Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Chapter 7: Why do people join groups? Is the robustness of a religion like the robustness of an ant colony or a corporation? Is religion the product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Or is there some other possibility? Are Stark and Finke right about the principal reason for the precipitous decline after Vatican II in Catholics seeking a vocation in the church?

Chapter 8: Of all the people who believe in belief in God, what percentage (roughly) also actually believe in God? At first it looks as if we could simply give people a questionnaire with a multiple-choice question on it:

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I believe in God: _____ Yes _____ No _____ I don’t know

Or should the question be:

God exists: _____ Yes _____ No _____ I don’t know

Would it make any difference how we framed the questions?

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You will notice that hardly any of these questions deal even indirectly with either brains or genes. Why not? Because having religious convictions is not very much like having either epileptic seizures or blue eyes. We can already be quite sure there isn’t going to be a “God gene,” or even a “spirituality” gene, and there isn’t going to be a Catholicism center in the brain of Catholics, or even a “religious experience” center. Yes, certainly, whenever you think of Jesus some parts of your brain are going to be more active than others, but whenever you think of anything this is going to be true. Before we start coloring in your particular brain-maps for thinking about jesting and Jet Skis and jewels (and Jews), we should note the evidence that suggests that such hot spots are both mobile and multiple, heavily dependent on context—and of course not arrayed in alphabetical order across the cortex! In fact, the likelihood that the places that light up today when you think about Jesus are the same places that will light up next week when you think about Jesus is not very high. It is still possible that we will find dedicated neural mechanisms for some aspects of religious experience and conviction, but the early forays into such research have not been persuasive.³

Until we develop better general theories of cognitive architecture for the representation of content in the brain, using neuro-imaging to study religious beliefs is almost as hapless as using a voltmeter to study a chess-playing computer. In due course, we should be able to relate everything we discover by other means to what is going on among the billions of neurons in our brains, but the more fruitful paths emphasize the methods of psychology and the other social sciences.⁴

As for genes, compare the story I have told in the earlier chapters with this simplified version, from Time magazine’s recent cover article “Is God in our Genes?”:

Humans who developed a spiritual sense thrived and bequeathed that trait to their offspring. Those who didn’t risked dying out in chaos and killing. The evolutionary equation is a simple but powerful one. [Kluger, 2004, p. 65]

The idea that lurks in this bold passage is that religion is “good for you” because it was endorsed by evolution. This is just the sort of simpleminded Darwinism that rightly gives the subtle scholars and theorists of religion the heebie-jeebies. Actually, as we have seen, it isn’t that simple, and there are more powerful evolutionary “equations.” The hypothesis that there is a (genetically) heritable “spiritual sense” that boosts human genetic fitness is one of the less likely and less interesting of the evolutionary possibilities. In place of a single spiritual sense we have considered a convergence of several different overactive dispositions, sensitivities, and other co-opted adaptations that have nothing to do with God or religion. We did consider one of the relatively straightforward genetic possibilities, a gene for heightened hypnotizability. This might have provided major health benefits in earlier times, and would be one way of taking Hamer’s “God gene” hypothesis seriously. Or we could put it together with William James’s old speculation that there are two kinds of people, those who require “acute” religion and those whose needs are “chronic” and milder. We can try to discover if there really are substantial organic differences between those who are highly religious and those whose enthusiasm for religion is moderate to nonexistent.