Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Astronomers and mathematicians collaborated with priests at the outset, helping each other with difficult questions: How many days till we can have our winter-solstice ritual? When will the stars be in the right position for the most effective and proper sacrificial ceremony? So, without the question-posing by religion, science might never have found the funding it needed to get off the ground. More recently, of course, these specialists’ perspectives have diverged into competing worldviews, a divorce made public and irrevocable at the dawn of modern science in the seventeenth century. The evolution of warfare also played a significant role in the development of science, as literal arms races paid for the R & D of new weapons, vehicles, maps, navigational devices, systems of human organization, and much more. Swords before plowshares, no doubt, and catalogues of plunder before bird lists and taxonomies of flowers. Agriculture, manufacturing, and trade—every project of human civilization has generated questions that needed answers, and over time the techniques for systematic and reliable question-answering evolved, by cultural, not genetic, evolution.

Thus was science born out of religion and civilization’s other projects, a very recent cultural phenomenon but one that has transformed the planet like nothing else in the last sixty-five million years. The visionary engineer Paul MacCready has made an arresting calculation: Ten thousand years ago, human beings (plus their domestic animals) accounted for less than a tenth of 1 percent (by weight) of all vertebrate life on land and in the air. Back then, we were just another mammalian species, and not a particularly populous one (he estimates eighty million people worldwide). Today, that percentage, including livestock and pets, is in the neighborhood of 98! As MacCready (2004) puts it:

Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life—complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly we humans (a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature), have grown in population, technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power: we now wield the paintbrush.³

So science, and the technology it spawns, has been explosively practical, an amplifier of human powers in almost every imaginable dimension, making us stronger, faster, able to see farther in both space and time, healthier, more secure, more knowledgeable about just about everything, including our own origins—but that doesn’t mean it can answer all questions or serve all needs.

Science doesn’t have the monopoly on truth, and some of its critics have argued that it doesn’t even live up to its advertisements as a reliable source of objective knowledge. I am going to deal swiftly with this bizarre claim, for two reasons: I and others have dealt with it at length elsewhere (Dennett, 1997; Gross and Levitt, 1998; Weinberg, 2003), and, besides, everybody knows better—whatever people may say in the throes of academic battle. They reveal this again and again in their daily lives. I have yet to meet a postmodern science critic who is afraid to fly in an airplane because he doesn’t trust the calculations of the thousands of aeronautical engineers and physicists who have demonstrated and exploited the principles of flight, nor have I ever heard of a devout Wahhabi who prefers consulting his favorite imam about the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia over the calculations of geologists. If you buy and install a new battery in your mobile phone, you expect it to work, and will be mightily surprised and angry if it doesn’t. You are quite ready to bet your life on the extraordinary reliability of the technology that surrounds you, and you don’t even give it a second thought. Every church trusts arithmetic to keep track accurately of the receipts in the collection plate, and we all calmly ingest drugs from aspirin to Zocor, confident that there is ample scientific evidence in support of the hypothesis that these are safe and effective.