2 Should science study religion?
Look before you leap.
âAesop, âThe Fox and the Goatâ
Research is expensive and sometimes has harmful side effects. One of the lessons of the twentieth century is that scientists are not above confabulating justifications for the work they want to do, driven by insatiable curiosity. Are there in fact good reasons, aside from sheer curiosity, to try to develop the natural science of religion? Do we need this for anything? Would it help us choose policies, respond to problems, improve our world? What do we know about the future of religion? Consider five wildly different hypotheses:
1. The Enlightenment is long gone; the creeping âsecularizationâ of modern societies that has been anticipated for two centuries is evaporating before our eyes. The tide is turning and religion is becoming more important than ever. In this scenario, religion soon resumes something like the dominant social and moral role it had before the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century. As people recover from their infatuation with technology and material comforts, spiritual identity becomes a personâs most valued attribute, and populations come to be ever more sharply divided among Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and a few other major multinational religious organizations. Eventuallyâit might take another millennium, or it might be hastened by catastropheâone major faith sweeps the planet.
2. Religion is in its death throes; todayâs outbursts of fervor and fanaticism are but a brief and awkward transition to a truly modern society in which religion plays at most a ceremonial role. In this scenario, although there may be some local and temporary revivals and even some violent catastrophes, the major religions of the world soon go just as extinct as the hundreds of minor religions that are vanishing faster than anthropologists can record them. Within the lifetimes of our grandchildren, Vatican City becomes the European Museum of Roman Catholicism, and Mecca is turned into Disneyâs Magic Kingdom of Allah.
3. Religions transform themselves into institutions unlike anything seen before on the planet: basically creedless associations selling self-help and enabling moral teamwork, using ceremony and tradition to cement relationships and build âlong-term fan loyalty.â In this scenario, being a member of a religion becomes more and more like being a Boston Red Sox fan, or a Dallas Cowboys fan. Different colors, different songs and cheers, different symbols, and vigorous competitionâwould you want your daughter to marry a Yankees fan?âbut aside from a rabid few, everybody appreciates the importance of peaceful coexistence in a Global League of Religions. Religious art and music flourish, and friendly rivalry leads to a degree of specialization, with one religion priding itself on its environmental stewardship, providing clean water for the worldâs billions, while another becomes duly famous for its concerted defense of social justice and economic equality.
4. Religion diminishes in prestige and visibility, rather like smoking; it is tolerated, since there are those who say they canât live without it, but it is discouraged, and teaching religion to impressionable young children is frowned upon in most societies and actually outlawed in others. In this scenario, politicians who still practice religion can be elected if they prove themselves worthy in other regards, but few would advertise their religious affiliationâor affliction, as the politically incorrect insist on calling it. It is considered as rude to draw attention to the religion of somebody as it is to comment in public about his sexuality or whether she has been divorced.
5. Judgment Day arrives. The blessed ascend bodily into heaven, and the rest are left behind to suffer the agonies of the damned, as the Antichrist is vanquished. As the Bible prophecies foretold, the rebirth of the nation of Israel in 1948 and the ongoing conflict over Palestine are clear signs of the End Times, when the Second Coming of Christ sweeps all the other hypotheses into oblivion.
Other possibilities are describable, of course, but these five hypotheses highlight the extremes that are taken seriously. What is remarkable about the set is that just about anybody would find at least one of them preposterous, or troubling, or even deeply offensive, but every one of them is not just anticipated but yearned for. People act on what they yearn for. We are at cross-purposes about religion, to say the least, so we can anticipate problems, ranging from wasted effort and counterproductive campaigns if we are lucky to all-out war and genocidal catastrophe if we are not.
Only one of these hypotheses (at most) will turn out to be true; the rest are not just wrong but wildly wrong. Many people think they know which is true, but nobody does. Isnât that fact, all by itself, enough reason to study religion scientifically? Whether you want religion to flourish or perish, whether you think it should transform itself or stay just as it is, you can hardly deny that whatever happens will be of tremendous significance to the planet. It would be useful to your hopes, whatever they are, to know more about what is likely to happen and why. In this regard, it is worth noting how assiduously those who firmly believe in number 5 scan the world news for evidence of prophecies fulfilled. They sort and evaluate their sources, debating the pros and cons of various interpretations of those prophecies. They think there is a reason to investigate the future of religion, and they donât even think the course of future events lies within human power to determine. The rest of us have all the more reason to investigate the phenomena, since it is quite obvious that complacency and ignorance could lead us to squander our opportunities to steer the phenomena in what we take to be the benign directions.
Looking ahead, anticipating the future, is the crowning achievement of our species. We have managed in a few short millennia of human culture to multiply the planetâs supply of look-ahead by many orders of magnitude. We know when eclipses will occur centuries in advance; we can predict the effects on the atmosphere of adjustments in how we generate electricity; we can anticipate in broad outline what will happen as our petroleum reserves dwindle in the next decades. We do this not with miraculous prophecy but with basic perception. We gather information from the environment, using our senses, and then we use science to cobble together anticipations based on that information. We mine the ore, and then refine it, again and again, and it lets us see into the futureâdimly, with lots of uncertainty, but much better than a coin toss. In every area of human concern, we have learned how to anticipate and then avoid catastrophes that used to blindside us.1 We have recently forestalled a global disaster due to a growing hole in the ozone layer because some far-seeing chemists were able to prove that some of our manufactured compounds were causing the problem. We have avoided economic collapses in recent years because our economic models have shown us impending problems.
A catastrophe averted is an anticlimax, obviously, so we tend not to appreciate how valuable our powers of look-ahead are. âSee?â we complain. âIt wasnât going to happen after all.â The flu season in the winter of 2003â2004 was predicted to be severe, since it arrived earlier than usual, but the broadcast recommendations for inoculation were so widely heeded that the epidemic collapsed as rapidly as it began. Ho-hum. It has become something of a tradition in recent years for the meteorologists on television to hype an oncoming hurricane or other storm, and then for the public to be underwhelmed by the actual storm. But sober evaluations show that many lives are saved, destruction is minimized. We accept the value of intensely studying El Niño and the other cycles in ocean currents so that we can do better meteorological forecasting. We keep exhaustive records of many economic events so that we can do better economic forecasting. We should extend the same intense scrutiny, for the same reasons, to religious phenomena. Few forces in the world are as potent, as influential, as religion. As we struggle to resolve the terrible economic and social inequities that currently disfigure our planet, and minimize the violence and degradation we see, we have to recognize that if we have a blind spot about religion our efforts will almost certainly fail, and may make matters much worse. We wouldnât permit
the worldâs food-producing interests to deflect us from studying human agriculture and nutrition, and we have learned not to exempt the banking-and-insurance world from intense and continuous scrutiny. Their effects are too important to take on faith. So what I am calling for is a concerted effort to achieve a mutual agreement under which religionâall religionâbecomes a proper object of scientific study.
Here I find that opinion is divided among those who are already convinced that this would be a good idea, those who are dubious and inclined to doubt that it would be of much value, and those who find the proposal evilâoffensive, dangerous, and stupid. Not wanting to preach to the converted, I am particularly concerned to address those who hate this idea, in hopes of persuading them that their repugnance is misplaced. This is a daunting task, like trying to persuade your friend with the cancer symptoms that she really ought to see a doctor now, since her anxiety may be misplaced and the sooner she learns that the sooner she can get on with her life, and if she does have cancer, timely intervention may make all the difference. Friends can get quite annoyed when you interfere with their denial at times like that, but perseverance is called for. Yes, I want to put religion on the examination table. If it is fundamentally benign, as many of its devotees insist, it should emerge just fine; suspicions will be put to rest and we can then concentrate on the few peripheral pathologies that religion, like every other natural phenomenon, falls prey to. If it is not, the sooner we identify the problems clearly the better. Will the inquiry itself generate some discomfort and embarrassment? Almost certainly, but that is a small price to pay. Is there a risk that such an invasive examination will make a healthy religion ill, or even disable it? Of course. There are always risks. Are they worth taking? Perhaps not, but I havenât yet seen an argument that persuades me of this, and we will soon consider the best of them. The only arguments worth attending to will have to demonstrate that (1) religion provides net benefits to humankind, and (2) these benefits would be unlikely to survive such an investigation. I, for one, fear that if we donât subject religion to such scrutiny now, and work out together whatever revisions and reforms are called for, we will pass on a legacy of ever more toxic forms of religion to our descendants. I canât prove that, and those who are dead sure that this will not happen are encouraged to say what supports their conviction, aside from loyalty to their tradition, which goes without saying and doesnât count for anything here.
In general, knowing more improves your chances of getting what you value. Thatâs not quite a truth of logic, since uncertainty is not the only factor that can lower the probability of achieving oneâs goals. The costs of knowing (such as the cost of coming to know) must be factored in, and these costs may be high, which is why âWing it!â is sometimes good advice. Suppose there is a limit on how much knowledge about some topic is good for us. If so, then, whenever that limit is reached (if that is possibleâthe limit may be unreachable for one reason or another), we should prohibit or at least strongly discourage any further seeking of knowledge on that topic, as antisocial activity. This may be a principle that never comes into play, but we donât know that, and we should certainly accept the principle. It may be, then, that some of our major disagreements in the world today are about whether weâve reached such a limit. This reflection puts the Islamist2 conviction that Western science is a bad thing in a different light: it may not be an ignorant mistake so much as a profoundly different view of where the threshold is. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. We need to consider such possibilities carefully.
3 Might music be bad for you?
Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.
âJoseph Addison
Is it not strange that sheepâs guts should hale souls out of menâs bodies?
âWilliam Shakespeare
It is not that I donât sympathize with the distaste of those who resist my proposal. Trying to imagine what their emotional response to my proposal would be, I have come up with an unsettling thought experiment that seems to me to do the trick. (I am speaking now to those who, like me, are not appalled by the idea of this examination.) Imagine how you would feel if you were to read in the science section of the New York Times that new research conducted at Cambridge University and Caltech showed that music, long viewed as one of the unalloyed treasures of human culture, is actually bad for your health, a major risk factor for Alzheimerâs and heart disease, a mood-distorter that impairs judgment in subtle but clearly deleterious ways, a significant contributor to aggressive tendencies, xenophobia, and weakness of will. Early and habitual exposure to music, both performing and listening, makes you 40 percent more likely to suffer serious depression, knocks an average of ten points off your IQ, and nearly doubles the probability that you will commit an act of violence at some time in your life. A panel of researchers recommends that people restrict their music intake to no more than an hour a day (including everything from elevator music and background music on television to symphony concerts) and that the widespread practice of music lessons for children be curtailed immediately.
Aside from the utter disbelief with which I would greet a report of such âfindings,â I can detect in my imagined reactions a visceral defensive surge, along the lines of âSo much the worse for Cambridge and Caltech! What do they know about music?â and âI donât care if it is true! Anybody who tries to take away my music had better be prepared for a fight, because a life without music isnât worth living. I donât care if it âhurtsâ me, and I donât even care if it âhurtsâ othersâweâre going to have music, and thatâs all there is to it.â That is how I would be tempted to respond. I would rather not live in a world without music. âBut why?â someone might ask. âItâs just some silly sawing away and making noise together. It doesnât feed the hungry or cure cancer orâ¦â I answer: âBut it brings great comfort and joy to hundreds of millions of people. Sure, there are excesses and controversies, but, still, can anybody doubt that music is by and large a good thing?â âWell, yes,â comes the reply. There are religious sectsâthe Taliban, for instance, but also Puritan sects of yore in Christianity and no doubt othersâthat have held that music is an evil pastime, a sort of drug to be forbidden. The idea is not clearly insane, so we should accept the intellectual burden of showing that it is an error.
I recognize that many people feel about religion the way I feel about music. They may be right. Letâs find out. That is, letâs subject religion to the same sort of scientific inquiry that we have done with tobacco and alcohol and, for that matter, music. Letâs find out why people love their religion, and what itâs good for. And we should no more take the existing research to settle the issue than we took the tobacco companiesâ campaigns about the safety of cigarette smoking at face value. Sure, religion saves lives. So does tobaccoâask those GIs for whom tobacco was an even greater comfort than religion during World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam.
Iâm prepared to look hard at the pros and cons of music, and if it turns out that music causes cancer, ethnic hatred, and war, then Iâll have to think seriously about how to live without music. It is only because I am so supremely confident that music doesnât do much harm that I can enjoy it with such a clear conscience. If I were told by credible people that music might be harmful to the world, all things considered, I would feel morally bound to examine the evidence as dispassionately as I could. In fact, I would feel guilty about my allegiance to music if I didnât check it out.
But isnât the hypothesis that the costs of religion outweigh the benefits even more ludicrous than the fantastic claim about music? I donât think so. Music may be what Marx said religion is: the opiate of the masses, keeping working people in tranquilized subjugation, but it may also be the rallying song of revolution, closing up the ranks and giving heart to all. On this point, m
usic and religion have quite similar profiles. In other regards, music looks far less problematic than religion. Over the millennia, music has started a few riots, and charismatic musicians may have sexually abused a shocking number of susceptible young fans, and seduced many others to leave their families (and their wits) behind, but no crusades or jihads have been waged over differences in musical tradition, no pogroms have been instituted against the lovers of waltzes or ragas or tangos. Whole populations havenât been subjected to obligatory scale-playing or kept in penury in order to furnish concert halls with the finest acoustics and instruments. No musicians have had fatwas pronounced against them by musical organizations, not even accordionists.
The comparison of religion to music is particularly useful here, since music is another natural phenomenon that has been ably studied by scholars for hundreds of years but is only just beginning to be an object of the sort of scientific study I am recommending. There has been no dearth of professional research on music theoryâharmony, counterpoint, rhythmâor the techniques of musicianship, or the history of every genre and instrument. Ethnomusicologists have studied the evolution of musical styles and practices in relation to social, economic, and other cultural factors, and neuroscientists and psychologists have rather recently begun studying the perception and creation of music, using all the latest technology to uncover the patterns of brain activity associated with musical experience, musical memory, and related topics. But most of this research still takes music for granted. It seldom asks: Why does music exist? There is a short answer, and it is true, so far as it goes: it exists because we love it, and hence we keep bringing more of it into existence. But why do we love it? Because we find that it is beautiful. But why is it beautiful to us? This is a perfectly good biological question, but it does not yet have a good answer. Compare it, for instance, with the question: Why do we love sweets? Here we know the evolutionary answer, in some detail, and it has some curious twists. It is no accident that we find sweet things to our liking, and if we want to adjust our policies regarding sweet things in the future, we had better understand the evolutionary basis of their appeal. We mustnât make the mistake of the man in the old joke who complained that, just when heâd finally succeeded in training his donkey not to eat, the stupid animal up and died on him.
Breaking the Spell Page 5
