By Mark S.

I had an experience today that helped me see why some (most?) people are religious. I drove a car in Lithuania for the first time tonight (I've had a driver for the past 7 weeks). Of course, instead of a bright, sunny day, it was night and raining. There's a 7km stretch of narrow rural road that I have to traverse that always has people walking along the side dressed in black. When a vehicle comes from the other direction, not only are you are blinded, you have to drive off onto the shoulder to let them pass. Fortunately, no one was walking in the shoulder at these times or else he would have been meat. I was so happy to make it into work without hitting a person or a cow that I just had to thank someone - so I thanked God. This is a little different from the “there are no atheists in foxholes” idea. I wasn't asking god to deliver me safely through this gauntlet of invisible pedestrians (although I suppose I could have). It was an after-the-fact way to relieve some traumatic stress.

I suppose this is another "gap" that God fills. It's not the kind of gap that is filled when a scientist figures out that (for example) it is gravity that causes the earth to revolve around the sun. It's more of the statistical gap. Many people call certain events "miracles" when in fact statisticians will tell you that in the average lifetime, individuals will experience a certain amount of bizarre coincidences such as talking about a person just as the phone rings with the news that that person just dropped dead).

Did I thank god because of a meme (God is the one who walks with us through the valley of the shadow) that I picked up or because of some inherent need to thank something? Or both? The rational explanation for this event is:

1] I put myself into a situation where there was a greater than normal probability for danger.

2] I beat the odds and did not cause any harm.

3] I must learn from this experience and take extra precautions while driving at night to further improve my probability for success in the future.

All well and good, but my brain is still equipped with all this flight or fight wiring that triggers all sorts of physiological responses such as increased heart rate, sweaty palms, etc. After the event is over, there is the period of emotional relief, almost euphoric, during which hormone levels return to normal. In a meme free environment, after a "fight or flight", I would be recording the event in memory (see 3 above). The intensity of the memory is probably directly proportional to the amount of hormones released. I would also be seeking out others of my kind to determine how many of them survived. I would be thankful that I survived and I would be thankful that I saw other survivors.

Living with memes, I have the benefit of discussing the event with other "survivors" and sharing experiences and possible precautions. This transfer of information benefits me and should improve my chances of survival and I would be thankful to the others for it. In my night driving situation, I already knew what precautions would be needed. Some of them I incorporated (I was driving very slowly). I should have thanked myself for having already learned enough to survive the trip. Instead the "god of the statistical gap" jumped in and took all the credit.

When you flip a coin it will turn out either heads or tails. But what decides whether it will be heads or tails? Nothing is truly random. It's just that predicting the outcome is often too difficult because of the multitude of minute factors that must be input into the calculations. Into this complexity jumps god. The strength of the God meme is that it started out as the explanation demanded by an explanation seeking species. We can't understand why a certain event occurred (or didn't occur), therefore God must have made it happen. My potential victim took a little bit longer milking his cow and therefore wasn't walking on the street when I passed. Statistics is the tool used to help us analyze groups of events that, because of the many unrelated inputs required, remain too complex to be determined rigorously. If irrationality is all that remains, God appears.

God willing, I will have an uneventful trip home today.

Mark S