Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Recent research on animal intelligence (Whiten and Byrne, 1988, 1997; Hauser, 2000; Sterelny, 2003; see also Dennett, 1996) has shown that some mammals and birds, and perhaps some other creatures as well, carry these agent-discriminations into more sophisticated territory. Evidence shows that they not only distinguish the animate movers from the rest, but draw distinctions between the likely sorts of motions to anticipate from the animate ones: will it attack me or flee, will it move left or right, will it back down if I threaten, does it see me yet, does it want to eat me or would it prefer to go after my neighbor? These cleverer animal minds have discovered the further Good Trick of adopting the intentional stance (Dennett, 1971, 1983, 1987): they treat some other things in the world as

agents with

limited beliefs about the world,

specific desires, and

enough common sense to do the rational thing given those beliefs and desires.

Once animals began adopting the intentional stance, something of an arms race ensued, with ploy and counterploy, deceptive move and intelligent detection of deceptive move, carrying animal minds to greater subtlety and power. If you have ever tried to catch or trap a wild animal, you have some appreciation of the wiliness that has evolved. (Clam-digging, in contrast, is child’s play. Clams have not evolved the intentional stance, though they do have simple hair-trigger HADDs.)

The utility of the intentional stance in describing and predicting animal behavior is undeniable, but that doesn’t mean that the animals themselves are clued in about what they are doing. When a low-nesting bird leads the predator away from her nestlings by doing a distraction display, she is making a convincing sham of a broken wing, creating the tempting illusion of an easy supper for the observing predator, but she need not understand this clever ruse. She does need to understand the conditions of likely success, so that she can adjust her behavior the better to fit the variations encountered, but she no more needs to be aware of the deeper rationale for her actions than does the fledgling cuckoo when it pushes the rival eggs out of the nest in order to maximize the food it will get from its foster parents.

Researchers have several other terms for the intentional stance. Some call it “theory of mind” (Premack and Woodruff, 1978; Leslie, 1987; Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997), but there are problems with that formulation, so I am going to stick with my more neutral terminology.⁵ Whenever an animal treats something as an agent, with beliefs and desires (with knowledge and goals), I say that it is adopting the intentional stance or treating that thing as an intentional system. The intentional stance is a useful perspective for an animal to take in a hostile world (Sterelny, 2003), since there are things out there that may want it and may have beliefs about where it is and where it is heading. Among the species that have evolved the intentional stance, there is considerable variation in sophistication. Faced with a threatening rival, many animals can make an informationally sensitive decision either to retreat or to call the other’s bluff, but there is scant evidence that they have any sense of what they are doing or why. There is some (controversial) evidence that a chimpanzee can believe that another agent—a chimpanzee or a human being, say—knows that the food is in the box rather than in the basket. This is second-order intentionality (Dennett, 1983), involving beliefs about beliefs (or beliefs about desires, or desires about beliefs, etc.), but there is no evidence (yet) that any nonhuman animal can want you to believe that it thinks you are hiding behind the tree on the left, not the right (third-order intentionality). But even preschool children delight in playing games in which one child wants another to pretend not to know what the first child wants the other to believe ( fifth-order intentionality): “You be the sheriff, and ask me which way the robbers went!”

Whatever the situation is with nonhuman animals—and this is a topic of vigorous and hotly debated research⁶—there is no doubt at all that normal human beings do not have to be taught how to conceive of the world as containing lots of agents who, like themselves, have beliefs and desires, as well as beliefs and desires about the beliefs and desires of others, and beliefs and desires about the beliefs and desires that others have about them, and so forth. This virtuoso use of the intentional stance comes naturally, and it has the effect of saturating the human environment with folk psychology (Dennett, 1981). We experience the world as not just full of moving human bodies but of rememberers and forgetters, thinkers and hopers and villains and dupes and promise-breakers and threateners and allies and enemies. Indeed, those human beings who find perceiving the world from this perspective difficult—those suffering from autism are the best-studied category—have a more significant disability than those who are born blind or deaf (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Dunbar, 2004).

So powerful is our innate urge to adopt the intentional stance that we have real difficulty turning it off when it is no longer appropriate. When somebody we love or even just know well dies, we suddenly are confronted with a major task of cognitive updating: revising all our habits of thought to fit a world with one less familiar intentional system in it. “I wonder if she’d like…,” “Does she know I’m…,” “Oh, look, this is something she always wanted….” A considerable portion of the pain and confusion we suffer when confronting a death is caused by the frequent, even obsessive, reminders that our intentional-stance habits throw up at us like annoying pop-up ads but much, much worse. We can’t just delete the file in our memory banks, and, besides, we wouldn’t want to be able to do so. What keeps many habits in place is the pleasure we take from indulging in them.⁷ And so we dwell on them, drawn to them like a moth to a candle. We preserve relics and other reminders of the deceased persons, and make images of them, and tell stories about them, to prolong these habits of mind even as they start to fade.