CHAPTER THREE Why Good Things Happen
1 Bringing out the best
Religious allegory has become a part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people.
âLangdon, hero of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
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When I began working on this book, I conducted interviews with quite a few people to try to get a sense of the different roles that religion plays in their lives. This was not scientific data-gathering (though I have also done some of that) but, rather, an attempt to set theories and experiments aside and go directly to real people and let them tell me in their own words why religion was so important to them. These were strictly confidential interviews, almost all one-on-one, 1 and although I was persistently inquisitive, I didnât challenge or argue with my informants. These occasions were often moving, to say the least, and I learned a lot. Some people had endured hardships that I could not readily imagine myself surviving, and some had found in their religion the strength to make, and hold fast to, decisions that were nothing short of heroic. Less dramatic, but even more impressive in retrospect, were the people of modest talent and accomplishment who were, in one way or another, simply much better people than one might expect them to be; it wasnât just that their lives had meaning to themâthough this was certainly trueâbut that they were actually making the world better by their efforts, inspired by their conviction that their lives were not their own to dispose of as they chose.
Religion can certainly bring out the best in a person, but it is not the only phenomenon with that property. Having a child often has a wonderfully maturing effect on a person. Wartime, famously, gives people an abundance of occasions to rise to, as do natural disasters like floods and hurricanes. But for day-in, day-out lifelong bracing, there is probably nothing so effective as religion: it makes powerful and talented people more humble and patient, it makes average people rise above themselves, it provides sturdy support for many people who desperately need help staying away from drink or drugs or crime. People who would otherwise be self-absorbed or shallow or crude or simply quitters are often ennobled by their religion, given a perspective on life that helps them make the hard decisions that we all would be proud to make.
No all-in value judgment can be based on such a limited and informal survey, of course. Religion does all this good and more, no doubt, but something else we could devise might do it as well or better. There are many wise, engaged, morally committed atheists and agnostics, after all. Perhaps a survey would show that as a group atheists and agnostics are more respectful of the law, more sensitive to the needs of others, or more ethical than religious people. Certainly no reliable survey has yet been done that shows otherwise. It might be that the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights. If you find that conjecture offensive, you need to adjust your perspective.
Among the questions that we need to consider, objectively, are whether Islam is more or less effective than Christianity at keeping people off drugs and alcohol (and whether the side effects in either case are worse than the benefit), whether sexual abuse is more or less of a problem among Sikhs than among Mormons, and so forth. You donât get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better. World War II certainly brought out the best in many people, and those who lived through it often say that it was the most important thing in their lives, without which their lives would have no meaning, but it certainly doesnât follow from this that we should try to have another world war. The price you must pay for any claim about the virtue of your religion or any other religion is the willingness to see your claim put squarely to the test. My point here at the outset is just to acknowledge that we already know enough about religion to know that, however terrible its negative effects areâbigotry, murderous fanaticism, oppression, cruelty, and enforced ignorance, to cite the obviousâthe people who view religion as the most important thing in life have many good reasons for thinking so.
2Cui bono?
Blessed be the Lord, who daily loadeth us with benefits, even the God of our salvation. Selah.
âPsalm 68:19
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The more we learn about the details of natural processes, the more evident it becomes that these processes are themselves creative. Nothing transcends Nature like Nature itself.
âLoyal Rue
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Good things donât just happen by chance. There are âstrokes of luck,â but sustaining a good thing isnât just luck. It might be Providence, of course. It might be that God makes sure that the good thing happens and that it sustains itself when it wouldnât otherwise, without Godâs intervening. But any such account will have to wait its turn, for the same reason that cancer researchers are unwilling to treat unexpected remissions as just âmiraclesâ that neednât be explored any further. What natural, nonmiraculous set of processes could produce and sustain this phenomenon that is so highly valued? The only way to take the hypothesis of miracles seriously is to eliminate the nonmiraculous alternatives.
The stinginess of Nature can be seen wherever we look, if we know what to look for. For instance, coyotes are emerging as a welcome addition to the wildlife of New England, howling eerily in the winter nights, but these beautiful, wily predators are wary of humans, and seldom seen. How can you tell their footprints in the snow from those of their cousins, domestic dogs? Even up close, it can be hard to tell the paw print of a coyote from the paw print of a similarly sized dogâa dogâs claws tend to be longer, since they spend scant time diggingâbut even from afar, a coyoteâs track can be readily distinguished from a dogâsâthe coyoteâs prints fall in an uncannily straight and single-file line, with hind paws in almost perfect registration with forepaws, whereas a dogâs track is typically a mess, as the dog galumphs exuberantly hither and yon, indulging every curious whim (David Brown, 2004). The dog is well fed and knows it will get its supper no matter what, whereas the coyote is on a very tight budget and needs to conserve every calorie for the job at hand: self-preservation. Its methods of locomotion have been ruthlessly optimized for efficiency. But, then, what explains the packâs characteristic howling? What good accrues to the coyote from that conspicuous expenditure of energy? Hardly a low profile. Doesnât it serve to scare away their supper and draw their presence to the attention of their own predators? Such costs would not be lightly recouped, one would think. These are good questions. Biologists are working on them, and even though they donât yet have definitive answers, they are surely right to seek them.2 Any such pattern of conspicuous outlay demands an accounting.
Consider, for instance, the huge outlay of human effort devoted worldwide to sugar: not just the planting and harvesting of sugarcane and sugar beets, and the refining and transporting of the basic product, but the larger surrounding world of manufacturing candy, publishing cookbooks full of dessert recipes, advertising soft drinks and chocolates, commercializing Halloween, as well as the counterbalancing parts of the system: obesity clinics, government-sponsored research on the epidemic of early-onset diabetes, dentists and the inclusion of fluoride in toothpaste and drinking water. Over a hundred million metric tons of sugar are produced and consumed each year. To explain the thousands of features of this huge system, which provides the lifework of millions of people and can be discerned at every level of society, we need many different scientific and historical investigations, only a small fraction of which are biological. We need to study the chemistry of sugar, the physics of crystallization and caramelization, human physiology, and the history of agriculture, but also the history of engineering, manufacturing, transportation, banking, geopolitics, advertising, and much more.