Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

In assuming that religion is a natural phenomenon, I am not prejudging its value to human life, one way or the other. Religion, like love and music, is natural. But so are smoking, war, and death. In this sense of natural, everything artificial is natural! The Aswan Dam is no less natural than a beaver’s dam, and the beauty of a skyscraper is no less natural than the beauty of a sunset. The natural sciences take everything in Nature as their topic, and that includes both jungles and cities, both birds and airplanes, the good, the bad, the ugly, the insignificant, and the all-important as well.

Over two hundred years ago, David Hume wrote two books on religion. One was about religion as a natural phenomenon, and its opening sentence is the epigraph of this section. The other was about the “foundation in reason” of religion, his famous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Hume wanted to consider whether there was any good reason—any scientific reason, we might say—for believing in God. Natural religion, for Hume, would be a creed that was as well supported by evidence and argument as Newton’s theory of gravitation, or plane geometry. He contrasted it with revealed religion, which depended on the revelations of mystical experience or other extra-scientific paths to conviction. I gave Hume’s Dialogues a place of honor in my 1995 book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea—Hume is yet another of my heroes—so you might think that I intend to pursue this issue still further in this book, but that is not in fact my intention. This time I am pursuing Hume’s other path. Philosophers have spent two millennia and more concocting and criticizing arguments for the existence of God, such as the Argument from Design and the Ontological Argument, and arguments against the existence of God, such as the Argument from Evil. Many of us brights have devoted considerable time and energy at some point in our lives to looking at the arguments for and against the existence of God, and many brights continue to pursue these issues, hacking away vigorously at the arguments of the believers as if they were trying to refute a rival scientific theory. But not I. I decided some time ago that diminishing returns had set in on the arguments about God’s existence, and I doubt that any breakthroughs are in the offing, from either side. Besides, many deeply religious people insist that all those arguments—on both sides—simply miss the whole point of religion, and their demonstrated lack of interest in the arguments persuades me of their sincerity. Fine. So what, then, is the point of religion?

What is this phenomenon or set of phenomena that means so much to so many people, and why—and how—does it command allegiance and shape so many lives so strongly? That is the main question I will address here, and once we have sorted out and clarified (not settled) some of the conflicting answers to this question, it will give us a novel perspective from which to look, briefly, at the traditional philosophical issue that some people insist is the only issue: whether or not there are good reasons for believing in God. Those who insist that they know that God exists and can prove it will have their day in court.⁶

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Chapter 1 Religions are among the most powerful natural phenomena on the planet, and we need to understand them better if we are to make informed and just political decisions. Although there are risks and discomforts involved, we should brace ourselves and set aside our traditional reluctance to investigate religious phenomena scientifically, so that we can come to understand how and why religions inspire such devotion, and figure out how we should deal with them all in the twenty-first century.

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Chapter 2 There are obstacles confronting the scientific study of religion, and there are misgivings that need to be addressed. A preliminary exploration shows that it is both possible and advisable for us to turn our strongest investigative lights on religion.

CHAPTER TWO Some Questions About Science

1 Can science study religion?

To be sure, man is, zoologically speaking, an animal. Yet, he is a unique animal, differing from all others in so many fundamental ways that a separate science for man is well-justified.

—Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought

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There has been some confusion about whether the earthly manifestations of religion should count as a part of Nature. Is religion out-of-bounds to science? It all depends on what you mean. If you mean the religious experiences, beliefs, practices, texts, artifacts, institutions, conflicts, and history of H. sapiens, then this is a voluminous catalogue of unquestionably natural phenomena. Considered as psychological states, drug-induced hallucination and religious ecstasy are both amenable to study by neuroscientists and psychologists. Considered as the exercise of cognitive competence, memorizing the periodic table of elements is the same sort of phenomenon as memorizing the Lord’s Prayer. Considered as examples of engineering, suspension bridges and cathedrals both obey the law of gravity and are subject to the same sorts of forces and stresses. Considered as salable manufactured goods, both mystery novels 29 and Bibles fall under the regularities of economics. The logistics of holy wars do not differ from the logistics of entirely secular conflicts. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!” as the World War II song said. A crusade or a jihad can be investigated by researchers in many disciplines, from anthropology and military history to nutrition and metallurgy.

In his book Rocks of Ages (1999), the late Stephen Jay Gould defended the political hypothesis that science and religion are two “non-overlapping magisteria”—two domains of concern and inquiry that can coexist peacefully as long as neither poaches on the other’s special province. The magisterium of science is factual truth on all matters, and the magisterium of religion, he claimed, is the realm of morality and the meaning of life. Although Gould’s desire for peace between these often warring perspectives was laudable, his proposal found little favor on either side, since in the minds of the religious it proposed abandoning all religious claims to factual truth and understanding of the natural world (including the claims that God created the universe, or performs miracles, or listens to prayers), whereas in the minds of the secularists it granted too much authority to religion in matters of ethics and meaning. Gould exposed some clear instances of immodest folly on both sides, but the claim that all conflict between the two perspectives is due to overreaching by one side or the other is implausible, and few readers were persuaded. But whether or not the case can be made for Gould’s proposal, my proposal is different. There may be some domain that is religion’s alone to command, some realm of human activity that science can’t properly address and religion can, but that does not mean that science cannot or should not study this very fact. Gould’s own book was presumably a product of just such a scientific investigation, albeit a rather informal one. He looked at religion with the eyes of a scientist and thought he could see a boundary that revealed two domains of human activity. Was he right? That is presumably a scientific, factual question, not a religious question. I am not suggesting that science should try to do what religion does, but that it should study, scientifically, what religion does.