Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

These cases may be exceptional. Your religion, you may believe, came into existence when its fundamental truth was revealed by God to somebody, who then passed it along to others. It flourishes today because you and the others of your faith know that it is the truth, and God has blessed you and encouraged you to keep the faith. It is as simple as that, for you. And why do all the other religions exist? If those people are just wrong, why don’t their creeds crumble as readily as false ideas about farming or obsolete building practices? They will crumble in due course, you may think, leaving only true religion, your religion, standing. Certainly there is some reason to believe this. In addition to the few dozen major religions in the world today—those whose adherents number in the hundreds of thousands or millions—there are thousands of less populous religions recognized. Two or three religions come into existence every day, and their typical lifespan is less than a decade.¹ There is no way of knowing how many distinct religions have flourished for a while during the last ten or fifty or a hundred thousand years, but it might even be millions, of which all traces are now lost forever.

Some religions have confirmed histories dating back for several millennia—but only if we are generous with our boundaries. The Mormon Church is less than two hundred years old, as its official name reminds us: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Protestantism is less than five hundred years old, Islam is less than fifteen hundred years old, Christianity is less than two thousand years old. Judaism is not even twice as old as that, and the Judaisms of today have evolved significantly from the earliest identifiable Judaism, though the varieties of Judaism are as nothing compared with the riotous blossoming of variations that Christianity has spawned in the last two millennia.

These are short periods of time, biologically speaking. They are not even long compared with the ages of other features of human culture. Writing is more than five thousand years old, agriculture is more than ten thousand years old, and language is—who knows?—maybe “only” forty thousand years old and maybe ten or twenty times older than that. It’s a contentious research topic, and since it’s widely agreed that fully articulated natural languages must have developed out of some kind of proto-languages (which may have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years), there is no consensus about what would even count as the birthdate of language. Is language older than religion? However we date its beginnings, language is much, much older than any existing religion, or even any religion of which we have any historical or archeological knowledge. The earliest impressive archeological evidence of religion is the elaborate Cro-Magnon burial sites in the Czech Republic, and they are about twenty-five thousand years old.² It is hard to tell, but something like religion may well have existed from the early days of language, however, or even before that. What were our ancestors like before there was anything like religion? Were they like bands of chimpanzees? What, if anything, did they talk about, aside from food and predators and the mating game? The weather? Gossip? What was the psychological and cultural soil in which religion first took root?

We can tentatively work backward, extrapolating under the guidance of our fundamental biological constraint: each innovative step had to “pay for itself” somehow, in the existing environment in which it first occurred, independently of whatever its role might become in later environments. What, then, could explain both the diversity and the similarities in the religious ideas we observe around the world? Are the similarities due to the fact that all religious ideas spring from a common ancestor idea, passed on over the generations as people spread around the globe, or are such ideas independently rediscovered by just about every culture because they are simply the truth, and obvious enough to occur to people in due course? These are obviously naïve oversimplifications, but at least they are attempts to ask and answer explicit questions often left unexamined by people who lose interest once they have found a purpose or function for religion that strikes them as plausible: responding to a suitably grand “human need” to account for the manifest outlay of time and energy that religion requires. The three favorite purposes or raisons d’être for religion are

to comfort us in our suffering and allay our fear of death

to explain things we can’t otherwise explain

to encourage group cooperation in the face of trials and enemies