Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  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

  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.

  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

  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.

  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.

  —Erns
t Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought

  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.

  One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. You are normally oblivious of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we don’t see colors in our peripheral vision. It seems as if we do, but we don’t, as you can prove to yourself by wiggling colored cards at the edge of your vision—you’ll see motion just fine but not be able to identify the color of the moving thing. It takes special provoking like that to get the absence of information to reveal itself to us. And the absence of information about religion is what I want to draw to everyone’s attention. We have neglected to gather a wealth of information about something of great import to us.

  This may come as a surprise. Haven’t we been looking carefully at religion for a long time? Yes, of course. There have been centuries of insightful and respectful scholarship about the history and variety of religious phenomena. This work, like the bounty gathered by dedicated bird-watchers and other nature lovers before Darwin’s time, is proving to be a hugely valuable resource to those pioneers who are now beginning, for the first time really, to study the natural phenomena of religion through the eyes of contemporary science. Darwin’s breakthrough in biology was enabled by his deep knowledge of the wealth of empirical details scrupulously garnered by hundreds of pre-Darwinian, non-Darwinian natural historians. Their theoretical innocence was itself an important check on his enthusiasm; they had not gathered their facts with an eye to proving Darwinian theory correct, and we can be equally grateful that almost all the “natural history of religion” that has been accumulated to date is, if not theoretically innocent, at least oblivious to the sorts of theories that now may be supported or undercut by it.

  The research to date has hardly been neutral, however. We don’t just walk up to religious phenomena and study them point-blank, as if they were fossils or soybeans in a field. Researchers tend to be either respectful, deferential, diplomatic, tentative—or hostile, invasive, and contemptuous. It is just about impossible to be neutral in your approach to religion, because many people view neutrality in itself as hostile. If you’re not for us, you’re against us. And so, since religion so clearly matters so much to so many people, researchers have almost never even attempted to be neutral; they have tended to err on the side of deference, putting on the kid gloves. It is either that or open hostility. For this reason, there has been an unfortunate pattern in the work that has been done. People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias. Such distortion is not inevitable. Scientists in every field have pet theories they hope to confirm, or target hypotheses they yearn to demolish, but, knowing this, they take a variety of tried-and-true steps to prevent their bias from polluting their evidence-gathering: double-blind experiments, peer review, statistical tests, and many other standard constraints of good scientific method. But in the study of religion, the stakes have often been seen to be higher. If you think that the disconfirmation of a hypothesis about one religious phenomenon or another would not be just an undesirable crack in the foundation of some theory but a moral calamity, you tend not to run all the controls. Or so, at least, it has often seemed to observers.

  That impression, true or false, has created a positive feedback loop: scientists don’t want to deal with second-rate colleagues, so they tend to shun topics where they see what they take to be mediocre work being done. This self-selection is a frustrating pattern that begins when students think about “choosing a major” in college. The best students typically shop around, and if they are unimpressed by the work they are introduced to in the first course in a field, they cross that field off their list for good. When I was an undergraduate, physics was still the glamour field, and then the race to the moon drew more than its share of talent. (A fossil trace is the phrase “Hey, it’s not rocket science.”) This was followed by computer science for a while, and all along—for half a century and more—biology, especially molecular biology, has attracted many of the smartest. Today, cognitive science and the various strands of evolutionary biology—bio-informatics, genetics, developmental biology—are on the rise. But through all this period, sociology and anthropology, social psychology, and my own home field, philosophy, have struggled along, attracting those whose interests match the field well, including some brilliant people, but having to combat somewhat unenviable reputations. As my old friend and former colleague, Nelson Pike, a respected philosopher of religion, once ruefully put it:

  If you are in a company of people of mixed occupations, and somebody asks what you do, and you say you are a college professor, a glazed look comes into his eye. If you are in a company of professors from various departments, and somebody asks what is your field, and you say philosophy, a glazed look comes into his eye. If you are at a conference of philosophers, and som
ebody asks you what you are working on, and you say philosophy of religion…[Quoted in Bambrough, 1980]

  This is not just a problem for philosophers of religion. It is equally a problem for sociologists of religion, psychologists of religion, and other social scientists—economists, political scientists—and for those few brave neuroscientists and other biologists who have decided to look at religious phenomena with the tools of their trade. One of the factors is that people think they already know everything they need to know about religion, and this received wisdom is pretty bland, not provocative enough to inspire either refutation or extension. In fact, if you set out to design an impermeable barrier between scientists and an underexplored phenomenon, you could hardly do better than to fabricate the dreary aura of low prestige, backbiting, and dubious results that currently envelops the topic of religion. And since we know from the outset that many people think such research violates a taboo, or at least meddles impertinently in matters best left private, it is not so surprising that few good researchers, in any discipline, want to touch the topic. I myself certainly felt that way until recently.

  These obstacles can be overcome. In the twentieth century, a lot was learned about how to study human phenomena, social phenomena. Wave after wave of research and criticism has sharpened our appreciation of the particular pitfalls, such as biases in data-gathering, investigator-interference effects, and the interpretation of data. Statistical and analytical techniques have become much more sophisticated, and we have begun setting aside the old oversimplified models of human perception, emotion, motivation, and control of action and replacing them with more physiologically and psychologically realistic models. The yawning chasm that was seen to separate the sciences of the mind (Geisteswissenschaften) from the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) has not yet been bridged securely, but many lines have been flung across the divide. Mutual suspicion and professional jealousy as well as genuine theoretical controversy continue to shake almost all efforts to carry insights back and forth on these connecting routes, but every day the traffic grows. The question is not whether good science of religion as a natural phenomenon is possible: it is. The question is whether we should do it.