These are short periods of time, biologically speaking. They are not even long compared with the ages of other features of human culture. Writing is more than five thousand years old, agriculture is more than ten thousand years old, and language isâwho knows?âmaybe âonlyâ forty thousand years old and maybe ten or twenty times older than that. Itâs a contentious research topic, and since itâs widely agreed that fully articulated natural languages must have developed out of some kind of proto-languages (which may have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years), there is no consensus about what would even count as the birthdate of language. Is language older than religion? However we date its beginnings, language is much, much older than any existing religion, or even any religion of which we have any historical or archeological knowledge. The earliest impressive archeological evidence of religion is the elaborate Cro-Magnon burial sites in the Czech Republic, and they are about twenty-five thousand years old.2 It is hard to tell, but something like religion may well have existed from the early days of language, however, or even before that. What were our ancestors like before there was anything like religion? Were they like bands of chimpanzees? What, if anything, did they talk about, aside from food and predators and the mating game? The weather? Gossip? What was the psychological and cultural soil in which religion first took root?
We can tentatively work backward, extrapolating under the guidance of our fundamental biological constraint: each innovative step had to âpay for itselfâ somehow, in the existing environment in which it first occurred, independently of whatever its role might become in later environments. What, then, could explain both the diversity and the similarities in the religious ideas we observe around the world? Are the similarities due to the fact that all religious ideas spring from a common ancestor idea, passed on over the generations as people spread around the globe, or are such ideas independently rediscovered by just about every culture because they are simply the truth, and obvious enough to occur to people in due course? These are obviously naïve oversimplifications, but at least they are attempts to ask and answer explicit questions often left unexamined by people who lose interest once they have found a purpose or function for religion that strikes them as plausible: responding to a suitably grand âhuman needâ to account for the manifest outlay of time and energy that religion requires. The three favorite purposes or raisons dâêtre for religion are
to comfort us in our suffering and allay our fear of death
to explain things we canât otherwise explain
to encourage group cooperation in the face of trials and enemies
Thousands of books and articles have been written defending these claims, and such compelling and familiar ideas are probably at least partly right, but if you settle for one of them, or even all three taken together, you succumb to a disorder often encountered in the humanities and social sciences: premature curiosity satisfaction. There is so much more to ask about, and so much more to understand. Why would these ideas comfort people? (And why are they comforting, exactly? Might there be better, more comforting ideas to be found?) Why would these ideas appeal to people as explanations of baffling events? (And how could they have arisen? Did some would-be proto-scientist hit upon a supernatural theory and enthusiastically proselytize her neighbors?) How do these ideas actually manage to enhance cooperation in the face of suspicion and defection? (And once more, how could they have arisen? Did some wise tribal leader invent religion to give her tribe a teamwork edge over the rival tribes?)
Some people suppose that we can never do better than such simple speculations about these processes and outcomes from the remote past. Some insist on it, in fact, and their vehemence betrays the fact that they are afraid they are wrong. They are. Today, thanks to advances in a variety of sciences, we can sharpen the questions and begin to answer them. In this and the next four chapters, I will try to tell the best current version of the story science can tell about how religions have become what they are. I am not at all claiming that this is what science has already established about religion. The main point of this book is to insist that we donât yet knowâbut we can discoverâthe answers to these important questions if we make a concerted effort. Probably some of the features of the story I tell will prove in due course to be mistaken. Maybe many of them are wrong. The purpose of trying to sketch a whole story now is to get something on the table that is both testable and worth testing. It is usually easier to fix something that has flaws than to build something from scratch. Trying to bridge the gaps in our knowledge forces us to frame questions we havenât framed before, and puts the issues in a perspective that enables further questions to be posed and answered. And that in itself can undercut the defeatist proclamation that these are mysteries beyond all human comprehension. Many people may wish that these were unanswerable questions. Letâs see what happens when we defy their defensive pessimism and give it a try.
2 The raw materials of religion
We may conclude, therefore, that, in all nations, which have embraced polytheism, the first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind.
âDavid Hume, The Natural History of Religion
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My guides are the pioneering scientists who have begun to tackle these questions with both imagination and discipline. An evolutionary biologist or a psychologist who knows only one religion at all well and has a smattering of (mis) information about the others (like most of us) is almost certain to overgeneralize from idiosyncratic familiarity when it comes to framing questions. A social historian or an anthropologist who knows a great deal about the beliefs and practices of people all around the world but is naïve about evolution is equally unlikely to frame the issues well. Fortunately, a few well-informed researchers have recently begun to pull these distant perspectives together, with tantalizing results. Their books and articles are well worth reading in their entirety, as I hope I will convince you by introducing a few highlights.
Jared Diamondâs Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) is an eye-opening exploration of very specific effects of geography and biology on the early development of agriculture in different parts of the world at different times. When the first agriculturalists domesticated animals, they naturally began living in close proximity to them, and this enhanced the likelihood of species-jumping by the animalsâ parasites. The most serious infectious diseases known to humanity, such as smallpox and influenza, all derive from domesticated animals, and our farming ancestors lived through a horrific pruning in which untold millions succumbed to early versions of these diseases, leaving only those fortunate enough to have some natural immunity to reproduce. Many generations of this evolutionary bottleneck guaranteed that their later descendants would be relatively immune to, or have a high tolerance for, the descendants of those virulent strains of parasite. When these grand-offspring, living mainly in Europe, developed the technology to cross the oceans, they brought their germs with them, and it was the germs, more than the guns and steel, that wiped out large fractions of the indigenous populations they encountered. The role of agriculture in spawning infectious diseases, and the relative immunity to them that had evolved among the peoples who had lived through the ravages of the early days of agriculture, can be studied with some precision now that we can extrapolate backward from the genomes of existing species of plants, animals, and germs. Accidents of geography gave European nations a head start that goes a long way to explain why they were the colonizers rather than the colonized in later centuries.