Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Thousands of books and articles have been written defending these claims, and such compelling and familiar ideas are probably at least partly right, but if you settle for one of them, or even all three taken together, you succumb to a disorder often encountered in the humanities and social sciences: premature curiosity satisfaction. There is so much more to ask about, and so much more to understand. Why would these ideas comfort people? (And why are they comforting, exactly? Might there be better, more comforting ideas to be found?) Why would these ideas appeal to people as explanations of baffling events? (And how could they have arisen? Did some would-be proto-scientist hit upon a supernatural theory and enthusiastically proselytize her neighbors?) How do these ideas actually manage to enhance cooperation in the face of suspicion and defection? (And once more, how could they have arisen? Did some wise tribal leader invent religion to give her tribe a teamwork edge over the rival tribes?)

Some people suppose that we can never do better than such simple speculations about these processes and outcomes from the remote past. Some insist on it, in fact, and their vehemence betrays the fact that they are afraid they are wrong. They are. Today, thanks to advances in a variety of sciences, we can sharpen the questions and begin to answer them. In this and the next four chapters, I will try to tell the best current version of the story science can tell about how religions have become what they are. I am not at all claiming that this is what science has already established about religion. The main point of this book is to insist that we don’t yet know—but we can discover—the answers to these important questions if we make a concerted effort. Probably some of the features of the story I tell will prove in due course to be mistaken. Maybe many of them are wrong. The purpose of trying to sketch a whole story now is to get something on the table that is both testable and worth testing. It is usually easier to fix something that has flaws than to build something from scratch. Trying to bridge the gaps in our knowledge forces us to frame questions we haven’t framed before, and puts the issues in a perspective that enables further questions to be posed and answered. And that in itself can undercut the defeatist proclamation that these are mysteries beyond all human comprehension. Many people may wish that these were unanswerable questions. Let’s see what happens when we defy their defensive pessimism and give it a try.

2 The raw materials of religion

We may conclude, therefore, that, in all nations, which have embraced polytheism, the first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind.

—David Hume, The Natural History of Religion

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My guides are the pioneering scientists who have begun to tackle these questions with both imagination and discipline. An evolutionary biologist or a psychologist who knows only one religion at all well and has a smattering of (mis) information about the others (like most of us) is almost certain to overgeneralize from idiosyncratic familiarity when it comes to framing questions. A social historian or an anthropologist who knows a great deal about the beliefs and practices of people all around the world but is naïve about evolution is equally unlikely to frame the issues well. Fortunately, a few well-informed researchers have recently begun to pull these distant perspectives together, with tantalizing results. Their books and articles are well worth reading in their entirety, as I hope I will convince you by introducing a few highlights.