Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

The more we learn about the details of natural processes, the more evident it becomes that these processes are themselves creative. Nothing transcends Nature like Nature itself.

—Loyal Rue

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Good things don’t just happen by chance. There are “strokes of luck,” but sustaining a good thing isn’t just luck. It might be Providence, of course. It might be that God makes sure that the good thing happens and that it sustains itself when it wouldn’t otherwise, without God’s intervening. But any such account will have to wait its turn, for the same reason that cancer researchers are unwilling to treat unexpected remissions as just “miracles” that needn’t be explored any further. What natural, nonmiraculous set of processes could produce and sustain this phenomenon that is so highly valued? The only way to take the hypothesis of miracles seriously is to eliminate the nonmiraculous alternatives.

The stinginess of Nature can be seen wherever we look, if we know what to look for. For instance, coyotes are emerging as a welcome addition to the wildlife of New England, howling eerily in the winter nights, but these beautiful, wily predators are wary of humans, and seldom seen. How can you tell their footprints in the snow from those of their cousins, domestic dogs? Even up close, it can be hard to tell the paw print of a coyote from the paw print of a similarly sized dog—a dog’s claws tend to be longer, since they spend scant time digging—but even from afar, a coyote’s track can be readily distinguished from a dog’s—the coyote’s prints fall in an uncannily straight and single-file line, with hind paws in almost perfect registration with forepaws, whereas a dog’s track is typically a mess, as the dog galumphs exuberantly hither and yon, indulging every curious whim (David Brown, 2004). The dog is well fed and knows it will get its supper no matter what, whereas the coyote is on a very tight budget and needs to conserve every calorie for the job at hand: self-preservation. Its methods of locomotion have been ruthlessly optimized for efficiency. But, then, what explains the pack’s characteristic howling? What good accrues to the coyote from that conspicuous expenditure of energy? Hardly a low profile. Doesn’t it serve to scare away their supper and draw their presence to the attention of their own predators? Such costs would not be lightly recouped, one would think. These are good questions. Biologists are working on them, and even though they don’t yet have definitive answers, they are surely right to seek them.² Any such pattern of conspicuous outlay demands an accounting.

Consider, for instance, the huge outlay of human effort devoted worldwide to sugar: not just the planting and harvesting of sugarcane and sugar beets, and the refining and transporting of the basic product, but the larger surrounding world of manufacturing candy, publishing cookbooks full of dessert recipes, advertising soft drinks and chocolates, commercializing Halloween, as well as the counterbalancing parts of the system: obesity clinics, government-sponsored research on the epidemic of early-onset diabetes, dentists and the inclusion of fluoride in toothpaste and drinking water. Over a hundred million metric tons of sugar are produced and consumed each year. To explain the thousands of features of this huge system, which provides the lifework of millions of people and can be discerned at every level of society, we need many different scientific and historical investigations, only a small fraction of which are biological. We need to study the chemistry of sugar, the physics of crystallization and caramelization, human physiology, and the history of agriculture, but also the history of engineering, manufacturing, transportation, banking, geopolitics, advertising, and much more.