The Faith Instinct (41 page)

Only in the last 350 years or so, the last 0.7 percent of modern human existence, has the strength of religion started to falter, yielding to the institutions of secular states and to the erosion of some of its premises by modern knowledge.

The dethronement of religion has been a necessary consequence of modernity. Religious leaders, being no better than other kinds, sometimes used their powers to persecute dissidents and stifle inquiry. Western nations could not function were not church and state separate. Theocratic regimes such as those of Iran seem seriously out of place in the modern world.

Less welcome than the church’s loss of direct political power has been the ebbing of its moral authority. Even the most cynical of religion’s critics have acknowledged its role in sustaining the moral fabric of society. “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world,” reported the historian Edward Gibbon, “were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.”

Religious belief is waning in many countries, especially among the most educated classes. Many modern states are secular and,
particularly in Europe, have confined the sacred to a separate sphere of seemingly limited relevance. The religious instinct, the inherited propensity for ritual and belief, is still wired into the human mind as much as ever before, but many people do not exercise it, whether because they choose not to or have lacked a religious upbringing. Many are driven by feelings of emptiness to search for transcendent meaning or spirituality in other ways and do not participate in organized religion, the form in which religious behavior exerts its cohesive powers. The low ebb that religion has reached in European countries may well presage its eventual decline in even the United States.

Is religious behavior in fact unnecessary in the modern secular state? Should we thank the gods for their long tutelage and bid them farewell? If history does not end in secularism, what is the future of religion?

The essential element of religious knowledge, from an evolutionary perspective, is not theology but the practical rules of moral, military and reproductive behavior, the distilled collective wisdom of leaders past and present as to the guiding principles most likely to ensure a society’s survival. These rules, having been negotiated with the gods, may be embedded in a sacred ritual or narrative, sometimes explicitly, sometimes only becoming evident in the way a text or ceremony is interpreted. They are quite unlike the rules in statute books because they command not merely intellectual but also emotional commitment. In practicing the religion that embodies these rules, members of a community, or of a nation, signal their commitment to one another and to the common vision of how their society should operate.

This is the behavior, secured with a prayer or a pinch of incense, that has preserved the fabric of human societies through the centuries. It seems unlikely that suddenly it no longer has a useful role to play.

Religion may not seem so essential in times of security and prosperity, when the social fabric appears reasonably robust. The test comes in times of crisis, whether warfare or economic disaster. Social order, past a certain point of stress, can rapidly collapse.

Beyond its role in strengthening the social fabric, religion ex
erts a cultural influence so deep that it has in effect become
a defining factor of the world’s major civilizations. In even the most secular
countries religion strongly influences the way people identify themselves. The qual
ity or nature of a religion affects everyone through its shapin
g of their culture. And culture, though social scientists cannot measure it and econ
omists largely ignore it, surely makes a difference. “One has only to ask,”
writes Samuel Huntington, “Would America be the America
it is today if in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been settled not b
y British Protestants but by French, Spanish or Portuguese Cath
olics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil.”
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If religion still has many valuable roles to play, how might religious leaders protect its foundations from erosion by the rising tides of secularism?

A central problem facing the three monotheisms has arisen from their claims to historicity. These helped recruit believers when the religions were starting to grow. But the price began to be paid when the textual analysts of the nineteenth century uncovered the composite nature of the sacred texts and when Darwin’s theory undermined most of what religion had to say about the nature of life. Scholars like Wellhausen showed that the Old and New Testaments were the works of many human hands, and so seemed less likely to have been divinely inspired. Modern archaeology has provided substantial evidence that there was no exodus from Egypt and no conquest of the promised land: the Israelites had always lived in Canaan. The great patriarchs of Israel belonged to legend, not to history. Jesus was a historical figure, but an orthodox Jew who probably sought to reformulate Judaism, not to found a new religion; Christianity was developed by his followers from an artful blend of Judaism and the mystery cults that had penetrated the Roman world. As for Muhammad, there is a strange paucity of independent historical evidence about his life; some scholars doubt whether he lived in the Hijaz, where Islamic texts locate him, and a few wonder if he lived at all.

Does it matter that each of the three monotheisms asserts a historical basis not wholly in accordance with the textual and archaeological facts? In many ways it does not matter. Religion is about symbolic communication. The sacred texts of the three monotheisms include themes that symbolize the values and traditions of each religion. Their longevity is a testament to their emotional truth and their enduring value for the civilizations constructed around them.

But in other ways the assertions of historicity present a problem because they make it much harder for each of the monotheisms to adapt to changing times and needs. Once the sacred texts of a religion have been finalized, a religion must live within the framework set by its canon. The fixed texts of Christianity and Islam have made both religions hard to update, and this in turn has led to clashes with modernity. In the long run, it would seem that both religions need to adapt to new knowledge or be undermined by it.

Religion is often taken as fixed and unalterable, responsive only to its mysterious internal laws. But could it perhaps be changed, reshaped in a manner that enhanced its cohesive properties and diminished its clashes with modernity and rationality? If religions are the product of the society they reflect, as argued above, why should they not be reworked so that as many people as possible can exercise their innate religious instincts to their own and society’s benefit? Judaism in particular has been quite successful in retaining the allegiance of secularists who do not believe in any deity but observe their faith because it is part of their culture and has preserved them as a people.

Can there be religion without gods? Buddhism formally has no gods, but has accreted many in practice. The ethical culture movement seeks to build a religion around ethics alone, but has few adherents. The New England transcendentalists of the nineteenth century sought to construct a religion on a mixture of Kant’s philosophy and socialism. Scientists from time to time propose that awe of the natural world and of the marvels of science would be a fitting focus for a new, god-free religion. Such ideas go nowhere because they are far from capturing all the facets of religious behavior, and in particular its appeal to deep-seated emotions. No religion is likely to succeed unless it evokes all or most of the genetically prescribed features of religious behavior.

But is belief in a supernatural power—the stumbling block for many people in today’s highly educated societies—an essential feature of religion? For those raised in any of the three monotheisms, which are centered on a single deity, a godless religion sounds self-contradictory. Yet consider how deftly modern societies have developed a secular version of religion’s ancient role in training and motivating warriors. The deity is no longer essential to making men go into battle.

Another reason for inferring that gods may not always be essential to an effective church can be drawn from Durkheim’s analysis of religion as embodying a society’s moral conception of itself. If the gods play an essentially symbolic role in this conception, perhaps their roles could be successfully delegated to other elements in a religion, as has been accomplished in secular military training.

East Asian religions such as Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism are without gods, at least at their philosophical core, even though all have adherents who also worship gods. The Falun Gong movement of China is a novel religion centered on ethics and exercise, with the supernatural playing no prominent role. The exercises are presented as health giving but, since they are performed in unison, clearly have the potential to induce feelings of togetherness. Falun Gong is familiar to Chinese because it draws on Buddhist traditions, but also has adherents in many other cultures, presumably because of its emphasis on universal ethical principles, the attraction of its exercises and the lack of specific theology.

A Western religion without gods could perhaps be made compatible with scientific knowledge about the human condition. But how, then, would such a religion assure people that their lives had a significance beyond material existence and that there was some larger purpose that transcended the cycle of birth, reproduction and death?

At first glance, science has nothing to offer in this regard. Evolution is driven by the three forces of mutation, drift and selection, of which the first two are random and the third is blind and purposeless. Yet there is another force at work within human evolution that has not yet been given its due, perhaps because its fingerprints are only just now becoming visible.

That force is human choice. People choose, to some large extent
, the nature of the societies and economies in which they live.
Over the course of generations, as people adapt genetically to their social environ
ment, cultural changes operate like a force of natural selection, favoring certain b
ehaviors and the genes and neural circuitry that underlie them.
Culture thus feeds back into and shapes the human genome. The best documented case
so far concerns a fine nutritional detail, the emergence of lac
tose tolerance among the cattle herding culture of north-central Europe 5,000 years
ago. Here a cultural practice—keeping cattle and drinking raw milk—has l
ed to changes in the human genome, giving northern Europeans th
e unusual genetic ability to digest milk in adulthood.
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Many other instances
of genetic changes in response to culture will doubtless come to light, including some to do with human nature.

The role of human choice in shaping human evolution is far from understood, in part because it has been found only recently that culture can feed back into the genome. But human preferences about the nature of society could have played a significant evolutionary role, accounting for at least some part of the vast difference between people and chimpanzees, their closest living cousins.

Indeed, looking back at the broad sweep of human evolution over the last 50,000 years, it is easy enough to recognize the ways in which societies today are vastly preferable—kinder, more prosperous, less warlike, less profligate of the environment and far more knowledgeable—to those of earlier times. This, however much historians may hesitate to use the word, looks a lot like progress.

Such substantial and fairly steady progress cannot have been directed by evolution, a blind and largely random process with not a flicker of interest in human welfare. Surely the only possible origin of progress is human choice. For generation after generation, people have passionately sought the better course for themselves and their families and their community and, despite many dead ends and reverses, they have in general attained it.

These collective choices about how a society should behave could well have left their imprint on the human genome, or rather, a multitude of imprints depending on each society’s circumstance. If people choose to devote their interests to warfare, then warriors are likely to have more children, as is known to have happened among the Yanomamo, and both the genetics and the culture of violence will be perpetuated.
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But in societies that see conciliation and commerce as the better choice, the creators of wealth will leave more progeny and the character of society will change accordingly.

Thus it is certainly possible to argue that a beneficial direction has been imposed on the course of human evolution over the last 50,000 years or more; that the course has been set by human choice, acting as a force within the evolutionary process; and that this favorable vector has had, as one of its components, the evolved propensity for religious beha
vior. Might this not be described, from a theological point of view, as the hand of the deity in action? Perhaps religious leaders interested in evolutionary theory may see some way to make use of this possibility.

The discovery that society molds and modulates the human genome is one that Durkheim would surely have appreciated. Not only do religions embody society’s moral authority, he would have said, but the gods may have shaped human societies in their own image. We are not just the product of a blind and random process but something more, a creature shaped for good or ill by the collective choices of all our ancestors for thousands of generations. Is there a metaphorical validity to ancestor worship after all? New religions can only emerge out of old ones, but perhaps the originator of a new sect might one day see how to draw inspiration from Durkheim’s analysis of how religions function.

For thousands of years people have negotiated with supernatural powers with prayer and sacrifice, and the religions they thus brought into being have shaped the moral nature of each society, reflecting the collective knowledge and desires of their people. Cruel and rapacious religions, like that of the Aztecs, have in the end led their societies to disaster. The winners of the Darwinian struggle between societies have been, surprisingly, not the most brutal and bellicose faiths but those that chose a more sustainable balance between warfare and conciliation.