Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Looking ahead, anticipating the future, is the crowning achievement of our species. We have managed in a few short millennia of human culture to multiply the planet’s supply of look-ahead by many orders of magnitude. We know when eclipses will occur centuries in advance; we can predict the effects on the atmosphere of adjustments in how we generate electricity; we can anticipate in broad outline what will happen as our petroleum reserves dwindle in the next decades. We do this not with miraculous prophecy but with basic perception. We gather information from the environment, using our senses, and then we use science to cobble together anticipations based on that information. We mine the ore, and then refine it, again and again, and it lets us see into the future—dimly, with lots of uncertainty, but much better than a coin toss. In every area of human concern, we have learned how to anticipate and then avoid catastrophes that used to blindside us.¹ We have recently forestalled a global disaster due to a growing hole in the ozone layer because some far-seeing chemists were able to prove that some of our manufactured compounds were causing the problem. We have avoided economic collapses in recent years because our economic models have shown us impending problems.

A catastrophe averted is an anticlimax, obviously, so we tend not to appreciate how valuable our powers of look-ahead are. “See?” we complain. “It wasn’t going to happen after all.” The flu season in the winter of 2003–2004 was predicted to be severe, since it arrived earlier than usual, but the broadcast recommendations for inoculation were so widely heeded that the epidemic collapsed as rapidly as it began. Ho-hum. It has become something of a tradition in recent years for the meteorologists on television to hype an oncoming hurricane or other storm, and then for the public to be underwhelmed by the actual storm. But sober evaluations show that many lives are saved, destruction is minimized. We accept the value of intensely studying El Niño and the other cycles in ocean currents so that we can do better meteorological forecasting. We keep exhaustive records of many economic events so that we can do better economic forecasting. We should extend the same intense scrutiny, for the same reasons, to religious phenomena. Few forces in the world are as potent, as influential, as religion. As we struggle to resolve the terrible economic and social inequities that currently disfigure our planet, and minimize the violence and degradation we see, we have to recognize that if we have a blind spot about religion our efforts will almost certainly fail, and may make matters much worse. We wouldn’t permit the world’s food-producing interests to deflect us from studying human agriculture and nutrition, and we have learned not to exempt the banking-and-insurance world from intense and continuous scrutiny. Their effects are too important to take on faith. So what I am calling for is a concerted effort to achieve a mutual agreement under which religion—all religion—becomes a proper object of scientific study.