Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (34 page)

Richard Dawkins has repeatedly argued that ideas are ideas. They all compete in the marketplace—as do physical traits (phenotypes). Only the best survive. That is, in fact, how you define success in evolutionary terms. Not the prettiest, not the brightest, but those that enjoy greatest reproductive success: those that successfully make it through into the next generation and ultimately spread in the population. Ideas are like phenotypes. They are subject to immense competition—selection pressure, if you will. As Dawkins has put it, ideas need to be “attacked.” Maybe a more socially acceptable term is
challenged
. In any case, they have to encounter some turbulence or we’ll never know how viable they are. If an idea withstands the challenge, it continues to live another day, to be transmitted from person to person for yet another day. If the idea cannot withstand the challenge, then down it goes. The junk pile of ideas is large. It is far larger than the number of ideas we presently hold. Phrenology didn’t make it through. Neither did the belief that Earth lies at the center of the universe. A lot of ideas have fallen under the weight of new evidence, as they should. This weeding out is crucial for the expanding knowledge base of our species. Debate and challenge are fair game, even essential to the process.

Why, then, is religion immune to this process? The answer is rooted in social rules. It is simply not polite to challenge religious beliefs. It is perfectly OK to risk offending spoon benders or psychics, but if you question the doctrine of papal infallibility or, for that matter, the existence of God as a guiding, controlling force in our everyday lives, you are violating the rules of polite social discourse.

As a university professor, I am rather careful when I tread on to the path of religion. There are powerful forces out there (very much of the natural world) that would challenge my right to academic freedom were I to dwell on someone’s religious beliefs or seriously call them into question. Flat Earthers are fair game; Christians, Muslims, Jews, or Hindus are not. If I were to repeat Christopher Hitchens’s case against Mother Teresa
²
or utter his description of her as “the ghastly bitch from Hell,” I would no doubt find myself in a meeting with my department chairman, dean, or university president. If I were to describe Darwin (or Lysenko) as an idiot, I would probably find I had carte blanche to do so. By not offering challenges to religious belief systems, we allow them to stagnate. In evolutionary terms, we are probably even weakening them.

Putting aside “taxation without representation” for the moment, wasn’t America founded on the basis of religious freedom? Isn’t the right to worship the supernatural entities of your choice a fundamental right, enshrined in the American Constitution? Doesn’t American money boldly proclaim, “In God We Trust”? Aren’t American political leaders evaluated on the basis of comparative piety? How can there be anything wrong with religion? A few Catholic priests, maybe, but those were just sick individuals, right? Surely, it’s not an indictment of the church itself, or of God or religion. Aren’t we going just a bit overboard here? What is it about this period in history that seems to be generating so much discussion of atheism? So much God-bashing! What’s a decent person to do?

The answer, at least the one suggested by this book, is to hold fast to that decency. God is not and has never been a prerequisite for human morality. The Founding Fathers seemed to understand that message quite well, although the principle has gotten lost over the years.
³
Nowhere is the distinction between morality and religion clearer than in the so-called Jefferson Bible. The third US president created this manuscript to retain the moral principles of Jesus, while excluding the supernatural “nonsense” (Jefferson’s word). Jefferson described the contrast between these essential moral teachings and the unnecessary supernatural ballast as being “as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill.”
⁴

Morality runs deep in human nature. Indeed, as author Matt Ridley has argued, a moral sense is coded in our genes and with good reason. “Moral,” “decent,” and “fair” social interactions were essential conduct in the small social groups in which our ancestors lived. These positive traits would have been selected for, just as strength, agility, or language would have been. Likewise, Marc Hauser’s book
Moral Minds
makes clear the transformation in how scientists understand the development of morality. Fifty years ago, the emphasis was on social learning and cognitive development. From that viewpoint, one might have concluded that, without religious indoctrination, humans might remain boundaryless brutes, capable of all manner of moral atrocities.

This is far from how moral development is now viewed, although conservative religion is in no hurry to let you know about the change. The cornerstone to understanding moral development today is evolutionary psychology. Marc Hauser’s book goes so far as to argue the parallel between an evolved language instinct and an evolved moral instinct. Hauser is talking about hardwired neural circuitry whose job it is to produce moral decisions and behavior. There is nothing about acting in a moral way that requires supernatural belief or intervention. It is true that many religions encode rules of moral conduct in their teaching, but it is naive to view those codes as the
basis
for morality. In
God Is Not Great
, Christopher Hitchens has put the issue even more bluntly. Is it reasonable to believe, Hitchens asks, that before Moses delivered the Ten Commandments containing the rule “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” his followers believed that it was perfectly all right to do so?

The separation of religion and morality is an extremely difficult idea for many people to grasp. Some of my students are appalled to hear me suggest that morality does not come directly from God or, at least, from religion. In his novel
Arthur & George
,
⁵
Julian Barnes recounts a conversation between Arthur Conan Doyle and his love interest, Jean. They are discussing religion and morality, and Jean observes, “If people, ordinary people, do not have the church to tell them how to behave, then they will relapse into brutish squalor and self-interest.” When Arthur disputes her view, Jean announces that she feels a headache coming on and ends their conversation.

The link between morality and religion is embodied in everyday language. The Colorado Rockies, a very successful baseball franchise in 2007, noted publicly that the management of their organization was guided by “Christian values.” Not surprisingly, this message was offensive to many non-Christians, including Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists. There was a lot of Internet discussion of Colorado’s position, and much of it underscores the point we make here about the separation of religion and morality. When asked to itemize some of those values, management listed such things as “decency,” “honesty,” and “charity.”

“Oh, you mean
Jewish
values,” one fan noted.

“No,
Buddhist
values,” another replied.

“Hindu values,” yet another said.

“You’re all wrong,” commented a fourth discussant. “These are
human
values. I’m an atheist and these are core values of the secular humanist organization I belong to.”

How quickly a Christian organization had laid claim to these cornerstones of decency and morality. They didn’t merely espouse the values that most people admire. They took
ownership
of them, suggesting in no uncertain terms that personnel decisions, like other parts of organizational policy, had reflected these attitudes. Although no such statement was made, it seems a short distance between this view and posting a “Non-Christians Need Not Apply” sign on the door.

A friend of mine who works thousands of miles away from Denver experienced a similar bias while working for a public (as opposed to a Catholic or “separate” school) board of education in Ontario, Canada. She had worked to implement a “community service” requirement into the curriculum of a civics course, only to receive an angry letter from an anonymous source. It contained a passage from the June 2006 issue of
Catholic Insight
magazine. It was essentially an attack on the public schools for meddling in “character education.” The article said in part that virtuous acts such as community service had to be rooted in “an understanding of the overall meaning of human life.” The article goes on to argue that only a Catholic teacher could instill a “virtuous character.” For non-Catholics, the teaching of such acts would be empty gestures with “only a semblance of moral respectability.” The basis for such a charade was obvious (to the writer): “Public schools don’t have the luxury of quoting the scriptures or speaking about God.” In summary, it is an “illusion that character education can bridge the gap between religious and non-religious schools.” Leave the good works to God’s people (better yet, to Catholics). Works alone are meaningless without character, and character can come only from accepting God. Our God.

In the October 9, 2006, issue of
Time
magazine, Andrew Sullivan argued cogently that embracing doubt in the area of religious belief was a core requirement for individual rationality and perhaps even world peace. Sullivan’s ire was directed at religious fundamentalists of all stripes and the rising tide of fundamentalism in world politics. Qualities like being utterly certain and uncompromising in judgments while preaching “absolute adherence to inerrant Scripture” are reserved for Sullivan’s sharpest criticism. Yet, for many, they are among the most attractive features of religious affiliation. Being infantilized by absolute notions of right and wrong continues to resonate with many people. For them, the separation between religion and morality is unthinkable.

Andrew Sullivan does not share the antireligious stance of the present book. In his book
The Conservative Soul
,
⁶
Sullivan argues that the problem lies not with religion, per se, but with its fundamentalist, assertively nonrational believers. It is certainly true that a holy war between two opponents who are utterly convinced that they are doing God’s work by smiting nonbelievers is scary business. And there is much to fear. American involvement in the Middle East cannot stand apart from a geopolitical system that is deeply rooted in religious history and perceived mandates from conflicting deities.

Although we are not making a case for mild-mannered, moderate religion, it is certainly to be favored over absolute, fundamentalist belief. The former may be wrong; the latter may be lethal. Sullivan has actually put the case quite strongly. Citing sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne, Sullivan concludes that “complete religious certainty is, in fact, the real blasphemy.” He goes on to argue that “true belief is not about blind submission.” Sullivan, interestingly, proposes a faith built on doubt. This may be a viable cornerstone for a personal belief system, but it seems an unlikely mantra for any organized religion. Certainly, it seems a poor match for what we know of the world’s major religions and their usual practitioners.

Religion appears to be one of the defining characteristics, if not of our species, then certainly of the cultures we create. Why is this so? What makes religion so widespread? Philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have grappled with this question quite unsuccessfully for thousands of years. It seems surprising that anything so widespread would be so resistant to analysis. In the opening chapter of his recent book,
⁷
Stewart Guthrie addresses the lack of a satisfactory theory of religion, citing a small sample of previous attempts, and uses 167 notes to document his conclusion.

It is only recently that advances in cognitive neuroscience, coupled with an interest in evolutionary psychology, has begun to cut a meaningful path through this mass of theorizing. Arguably, previous accounts have been misguided. By focusing on religion itself as an adaptation, one may be led to ask the wrong questions about how it came to be and why it persists. Because this is not a book on religion, per se, these debates lie beyond our immediate concern. A brief summary, however, will help to draw the issue of religion into the framework of Caveman Logic.

Previous approaches by believers and skeptic/scholars alike have often confronted the “why” of religion by asking, “What benefits does religion confer on the believer?” This functional analysis confuses
benefits
with
causes
. It assumes that once identified, the benefits of religion will explain why it was chosen or persists. Thinkers like Freud or Marx—to name the most famous of this viewpoint—concluded that the intolerable anxieties of everyday life, whether spiritual, economic, or social, lead humans to search for something to dull the pain. Freud argued that religion was “born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable.” Marx’s famous phrase “the opiate of the masses,” patronizing as it may be, embodies this same viewpoint.

Although many have accepted this approach to the “why” question, there are at least three problems with it. First, as many writers have noted, much religious doctrine invokes as much anxiety as it relieves. Indeed, religious devotees often bask in florid depictions, both artistic and lyrical, of the sort of torture that lies ahead of them in the afterlife. As sources as diverse as painter Hieronymus Bosch’s grotesque
The Descent of the Damned into Hell
or musician Chuck Berry’s “The Downbound Train”
⁸
confirm, religion has the potential to agitate as many people as it soothes.

The second problem with the functional or “utility” analysis of religion lies in its assumption that people are simply acting as unconstrained free agents selecting what makes them feel good. It is as if most people in our culture find themselves with a headache and turn to each other, saying “Hey, my head is really throbbing. Any idea what I can do for it?” And the answer comes back from anyone you ask, “Take Tylenol. It’s great for headaches.” And before you know it, more and more people are taking Tylenol and recommending it to others. One day you look around and realize that virtually the whole human race is taking Tylenol—or whatever the local equivalent may be in areas where Johnson & Johnson has no distribution. The headache really hasn’t gone away, and Tylenol-crazed people are flying airplanes into buildings or attacking other people who use Bufferin, but the Tylenol use grows daily.