The GOD Delusion (25 page)

To
an evolutionist, religious rituals 'stand out like peacocks in a sunlit
glade' (Dan Dennett's phrase). Religious behaviour is a writ-large
human equivalent of anting or bower-building. It is time-consuming,
energy-consuming, often as extravagantly ornate as the plumage of a
bird of paradise. Religion can endanger the life of the pious
individual, as well as the lives of others. Thousands of people have
been tortured for their loyalty to a religion, persecuted by zealots
for what is in many cases a scarcely distinguishable alternative faith.
Religion devours resources, sometimes on a massive scale. A medieval
cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction,
yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful
purpose. Was it some kind of architectural peacock's tail? If so, at
whom was the advertisement aimed? Sacred music and devotional paintings
largely monopolized medieval and Renaissance talent. Devout people have
died for their gods and killed for them; whipped blood from their
backs, sworn themselves
to a lifetime of celibacy or to lonely silence, all in the service of
religion. What is it all for? What is the benefit of religion?

By
'benefit', the Darwinian normally means some enhancement to the
survival of the individual's genes. What is missing from this is the
important point that Darwinian benefit is not restricted to the genes
of the individual organism. There are three possible alternative
targets of benefit. One arises from the theory of group selection, and
I'll come to that. The second follows from the theory that I advocated
in
The Extended Phenotype:
the individual you are
watching may be working under the manipulative influence of genes in
another individual, perhaps a parasite. Dan Dennett reminds us that the
common cold is universal to all human peoples in much the same way as
religion is, yet we would not want to suggest that colds benefit us.
Plenty of examples are known of animals manipulated into behaving in
such a way as to benefit the transmission of a parasite to its next
host. I encapsulated the point in my 'central theorem of the extended
phenotype': 'An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of
the genes "for" that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be
in the body of the particular animal performing it.'

Third,
the 'central theorem' may substitute for 'genes' the more general term
'replicators'. The fact that religion is ubiquitous probably means that
it has worked to the benefit of something, but it may not be us or our
genes. It may be to the benefit of only the religious ideas themselves,
to the extent that they behave in a somewhat gene-like way, as
replicators. I shall deal with this below, under the heading 'Tread
softly, because you tread on my memes'. Meanwhile, I press on with more
traditional interpretations of Darwinism, in which 'benefit' is assumed
to mean benefit to individual survival and reproduction.

Hunter-gatherer
peoples such as Australian aboriginal tribes presumably live in
something like the way our distant ancestors did. The New
Zealand/Australian philosopher of science Kim Sterelny points up a
dramatic contrast in their lives. On the one hand aboriginals are
superb survivors under conditions that test their practical skills to
the uttermost. But, Sterelny goes on, intelligent as our species might
be, we are
perversely
intelligent. The very same
peoples who are so savvy about the natural world and how to survive
in it simultaneously clutter their minds with beliefs that are palpably
false and for which the word 'useless' is a generous understatement.
Sterelny himself is familiar with aboriginal peoples of Papua New
Guinea. They survive under arduous conditions where food is hard to
come by, by dint of 'a legendarily accurate understanding of their
biological environment. But they combine this understanding with deep
and destructive obsessions about female menstrual pollution and about
witchcraft. Many of the local cultures are tormented by fears of
witchcraft and magic, and by the violence that accompanies those
fears.' Sterelny challenges us to explain 'how we can be simultaneously
so smart and so dumb'.
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Though
the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some
version of the time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking
rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.
Some educated individuals may have abandoned religion, but all were
brought up in a religious culture from which they usually had to make a
conscious decision to depart. The old Northern Ireland joke, 'Yes, but
are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?', is spiked with
bitter truth. Religious behaviour can be called a human universal in
the same way as heterosexual behaviour can. Both generalizations allow
individual exceptions, but all those exceptions understand only too
well the rule from which they have departed. Universal features of a
species demand a Darwinian explanation.

Obviously,
there is no difficulty in explaining the Darwinian advantage of sexual
behaviour. It is about making babies, even on those occasions where
contraception or homosexuality seems to belie it. But what about
religious behaviour? Why do humans fast, kneel, genuflect,
self-flagellate, nod maniacally towards a wall, crusade, or otherwise
indulge in costly practices that can consume life and, in extreme
cases, terminate it?

There
is a little evidence that religious belief protects people from
stress-related diseases. The evidence is not strong, but it would not
be
surprising if it were true, for the same kind of reason as
faith-healing might turn out to work in a few cases. I wish it were not
necessary to add that such beneficial effects in no way boost the truth
value of religion's claims. In George Bernard Shaw's words, 'The fact
that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than
the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.'

Part
of what a doctor can give a patient is consolation and reassurance.
This is not to be dismissed out of hand. My doctor doesn't literally
practise faith-healing by laying on of hands. But many's the time I've
been instantly 'cured' of some minor ailment by a reassuring voice from
an intelligent face surmounting a stethoscope. The placebo effect is
well documented and not even very mysterious. Dummy pills, with no
pharmacological activity at all, demonstrably improve health. That is
why double-blind drug trials must use placebos as controls. It's why
homoeopathic remedies appear to work, even though they are so dilute
that they have the same amount of active ingredient as the placebo
control -zero molecules. Incidentally, an unfortunate by-product of the
encroachment by lawyers on doctors' territory is that doctors are now
afraid to prescribe placebos in normal practice. Or bureaucracy may
oblige them to identify the placebo in written notes to which the
patient has access, which of course defeats the object. Homoeopaths may
be achieving relative success because they, unlike orthodox
practitioners, are still allowed to administer placebos - under another
name. They also have more time to devote to talking and simply being
kind to the patient. In the early part of its long history, moreover,
homoeopathy's reputation was inadvertently enhanced by the fact that
its remedies did nothing at all - by contrast with orthodox medical
practices, such as bloodletting, which did active harm.

Is
religion a placebo that prolongs life by reducing stress? Possibly,
although the theory must run a gauntlet of sceptics who point out the
many circumstances in which religion causes rather than relieves
stress. It is hard to believe, for example, that health is improved by
the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic
possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence.
Perhaps it is unfair to single out the Catholics. The American comedian
Cathy Ladman observes that 'All religions are
the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.' In any
case, I find the placebo theory unworthy of the massively pervasive
worldwide phenomenon of religion. I don't think the reason we have
religion is that it reduced the stress levels of our ancestors. That's
not a big enough theory for the job, although it may have played a
subsidiary role. Religion is a large phenomenon and it needs a large
theory to explain it.

Other
theories miss the point of Darwinian explanations altogether. I'm
talking about suggestions like 'religion satisfies our curiosity about
the universe and our place in it', or 'religion is consoling'. There
may be some psychological truth here, as we shall see in Chapter 10,
but neither is in itself a Darwinian explanation. As Steven Pinker
pointedly said of the consolation theory, in
How the Mind
Works:
'it only raises the question of
why
a
mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are
false. A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a
person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction
that it is a rabbit.' At the very least, the consolation theory needs
to be translated into Darwinian terms, and that is harder than you
might think. Psychological explanations to the effect that people find
some belief agreeable or disagreeable are proximate, not ultimate,
explanations.

Darwinians
make much of this distinction between proximate and ultimate. The
proximate explanation for the explosion in the cylinder of an internal
combustion engine invokes the sparking plug. The ultimate explanation
concerns the purpose for which the explosion was designed: to impel a
piston from the cylinder, thereby turning a crankshaft. The proximate
cause of religion might be hyperactivity in a particular node of the
brain. I shall not pursue the neurological idea of a 'god centre' in
the brain because I am not concerned here with proximate questions.
That is not to belittle them. I recommend Michael Shermer's
How
We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science
for a
succinct discussion, which includes the suggestion by Michael Persinger
and others that visionary religious experiences are related to temporal
lobe epilepsy.

But
my preoccupation in this chapter is with Darwinian
ultimate
explanations.
If neuroscientists find a 'god centre' in the brain, Darwinian
scientists like me will still want to understand the natural
selection pressure that favoured it. Why did those of our ancestors who
had a genetic tendency to grow a god centre survive to have more
grandchildren than rivals who didn't? The Darwinian ultimate question
is not a better question, not a more profound question, not a more
scientific question than the neurological proximate question. But it is
the one I am talking about here.

Nor
are Darwinians satisfied by political explanations, such as 'Religion
is a tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the underclass.' It is
surely true that black slaves in America were consoled by promises of
another life, which blunted their dissatisfaction with this one and
thereby benefited their owners. The question of whether religions are
deliberately designed by cynical priests or rulers is an interesting
one, to which historians should attend. But it is not, in itself, a
Darwinian question. The Darwinian still wants to know why people are
vulnerable
to the charms of religion and therefore open to exploitation
by priests, politicians and kings.

A
cynical manipulator might use sexual lust as a tool of political power,
but we still need the Darwinian explanation of why it works. In the
case of sexual lust, the answer is easy: our brains are set up to enjoy
sex because sex, in the natural state, makes babies. Or a political
manipulator might use torture to achieve his ends. Once again, the
Darwinian must supply the explanation for why torture is effective; why
we will do almost anything to avoid intense pain. Again it seems
obvious to the point of banality, but the Darwinian still needs to
spell it out: natural selection has set up the perception of pain as a
token of life-threatening bodily damage, and programmed us to avoid it.
Those rare individuals who cannot feel pain, or don't care about it,
usually die young of injuries which the rest of us would have taken
steps to avoid. Whether it is cynically exploited, or whether it just
manifests itself spontaneously, what ultimately explains the lust for
gods?

Some
alleged ultimate explanations turn out to be - or avowedly are -
'group-selection' theories. Group selection is the controversial idea
that Darwinian selection chooses among species or other
groups
of individuals. The Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew
suggests that Christianity survived by a form of group selection
because it fostered the idea of in-group loyalty and in-group brotherly
love, and this helped religious groups to survive at the expense of
less religious groups. The American group-selection apostle D. S.
Wilson independently developed a similar suggestion at more length, in
Darwin's
Cathedral.

Here's
an invented example, to show what a group-selection theory of religion
might look like. A tribe with a stirringly belligerent 'god of battles'
wins wars against rival tribes whose gods urge peace and harmony, or
tribes with no gods at all. Warriors who unshakeably believe that a
martyr's death will send them straight to paradise fight bravely, and
willingly give up their lives. So tribes with this kind of religion are
more likely to survive in inter-tribal warfare, steal the conquered
tribe's livestock and seize their women as concubines. Such successful
tribes prolifically spawn daughter tribes that go off and propagate
more daughter tribes, all worshipping the same tribal god. The idea of
a group spawning daughter groups, like a beehive throwing off swarms,
is not implausible, by the way. The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon
mapped just such fissioning of villages in his celebrated study of the
'Fierce People', the Yanomamo of the South American jungle.
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