Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

It is extremely unlikely that such a small genetic change could be responsible for all the differences between chimpanzee brains and human brains, but there has been time in any case for a whole suite of genetic adjustments to make our brains more language-friendly than chimpanzee brains. Whatever the differences are, they mark a major innovation in evolutionary history, because once language evolved we became not just curious but inquisitive: we actually asked questions aloud, in articulated language. Questions became ubiquitous items in our perceptual worlds, and provoked reactions, which provoked more questions, and so forth, snowballing into an accumulation of lore that could be orally transmitted, and eventually written down. On one point at least, the Darwinian and Biblical accounts of how we got here agree: in the beginning was the Word.

But it was a long time before this accumulation of lore, of both wisdom and superstition, history and myth, practical facts and frozen lies, came to look at all like science. It was neither systematic nor self-conscious about its methods. It had not yet paid much attention to itself. This reflexive move, giving us the science of science, the history of history, the philosophy of philosophy, the logic of logic, and so forth, is one of the great enabling strokes of human civilization, refining the ore obtained by millennia of informal curiosity into the purified metal of investigation. Can you “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”? Not without defying the law of gravity, but you can do something almost as good: you can use your existing, imperfect, ill-understood methods of inquiry to refine those very methods, pitting good ideas against better ideas, and using your current sense of what counts for a good idea as your temporary, defeasible guide to improvement. In this regard it is like the strategy, when moving to a foreign country, of picking a few informants and trusting them—until you learn otherwise. If you have really bad luck with your initial choices, you may end up almost helplessly misinformed and victimized. If your informants are somewhat reliable, on the other hand, you can soon discover some of the limits of their reliability and begin making targeted adjustments. It isn’t logically guaranteed to work, but so what? It is much more likely to work than flipping a coin, and the odds get better over time.

Consider the curious problem of drawing a straight line. A really straight line. How do we do it? We use a straight-edge, of course. And where did we get it? Over the centuries we refined our techniques for making straighter and straighter so-called straightedges, pitting them against one another in supervised trials and mutual adjustments that have kept raising the threshold of accuracy. We now have large machines that are accurate to within a millionth of an inch over their entire length, and we have no difficulty in using our current vantage point to appreciate the practically unattainable but readily conceivable norm of a really straight edge. We discovered that norm, the eternal Platonic Form of the Straight, if you like, through our creative activity.²

Whether we date the beginning of science to early Egyptian geometry (literally, earth-measuring) or follow the transformation of religious fascination with “heavenly bodies” and calendar cycles into astronomy, science began to take on its self-critical concern for evidence and rigorous argumentation only a few thousand years ago. Religion is much older, of course, although organized religion—with creeds and hierarchies of ecclesiastical officials and codified systems of prohibitions and requirements—is roughly contemporaneous with organized science, and with writing. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. It takes a lot of record-keeping to overcome the memory limitations of the human brain—a topic considered in more detail in chapters 5 and 6.