When the Zurich classicist Walter Burkert dared to expose his fellow humanists to biological thinking about the origins of religion in his Gifford Lectures of 1989, he became really the first humanist to attempt to cross the chasm going in the other direction. Burkert is a distinguished historian of ancient religion, widely read in anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, and he has begun educating himself in the evolutionary biology that he sees clearly must ground his own efforts at theorizing. One of the delights of reading his book Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (1996) is seeing how valuable his treasure trove of historical insights turns out to be when placed in the context of biological questions. And one of the causes for dismay is seeing how gingerly he thinks he must tiptoe around the hair-trigger sensitivities of his fellow humanists when he introduces these dread biological notions into their world (Dennett, 1997, 1998b).
Scientists have much to learn from the historians and the cultural anthropologists. The infrastructure for constructive collaborations already exists in the form of interdisciplinary journals, such as Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, and Journal of Cognition and Culture, as well as professional societies and Web sites. One of my goals in this book is to make it easier for subsequent researchers to enter these forbidden zones and find friendly natives with whom to collaborate, without having to hack their way through a jungle of hostile defenders. They will discover that the anthropologists and historians have already thought of most of their ânewâ ideas and have plenty to say about what the problems with them are, so I recommend that they behave modestly, ask lots of questions, and just ignore the often breathtakingly rude and condescending put-downs they inspire in those who dread their approach.1
3 Why does it matter what you believe?
To-day we have to change our attitude from that of description to that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can help us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds to human life.
âWilliam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
It isnât just that I donât believe in God and naturally, hope there is no God! I donât want there to be a God; I donât want the universe to be like that.
âThomas Nagel, The Last Word
We have one last deflector to set aside before we can safely address the main question. Why believe in belief in God? Many people would answer: Simply because God exists! They believe in trees and mountains, tables and chairs, people and places, wind and waterâand God. This would indeed explain their belief in God, but not the fact that they take believing in God to be so important. In particular, why do people care so much what other people believe about God? I believe that the center of the Earth consists mainly of molten iron and nickel. Relative to other things I believe, this is a pretty big and exciting fact. Just imagine: thereâs a ball of molten iron and nickel nearby; itâs about the size of the moon and a lot closer; in fact, itâs between me and Australia! Lots of people donât know this, and too bad for themâsince itâs quite a delightful fact. But it really doesnât bother me that they donât share my belief, or my delight. Why should it matter so much whether others share your belief in God?
Does God care? I can see that Jehovah might be really peeved if He found lots of people oblivious to His power and greatness. Part of what makes Jehovah such a fascinating participant in stories of the Old Testament is His kinglike jealousy and pride, and His great appetite for praise and sacrifices. But we have moved beyond this God (havenât we?). The Creative Intelligence that is supposed by many to have done all the design work we evolutionists attribute to natural selection is not the sort of Being that could be jealous, is it? I know professors who can get mighty annoyed if you pretend you havenât heard of their published work, but it is hard to see why the Creative Intelligence that invented DNA and the metabolic cycle and mangrove trees and sperm whales would care whether any of Its creatures recognized Its authorship. The second law of thermodynamics canât care whether anybody believes in it, and I would think that the Ground of All Being must be a similarly unmoved mover.
An anthropologist once told me about an African tribe (I canât remember their name) whose dealings with their neighbors proceeded at a stately pace. An emissary sent by foot to the settlement of a neighboring tribe would rest for a day after his arrival before conducting any official business, since he had to wait for his soul to catch up. Souls in that culture are slow walkers, apparently. We can see a similar time lag in the migration many believers have made from a highly anthropomorphic God to a more abstract and hard-to-imagine God. They still use anthropomorphic language when speaking of a God who (sic) is not a supernatural being at all but just an essence (to use Starkâs useful if philosophically misbegotten terminology). It is obvious enough why they do this: it permits them to carry over all the connotations required to make any sense of a personal love of God. One can feel, I suppose, a certain affection or gratitude for a law of natureââGood olâ gravity, she just never lets you down!ââbut the proper object of adoration really has to be some sort of person, however inconceivably unlike us talking, featherless bipeds. Only a person could be literally disappointed in you if you misbehaved, or could answer your prayers, or forgive you, so the âtheological incorrectnessâ that persists in imagining God to be a Wise Old Guy in the Sky is not only tolerated by the experts, but subtly encouraged.
William James opined at the turn of the twentieth century, âToday a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriouslyâ (1902, p. 328), but a century later, few would agree publicly with Thomas Nagel when he candidly says that he would not want such a God to exist. (I doubt if Nagel finds Spinozaâs Deus sive NaturaâGod, or Natureârepugnant, and he may well be as indifferent as I am to the Ground of All Being, whatever that is.) If pressed, many people insist that the anthropomorphic language used to describe God is metaphorical, not literal. One might suppose, then, that the curious adjective âGod-fearingâ would have faded into disuse over the years, a fossil trace of a rather embarrassingly juvenile period in our religious past, but far from it. People want a God who can be loved and feared the way you love or fear another person. âReligion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed inâwhether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectuallyâagree with each other in recognizing personal calls,â James observed. âToday, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concernsâ (1902, p. 491).
For many believers, of course, this is all just obvious. God isâof courseâa person who talks to them directlyâif not on a daily basis, then at least in a once-in-a-lifetime revelation. But as James pointed out, the believers themselves shouldnât put too much stock in such experiences:
The supernormal incidents, such as voices and visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly presented scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still, be counterfeited by Satan. [1902, p. 238]
So, however convinced some people may be by their powerful personal experiences, such revelations donât travel well. They canât be used as contributions to the communal discussion that we are now conducting. Philosophers and theologians have often debated the question of whether acts are good because God loves them or God loves them because they are good, and although these inquiries may make some sense within a theological tradition, in any ecumenical setting where we aspire for âuniversalâ consensus we have to choose the latter presumption. Moreover, the evidence of history makes it clear that, as time has passed, peopleâs moral sense about what is permissible and what is heinous has shifted, and along with it
their convictions about what God loves and hates. Those who see either blasphemy or adultery as a crime deserving the death penalty are today a dwindling minority, thank heaven. Still, the reason people care so much what other people believe about God is a fine reason, so far as it goes: they want the world to be a better place. They think that getting others to share their beliefs about God is the best way to achieve that end, and this is far from obvious.
I, too, want the world to be a better place. This is my reason for wanting people to understand and accept evolutionary theory: I believe that their salvation may depend on it! How so? By opening their eyes to the dangers of pandemics, degradation of the environment, and loss of biodiversity, and by informing them about some of the foibles of human nature. So isnât my belief that belief in evolution is the path to salvation a religion? No; there is a major difference. We who love evolution do not honor those whose love of evolution prevents them from thinking clearly and rationally about it! On the contrary, we are particularly critical of those whose misunderstandings and romantic misstatements of these great ideas mislead themselves and others. In our view, there is no safe haven for mystery or incomprehensibility. Yes, there is humility, and awe, and sheer delight, at the glory of the evolutionary landscape, but it is not accompanied by, or in the service of, a willing (let alone thrilling) abandonment of reason. So I feel a moral imperative to spread the word of evolution, but evolution is not my religion. I donât have a religion.
So, now, with apologies to those whose equanimity is disturbed by my asking such a fundamental question: What are the pros and cons of religion? Is it worthy of the intense loyalty it has inspired in most of the people of the world? William James led the way in this inquiry as well, and I will use his words to frame the issues for us, because they are wonderful in themselves but also because they reveal some of the progress we have made in the last century, clarifying and sharpening our thinking in a number of regards. Long before anybody talked of memes or memetics, James noted that religions had indeed evolved, in spite of all their claims to âeternalâ and âimmutableâ principles, and he noted that this evolution had always been responsive to human value judgments:
What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activityâ¦. It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. [1902, p. 331]
When James speaks of what is âhumanly unfitâ he means something like âunfit for human useâ rather than âbiologicallyâ or âgeneticallyâ unfit, and this choice of words blurs his vision. In spite of his desire to look at history without prejudice, his phrase biases his judgment in the direction of optimism: the memes that have resisted extinction over the centuries are only those memes that actually somehow enhance humanity. What do they enhance exactly: human genetic fitness? human happiness? human well-being? James gives us a very Victorian version of Darwinism: what survives must be good, because evolution is always a matter of progress toward the better. Does evolution foster the good? It all depends, as we have seen, on how we ask and answer the cui bono? question.
But now, for the first time in the book, we are stepping aside from explanation and description and turning to appreciation, as James said, asking what ought to be, not just what is (and how it got that way):
If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work of it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it. [1902, p. 237]
Does religion make us better? James distinguished two main ways in which this might be true. It might make people more effective in their daily lives, healthier, both physically and mentally, more steadfast and composed, more strong-willed against temptation, less tormented by despair, better able to bear their misfortunes without giving up. He calls this the âmind-cure movement.â Or it might make people morally better. The ways in which religion purports to accomplish this he calls âsaintliness.â Or it could accomplish both ends, in varying degrees under different circumstances. There is a lot to be said regarding both of them, and the rest of this chapter will be devoted to the first claim, leaving the hugely important question of the role of religion in morality to another chapter.
4 What can your religion do for you?
Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons.
âWilliam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
No one dares suggest that neon signs blinking the message that âJesus Savesâ may be false advertising.
âR. Laurence Moore, Selling God
Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
âAmbrose Bierce, The Devilâs Dictionary
In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.
âNicholas Humphreyâs Law of the Efficacy of Prayer (2004) 2
James speculated that there may be two entirely different types of people, the healthy-minded and the sick-minded, who need different things from religion, and noted that churches face âan everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the manyâ (p. 114). You canât please everybody all the time, so every religion must make its compromises. His informal surveys and inquiries were the forerunners of the intensive and sometimes quite sophisticated market research undertaken by religious leaders in recent years, as well as the more academic investigations conducted by psychologists and other social scientists trying to assess the claims made on behalf of religion. Religious revival movements flourished in Jamesâs day, but so did secular promoters of all manner of fantastical products and regimens. The self-help âinfomercialsâ on television today are the descendants of a long line of earlier hucksters who plied their wares in tent shows and rented theaters.
One hears of the âGospel of Relaxation,â of the âDonât Worry Movement,â of people who repeat to themselves, âYouth, health, vigor!â when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day. [p. 95]
James asked if the religions provided bracing as good as or better than that of their secular counterparts, and observed that, whatever they may protest about their aloofness from science, in fact religions do rely on âexperiment and verificationâ at every turn: âLive as if I were true, [religion] says, and every day will practically prove you rightâ (p. 119). In other words: youâll see the results for yourself; try it, youâll like it. âHere, in the very heyday of scienceâs authority, it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific philosophy, and succeeds by using scienceâs own peculiar methods and weaponsâ (p. 120).
The best salespeople are satisfied customers, and even if that is not the point of being a member of a church, there is nothing wrong with paying close attention to any factors that may improve the health, both spiritual and physical, of those who are loyal and active members. If I were to try to design a secular organization for furthering world peace, for instance, I would certainly keep my eyes open for any features that would have the incidental benefit of boosting membersâ health or prosperity, since I recognize that the organization would always be competing against all the other ways people can spend their time and energy. Even if I expect and encourage sacrifices from those who join, I should weigh the sacrifices carefully, and eliminate any gratuitous shortcomingsâan
d replace them with benefits, if possibleâso as to give greater leverage to the essential sacrifices.3
So is religion good for your health? There is growing evidence that many religions have succeeded remarkably well on this score, improving both the health and the morale of their members, quite independently of the good works they may have accomplished to benefit others. For instance, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia are much less common among women in Muslim countries, in which the physical attractiveness of women plays a muted role relative to that in Westernized countries (Abed, 1998). A current surge of interest is bringing to bear all the statistical tools of epidemiology and public health on such questions as whether regular churchgoers live longer, are less likely to have heart attacks, and so forth, and in most of the surveys the results are positive, often strongly so. (For an extensive overview, now rapidly becoming out of date, see Koenig et al., 2000.) The early results are impressive enough to have provoked knee-jerk skeptical dismissals from some atheists who havenât stopped to consider how independent these questions are from whether or not any religious beliefs are true. We already know from studies involving many different kinds of performance that if you randomly tell half a group of subjects that they are âabove averageâ on the task in question, they will do better, so the power of false belief to improve human capacities is already established. There are studies that demonstrate, according to some(e.g., Taylor and Brown, 1988), that positive illusions improve mental health, but there are critics who say the case is not yet secure (Colvin and Block, 1994).
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