Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

I am a philosopher, not a biologist or an anthropologist or a sociologist or historian or theologian. We philosophers are better at asking questions than at answering them, and this may strike some people as a comical admission of futility—“He says his specialty is just asking questions, not answering them. What a puny job! And they pay him for this?” But anybody who has ever tackled a truly tough problem knows that one of the most difficult tasks is finding the right questions to ask and the right order to ask them in. You have to figure out not only what you don’t know, but what you need to know and don’t need to know, and what you need to know in order to figure out what you need to know, and so forth. The form our questions take opens up some avenues and closes off others, and we don’t want to waste time and energy barking up the wrong trees. Philosophers can sometimes help in this endeavor, but of course they have often gotten in the way, too. Then some other philosopher has to come in and try to clean up the mess. I have always liked the way John Locke put it, in the “Epistle to the Reader” at the beginning of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690):

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…it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge;—which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that degree that Philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit or incapable to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation.

Another of my philosophical heroes, William James, recognized as well as any philosopher ever has the importance of enriching your philosophical diet of abstractions and logical arguments with large helpings of hard-won fact, and just about a hundred years ago, he published his classic investigation, The Varieties of Religious Experience. It will be cited often in this book, for it is a treasure trove of insights and arguments, too often overlooked in recent times, and I will begin by putting an old tale he recounts to a new use:

A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared. [James, 1902, p. 111]

Like the revivalist preacher, I say unto you, O religious folks who fear to break the taboo: Let go! Let go! You’ll hardly notice the drop! The sooner we set about studying religion scientifically, the sooner your deepest fears will be allayed. But that is just a plea, not an argument, so I must persist with my case. I ask just that you try to keep an open mind and refrain from prejudging what I say because I am a godless philosopher, while I similarly do my best to understand you. (I am a bright. My essay “The Bright Stuff,” in the New York Times, July 12, 2003, drew attention to the efforts of some agnostics, atheists, and other adherents of naturalism to coin a new term for us nonbelievers, and the large positive response to that essay helped persuade me to write this book. There was also a negative response, largely objecting to the term that had been chosen [not by me]: bright, which seemed to imply that others were dim or stupid. But the term, modeled on the highly successful hijacking of the ordinary word “gay” by homosexuals, does not have to have that implication. Those who are not gays are not necessarily glum; they’re straight. Those who are not brights are not necessarily dim. They might like to choose a name for themselves. Since, unlike us brights, they believe in the supernatural, perhaps they would like to call themselves supers. It’s a nice word with positive connotations, like gay and bright and straight. Some people would not willingly associate with somebody who was openly gay, and others would not willingly read a book by somebody who was openly bright. But there is a first time for everything. Try it. You can always back out later if it becomes too offensive.)

As you can already see, this is going to be something of a roller-coaster ride for both of us. I have interviewed many deeply religious people in the last few years, and most of these volunteers had never conversed with anybody like me about such topics (and I had certainly never before attempted to broach such delicate topics with people so unlike myself), so there were more than a few awkward surprises and embarrassing miscommunications. I learned a lot, but in spite of my best efforts I will no doubt outrage some readers, and display my ignorance of matters they consider of the greatest importance. This will give them a handy reason to discard my book without considering just which points in it they disagree with and why. I ask that they resist hiding behind this excuse and soldier on. They will learn something, and then they may be able to teach us all something.

Some people think it is deeply immoral even to consider reading such a book as this! For them, wondering whether they should read it would be as shameful as wondering whether to watch a pornographic videotape. The psychologist Philip Tetlock (1999, 2003, 2004) identifies values as sacred when they are so important to those who hold them that the very act of considering them is offensive. The comedian Jack Benny was famously stingy—or so he presented himself on radio and television—and one of his best bits was the skit in which a mugger puts a gun in his back and barks, “Your money or your life!” Benny just stands there silently. “Your money or your life!” repeats the mugger, with mounting impatience. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” Benny replies. This is funny because most of us—religious or not—think that nobody should even think about such a trade-off. Nobody should have to think about such a trade-off. It should be unthinkable, a “no-brainer.” Life is sacred, and no amount of money would be a fair exchange for a life, and if you don’t already know that, what’s wrong with you? “To transgress this boundary, to attach a monetary value to one’s friendships, children, or loyalty to one’s country, is to disqualify oneself from the accompanying social roles” (Tetlock et al., 2004, p. 5). That is what makes life a sacred value.

Tetlock and his colleagues have conducted ingenious (and sometimes troubling) experiments in which subjects are obliged to consider “taboo trade-offs,” such as whether or not to purchase live human body parts for some worthy end, or whether or not to pay somebody to have a baby that you then raise, or pay somebody to perform your military service. As their model predicts, many subjects exhibit a strong “mere contemplation effect”: they feel guilty and sometimes get angry about being lured into even thinking about such dire choices, even when they make all the right choices. When given the opportunity by the experimenters to engage in “moral cleansing” (by volunteering for some relevant community service, for instance), subjects who have had to think about taboo trade-offs are significantly more likely than control subjects to volunteer—for real—for such good deeds. (Control subjects had been asked to think about purely secular trade-offs, such as whether to hire a housecleaner or buy food instead of something else.) So this book may do some good by just increasing the level of charity in those who feel guilty reading it! If you feel yourself contaminated by reading this book, you will perhaps feel resentful, but also more eager than you otherwise would be to work off that resentment by engaging in some moral cleansing. I hope so, and you needn’t thank me for inspiring you.