Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

The great ideas of religion have been holding us human beings enthralled for thousands of years, longer than recorded history but still just a brief moment in biological time. If we want to understand the nature of religion today, as a natural phenomenon, we have to look not just at what it is today, but at what it used to be. An account of the origins of religion, in the next seven chapters, will provide us with a new perspective from which to look, in the last three chapters, at what religion is today, why it means so much to so many people, and what they might be right and wrong about in their self-understanding as religious people. Then we can see better where religion might be heading in the near future, our future on this planet. I can think of no more important topic to investigate.

2 A working definition of religion

Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense; by calling “God” some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves, they pose as deists, as believers, before the world; they may even pride themselves on having attained a higher and purer idea of God, although their God is nothing but an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrine.

—Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

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How do I define religion? It doesn’t matter just how I define it, since I plan to examine and discuss the neighboring phenomena that (probably) aren’t religions—spirituality, commitment to secular organizations, fanatical devotion to ethnic groups (or sports teams), superstition…. So, wherever I “draw the line,” I’ll be going over the line in any case. As you will see, what we usually call religions are composed of a variety of quite different phenomena, arising from different circumstances and having different implications, forming a loose family of phenomena, not a “natural kind” like a chemical element or a species.

What is the essence of religion? This question should be considered askance. Even if there is a deep and important affinity between many or even most of the world’s religions, there are sure to be variants that share some typical features while lacking one or another “essential” feature. As evolutionary biology advanced during the last century, we gradually came to appreciate the deep reasons for grouping living things the way we do—sponges are animals, and birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than frogs are—and new surprises are still being discovered every year. So we should expect—and tolerate—some difficulty in arriving at a counterexample-proof definition of something as diverse and complex as religion. Sharks and dolphins look very much alike and behave in many similar ways, but they are not the same sort of thing at all. Perhaps, once we understand the whole field better, we will see that Buddhism and Islam, for all their similarities, deserve to be considered two entirely different species of cultural phenomenon. We can start with common sense and tradition and consider them both to be religions, but we shouldn’t blind ourselves to the prospect that our initial sorting may have to be adjusted as we learn more. Why is suckling one’s young more fundamental than living in the ocean? Why is having a backbone more fundamental than having wings? It may be obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious at the dawn of biology.

In the United Kingdom, the law regarding cruelty to animals draws an important moral line at whether the animal is a vertebrate: as far as the law is concerned, you may do what you like to a live worm or fly or shrimp, but not to a live bird or frog or mouse. It’s a pretty good place to draw the line, but laws can be amended, and this one was. Cephalopods—octopus, squid, cuttlefish—were recently made honorary vertebrates, in effect, because they, unlike their close mollusc cousins the clams and oysters, have such strikingly sophisticated nervous systems. This seems to me a wise political adjustment, since the similarities that mattered to the law and morality didn’t line up perfectly with the deep principles of biology.