Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Simple forms of what we might call practical animism are arguably not mistakes at all, but extremely useful ways of keeping track of the tendencies of designed things, living or artifactual. The gardener who tries to discover what her different flowers and vegetables prefer, or tricks a dogwood branch into thinking it’s spring and opening its buds by bringing it indoors, where it is warm, doesn’t have to go overboard and wonder what her petunias are daydreaming about. Even undesigned physical systems can sometimes be usefully described in intentional or animistic terms: the river doesn’t literally want to return to the ocean, but water seeks its own level, as they say, and lightning searches for the best path to ground. It is not surprising that the attempt to explain patterns discerned in the world has often hit upon animism as a good—actually predictive—approximation of some unimaginably complex underlying phenomenon.

But sometimes the tactic of seeking an intentional-stance perspective comes up dry. Much as our ancestors would have loved to predict the weather by figuring out what it wanted and what beliefs it harbored about them, it simply didn’t work. It no doubt often seemed to work, however. Every now and then the rain dances were rewarded by rain. What would the effect be? Many years ago, the behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner (1948) showed a striking “superstition” effect in pigeons that were put on a random schedule of reinforcement. Every so often, no matter what the pigeon was doing at the moment, a click and a food-pellet reward were delivered. Soon the pigeons put on this random schedule were doing elaborate “dances,” bobbing and whirling and craning their necks. It’s hard to resist putting a soliloquy into these birds’ brains: “Now, let’s see: the last time I got the reward, I’d just spun around once and craned my neck. Let’s try it again…. Nope, no reward. Perhaps I didn’t spin enough…. Nope. Perhaps I should bob once before spinning and craning…. YESSS! OK, now, what did I just do?…” You don’t have to have language, of course, to be vulnerable to such enticing illusions. The soliloquy dramatizes the dynamics that produce the effect, which doesn’t require conscious reflection, just reinforcement. But in a species that does represent both itself and other agents to itself, the effect can be multiplied. If such a strikingly extravagant behavioral effect can be produced in pigeons by making them wander into a random-reinforcement trap, it is not hard to believe that similar effects could be inculcated by happy accident in our ancestors, whose built-in love for the intentional stance would tend to encourage them to add invisible agents or other homunculi to be the secret puppeteers behind the perplexing phenomena. Clouds certainly don’t look like agents with beliefs and desires, so it is no doubt natural to suppose that they are indeed inert and passive things being manipulated by hidden agents that do look like agents: rain gods and cloud gods and the like—if only we could see them.

This curiously paradoxical idea—something invisible that looks like a person (has a head, eyes, arms and legs, perhaps wears a special helmet)—is different from other self-contradictory combinations. Consider the idea of a box that has no interior space to put things in, or a liquid that isn’t wet. To put it crudely, these ideas are not interesting enough to be puzzling for very long. Some nonsense is more attention-grabbing than other nonsense. Why? Just because our memories are not indifferent to the content of what they store. Some things we find more memorable than others, and some things are so interesting that they are well nigh unforgettable, and still others, such as the random string of words “volunteers trainer regardless court exercise” (pulled by me “at random” from the first newspaper story I could lay my hands on just now), could be remembered for more than a few seconds only if you either deliberately repeated it to yourself dozens of times or made up some interesting story that somehow made sense of these words in just this sequence.

We are all painfully aware today that our attention is a limited commodity with many competitors vying for more than their share. This information overload, with advertisements bombarding us on all sides, plus a host of other distractions, is nothing new; we’ve just become self-conscious about it, now that there are thousands of people who specialize in designing novel attention-grabbers and attention-holders. We—and, indeed, all animate species—have always had to have filters and biases built into our nervous systems to screen the passing show for things worth hanging on to, and these filters favor certain sorts of exceptions or anomalies. Pascal Boyer(2001) calls these exceptions counterintuitive, but he means this in a rather circumscribed technical sense: counterintuitive anomalies are especially attention-worthy and memorable if they violate just one or two of the basic default assumptions about a fundamental category like person or plant or tool. Concoctions that aren’t readily classifiable at all because they are too nonsensical can’t hold their own in the competition for attention, and concoctions that are too bland are just not interesting enough. An invisible ax with no handle and a spherical head is just irritating nonsense, an ax made of cheese is a bit titillating (there are conceptual artists who make a good living coming up with such japes), but a talking ax—ah, now we’ve got something to hold the attention!

Put these two ideas together—a hyperactive agent-seeking bias and a weakness for certain sorts of memorable combos—and you get a kind of fiction-generating contraption. Every time something puzzling happens, it triggers a sort of curiosity startle, a “Who’s there?” response that starts churning out “hypotheses” of sorts: “Maybe it’s Sam, maybe it’s a wolf, maybe it’s a falling branch, maybe it’s…a tree that can walk—hey, maybe it’s a tree that can walk!” We can suppose that this process almost never generates anything with any staying power—millions or billions of little stretches of fantasy that almost instantly evaporate beyond recall until, one day, one happens to occur at just the right moment, with just the right sort of zing, to get rehearsed not just once and not just twice, but many times. A lineage of ideas—the walking-tree lineage—is born. Every time the initiator’s mind is led to review the curious idea, not deliberately but just idly, the idea gets a little stronger—in the sense of a little more likely to occur in the initiator’s mind again. And again. It has a little self-replicative power, a little more self-replicative power than the other fantasies it competes with for time in the brain. It is not yet a meme, an item that escapes an individual mind and spreads through human culture, but it is a good proto-meme: a slightly obsessional—that is, oft-recurring, oftrehearsed—little hobbyhorse of an idea.

(Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen. Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but speciation almost never happens, not once in a million births. Mutation in DNA almost never happens—not once in a trillion copyings—but evolution depends on it. Take the set of infrequent accidents—things that almost never happen—and sort them into the happy accidents, the neutral accidents, and the fatal accidents; amplify the effects of the happy accidents—which happens automatically when you have replication and competition—and you get evolution.)