Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

My description of the evolution of various features of religion in chapters 4–8 is definitely “just a theory”—or, rather, a family of proto-theories, in need of further development. In a nutshell, this is what it says: Religion evolved, but it doesn’t have to be good for us in order to evolve. (Tobacco isn’t good for us, but it survives just fine.) We don’t all learn language because we think it’s good for us; we all learn language because we cannot do otherwise (if we have normal nervous systems). In the case of religion, there is a lot more teaching and drill, a lot more deliberate social pressure, than there is in language learning. In this regard, religion is more like reading than talking. There are tremendous benefits to being able to read, and perhaps there are similar or greater benefits to being religious. But people may well love religion independently of any benefits it provides them. (I am delighted to learn that red wine in moderation is good for my health, since, whether or not it is good for me, I like it, and I want to go on drinking it. Religion could be like that.) It is not surprising that religion survives. It has been pruned and revised and edited for thousands of years, with millions of variants extinguished in the process, so it has plenty of features that appeal to people, and plenty of features that preserve the identity of its recipes for these very features, features that ward off or confound enemies and competitors, and secure allegiance. Only gradually have people come to have any appreciation of the reasons—the heretofore free-floating rationales—for these features. Religion is many things to many people. For some, the memes of religion are mutualists, providing undeniable benefits of sorts that cannot be found elsewhere. These people may well depend for their very lives on religion, the way we all depend on the bacteria in our guts that help us digest our food. Religion provides some people with a motivated organization for doing great things—working for social justice, education, political action, economic reform, and so forth. For others, the memes of religion are more toxic, exploiting less savory aspects of their psychology, playing on guilt, loneliness, the longing for self-esteem and importance. Only when we can frame a comprehensive view of the many aspects of religion can we formulate defensible policies for how to respond to religions in the future.

Some aspects of this theory sketch are pretty well established, but getting down to specifics and generating further testable hypotheses is work for the future. I wanted to give readers a good idea of what a testable theory would be like, what sorts of questions it would raise, and what sorts of explanatory principles it could invoke. My theory sketch may well be false in many regards, but if so, this will be shown by confirming some alternative theory of the same sort. In science, the tactic is to put forward something that can be either fixed or refuted by something better. A century ago, it was just a theory that powered fixed-wing flight was possible; now it is fact. A few decades ago, it was just a theory that the cause of AIDS was a virus, but the reality of HIV is not just a theory today.

Since my proto-theory is not yet established and may prove to be wrong, it shouldn’t be used yet to guide our policies. Having insisted at the outset that we need to do much more research so that we can make well-informed decisions, I would be contradicting myself if I now proceeded to prescribe courses of action on the basis of my initial foray. Recall, from chapter 3, the moral that Taubes drew in his history of the misguided activism that led us on the low-fat crusade: “It’s a story of what can happen when the demands of public health policy—and the demands of the public for simple advice—run up against the confusing ambiguity of real science.” There is pressure on us all to act decisively today, on the basis of the little we already (think we) know, but I am counseling patience. The current situation is scary—one religious fanaticism or another could produce a global catastrophe, after all—but we should resist rash “remedies” and other overreactions. It is possible, however, to discuss options today, and to think hypothetically of what the sound policies would be if something like my account of religion is correct. Such a consideration of possible policies can help motivate the further research, giving us pressing reasons for finding out which hypotheses are really true.