Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Consider our current controversies regarding nutrition and diet. Understanding the design rationale of the machinery in our bodies that drives us to overindulge in sweets and fats is the key to finding the corrective measures that will actually work. For many years, nutritionists thought that the key to preventing obesity was simply cutting fat out of the diet. Now it is emerging that this simplistic approach to dieting is counterproductive: when you strenuously keep your fat-craving system unsatisfied, this intensifies your body’s compensatory efforts, leading to overindulgence in carbohydrates. The evolutionarily naïve thinking of the recent past helped build and put in motion the low-fat bandwagon, which then became self-sustaining under the solicitous care of the low-fat-food manufacturers and advertisers. Taubes (2001) is an eye-opening account of the political processes that created and sustained this “low-fat gospel,” and it provides a timely warning for the enterprise I am proposing here: “It’s a story of what can happen when the demands of public health policy—and the demands of the public for simple advice [emphasis added]—run up against the confusing ambiguity of real science” (p. 2537). Even if we do the science of religion right (for the first time), we must strenuously guard the integrity of the next process, the boiling down of the complex results of the research into political decisions. This will not be easy at all. Basil Rifkind, one of the nutritionists who were pressured into a premature verdict on low dietary fat, puts it succinctly: “There comes a point when, if you don’t make a decision, the consequences can be great as well. If you just allow Americans to keep on consuming 40% of calories from fat, there’s an outcome to that as well” (Taubes, 2001, p. 2541). Good intentions are not enough. This is the sort of misguided campaign that we want to avoid when we try to correct what we take to be the toxic excesses of religion. One recoils in horror at the possible effects of trying to impose one misguided “crash diet” or another on those hungry for religion.

It may be tempting to argue that we’d all have been better off if there hadn’t been any know-it-all nutritionists meddling with our diets in the first place. We’d have eaten what was good for us by just relying on our evolution-shaped instincts, the way other animals do. But this is simply mistaken, in the case of both diet and religion. Civilization—agriculture in particular and technology in general—has hugely and swiftly altered our ecological circumstances compared with the circumstances of our quite recent ancestors, and this renders many of our instincts out of date. Some of them may still be valuable in spite of their obsolescence, but it is likely that some are positively harmful. We can’t return to the blissful ignorance of our animal past with any confidence. We’re stuck being the knowing species, and that means we’ll have to use our knowledge as best we can to adapt our policies and practices to cope with our biological imperatives.

4 A Martian’s list of theories

If you were God, would you have invented laughter?

—Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not for Burning

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We may be too close to religion to be able to see it clearly at first. This has been a familiar theme among artists and philosophers for years. One of their self-appointed tasks is to “make the familiar strange,”¹¹ and some of the great strokes of creative genius get us to break through the crust of excessive familiarity and look at ordinary, obvious things with fresh eyes. Scientists couldn’t agree more. Sir Isaac Newton’s mythic moment was asking himself the weird question about why the apple fell down from the tree. (“Well, why wouldn’t it?” asks the everyday nongenius; “It’s heavy!”—as if this were a satisfactory explanation.) Albert Einstein asked a similarly weird question: everyone knows what “now” means, but Einstein asked whether you and I mean the same thing by “now” when we are leaving each other’s company at near the speed of light. Biology has some strange questions as well. “Why don’t male animals lactate?” asks the late great evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith (1977), vividly awakening us from our dogmatic slumbers to confront a curious prospect. “Why do we blink with both eyes simultaneously?” asks another great evolutionary biologist, George Williams (1992). Good questions, not yet answered by biology. Here are some more. Why do we laugh when something funny happens? We may think it is just obvious that laughter (as opposed to, say, scratching one’s ear or belching) is the appropriate response to humor, but why is it? Why are some female shapes sexy and others not? Isn’t it obvious? Just look at them! But that is not the end of it. The regularities and trends in our responses to the world do indeed guarantee, trivially, that they are part of “human nature,” but that still leaves the question of why. Curiously, it is this very feature of evolutionary questioning that is often viewed with deep aversion by…artists and philosophers. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that explanation has to stop somewhere, but this undeniable truth misleads us if it discourages us from asking such questions, prematurely terminating our curiosity. Why does music exist, for instance? “Because it’s natural!” comes the complacent everyday reply, but science takes nothing natural for granted. People around the world devote many hours—often their professional lives—to making, and listening and dancing to, music. Why? Cui bono? Why does music exist? Why does religion exist? To say that it is natural is only the beginning of the answer, not the end.

The remarkable autistic author and animal expert Temple Grandin gave neurologist Oliver Sacks a great title for one of his collections of case studies of unusual human beings: An Anthropologist on Mars (1995). That’s what she felt like, she told Sacks, when dealing with other people right here on Earth. Usually such alienation is a hindrance, but getting some distance from the ordinary world helps focus our attention on what is otherwise too obvious to notice, and it will help if we temporarily put ourselves into the (three bright green) shoes of a “Martian,” one of a team of alien investigators who can be imagined to be unfamiliar with the phenomena they are observing here on Planet Earth.

What they see today is a population of over six billion people, almost all of whom devote a significant fraction of their time and energy to some sort of religious activity: rituals such as daily prayer (both public and private) or frequent attendance at ceremonies, but also costly sacrifices—not working on certain days no matter what looming crisis needs prompt attention, deliberately destroying valuable property in lavish ceremonies, contributing to the support of specialist practitioners within the community and the maintenance of elaborate buildings, and abiding by a host of strenuously observed prohibitions and requirements, including not eating certain foods, wearing veils, taking offense at apparently innocuous behaviors in others, and so forth. The Martians would have no doubt that all of this was “natural” in one sense: they observe it almost everywhere in nature, in one species of vocal bipeds. Like the other phenomena of nature, it exhibits both breathtaking diversity and striking commonalities, ravishingly ingenious design (rhythmic, poetic, architectural, social…) and yet baffling inscrutability. Where did all this design come from, and what sustains it? In addition to all the contemporary expenditures of time and effort, there is all the implied design work that preceded it. Design work—R & D, research and development—is costly, too.