Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

The first spell—the taboo—and the second spell—religion itself—are bound together in a curious embrace. Part of the strength of the second may be—may be—the protection it receives from the first. But who knows? If we are enjoined by the first spell not to investigate this possible causal link, then the second spell has a handy shield, whether it needs it or not. The relationship between these two spells is vividly illustrated in Hans Christian Andersen’s charming fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Sometimes falsehoods and myths that are “common wisdom” can survive indefinitely simply because the prospect of exposing them is itself rendered daunting or awkward by a taboo. An indefensible mutual presumption can be kept aloft for years or even centuries because each person assumes that somebody else has some very good reasons for maintaining it, and nobody dares to challenge it.

Up to now, there has been a largely unexamined mutual agreement that scientists and other researchers will leave religion alone, or restrict themselves to a few sidelong glances, since people get so upset at the mere thought of a more intensive inquiry. I propose to disrupt this presumption, and examine it. If we shouldn’t study all the ins and outs of religion, I want to know why, and I want to see good, factually supported reasons, not just an appeal to the tradition I am rejecting. If the traditional cloak of privacy or “sanctuary” is to be left in place, we should know why we’re doing this, since a compelling case can be made that we’re paying a terrible price for our ignorance. This sets the order of business: First, we must look at the issue of whether the first spell—the taboo—should be broken. Of course, by writing and publishing this book I am jumping the gun, leaping in and trying to break the first spell, but one has to start somewhere. Before continuing further, then, and possibly making matters worse, I am going to pause to defend my decision to try to break that spell. Then, having mounted my defense for starting the project, I am going to start the project! Not by answering the big questions that motivate the whole enterprise but by asking them, as carefully as I can, and pointing out what we already know about how to answer them, and showing why we need to answer them.

I am a philosopher, not a biologist or an anthropologist or a sociologist or historian or theologian. We philosophers are better at asking questions than at answering them, and this may strike some people as a comical admission of futility—“He says his specialty is just asking questions, not answering them. What a puny job! And they pay him for this?” But anybody who has ever tackled a truly tough problem knows that one of the most difficult tasks is finding the right questions to ask and the right order to ask them in. You have to figure out not only what you don’t know, but what you need to know and don’t need to know, and what you need to know in order to figure out what you need to know, and so forth. The form our questions take opens up some avenues and closes off others, and we don’t want to waste time and energy barking up the wrong trees. Philosophers can sometimes help in this endeavor, but of course they have often gotten in the way, too. Then some other philosopher has to come in and try to clean up the mess. I have always liked the way John Locke put it, in the “Epistle to the Reader” at the beginning of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690):

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…it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge;—which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that degree that Philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit or incapable to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation.

Another of my philosophical heroes, William James, recognized as well as any philosopher ever has the importance of enriching your philosophical diet of abstractions and logical arguments with large helpings of hard-won fact, and just about a hundred years ago, he published his classic investigation, The Varieties of Religious Experience. It will be cited often in this book, for it is a treasure trove of insights and arguments, too often overlooked in recent times, and I will begin by putting an old tale he recounts to a new use: