Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book is deservedly well known, but not alone. There is a new generation of interdisciplinary researchers working to put together the biology with the evidence gleaned by centuries of work by historians, anthropologists, and archeologists. Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran are anthropologists who have done extensive fieldwork in Africa and Asia but who are also trained in evolutionary theory and cognitive psychology. Their recent books, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (Boyer, 2001) and In Gods We Trust (Atran, 2002), develop largely harmonious accounts of the major steps into the swamp that they and others have been taking. Then there is David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist who has been devoting himself in recent years to analyses that systematically exploit the Human Relations Area File, a database of all the world’s cultures compiled by anthropologists. His recent book Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (2002) makes the best case to date for the hypothesis that religion is a social phenomenon designed (by evolution) to improve cooperation within (not among!) human groups. According to Wilson, religion emerged by a process of group selection, a controversial wrinkle in evolutionary theory that is dismissed by many evolutionary theorists as at best a marginal process whose conditions for success are unlikely to arise and persist for long. There are deep reasons to be skeptical about group selection, especially in our species, and precisely because Wilson’s thesis—religion as a cooperation-enhancer—is deeply attractive to many people, we need to brace ourselves to avoid wishful thinking. It is quite generally agreed among his critics that he has not (yet ) succeeded in making the case for his radical thesis of group selection, but even a roundly refuted scientific theory can make a major contribution to the steady accumulation of scientific understanding if the evidence marshaled for and against it has been scrupulously gathered. (For more on this point, see appendix B.) Here I will introduce the main points of agreement, as well as acknowledging the continuing points of contention, packing off most of the controversial details into the endnotes and appendixes, where those with a taste for them can (begin to) pursue their own deeper consideration of them.

Both Boyer and Atran present the work of a small but growing community of researchers in relatively accessible terms.³ Their central thesis is that in order to explain the hold that various religious ideas and practices have on people, we need to understand the evolution of the human mind. For many centuries, most philosophers and theologians contended that the human mind (or soul) was an immaterial, incorporeal thing, what René Descartes called a rescogitans (thinking thing). It was in some sense infinite, immortal, and utterly inexplicable by material means. We now understand that the mind is not, as Descartes confusedly supposed, in communication with the brain in some miraculous way; it is the brain, or, more specifically, a system or organization within the brain that has evolved in much the way our immune system or respiratory system or digestive system has evolved. Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection. Driven by the demands of a dangerous world, it is deeply biased in favor of noticing the things that mattered most to the reproductive success of our ancestors.⁴

Some of the features of our minds are endowments we share with much simpler creatures, and others are specific to our lineage, and hence much more recently evolved. These features sometimes overshoot, sometimes have curious by-products, sometimes are ripe for exploitation by other replicators. Of all the quirky effects generated by the whole bag of tricks—our set of “gadgets,” as Boyer calls them—a few happen to interact with one another in mutually reinforcing ways, creating patterns observable in all cultures, with interesting variations. Some of these patterns look rather like religions, or pseudo-religions, or proto-religions. The by-products of the various gadgets are what Boyer calls concepts:

Some concepts happen to connect with inference systems in the brain in a way that makes recall and communication easy. Some concepts happen to trigger our emotional programs in particular ways. Some concepts happen to connect to our social mind. Some of them are represented in such a way that they soon become plausible and direct behavior. The ones that do all this are the religious ones we actually observe in human societies. [p. 50]

Boyer lists more than half a dozen distinct cognitive systems that feed effects into this recipe for religion—an agent-detector, a memory-manager, a cheater-detector, a moral-intuition-generator, a sweet tooth for stories and storytelling, various alarm systems, and what I call the intentional stance. Any mind with this particular set of thinking tools and biases is bound to harbor something like a religion sooner or later, he claims. Atran and others offer largely concurring accounts, and the details are well worth exploring, but I am just going to sketch some of the big picture so that we can see the overall shape of the theory, not (yet) assess it for truth. It will take decades of research to secure any of this theory, but right now we can get a sense of what the possibilities are, and hence what questions we ought to be trying to answer.

3 How Nature deals with the problem of other minds

We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.

—David Hume, The Natural History of Religion

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“I saw you take his kiss!” “’Tis true”

“Oh Modesty!” “’Twas strictly kept:

He thought me asleep; at least I knew

He thought I thought he thought I slept”

—Coventry Patmore, “The Kiss”

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The first thing we have to understand about human minds as suitable homes for religion is how our minds understand other minds! Everything that moves needs something like a mind, to keep it out of harm’s way and help it find the good things; even a lowly clam, which tends to stay in one place, has one of the key features of a mind—a harm-avoiding retreat of its feeding “foot” into its shell when something alarming is detected. Any vibration or bump is apt to set it off, and probably most of these are harmless, but better safe than sorry is the clam’s motto (the free-floating rationale of the clam’s alarm system). More mobile animals have evolved more discriminating methods; in particular, they tend to have the ability to divide detected motion into the banal (the rustling of the leaves, the swaying of the seaweed) and the potentially vitaclass="underline" the “animate motion” (or “biological motion”) of another agent, another animal with a mind, who might be a predator, or a prey, or a mate, or a rival conspecific. This makes economic sense, of course. If you startle at every motion you detect, you’ll never find supper, and if you don’t startle at the dangerous motions, you’ll soon be somebody else’s supper. This is another Good Trick, an evolutionary innovation—like eyesight itself, or flight—that is so useful to so many different ways of life that it evolves over and over again in many different species. Sometimes this Good Trick can be too much of a good thing; then we have what Justin Barrett (2000) calls a hyperactive agent detection device, or HADD. This overshooting is not restricted to human beings. When your dog leaps up and growls when some snow falls off the eaves with a thud that rouses him from his nap, he is manifesting a “false positive” orienting response triggered by his HADD.