Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Â

In spite of the religious connotations of the term, even atheists and agnostics can have sacred values, values that are simply not up for re-evaluation at all. I have sacred values—in the sense that I feel vaguely guilty even thinking about whether they are defensible and would never consider abandoning them (I like to think!) in the course of solving a moral dilemma. My sacred values are obvious and quite ecumenicaclass="underline" democracy, justice, life, love, and truth (in alphabetical order). But since I’m a philosopher, I’ve learned how to set aside the vertigo and embarrassment and ask myself what in the end supports even them, what should give when they conflict, as they often tragically do, and whether there are better alternatives. It is this traditional philosophers’ open-mindedness to every idea that some people find immoral in itself. They think that they should be closed-minded when it comes to certain topics. They know that they share the planet with others who disagree with them, but they don’t want to enter into dialogue with those others. They want to discredit, suppress, or even kill those others. While I recognize that many religious people could never bring themselves to read a book like this—that is part of the problem the book is meant to illuminate—I intend to reach as wide an audience of believers as possible. Other authors have recently written excellent books and articles on the scientific analysis of religion that are directed primarily to their fellow academics. My goal here is to play the role of ambassador, introducing (and distinguishing, criticizing, and defending) the main ideas of that literature. This puts my sacred values to work: I want the resolution to the world’s problems to be as democratic and just as possible, and both democracy and justice depend on getting on the table for all to see as much of the truth as possible, bearing in mind that sometimes the truth hurts, and hence should sometimes be left concealed, out of love for those who would suffer were it revealed. But I’m prepared to consider alternative values and reconsider the priorities I find among my own.

5 Religion as a natural phenomenon

As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature.

—David Hume, The Natural History of Religion

Â

What do I mean when I speak of religion as a natural phenomenon?

I might mean that it’s like natural food—not just tasty but healthy, unadulterated, “organic.” (That, at any rate, is the myth.) So do I mean: “Religion is healthy; it’s good for you!”? This might be true, but it is not what I mean.

I might mean that religion is not an artifact, not a product of human intellectual activity. Sneezing and belching are natural, reciting sonnets is not; going naked—au naturel—is natural; wearing clothes is not. But it is obviously false that religion is natural in this sense. Religions are transmitted culturally, through language and symbolism, not through the genes. You may get your father’s nose and your mother’s musical ability through your genes, but if you get your religion from your parents, you get it the way you get your language, through upbringing. So of course that is not what I mean by natural.

With a slightly different emphasis, I might mean that religion is doing what comes naturally, not an acquired taste, or an artificially groomed or educated taste. In this sense, speaking is natural but writing is not; drinking milk is natural but drinking a dry martini is not; listening to tonal music is natural but listening to atonal music is not; gazing at sunsets is natural but gazing at late Picasso paintings is not. There is some truth to this: religion is not an unnatural act, and this will be a topic explored in this book. But it is not what I mean.

I might mean that religion is natural as opposed to supernatural, that it is a human phenomenon composed of events, organisms, objects, structures, patterns, and the like that all obey the laws of physics or biology, and hence do not involve miracles. And that is what I mean. Notice that it could be true that God exists, that God is indeed the intelligent, conscious, loving creator of us all, and yet still religion itself, as a complex set of phenomena, is a perfectly natural phenomenon. Nobody would think it was presupposing atheism to write a book subtitled Sports as a Natural Phenomenon or Cancer as a Natural Phenomenon. Both sports and cancer are widely recognized as natural phenomena, not supernatural, in spite of the well-known exaggerations of various promoters. (I’m thinking, for instance, of two famous touchdown passes known respectively as the Hail Mary and the Immaculate Reception, to say nothing of the weekly trumpetings by researchers and clinics around the world of one “miraculous” cancer cure or another.)

Sports and cancer are the subject of intense scientific scrutiny by researchers working in many disciplines and holding many different religious views. They all assume, tentatively and for the sake of science, that the phenomena they are studying are natural phenomena. This doesn’t prejudge the verdict that they are. Perhaps there are sports miracles that actually defy the laws of nature; perhaps some cancer cures are miracles. If so, the only hope of ever demonstrating this to a doubting world would be by adopting the scientific method, with its assumption of no miracles, and showing that science was utterly unable to account for the phenomena. Miracle-hunters must be scrupulous scientists or else they are wasting their time—a point long recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, which at least goes through the motions of subjecting the claims of miracles made on behalf of candidates for sainthood to objective scientific investigation. So no deeply religious person should object to the scientific study of religion with the presumption that it is an entirely natural phenomenon. If it isn’t entirely natural, if there really are miracles involved, the best way—indeed, the only way—to show that to doubters would be to demonstrate it scientifically. Refusing to play by these rules only creates the suspicion that one doesn’t really believe that religion is supernatural after all.