Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

There has been some confusion about whether the earthly manifestations of religion should count as a part of Nature. Is religion out-of-bounds to science? It all depends on what you mean. If you mean the religious experiences, beliefs, practices, texts, artifacts, institutions, conflicts, and history of H. sapiens, then this is a voluminous catalogue of unquestionably natural phenomena. Considered as psychological states, drug-induced hallucination and religious ecstasy are both amenable to study by neuroscientists and psychologists. Considered as the exercise of cognitive competence, memorizing the periodic table of elements is the same sort of phenomenon as memorizing the Lord’s Prayer. Considered as examples of engineering, suspension bridges and cathedrals both obey the law of gravity and are subject to the same sorts of forces and stresses. Considered as salable manufactured goods, both mystery novels 29 and Bibles fall under the regularities of economics. The logistics of holy wars do not differ from the logistics of entirely secular conflicts. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!” as the World War II song said. A crusade or a jihad can be investigated by researchers in many disciplines, from anthropology and military history to nutrition and metallurgy.

In his book Rocks of Ages (1999), the late Stephen Jay Gould defended the political hypothesis that science and religion are two “non-overlapping magisteria”—two domains of concern and inquiry that can coexist peacefully as long as neither poaches on the other’s special province. The magisterium of science is factual truth on all matters, and the magisterium of religion, he claimed, is the realm of morality and the meaning of life. Although Gould’s desire for peace between these often warring perspectives was laudable, his proposal found little favor on either side, since in the minds of the religious it proposed abandoning all religious claims to factual truth and understanding of the natural world (including the claims that God created the universe, or performs miracles, or listens to prayers), whereas in the minds of the secularists it granted too much authority to religion in matters of ethics and meaning. Gould exposed some clear instances of immodest folly on both sides, but the claim that all conflict between the two perspectives is due to overreaching by one side or the other is implausible, and few readers were persuaded. But whether or not the case can be made for Gould’s proposal, my proposal is different. There may be some domain that is religion’s alone to command, some realm of human activity that science can’t properly address and religion can, but that does not mean that science cannot or should not study this very fact. Gould’s own book was presumably a product of just such a scientific investigation, albeit a rather informal one. He looked at religion with the eyes of a scientist and thought he could see a boundary that revealed two domains of human activity. Was he right? That is presumably a scientific, factual question, not a religious question. I am not suggesting that science should try to do what religion does, but that it should study, scientifically, what religion does.

One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. You are normally oblivious of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we don’t see colors in our peripheral vision. It seems as if we do, but we don’t, as you can prove to yourself by wiggling colored cards at the edge of your vision—you’ll see motion just fine but not be able to identify the color of the moving thing. It takes special provoking like that to get the absence of information to reveal itself to us. And the absence of information about religion is what I want to draw to everyone’s attention. We have neglected to gather a wealth of information about something of great import to us.