Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

What we should make of this theme in human culture is an interesting question, about which I will say more later, but in the meantime we should note that the only anchor we have seen so far for “intrinsic” value is the capacity of something to provoke a preference response in the brain quite directly. Pain is “intrinsically bad,” but this negative valence is just as dependent on an evolutionary rationale as the “intrinsic goodness” of satisfied hunger. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, no doubt, but it is also true that if poking around in rotting elephant carcases was as good for our reproductive prospects as it is for those of vultures, such a dead elephant would smell as sweet as a rose to us.⁹ Biology insists on delving beneath the surface of “intrinsic” values and asking why they exist, and any answer that is supported by the facts has the effect of showing that the value in question is—or once was—really instrumental, not intrinsic, even if we don’t see it that way. A truly intrinsic value couldn’t have such an explanation of course. It would be good just because it was good, not because it was good for something. A hypothesis to consider seriously, then, is that all our “intrinsic” values started out as instrumental values, and now that their original purpose has lapsed, at least in our eyes, they remain as things we like just because we like them. (That would not mean that we are wrong to like them! It would mean—by definition—that we like them without needing any ulterior reason to like them.)

3 Asking what pays for religion

But what are the benefits; why do people want religion at all? They want it because religion is the only plausible source of certain rewards for which there is a general and inexhaustible demand.

—Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith

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Whatever else religion is as a human phenomenon, it is a hugely costly endeavor, and evolutionary biology shows that nothing so costly just happens. Any such regular expenditure of time and energy has to be balanced by something of “value” obtained, and the ultimate measure of evolutionary “value” is fitness: the capacity to replicate more successfully than the competition does. (This does not mean that we ought to value replication above all! It means only that nothing can evolve and persist for long in this demanding world unless it somehow provokes its own replication better than the replication of its rivals.) Since money is such a recent innovation from the perspective of evolutionary history, it is weirdly anachronistic to ask what pays for one evolved biological feature or another as if there were actual transactions and ledgers in Darwin’s countinghouse. But this metaphor nevertheless nicely captures the underlying balance of forces observed everywhere in nature, and we know of no exceptions to the rule. So, risking offense but shrugging off that risk as just one more aspect of the taboo that must be broken, I ask: what pays for religion? Abhor the language if you must, but that gives you no good reason to ignore the question. Any claim to the effect that religion—your religion or all religion—stands above the biosphere and does not have to answer to this demand is simply bluster. It might be that God implants each human being with an immortal soul that thirsts for opportunities to worship God. That would indeed explain the bargain struck, the exchange of human time and energy for religion. The only honest way to defend that proposition, or anything like it, is to give fair consideration to alternative theories of the persistence and popularity of religion and rule them out by showing that they are unable to account for the phenomena observed. Besides, you might want to defend the hypothesis that God set up the universe so that we would evolve to have a love of God. If so, we would want to understand how that evolution occurred.

The same sort of investigation that has unlocked the mysteries of sweetness and alcohol and sex and money can be undertaken for the many facets of religion. There was a time, not so very long ago by evolutionary standards, when there was no religion on this planet, and now there is lots of it. Why? It may have one primary evolutionary source or many, or it may defy evolutionary analysis altogether, but we won’t know until we look. Do we really need to inquire about this? Can’t we just accept the obvious fact that religion is a human phenomenon and that humans are mammals, and hence products of evolution, and then leave the biological underpinnings of religion at that? People make religions but they also make automobiles and literature and sports, and surely we don’t need to look deep into biological prehistory to understand the differences between a sedan, a poem, and a tennis tournament. Aren’t most of the religious phenomena that need investigation cultural and social—ideological, philosophical, psychological, political, economic, historical—and hence somehow “above” the biological level?

This is a familiar presumption among researchers in the social sciences and humanities, who often deem it “reductionistic” (and very bad form) even to pose questions about the biological bases of these delightful and important phenomena. I can see some cultural anthropologists and sociologists rolling their eyes in disdain—“Oh, no! Here comes Darwin again, butting in where he isn’t needed!”—while some historians and philosophers of religion and theologians snicker at the philistinism of anybody who could ask with a straight face about the evolutionary underpinnings of religion. “What next, a search for the Catholicism gene?” This negative response is typically unthinking, but it isn’t foolish. It is supported in part by unpleasant memories of past campaigns that failed: naïve and ill-informed forays by biologists into the thickets of cultural complexity. There is a good case to be made that the social sciences and humanities—the Geisteswissenschaften, or mind sciences—have their own “autonomous” methodologies and subject matters, independent of the natural sciences. But in spite of all that can be said in favor of this idea (and I will spend some time looking at the best case for it in due course), the disciplinary isolation it motivates has become a major obstacle to good scientific practice, a poor excuse for ignorance, an ideological crutch that should be thrown away.¹⁰

We have particularly compelling reasons for investigating the biological bases of religion now. Sometimes—rarely—religions go bad, veering into something like group insanity or hysteria, and causing great harm. Now that we have created the technologies to cause global catastrophe, our jeopardy is multiplied to the maximum: a toxic religious mania could end human civilization overnight. We need to understand what makes religions work, so we can protect ourselves in an informed manner from the circumstances in which religions go haywire. What is religion composed of? How do the parts fit together? How do they mesh? Which effects depend on which causes? Which features, if any, invariably occur together? Which exclude each other? What constitutes the health and pathology of religious phenomena? These questions can be addressed by anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, and any other variety of cultural studies that you like, but it is simply inexcusable for researchers in these fields to let disciplinary jealousy and fear of “scientific imperialism” create an ideological iron curtain that could conceal important underlying constraints and opportunities from them.