"Stars No. 1207," 1996 by
David Stephenson/Julie Saul Gallery
By
ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published:
March 4, 2007
God
has always been a puzzle for Scott Atran. When he was
10 years old, he scrawled a plaintive message on the wall of his bedroom in
Call it God; call it superstition;
call it, as Atran does, “belief in hope beyond
reason” — whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe
in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the
reach or understanding of science. “Why do we cross our fingers during
turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?” asked Atran
when we spoke at his
If
they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?
Atran first conducted the magic-box demonstration in the 1980s,
when he was at Cambridge
University studying the nature of religious belief. He had received
a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia
University and, in the course of his fieldwork, saw evidence of
religion everywhere he looked — at archaeological digs in Israel, among the
Mayans in Guatemala, in artifact drawers at the American Museum of Natural History in New
York. Atran is Darwinian in his approach, which means
he tries to explain behavior by how it might once have solved problems of
survival and reproduction for our early ancestors. But it was not clear to him
what evolutionary problems might have been solved by religious belief. Religion
seemed to use up physical and mental resources without an obvious benefit for
survival. Why, he wondered, was religion so pervasive, when it was something
that seemed so costly from an evolutionary point of view?
The
magic-box demonstration helped set Atran on a career
studying why humans might have evolved to be religious, something few people were
doing back in the ’80s. Today, the effort has gained momentum, as scientists
search for an evolutionary explanation for why belief in God exists — not
whether God exists, which is a matter for philosophers and theologians, but why
the belief does.
This
is different from the scientific assault on religion that has been garnering
attention recently, in the form of best-selling books from scientific atheists
who see religion as a scourge. In “The God Delusion,” published last year and
still on best-seller lists, the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins
concludes that religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes
dangerous, evolutionary accident. “Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an
unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other
circumstances is, or once was, useful,” Dawkins wrote. He is joined by two
other best-selling authors — Sam Harris, who wrote “The End of Faith,” and
Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts
University who wrote “Breaking the Spell.” The three men differ in
their personal styles and whether they are engaged in a battle against
religiosity, but their names are often mentioned together. They have been
portrayed as an unholy trinity of neo-atheists, promoting their secular world
view with a fervor that seems almost evangelical.
Lost
in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more
illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but
within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution
of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief
is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history.
What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was
because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary
byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the
human brain.
Which
is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary
adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive
functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural
deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining
religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and
is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection,
a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers
right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God
suggest that it was God who put them there?
In
short, are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that
happen?
“All
of our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs . . . are equally
organically founded,” William James wrote in “The Varieties of Religious
Experience.” James, who taught philosophy and experimental psychology at Harvard
for more than 30 years, based his book on a 1901 lecture series in which he
took some early tentative steps at breaching the science-religion divide.
In
the century that followed, a polite convention generally separated science and
religion, at least in much of the Western world. Science, as the old trope had
it, was assigned the territory that describes how the heavens go; religion, how
to go to heaven.
Anthropologists
like Atran and psychologists as far back as James had
been looking at the roots of religion, but the mutual hands-off policy really
began to shift in the 1990s. Religion made incursions into the traditional
domain of science with attempts to bring intelligent design into the biology
classroom and to choke off human embryonic stem-cell research on religious
grounds. Scientists responded with counterincursions.
Experts from the hard sciences, like evolutionary biology and cognitive
neuroscience, joined anthropologists and psychologists in the study of
religion, making God an object of scientific inquiry.
The
debate over why belief evolved is between byproduct theorists and adaptationists. You might think that the byproduct
theorists would tend to be nonbelievers, looking for a way to explain religion
as a fluke, while the adaptationists would be more
likely to be believers who can intuit the emotional, spiritual and community
advantages that accompany faith. Or you might think they would all be atheists,
because what believer would want to subject his own devotion to rationalism’s
cold, hard scrutiny? But a scientist’s personal religious view does not always
predict which side he will take. And this is just one sign of how complex and
surprising this debate has become.
Angels,
demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since
mankind first started telling stories. Charles Darwin noted this in “The
Descent of Man.” “A belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies,” he wrote,
“seems to be universal.” According to anthropologists, religions that share
certain supernatural features — belief in a noncorporeal
God or gods, belief in the afterlife, belief in the ability of prayer or ritual
to change the course of human events — are found in virtually every culture on
earth.
This
is certainly true in the
When
a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation
and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive
success. In many ways, it’s an exercise in post-hoc hypothesizing: what would
have been the advantage, when the human species first evolved, for an
individual who happened to have a mutation that led to, say, a smaller jaw, a
bigger forehead, a better thumb? How about certain behavioral traits, like a
tendency for risk-taking or for kindness?
Atran saw such questions as a puzzle when applied to religion.
So many aspects of religious belief involve misattribution and misunderstanding
of the real world. Wouldn’t this be a liability in the survival-of-the-fittest
competition? To Atran, religious belief requires taking
“what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be
false.” One example of this is the belief that even after someone dies and the
body demonstrably disintegrates, that person will still exist, will still be
able to laugh and cry, to feel pain and joy. This confusion “does not appear to
be a reasonable evolutionary strategy,” Atran wrote
in “In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion” in 2002. “Imagine
another animal that took injury for health or big for small or fast for slow or
dead for alive. It’s unlikely that such a species could survive.” He began to
look for a sideways explanation: if religious belief was not adaptive, perhaps
it was associated with something else that was.
Atran intended to study mathematics when he entered
Atran, equally unflappable, did go to see her — and ended up
working for Mead, spending much of his time exploring the cabinets of
curiosities in her tower office at the American Museum of Natural History. Soon
he switched his major to anthropology.
Many
of the museum specimens were religious, Atran says.
So were the artifacts he dug up on archaeological excursions in
Maybe
cognitive effort was precisely the point. Maybe it took less mental work than Atran realized to hold belief in God in one’s mind. Maybe,
in fact, belief was the default position for the human mind, something that
took no cognitive effort at all.
While
still an undergraduate, Atran decided to explore
these questions by organizing a conference on universal aspects of culture and
inviting all his intellectual heroes: the linguist Noam Chomsky,
the psychologist Jean Piaget, the anthropologists Claude Levi-Strauss and
Gregory Bateson (who was also Margaret Mead’s
ex-husband), the Nobel
Prize-winning biologists Jacques Monod and
Francois Jacob. It was 1974, and the only site he could find for the conference
was at a location just outside
Atran is a sociable man with sharp hazel eyes, who sparks
provocative conversations the way other men pick bar fights. As he traveled in
the ’70s and ’80s, he accumulated friends who were thinking about the issues he
was: how culture is transmitted among human groups and what evolutionary
function it might serve. “I started looking at history, and I wondered why no
society ever survived more than three generations without a religious
foundation as its raison d’être,” he says. Soon he turned to an emerging subset
of evolutionary theory — the evolution of human cognition.
Some
cognitive scientists think of brain functioning in terms of modules, a series
of interconnected machines, each one responsible for a
particular mental trick. They do not tend to talk about a God module per se;
they usually consider belief in God a consequence of other mental modules.
Religion,
in this view, is “a family of cognitive phenomena that involves the
extraordinary use of everyday cognitive processes,” Atran
wrote in “In Gods We Trust.” “Religions do not exist apart from the individual
minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them, any more
than biological species and varieties exist independently of the individual
organisms that compose them and the environments that conform
them.”
At
around the time “In Gods We Trust” appeared five years ago, a handful of other
scientists — Pascal Boyer, now at Washington
University; Justin Barrett, now at Oxford; Paul Bloom at Yale
— were addressing these same questions. In synchrony they were moving toward
the byproduct theory.
Darwinians
who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves
adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that
are byproducts of adaptations, like the redness of blood. There is no survival
advantage to blood’s being red instead of turquoise; it is just a byproduct of
the trait that is adaptive, having blood that contains hemoglobin.
Something
similar explains aspects of brain evolution, too, say the byproduct theorists. Which brings us to the idea of the spandrel.
Stephen
Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in
2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed
“spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They
borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the
V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there
for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.
In
architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building
a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a
blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space
takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless.
Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a
spandrel, an unintended byproduct.
“Natural
selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental
properties and potentials may be spandrels — that is, nonadaptive
side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”
The
possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran
a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a
spandrel of what, exactly?
Hardships
of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among
them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come
up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people
have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions.
Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning
and theory of mind.
Agent
detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent — which is jargon
for any creature with volitional, independent behavior — is more adaptive than
assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off
presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent
and something to run from, even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been
just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves
rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.
A
classic experiment from the 1940s by the psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel
suggested that imputing agency is so automatic that people may do it even for
geometric shapes. For the experiment, subjects watched a film of triangles and
circles moving around. When asked what they had been watching, the subjects
used words like “chase” and “capture.” They did not just see the random
movement of shapes on a screen; they saw pursuit, planning, escape.
So
if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an
agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently. This usually
operates in one direction only; lots of people mistake a rock for a bear, but
almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.
What
does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our brains are primed
for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence
confounds logic. “The most central concepts in religions are related to
agents,” Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the
byproduct theory, “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Religious agents are often
supernatural, he wrote, “people with superpowers, statues that can answer
requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world.”
A
second mental module that primes us for religion is causal reasoning. The human
brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology
and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently
random. “We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of
why things happen to us,” Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no
explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their
mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these
unusual events.” The ancient Greeks believed thunder was the sound of Zeus’s
thunderbolt. Similarly, a contemporary woman whose cancer treatment works
despite 10-to-1 odds might look for a story to explain her survival. It fits
better with her causal-reasoning tool for her recovery to be a miracle, or a
reward for prayer, than for it to be just a lucky roll of the dice.
A
third cognitive trick is a kind of social intuition known as theory of mind.
It’s an odd phrase for something so automatic, since the word “theory” suggests
formality and self-consciousness. Other terms have been used for the same
concept, like intentional stance and social cognition. One good alternative is
the term Atran uses: folkpsychology.
Folkpsychology, as Atran and his colleagues
see it, is essential to getting along in the contemporary world, just as it has
been since prehistoric times. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others
and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at the heart
of everything from marriage to office politics to poker. People without this
trait, like those with severe autism, are impaired, unable to imagine
themselves in other people’s heads.
The
process begins with positing the existence of minds, our own and others’, that we cannot see or feel. This leaves us open,
almost instinctively, to belief in the separation of the body (the visible) and
the mind (the invisible). If you can posit minds in other people that you
cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author
of “Descartes’ Baby,” published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds
that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is
another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.
The
traditional psychological view has been that until about age 4, children think
that minds are permeable and that everyone knows whatever the child himself
knows. To a young child, everyone is infallible. All other people, especially
Mother and Father, are thought to have the same sort of insight as an
all-knowing God.
But
at a certain point in development, this changes. (Some new research suggests
this might occur as early as 15 months.) The “false-belief test” is a classic
experiment that highlights the boundary. Children watch a puppet show with a
simple plot: John comes onstage holding a marble, puts it in Box A and walks
off. Mary comes onstage, opens Box A, takes out the marble, puts it in Box B
and walks off. John comes back onstage. The children are asked, Where will John look for the marble?
Very
young children, or autistic children of any age, say
John will look in Box B, since they know that’s where the marble is. But older
children give a more sophisticated answer. They know that John never saw Mary
move the marble and that as far as he is concerned it is still where he put it,
in Box A. Older children have developed a theory of mind; they understand that
other people sometimes have false beliefs. Even though they know that the
marble is in Box B, they respond that John will look for it in Box A.
The
adaptive advantage of folkpsychology is obvious.
According to Atran, our ancestors needed it to
survive their harsh environment, since folkpsychology
allowed them to “rapidly and economically” distinguish good guys from bad guys.
But how did folkpsychology — an understanding of
ordinary people’s ordinary minds — allow for a belief in supernatural,
omniscient minds? And if the byproduct theorists are right and these beliefs
were of little use in finding food or leaving more offspring, why did they
persist?
Atran ascribes the persistence to evolutionary misdirection,
which, he says, happens all the time: “Evolution always produces something that
works for what it works for, and then there’s no control for however else it’s
used.” On a sunny weekday morning, over breakfast at a French cafe on upper
Broadway, he tried to think of an analogy and grinned when he came up with an
old standby: women’s breasts. Because they are associated with female hormones,
he explained, full breasts indicate a woman is fertile, and the evolution of
the male brain’s preference for them was a clever mating strategy. But breasts
are now used for purposes unrelated to reproduction, to sell anything from
deodorant to beer. “A Martian anthropologist might look at this and say, ‘Oh,
yes, so these breasts must have somehow evolved to sell hygienic stuff or food
to human beings,’ ” Atran said. But the Martian
would, of course, be wrong. Equally wrong would be to make the same mistake
about religion, thinking it must have evolved to make people behave a certain
way or feel a certain allegiance.
That
is what most fascinated Atran. “Why is God in there?”
he wondered.
The
idea of an infallible God is comfortable and familiar, something children
readily accept. You can see this in the experiment Justin Barrett conducted
recently — a version of the traditional false-belief test but with a religious
twist. Barrett showed young children a box with a picture of crackers on the
outside. What do you think is inside this box? he
asked, and the children said, “Crackers.” Next he opened it and showed them
that the box was filled with rocks. Then he asked two follow-up questions: What
would your mother say is inside this box? And what would God say?
As
earlier theory-of-mind experiments already showed, 3- and 4-year-olds tended to
think Mother was infallible, and since the children knew the right answer, they
assumed she would know it, too. They usually responded that Mother would say
the box contained rocks. But 5- and 6-year-olds had learned that Mother, like
any other person, could hold a false belief in her mind, and they tended to
respond that she would be fooled by the packaging and would say, “Crackers.”
And
what would God say? No matter what their age, the children, who were all
Protestants, told Barrett that God would answer, “Rocks.” This was true even
for the older children, who, as Barrett understood it, had developed folkpsychology and had used it when predicting a wrong
response for Mother. They had learned that, in certain situations, people could
be fooled — but they had also learned that there is no fooling God.
The
bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a
tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial
souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds,
hard-wired for belief, with specifics. It is a little like
language acquisition, Paul Bloom says, with the essential difference that language
is a biological adaptation and religion, in his view, is not. We are born with
an innate facility for language but the specific language we learn depends on
the environment in which we are raised. In much the same way, he says, we are
born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up
believing — whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven
or occupies another animal after death — are
culturally shaped.
Whatever
the specifics, certain beliefs can be found in all religions. Those that
prevail, according to the byproduct theorists, are those that fit most
comfortably with our mental architecture. Psychologists have shown, for
instance, that people attend to, and remember, things that are unfamiliar and
strange, but not so strange as to be impossible to assimilate. Ideas about God
or other supernatural agents tend to fit these criteria. They are what Pascal
Boyer, an anthropologist and psychologist, called “minimally counterintuitive”:
weird enough to get your attention and lodge in your memory but not so weird
that you reject them altogether. A tree that talks is minimally
counterintuitive, and you might believe it as a supernatural agent. A tree that
talks and flies and time-travels is maximally
counterintuitive, and you are more likely to reject it.
Atran, along with Ara Norenzayan of the
It
is not enough for an agent to be minimally counterintuitive for it to earn a
spot in people’s belief systems. An emotional component is often needed, too,
if belief is to take hold. “If your emotions are involved, then that’s the time
when you’re most likely to believe whatever the religion tells you to believe,”
Atran says. Religions stir up emotions through their
rituals — swaying, singing, bowing in unison during group prayer, sometimes working people up to a state of physical arousal that
can border on frenzy. And religions gain strength during the natural
heightening of emotions that occurs in times of personal crisis, when the
faithful often turn to shamans or priests. The most intense personal crisis,
for which religion can offer powerfully comforting answers, is when someone
comes face to face with mortality.
In
John
Updike’s celebrated early short story “Pigeon Feathers,” 14-year-old
David spends a lot of time thinking about death. He suspects that adults are
lying when they say his spirit will live on after he dies. He keeps catching
them in inconsistencies when he asks where exactly his soul will spend
eternity. “Don’t you see,” he cries to his mother, “if when we die there’s
nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It’s just an
ocean of horror.”
The
story ends with David’s tiny revelation and his boundless relief. The boy gets
a gun for his 15th birthday, which he uses to shoot down some pigeons that have
been nesting in his grandmother’s barn. Before he buries them, he studies the
dead birds’ feathers. He is amazed by their swirls of color, “designs executed,
it seemed, in a controlled rapture.” And suddenly the fears that have plagued
him are lifted, and with a “slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to
give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had
lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole
Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”
Fear
of death is an undercurrent of belief. The spirits of dead ancestors, ghosts,
immortal deities, heaven and hell, the everlasting soul: the notion of
spiritual existence after death is at the heart of almost every religion.
According to some adaptationists, this is part of
religion’s role, to help humans deal with the grim certainty of death.
Believing in God and the afterlife, they say, is how we make sense of the
brevity of our time on earth, how we give meaning to this brutish and short
existence. Religion can offer solace to the bereaved and comfort to the
frightened.
But
the spandrelists counter that saying these beliefs
are consolation does not mean they offered an adaptive advantage to our
ancestors. “The human mind does not produce adequate comforting delusions
against all situations of stress or fear,” wrote Pascal Boyer, a leading
byproduct theorist, in “Religion Explained,” which came out a year before Atran’s book. “Indeed, any organism that was prone to such
delusions would not survive long.”
Whether
or not it is adaptive, belief in the afterlife gains power in two ways: from
the intensity with which people wish it to be true and from the confirmation it
seems to get from the real world. This brings us back to folkpsychology.
We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them, an adaptive trait that allowed our
ancestors to outwit potential enemies. But when we think about being dead, we
run into a cognitive wall. How can we possibly think about not thinking? “Try
to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you
will see the impossibility of it,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in “Tragic Sense of Life.” “The effort to
comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of
ourselves as not existing.”
Much easier, then, to imagine that the thinking somehow
continues.
This is what young children seem to do, as a study at the
Afterward,
Bering and Bjorklund asked their subjects, ages 4 to
12, what it meant for Brown Mouse to be “not alive anymore.” Is he still
hungry? Is he still sleepy? Does he still want to go home? Most said the mouse
no longer needed to eat or drink. But a large proportion, especially the
younger ones, said that he still had thoughts, still loved his mother and still
liked cheese. The children understood what it meant for the mouse’s body to
cease to function, but many believed that something about the mouse was still
alive.
“Our
psychological architecture makes us think in particular ways,” says Bering, now
at
It
might be just as impossible to simulate the nonexistence of loved ones. A large
part of any relationship takes place in our minds, Bering said, so it’s natural
for it to continue much as before after the other person’s death. It is easy to
forget that your sister is dead when you reach for the phone to call her, since
your relationship was based so much on memory and imagined conversations even
when she was alive. In addition, our agent-detection device sometimes confirms
the sensation that the dead are still with us. The wind brushes our cheek, a
spectral shape somehow looks familiar and our agent detection goes into
overdrive. Dreams, too, have a way of confirming belief in the afterlife, with
dead relatives appearing in dreams as if from beyond the grave, seeming very
much alive.
Belief
is our fallback position, according to Bering; it is our reflexive style of
thought. “We have a basic psychological capacity that allows anyone to reason
about unexpected natural events, to see deeper meaning where there is none,” he
says. “It’s natural; it’s how our minds work.”
Intriguing
as the spandrel logic might be, there is another way to think about the
evolution of religion: that religion evolved because it offered survival
advantages to our distant ancestors. This is where the action is in the science
of God debate, with a coterie of adaptationists
arguing on behalf of the primary benefits, in terms of survival advantages, of
religious belief.
The
trick in thinking about adaptation is that even if a trait offers no survival
advantage today, it might have had one long ago. This is how Darwinians explain
how certain physical characteristics persist even if they do not currently seem
adaptive — by asking whether they might have helped our distant ancestors form
social groups, feed themselves, find suitable mates or keep from getting killed.
A facility for storing calories as fat, for instance, which is a detriment in
today’s food-rich society, probably helped our ancestors survive cyclical
famines.
So
trying to explain the adaptiveness of religion means
looking for how it might have helped early humans survive and reproduce. As
some adaptationists see it, this could have worked on
two levels, individual and group. Religion made people feel
better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future,
more willing to take care of themselves. As William James put it, religion
filled people with “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life . . . an
assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a
preponderance of loving affections.”
Such
sentiments, some adaptationists say, made the
faithful better at finding and storing food, for instance, and helped them
attract better mates because of their reputations for morality, obedience and
sober living. The advantage might have worked at the group level too, with religious
groups outlasting others because they were more cohesive, more likely to
contain individuals willing to make sacrifices for the group and more adept at
sharing resources and preparing for warfare.
One
of the most vocal adaptationists is David Sloan
Wilson, an occasional thorn in the side of both Scott Atran
and Richard Dawkins. Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at the State University
of New York at
“I
knew I couldn’t be a novelist,” said Wilson, who crackled with intensity during
a telephone interview, “so I chose something as far as possible from literature
— I chose science.” He is disarmingly honest about what motivated him: “I was
very ambitious, and I wanted to make a mark.” He chose to study human
evolution, he said, in part because he had some of his father’s literary
leanings and the field required a novelist’s attention to human motivations,
struggles and alliances — as well as a novelist’s flair for narrative.
Wilson
eventually chose to study religion not because religion mattered to him
personally — he was raised in a secular Protestant household and says he has
long been an atheist — but because it was a lens through which to look at and
revivify a branch of evolution that had fallen into disrepute. When
Dawkins
once called
Still,
for all its controversial elements, the narrative
To
explain how a self-sacrificing gene can persist,
There
are costs to any individual of being religious: the time and resources spent on
rituals, the psychic energy devoted to following certain injunctions, the pain
of some initiation rites. But in terms of intergroup
struggle, according to
There
is another element here too, unique to humans because it depends on language. A
person’s behavior is observed not only by those in his immediate surroundings
but also by anyone who can hear about it. There might be clear costs to taking
on a role analogous to the sentry bird — a person who stands up to authority,
for instance, risks losing his job, going to jail or getting beaten by the
police — but in humans, these local costs might be outweighed by long-distance
benefits. If a particular selfless trait enhances a person’s reputation, spread
through the written and spoken word, it might give him an advantage in many of
life’s challenges, like finding a mate. One way that reputation is enhanced is
by being ostentatiously religious.
“The
study of evolution is largely the study of trade-offs,”
Even
if
Richard
Sosis, an anthropologist with positions at the University of Connecticut and Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, has suggested a partial answer. Like many adaptationists, Sosis focuses on
the way religion might be adaptive at the individual level. But even
adaptations that help an individual survive can sometimes play themselves out
through the group. Consider religious rituals.
“Religious
and secular rituals can both promote cooperation,” Sosis
wrote in American Scientist in 2004. But religious rituals “generate greater
belief and commitment” because they depend on belief rather than on proof. The
rituals are “beyond the possibility of examination,” he wrote, and a commitment
to them is therefore emotional rather than logical — a commitment that is, in Sosis’s view, deeper and more long-lasting.
Rituals
are a way of signaling a sincere commitment to the religion’s core beliefs,
thereby earning loyalty from others in the group. “By donning several layers of
clothing and standing out in the midday sun,” Sosis
wrote, “ultraorthodox Jewish men are signaling to
others: ‘Hey! Look, I’m a haredi’ — or extremely
pious — ‘Jew. If you are also a member of this group, you can trust me because
why else would I be dressed like this?’ ” These “signaling” rituals can grant
the individual a sense of belonging and grant the group some freedom from
constant and costly monitoring to ensure that their members are loyal and
committed. The rituals are harsh enough to weed out the infidels, and both the
group and the individual believers benefit.
In
2003, Sosis and Bradley Ruffle of
In
1997, Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay in Natural History that called for a
truce between religion and science. “The net of science covers the empirical
universe,” he wrote. “The net of religion extends over questions of moral
meaning and value.” Gould was emphatic about keeping the domains separate,
urging “respectful discourse” and “mutual humility.” He called the demarcation
“nonoverlapping magisteria”
from the Latin magister, meaning “canon.”
Richard
Dawkins had a history of spirited arguments with Gould, with whom he disagreed
about almost everything related to the timing and focus of evolution. But he
reserved some of his most venomous words for nonoverlapping
magisteria. “Gould carried the art of bending over
backward to positively supine lengths,” he wrote in “The God Delusion.” “Why
shouldn’t we comment on God, as scientists? . . . A universe with a creative
superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why
is that not a scientific matter?”
The
separation, other critics said, left untapped the potential richness of letting
one worldview inform the other. “Even if Gould was right that there were two
domains, what religion does and what science does,” says Daniel Dennett (who,
despite his neo-atheist label, is not as bluntly antireligious as Dawkins and
Harris are), “that doesn’t mean science can’t study what religion does. It just
means science can’t do what religion does.”
The
idea that religion can be studied as a natural phenomenon might seem to require
an atheistic philosophy as a starting point. Not necessarily. Even some
neo-atheists aren’t entirely opposed to religion. Sam Harris practices
Buddhist-inspired meditation. Daniel Dennett holds an annual Christmas
sing-along, complete with hymns and carols that are not only harmonically lush
but explicitly pious.
And
one prominent member of the byproduct camp, Justin Barrett, is an observant
Christian who believes in “an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good God who
brought the universe into being,” as he wrote in an e-mail message. “I believe
that the purpose for people is to love God and love each other.”
At
first blush, Barrett’s faith might seem confusing. How does his view of God as
a byproduct of our mental architecture coexist with his Christianity? Why
doesn’t the byproduct theory turn him into a skeptic?
“Christian
theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship
with him and other people,” Barrett wrote in his e-mail message. “Why wouldn’t
God, then, design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite
natural?” Having a scientific explanation for mental phenomena does not mean we
should stop believing in them, he wrote. “Suppose science produces a convincing
account for why I think my wife loves me — should I then stop believing that
she does?”
What
can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true,
they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic
habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle
to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he
suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought
about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case.
It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts
and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will
become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because
he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of
spiritualism.
This
internal push and pull between the spiritual and the rational reflects what
used to be called the “God of the gaps” view of religion. The presumption was
that as science was able to answer more questions about the natural world, God
would be invoked to answer fewer, and religion would eventually recede.
Research about the evolution of religion suggests otherwise. No matter how much
science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that
our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the
supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an
inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the
tragedy of human cognition.
Robin Marantz Henig, a contributing writer, has written recently for the magazine about the neurobiology of lying and about obesity.