barrett and Tanya Behne, “Children’s Understanding of Death as the Cessation of Agency: A Test Using Sleep versus Death,”
Cognition
96 (2005): 93–108.

18
.
Ibid.

19
.
The difference between minds and souls is a very subtle one, and most people struggle with teasing the two apart. According to University of California at Irvine psychologist Rebekah Richert and Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris, however, people differentiate minds and souls on several shady grounds. First, most people find the mind to be a more believable entity than the soul. In a 2008 study reported in the
Journal of Cognition and Culture,
Richert and Harris found that, out of 161 undergraduate students surveyed, 151 (93.8 percent) claimed that the mind exists, whereas only 107 (66.5 percent) felt the same about the soul. Second, people tend to conceptualize the soul as coming into existence earlier than the mind. Whereas only 8.1 percent of study participants believed the mind begins “prior to conception,” 26.1 percent stated that the soul predated the union of egg and sperm. An equal number of students thought that minds and souls appeared simultaneously at the moment of conception, but more people thought that the mind begins at some point “during pregnancy” (35.4 percent) than thought the same of the soul (12.4 percent). Third, more people conceptualize the mind as changing over the life span (86.3 percent) than they do the soul (51.6 percent). Whereas only 4.4 percent of the study respondents claimed that the mind remains unchanged over the life span, 28.0 percent were certain that this was the case for the soul. In addition, for most people (83.9 percent) the soul is envisioned as continuing “in some way” after death, whereas the mind is more likely to be seen as ceasing to exist at death (70.8 percent). When Richert and Harris asked their participants whether they thought a human clone would have a mind, 67.1 percent said “yes,” 21.1 percent were unsure, and 11.8 percent said “no.” By contrast, only 32.3 percent thought a human clone would have a soul, 34.4 percent were unsure, and 33.5 percent were convinced it would be soulless. Furthermore, the more “spiritual” the participants considered the soul to be (in terms of performing special spiritual functions such as journeying to the afterlife and connecting to a higher power), and the more they distinguished between mind and soul, the less likely they were to support using embryos for stem cell research, disconnecting people from life support, and cloning humans. Interestingly, Richert and Harris discovered that, “people’s concepts of the soul predicted their ethical decision making [on these issues] independently of religious affiliation.” Rebekah A. Richert and Paul L. Harris, “The Ghost in My Body: Children’s Developing Concept of the Soul,”
Journal of Cognition and Culture
6 (2006): 409–27.

20
.
Paul L. Harris and Marta Giménez, “Children’s Acceptance of Conflicting Testimony: The Case of Death,”
Journal of Cognition and Culture
5 (2005): 143–64.

21
.
Jesse M. Bering, Carlos Hernández Blasi, David F. Bjorklund, “The Development of ‘Afterlife’ Beliefs in Religiously and Secularly Schooled Children,”
British Journal of Developmental Psychology
23 (2005): 587–607.

22
.
Fernando Pessoa,
The Book of Disquiet,
trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2002), 41. Originally published in 1916.

23
.
“Mystery of Missing Teens Believed Solved: Discovery Brings Grief, Relief,”
Palm Beach Post
(March 3, 1997), http://nl.newsbank.com.

24
.
Penny Owen, “Soldier Leaves Behind Wife, 4 Children,”
The Oklahoman,
May 30, 2002.

25
.
John Fowles,
The Magus
(New York: Back Bay Books, 2001), 427. Originally published in 1966.

26
.
K. Mitch Hodge, “Descartes’ Mistake: How Afterlife Beliefs Challenge the Assumption That Humans Are Intuitive Cartesian Substance Dualists,”
Journal of Cognition and Culture
8 (2008): 387–415.

27
.
David Lester, Megan Aldridge, Christine Aspenberg, Kathleen Boyle, Pam Radsniak, and Chris Waldron, “What Is the Afterlife Like?”
Omega
44 (2001–02): 113–26.

C
HAPTER
5

1
.
“A Dreadful Accident,”
Norfolk Chronicle
and
Norwich Gazette
(May 10, 1845), www.gotts.org.uk/ Yarmouth%20bridge.htm.

2
.
Ibid.

3
.
Henry MacKenzie,
Sermon, Preached on Whitsunday, 1845: Being One of a Series Delivered after the Fall of the Bridge, at Great Yarmouth
(London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1845).

4
.
Kurt Kelly, “Hundreds Gather to Mourn Victims of Bridge Collapse,”
NewsOK
(May 27, 2003), http://newsok.com/hundreds-gather-to-mourn- victims-of-bridge-collapse/article/1030595. One of the other victims to perish was Andrew Clements, a young army captain and father of four from California en route to his new home in Alexandria, Virginia, where his family had flown in a few days earlier and was waiting anxiously for him to arrive. Clements’s commanding officer “pondered the odds of making a 2,929-mile drive and landing on a 500-foot stretch of bridge that, in the most bizarre of accidents, had plummeted precisely as he crossed it. ‘If [he] just stopped at a rest stop or stopped to get gas…There’s just so many variables—and the timing.’” Ibid.

5
.
Jean Piaget,
The Moral Judgment of the Child,
trans. Marjorie Gabain (New York: Free Press, 1997), 252. Originally published in 1932.

6
.
Thornton Wilder,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1955), 7. Originally published in 1927.

7
.
Ibid., 10.

8
.
Ibid., 163.

9
.
Ibid., 4.

10
.
Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, “Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the Divine Mind,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
14 (2010): 7–16.

11
.
Ibid.

12
.
Ibid.

13
.
Alison Gopnik, “Explanation as Orgasm and the Drive for Causal Understanding: The Evolution, Function, and Phenomenology of the Theory-Formation System,” in
Cognition and Explanation,
ed. F. Keil and R. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 299–323.

14
.
Ibid.

15
.
Ibid.

16
.
Quoted in P. C. W. Davies and Julian Brown, eds.,
Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 208–9.

17
.
For example, consider this passage from the Bible: “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Matt. 5:28 (New International Version).

18
.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard,
Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 22. Originally published in 1937.

19
.
Cristine H. Legare and Susan A. Gelman, “Bewitchment, Biology, or Both: The Co-existence of Natural and Supernatural Explanatory Frameworks across Development,”
Cognitive Science
32 (2008): 607–42.