Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Our ability to devote our lives to something we deem more important than our own personal welfare—or our own biological imperative to have offspring—is one of the things that set us aside from the rest of the animal world. A mother bear will bravely defend a food patch, and ferociously protect her cub, or even her empty den, but probably more people have died in the valiant attempt to protect sacred places and texts than in the attempt to protect food stores or their own children and homes. Like other animals, we have built-in desires to reproduce and to do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this goal, but we also have creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives. This fact does make us different, but it is itself a biological fact, visible to natural science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science. How did just one species, Homo sapiens, come to have these extraordinary perspectives on their own lives?

Hardly anybody would say that the most important thing in life is having more grandchildren than one’s rivals do, but this is the default summum bonum of every wild animal. They don’t know any better. They can’t. They’re just animals. There is one interesting exception, it seems: the dog. Can’t “man’s best friend” exhibit devotion that rivals that of a human friend? Won’t a dog even die if need be to protect its master? Yes, and it is no coincidence that this admirable trait is found in a domesticated species. The dogs of today are the offspring of the dogs our ancestors most loved and admired in the past; without even trying to breed for loyalty, they managed to do so, bringing out the best (by their lights, by our lights) in our companion animals.² Did we unconsciously model this devotion to a master on our own devotion to God? Were we shaping dogs in our own image? Perhaps, but then where did we get our devotion to God?

The comparison with which I began, between a parasitic worm invading an ant’s brain and an idea invading a human brain, probably seems both far-fetched and outrageous. Unlike worms, ideas aren’t alive, and don’t invade brains; they are created by minds. True on both counts, but these are not as telling objections as they first appear. Ideas aren’t alive; they can’t see where they’re going and have no limbs with which to steer a host brain even if they could see. True, but a lancet fluke isn’t exactly a rocket scientist either; it’s no more intelligent than a carrot, really; it doesn’t even have a brain. What it has is just the good fortune of being endowed with features that affect ant brains in this useful way whenever it comes in contact with them. (These features are like the eye spots on butterfly wings that sometimes fool predatory birds into thinking some big animal is looking at them. The birds are scared away and the butterflies are the beneficiaries, but are none the wiser for it.) An inert idea, if it were designed just right, might have a beneficial effect on a brain without having to know it was doing so! And if it did, it might prosper because it had that design.

The comparison of the Word of God to a lancet fluke is unsettling, but the idea of comparing an idea to a living thing is not new. I have a page of music, written on parchment in the mid-sixteenth century, which I found half a century ago in a Paris bookstall. The text (in Latin) recounts the moral of the parable of the Sower (Matthew 13): Semen est verbum Dei; sator autem Christus. The Word of God is a seed, and the sower of the seed is Christ. These seeds take root in individual human beings, it seems, and get those human beings to spread them, far and wide (and in return, the human hosts get eternal life—eum qui audit manebit in eternum).

How are ideas created by minds? It might be by miraculous inspiration, or it might be by more natural means, as ideas are spread from mind to mind, surviving translation between different languages, hitchhiking on songs and icons and statues and rituals, coming together in unlikely combinations in particular people’s heads, where they give rise to yet further new “creations,” bearing family resemblances to the ideas that inspired them but adding new features, new powers as they go. And perhaps some of the “wild” ideas that first invaded our minds have yielded offspring that have been domesticated and tamed, as we have attempted to become their masters or at least their stewards, their shepherds. What are the ancestors of the domesticated ideas that spread today? Where did they originate and why? And once our ancestors took on the goal of spreading these ideas, not just harboring them but cherishing them, how did this belief in belief transform the ideas being spread?