Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Among the adaptations for improving the bandwidth and fidelity of parent-offspring transmission is imprinting, in which the newborn has a readily triggered and powerful instinctual urge to approach and stay close to and attend to the first large moving thing it sees. In mammals the urge to find and cling to the nipple is hardwired by the genes, and it has the side effect, opportunistically exploited by further adaptations, of keeping the young where they can watch Mother when they are not feeding. Human infants are no exception to the mammalian rules. Meanwhile, going in the other direction, parents have been genetically designed to attend to infants. Whereas gull chicks are irresistibly drawn to an orange spot, human beings are irresistibly captivated by the special proportions of a “baby face.” It brings out the “Aw, isn’t she cunning!” response in the steeliest curmudgeons. As Konrad Lorenz (1950) and others have argued, the correlation between an infant’s facial appearance and an adult’s nurturing response is no accident. It is not that baby faces are somehow intrinsically darling (what on earth could that mean?) but that evolution hit upon facial proportions as the signal to trigger parental responses, and this has been refined and intensified over the eons in many lineages. We don’t love babies and puppies because they’re cute. It’s the other way around: we see them as cute because evolution has designed us to love things that look like that. So strong is the correlation that measurements of fossils of newborn dinosaurs have been used to support the radical hypothesis that some dinosaur species were altricial (Hopson, 1977; Horner, 1984). Stephen Jay Gould’s classic analysis (1980) of the gradual juvenilization over the years of Mickey Mouse’s features provides an elegant demonstration of the way cultural evolution can parallel genetic evolution, homing in on what human beings instinctually prefer.

But even more potent than the bias in adults to respond parentally to baby-faced young is the bias in those young to respond with obedience to parental injunction—a trait observable in bear cubs as well as human babies. The free-floating rationale is not far to seek: it is in the genetic interests of parents (but not necessarily other conspecifics!) to inform—not misinform—their young, so it is efficient (and relatively safe) to trust one’s parents. (Sterelny, 2003, has particularly acute observations on the trade-offs between trust and suspicion in the evolutionary arms races of cognition.) Once the information superhighway between parent and child is established by genetic evolution, it is ready to be used—or abused—by any agents with agendas of their own, or by any memes that happen to have features that benefit from the biases built into the highway.³

One’s parents—or whoever are hard to distinguish from one’s parents—have something approaching a dedicated hotline to acceptance, not as potent as hypnotic suggestion, but sometimes close to it. Many years ago, my five-year-old daughter, attempting to imitate the gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s performance on the horizontal bar, tipped over the piano stool and painfully crushed two of her fingertips. How was I going to calm down this terrified child so I could safely drive her to the emergency room? Inspiration struck: I held my own hand near her throbbing little hand and sternly ordered: “Look, Andrea! I’m going to teach you a secret! You can push the pain into my hand with your mind. Go ahead, push! Push!” She tried—and it worked! She’d “pushed the pain” into Daddy’s hand. Her relief (and fascination) were instantaneous. The effect lasted only for minutes, but with a few further administrations of impromptu hypnotic analgesia along the way, I got her to the emergency room, where they could give her the further treatment she needed. (Try it with your own child, if the occasion arises. You may be similarly lucky.) I was exploiting her instincts—though the rationale didn’t occur to me until years later, when I was reflecting on it. (This raises an interesting empirical question: would my attempt at instant hypnosis have worked as effectively on some other five-yearold, who hadn’t imprinted on me as an authority figure? And if imprinting is implicated, how young must a child be to imprint so effectively on a parent? Our daughter was three months old when we adopted her.)

“Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them” (Dawkins, 2004a, p. 12). It is not surprising, then, to find religious leaders in every part of the world hitting upon the extra authority provided them by their taking on the title “Father”—but this is to get ahead of our story. We’re still at the stage where, Boyer claims, our ancestors were unwittingly summoning up fantasies about their ancestors in order to relieve some of their quandaries about what to do next. An important feature of Boyer’s hypothesis is that these imagined full-access agents are not typically deemed to be omniscient; if you lose your knife, you don’t automatically suppose that they would know the whereabouts of your knife unless somebody stole it from you or you dropped it in an incriminating place during a tryst—unless, that is, it was strategic information. And the ancestors know all the strategic information, because they are interested in it. What you and your kin do is of concern to them for the same reason it is of concern to your parents, and for the same reason it matters to you what your children do and how they are perceived in the community. Boyer’s suggestion is that the idea of omniscience—a god who knows absolutely everything about everything, including where your car keys are, the largest prime number smaller than a quadrillion, and the number of grains of sand on that beach—is a later wrinkle, a bit of sophistication or intellectual tidying-up much more recently adopted by theologians. There is some experimental evidence in support of this hypothesis. People have been taught since childhood, and hence will avow, that God knows everything, but they don’t rely on this when reasoning un-self-consciously about God. The root idea, the one that people actually use when they are not worrying about “theological correctness” (Barrett, 2000), is that the ancestors or the gods know the things that matter the most: the secret longings and schemes and worries and pangs of guilt. Gods know where all the bodies are buried, as the saying goes.