Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Money is clearly one of the most effective “inventions” of our clever species, but that rationale was free-floating until very recently. We used, and relied on, and valued money, and occasionally killed and died for money, long before the rationale of its value was made explicit in any minds. Money is not the only cultural invention to lack a specific inventor or author. Nobody invented language or music either.⁶ An entertaining coincidence is that an old term for money in the form of coin and paper issue is specie (from the same Latin root as species), and, as many have noted, the free-floating rationale of specie could lapse in the foreseeable future, and it could go extinct in the wake of credit cards and other forms of electronic funds transfer. Specie, like a virus, travels light, and doesn’t carry its own reproductive machinery with it, but, rather, depends for the persistence of its kind on provoking a host (us) to make copies of it using our expensive reproduction machinery (printing presses, stamps and dies).⁷ Individual coins and pieces of paper money wear out over time, and unless more are made and adopted, the whole system may go extinct. (You may confirm this by trying to buy a boat with a pile of cowrie shells.) But since money is a Good Trick, expect some other species of money to take over the niche left vacant by the departing specie.

I have another, ulterior motive for bringing up money. The goods being surveyed—sugar, sex, alcohol, music, money—are all problematic because in each case we can develop an obsession, and crave too much of a good thing, but money has perhaps the worst reputation as a good thing. Alcohol is condemned by many—by the Muslims in particular—but among those who appreciate it—such as the Roman Catholics—a person who loves it in moderation is not considered ignoble or a fool. But we are all supposed to despise money as a thing in itself, and value it only instrumentally. Money is “filthy lucre,” something to be enjoyed only for what it can provide in the way of more worthy things of value, things with “intrinsic” value.⁸ As the old song says, not entirely convincingly, the best things in life are free. Is this because money is “artificial” and the others are all “natural”? Not likely. Is a string quartet or a single-malt whisky or a chocolate truffle any less artificial than a gold coin?

What we should make of this theme in human culture is an interesting question, about which I will say more later, but in the meantime we should note that the only anchor we have seen so far for “intrinsic” value is the capacity of something to provoke a preference response in the brain quite directly. Pain is “intrinsically bad,” but this negative valence is just as dependent on an evolutionary rationale as the “intrinsic goodness” of satisfied hunger. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, no doubt, but it is also true that if poking around in rotting elephant carcases was as good for our reproductive prospects as it is for those of vultures, such a dead elephant would smell as sweet as a rose to us.⁹ Biology insists on delving beneath the surface of “intrinsic” values and asking why they exist, and any answer that is supported by the facts has the effect of showing that the value in question is—or once was—really instrumental, not intrinsic, even if we don’t see it that way. A truly intrinsic value couldn’t have such an explanation of course. It would be good just because it was good, not because it was good for something. A hypothesis to consider seriously, then, is that all our “intrinsic” values started out as instrumental values, and now that their original purpose has lapsed, at least in our eyes, they remain as things we like just because we like them. (That would not mean that we are wrong to like them! It would mean—by definition—that we like them without needing any ulterior reason to like them.)

3 Asking what pays for religion

But what are the benefits; why do people want religion at all? They want it because religion is the only plausible source of certain rewards for which there is a general and inexhaustible demand.

—Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith

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