Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Sweet-tooth theories: First, consider the variety of things we like to ingest or otherwise insert into our bodies: sugar, fat, alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, nicotine, marijuana, and opium for a start. In each case, there is an evolved receptor system in the body designed to detect substances (either ingested or constructed within the body, such as the endorphins or endogenously created morphine analogues) that these favorites have in high concentration. Over the ages, our clever species has gone prospecting, sampling just about everything in the environment, and after millennia of trial and error has managed to discover ways of gathering and concentrating these special substances so that we can use them to (over) stimulate our innate systems. The Martians may wonder if there are also genetically evolved systems in our bodies that are designed to respond to something that religions provide in intensified form. Many have thought so. Karl Marx may have been more right than he knew when he called religion the opiate of the masses. Might we have a god center in our brains along with our sweet tooth? What would it be for? What would pay for it? As Richard Dawkins puts it, “If neuroscientists find a ‘god center’ in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me want to know why the god center evolved. Why did those of our ancestors who had a genetic tendency to grow a god center survive better than rivals who did not?” (2004b, p. 14).

If any such evolutionary account is correct, then those with a god center not only survived better than those without one; they tended to have more offspring. But we should carefully set aside the anachronism involved in thinking of this hypothesized innate system as a “god center,” since its original target may have been quite unlike the intense stuff that turns it on today—we don’t have an innate chocolate-ice-cream center in the brain, after all, or a nicotine center. God may just be the latest and most intense confection that triggers the whatsis center in so many people. What benefit accrued to those who satisfied their whatsis craving? It could even be that there isn’t and never has been any actual target in the world to obtain, but just an imaginary or virtual target, in effect: it’s been the seeking, not the getting, that has had a fitness advantage. In any case, if the need, or at least the taste, for this still-unidentified treasure has become a genetically transmitted part of human nature, we tamper with it at our peril.

Theories in this family raise some interesting possibilities. Both sugar and saccharine trigger our sweet-tooth system. Are there religion substitutes to be found or concocted by clever psychoengineers? Or—even more interesting—are religions themselves a kind of saccharine for the brain, less filling or debilitating or intoxicating than the original and potentially harmful target? Is religion itself a subspecies of folk medicine, in which we self-medicate for relief, using therapies honed by thousands of years of trial-and-error development? Is there genetic variation in religious sensitivity, like the huge genetic variation recently discovered among human beings in taste and olfaction? Those of us who can’t stand cilantro have a gene for an olfactory receptor that cilantro lovers don’t share. Cilantro “tastes” rather like soap to us. William James speculated a hundred years ago that he—but not everybody—had a brute need for religion: “Call this, if you like, my mystical germ. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of believers. As it withstands in my case, so it will withstand in most cases, all purely atheistic criticism” (letter to Leuba, quoted in introduction to James, 1902, p. xxiv). James’s mystical germ might actually be a mystical gene. Or it might be, just as he said, a mystical germ, something that spread from person to person not “vertically” (by descent from parents) but “horizontally,” by infection.

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