Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

We may be too close to religion to be able to see it clearly at first. This has been a familiar theme among artists and philosophers for years. One of their self-appointed tasks is to “make the familiar strange,”¹¹ and some of the great strokes of creative genius get us to break through the crust of excessive familiarity and look at ordinary, obvious things with fresh eyes. Scientists couldn’t agree more. Sir Isaac Newton’s mythic moment was asking himself the weird question about why the apple fell down from the tree. (“Well, why wouldn’t it?” asks the everyday nongenius; “It’s heavy!”—as if this were a satisfactory explanation.) Albert Einstein asked a similarly weird question: everyone knows what “now” means, but Einstein asked whether you and I mean the same thing by “now” when we are leaving each other’s company at near the speed of light. Biology has some strange questions as well. “Why don’t male animals lactate?” asks the late great evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith (1977), vividly awakening us from our dogmatic slumbers to confront a curious prospect. “Why do we blink with both eyes simultaneously?” asks another great evolutionary biologist, George Williams (1992). Good questions, not yet answered by biology. Here are some more. Why do we laugh when something funny happens? We may think it is just obvious that laughter (as opposed to, say, scratching one’s ear or belching) is the appropriate response to humor, but why is it? Why are some female shapes sexy and others not? Isn’t it obvious? Just look at them! But that is not the end of it. The regularities and trends in our responses to the world do indeed guarantee, trivially, that they are part of “human nature,” but that still leaves the question of why. Curiously, it is this very feature of evolutionary questioning that is often viewed with deep aversion by…artists and philosophers. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that explanation has to stop somewhere, but this undeniable truth misleads us if it discourages us from asking such questions, prematurely terminating our curiosity. Why does music exist, for instance? “Because it’s natural!” comes the complacent everyday reply, but science takes nothing natural for granted. People around the world devote many hours—often their professional lives—to making, and listening and dancing to, music. Why? Cui bono? Why does music exist? Why does religion exist? To say that it is natural is only the beginning of the answer, not the end.

The remarkable autistic author and animal expert Temple Grandin gave neurologist Oliver Sacks a great title for one of his collections of case studies of unusual human beings: An Anthropologist on Mars (1995). That’s what she felt like, she told Sacks, when dealing with other people right here on Earth. Usually such alienation is a hindrance, but getting some distance from the ordinary world helps focus our attention on what is otherwise too obvious to notice, and it will help if we temporarily put ourselves into the (three bright green) shoes of a “Martian,” one of a team of alien investigators who can be imagined to be unfamiliar with the phenomena they are observing here on Planet Earth.

What they see today is a population of over six billion people, almost all of whom devote a significant fraction of their time and energy to some sort of religious activity: rituals such as daily prayer (both public and private) or frequent attendance at ceremonies, but also costly sacrifices—not working on certain days no matter what looming crisis needs prompt attention, deliberately destroying valuable property in lavish ceremonies, contributing to the support of specialist practitioners within the community and the maintenance of elaborate buildings, and abiding by a host of strenuously observed prohibitions and requirements, including not eating certain foods, wearing veils, taking offense at apparently innocuous behaviors in others, and so forth. The Martians would have no doubt that all of this was “natural” in one sense: they observe it almost everywhere in nature, in one species of vocal bipeds. Like the other phenomena of nature, it exhibits both breathtaking diversity and striking commonalities, ravishingly ingenious design (rhythmic, poetic, architectural, social…) and yet baffling inscrutability. Where did all this design come from, and what sustains it? In addition to all the contemporary expenditures of time and effort, there is all the implied design work that preceded it. Design work—R & D, research and development—is costly, too.