Our ability to devote our lives to something we deem more important than our own personal welfareâor our own biological imperative to have offspringâis one of the things that set us aside from the rest of the animal world. A mother bear will bravely defend a food patch, and ferociously protect her cub, or even her empty den, but probably more people have died in the valiant attempt to protect sacred places and texts than in the attempt to protect food stores or their own children and homes. Like other animals, we have built-in desires to reproduce and to do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this goal, but we also have creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives. This fact does make us different, but it is itself a biological fact, visible to natural science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science. How did just one species, Homo sapiens, come to have these extraordinary perspectives on their own lives?
Hardly anybody would say that the most important thing in life is having more grandchildren than oneâs rivals do, but this is the default summum bonum of every wild animal. They donât know any better. They canât. Theyâre just animals. There is one interesting exception, it seems: the dog. Canât âmanâs best friendâ exhibit devotion that rivals that of a human friend? Wonât a dog even die if need be to protect its master? Yes, and it is no coincidence that this admirable trait is found in a domesticated species. The dogs of today are the offspring of the dogs our ancestors most loved and admired in the past; without even trying to breed for loyalty, they managed to do so, bringing out the best (by their lights, by our lights) in our companion animals.2 Did we unconsciously model this devotion to a master on our own devotion to God? Were we shaping dogs in our own image? Perhaps, but then where did we get our devotion to God?
The comparison with which I began, between a parasitic worm invading an antâs brain and an idea invading a human brain, probably seems both far-fetched and outrageous. Unlike worms, ideas arenât alive, and donât invade brains; they are created by minds. True on both counts, but these are not as telling objections as they first appear. Ideas arenât alive; they canât see where theyâre going and have no limbs with which to steer a host brain even if they could see. True, but a lancet fluke isnât exactly a rocket scientist either; itâs no more intelligent than a carrot, really; it doesnât even have a brain. What it has is just the good fortune of being endowed with features that affect ant brains in this useful way whenever it comes in contact with them. (These features are like the eye spots on butterfly wings that sometimes fool predatory birds into thinking some big animal is looking at them. The birds are scared away and the butterflies are the beneficiaries, but are none the wiser for it.) An inert idea, if it were designed just right, might have a beneficial effect on a brain without having to know it was doing so! And if it did, it might prosper because it had that design.
The comparison of the Word of God to a lancet fluke is unsettling, but the idea of comparing an idea to a living thing is not new. I have a page of music, written on parchment in the mid-sixteenth century, which I found half a century ago in a Paris bookstall. The text (in Latin) recounts the moral of the parable of the Sower (Matthew 13): Semen est verbum Dei; sator autem Christus. The Word of God is a seed, and the sower of the seed is Christ. These seeds take root in individual human beings, it seems, and get those human beings to spread them, far and wide (and in return, the human hosts get eternal lifeâeum qui audit manebit in eternum).
How are ideas created by minds? It might be by miraculous inspiration, or it might be by more natural means, as ideas are spread from mind to mind, surviving translation between different languages, hitchhiking on songs and icons and statues and rituals, coming together in unlikely combinations in particular peopleâs heads, where they give rise to yet further new âcreations,â bearing family resemblances to the ideas that inspired them but adding new features, new powers as they go. And perhaps some of the âwildâ ideas that first invaded our minds have yielded offspring that have been domesticated and tamed, as we have attempted to become their masters or at least their stewards, their shepherds. What are the ancestors of the domesticated ideas that spread today? Where did they originate and why? And once our ancestors took on the goal of spreading these ideas, not just harboring them but cherishing them, how did this belief in belief transform the ideas being spread?
The great ideas of religion have been holding us human beings enthralled for thousands of years, longer than recorded history but still just a brief moment in biological time. If we want to understand the nature of religion today, as a natural phenomenon, we have to look not just at what it is today, but at what it used to be. An account of the origins of religion, in the next seven chapters, will provide us with a new perspective from which to look, in the last three chapters, at what religion is today, why it means so much to so many people, and what they might be right and wrong about in their self-understanding as religious people. Then we can see better where religion might be heading in the near future, our future on this planet. I can think of no more important topic to investigate.
2 A working definition of religion
Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense; by calling âGodâ some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves, they pose as deists, as believers, before the world; they may even pride themselves on having attained a higher and purer idea of God, although their God is nothing but an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrine.
âSigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
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How do I define religion? It doesnât matter just how I define it, since I plan to examine and discuss the neighboring phenomena that (probably) arenât religionsâspirituality, commitment to secular organizations, fanatical devotion to ethnic groups (or sports teams), superstitionâ¦. So, wherever I âdraw the line,â Iâll be going over the line in any case. As you will see, what we usually call religions are composed of a variety of quite different phenomena, arising from different circumstances and having different implications, forming a loose family of phenomena, not a ânatural kindâ like a chemical element or a species.
What is the essence of religion? This question should be considered askance. Even if there is a deep and important affinity between many or even most of the worldâs religions, there are sure to be variants that share some typical features while lacking one or another âessentialâ feature. As evolutionary biology advanced during the last century, we gradually came to appreciate the deep reasons for grouping living things the way we doâsponges are animals, and birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than frogs areâand new surprises are still being discovered every year. So we should expectâand tolerateâsome difficulty in arriving at a counterexample-proof definition of something as diverse and complex as religion. Sharks and dolphins look very much alike and behave in many similar ways, but they are not the same sort of thing at all. Perhaps, once we understand the whole field better, we will see that Buddhism and Islam, for all their similarities, deserve to be considered two entirely different species of cultural phenomenon. We can start with common sense and tradition and consider them both to be religions, but we shouldnât blind ourselves to the prospect that our initial sorting may have to be adjusted as we learn more. Why is suckling oneâs young more fundamental than living in the ocean? Why is having a backbone more fundamental than having wings? It may be obvious now, but it wasnât obvious at the dawn of biology.