Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

We have particularly compelling reasons for investigating the biological bases of religion now. Sometimes—rarely—religions go bad, veering into something like group insanity or hysteria, and causing great harm. Now that we have created the technologies to cause global catastrophe, our jeopardy is multiplied to the maximum: a toxic religious mania could end human civilization overnight. We need to understand what makes religions work, so we can protect ourselves in an informed manner from the circumstances in which religions go haywire. What is religion composed of? How do the parts fit together? How do they mesh? Which effects depend on which causes? Which features, if any, invariably occur together? Which exclude each other? What constitutes the health and pathology of religious phenomena? These questions can be addressed by anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, and any other variety of cultural studies that you like, but it is simply inexcusable for researchers in these fields to let disciplinary jealousy and fear of “scientific imperialism” create an ideological iron curtain that could conceal important underlying constraints and opportunities from them.

Consider our current controversies regarding nutrition and diet. Understanding the design rationale of the machinery in our bodies that drives us to overindulge in sweets and fats is the key to finding the corrective measures that will actually work. For many years, nutritionists thought that the key to preventing obesity was simply cutting fat out of the diet. Now it is emerging that this simplistic approach to dieting is counterproductive: when you strenuously keep your fat-craving system unsatisfied, this intensifies your body’s compensatory efforts, leading to overindulgence in carbohydrates. The evolutionarily naïve thinking of the recent past helped build and put in motion the low-fat bandwagon, which then became self-sustaining under the solicitous care of the low-fat-food manufacturers and advertisers. Taubes (2001) is an eye-opening account of the political processes that created and sustained this “low-fat gospel,” and it provides a timely warning for the enterprise I am proposing here: “It’s a story of what can happen when the demands of public health policy—and the demands of the public for simple advice [emphasis added]—run up against the confusing ambiguity of real science” (p. 2537). Even if we do the science of religion right (for the first time), we must strenuously guard the integrity of the next process, the boiling down of the complex results of the research into political decisions. This will not be easy at all. Basil Rifkind, one of the nutritionists who were pressured into a premature verdict on low dietary fat, puts it succinctly: “There comes a point when, if you don’t make a decision, the consequences can be great as well. If you just allow Americans to keep on consuming 40% of calories from fat, there’s an outcome to that as well” (Taubes, 2001, p. 2541). Good intentions are not enough. This is the sort of misguided campaign that we want to avoid when we try to correct what we take to be the toxic excesses of religion. One recoils in horror at the possible effects of trying to impose one misguided “crash diet” or another on those hungry for religion.

It may be tempting to argue that we’d all have been better off if there hadn’t been any know-it-all nutritionists meddling with our diets in the first place. We’d have eaten what was good for us by just relying on our evolution-shaped instincts, the way other animals do. But this is simply mistaken, in the case of both diet and religion. Civilization—agriculture in particular and technology in general—has hugely and swiftly altered our ecological circumstances compared with the circumstances of our quite recent ancestors, and this renders many of our instincts out of date. Some of them may still be valuable in spite of their obsolescence, but it is likely that some are positively harmful. We can’t return to the blissful ignorance of our animal past with any confidence. We’re stuck being the knowing species, and that means we’ll have to use our knowledge as best we can to adapt our policies and practices to cope with our biological imperatives.

4 A Martian’s list of theories

If you were God, would you have invented laughter?

—Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not for Burning

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