Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (34 page)

Memes aside, what are some other evolutionary hypotheses for religion, suggesting how it might benefit its practitioners? It is not sufficient simply to say that people worldwide turn to religion to meet certain needs, otherwise unmet: explaining great mysteries such as death or the meaning of life, or because it provides solace, a sense of belonging, meeting our “spiritual needs,” and so forth. The problem is that these don’t suffice as biology, which requires us to ask: Why do people need explanations for death, or for the meaning of life? Why do people need the solace that religion evidently provides, etc.? Why do people have spiritual needs? And by “why,” we mean: What is the evolutionary payoff? We might ask, for example, why do people eat? Answer: because they get hungry. But why do they get hungry? Because hunger is a sensation generated by natural selection, a mechanism to get people to nourish themselves when such nourishment is necessary, which is to say, when it is adaptive to eat. If people have a universal hunger
for God, why is that? Maybe God is a worldwide tapeworm, generating hunger for His own sake. Or maybe—warning: snark attack!—God yearns for the kind of worldwide worship that religion generates, so He has instilled a need for religion in human beings because He is fundamentally lacking in self-esteem. If God felt better about Himself, we’d all be atheists.

Getting serious now, let’s first examine possible payoffs to individuals. Once again, it isn’t sufficient to conclude that religion provides answers to “deep questions” not otherwise answerable—unless we accept that these answers are more accurate and thus more fitness enhancing than those otherwise available. If that is your perspective, then you have your “scientific” answer and there’s nothing more to say.

For the rest of you, let’s start with something basic: a definition of religion. Daniel Dennett came up with a good one, not only useful but pleasantly simple: Religions are “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.”
¹⁴
Each part of this deserves being “unpacked”—religions involve social systems rather than solitary activity, commitment to the supernatural as opposed to nature generally, and the seeking of approval, as opposed to, say, black magic or voodoo, for which the goal is to manipulate the supernatural for personal benefit.

A series of closely related hypotheses present themselves, all starting with traits that are otherwise adaptive, which then overshoot their mark. Start with the importance of being attuned to the world outside ourselves. As useful as it is to know when it is getting dark, or where to find the nearest water hole, these are things that nonhuman animals can manage. A higher level of cognition—and, presumably, of benefit—involves knowing (or making a good guess) about what others are doing, and why, interpreting underlying motives and attributing significance to things: A cracking sound might mean a predator stepping on a branch while sneaking up on you, or it might simply be a twig breaking in the wind. Better to assume the more consequential, even if there is a cost if it is, in fact, a false alarm.

Statisticians refer to two different kinds of error. Type I errors are false positives, thinking that something is true or significant when in fact it isn’t. Type II errors are false negatives, thinking
that something isn’t genuine or meaningful when in fact it is. When it comes to interpreting underlying meaning or pattern in something, a type I error is inconvenient and even potentially costly, but not that big a deal—at least, not compared to a type II error. For example, if you hear a noise and figure it’s a murderous villain when it’s just a tree branch scraping against your window, the resulting type I error may cause you to lose some sleep, or to get out of bed unnecessarily. The alternative, a type II error, occurs if you hear a noise and decide it’s merely a tree branch when in fact it’s a lethal threat. For our ancestors on the African savannah who interpreted a rustling in the grass to be a snake when it was just a small rodent, such a type I error would have been troublesome but hardly lethal, whereas those who committed the opposite error—thinking it’s a mouse when it’s really a venomous snake—would have left fewer descendants. Hence, it’s a good bet that we’re predisposed to err on the side of false positives rather than false negatives.

A similar logical argument was made by the brilliant mathematician and devout Catholic Blaise Pascal, who maintained that God might (1) exist or (2) not, and that we might (a) believe or (b) not. Since the conjunction of situations 1 and b is liable to be very severe—that is, eternal damnation—best to play it safe, and bet on 1 and a. (“Pascal’s wager” has never been very persuasive to me, since if nothing else, God would seem unlikely to be impressed by someone who based her “faith” on such reasoning; it is conceivable, however, that natural selection would have favored just this kind of risk-minimizing wager.)

Early human beings may thus have been especially prone to expand such an adaptive tendency to protect themselves, if need be by anticipating the worst and, in the process, being prone to over-interpreting the world. Add to this, as well, the payoff of delving deeply into a version of Lenin’s famous question: “Who, whom?”: Who is doing what to whom? Who is planning what with—or against—whom? The result is a powerful inclination to see “agency” in the world, not only when it is really there but even when it isn’t, especially when potentially directed at ourselves and thus important to us. “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds,” wrote David Hume in
The Natural History of Religion
, “and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good will to every thing that hurts or
pleases us”—sometimes not just to those things that hurt or please us, but to everything, period.

Renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky argued similarly, suggesting that religion evolved as a consequence of humanity’s restless intellect: “Like magic it [religion] comes from the curse of forethought and imagination, which fall on man once he rises above brute animal nature.”
¹⁵

The idea, in brief, is that human beings are especially prone to detect or imagine that these worldly agents are directed toward ourselves because sometimes they are, and when this is the case, better safe than sorry. The result is a human penchant for wielding an array of hyperactive agent detection devices (HADDs),
¹⁶
which aren’t devices for the detection of hyperactive agents, but rather, detection devices that are themselves hyperactive, readily perceiving “agency” in the universe. Once again, the hypothesis is uncongenial to believers since it suggests that although agency detection devices were adaptive (and probably still are), when it comes to religion, we’ve been HADD.

As for attributing “agency” to entities outside ourselves, probably the trickiest—and, paradoxically, the most important as well—are those entities known as
others
. As we already briefly considered earlier, psychologists have been especially interested in what is known as Theory of Mind (ToM). This is the highly adaptive human capacity to “read someone else’s mind,” not implying extra-sensory perception, but rather, the far more down-to-earth process of making assumptions that other beings have their own agendas, their own subjective sources of information as well as their own motivation, independent of our own. Put this all together and the result is a world that is populated not only by other things and creatures but also by things and creatures that are bursting with portents and meaning, all oriented toward ourselves.

Here is Dennett on how it works once people started populating the world with objects that move and whose actions could have consequences for themselves: “We experience the world as not just full of moving human bodies but of rememberers and forgetters,
thinkers and hopers and villains and dupes and promise-breakers and threateners and allies and enemies.” Not only that, but even inanimate objects can take on the aura or intentionality, or at least, of consequentiality for those weak-bodied (albeit strongly imagining) creatures who are so vulnerable to attack, and who therefore must rely on their ability to imagine events in order to flourish. Think of the clutching, grasping arms of a forest at night, or the building threat of accumulating storm clouds, or—on the positive side—the cheerful promise of a sunny day or the friendly, hopeful caress of a spring rain on parched fields. And then, consider that once the world is so populated with fitness-relevant agents, how tempting it must have been (and still be) to attempt to pacify, or otherwise influence them—that is, to seek their approval.

To this, add animism, the likely universal tendency to attribute motives even to things that are “animated” by altogether nonliving energies and impulses … and which, a few minutes ago, I just indulged when I muttered something about my computer not
wanting
to boot up. At other times, it spends time
thinking
, while
trying
to download a lengthy file, just as your car may
struggle
in low gear. After all, we all know—sort of—that plants
seek
the light, that rivers
try
to
reach
the sea, and, that when the sky is partly cloudy, the sun often
attempts
to break through.

Along the way, it is plausible that our ancient ancestors’ Theory of Mind contributed not only to the personification of nature but also—quite naturally—to a belief in souls, spirits, and ghosts, which in one form or another is closely allied to most religious traditions. Once you attribute mind, an independent consciousness, to others, you have opened the door to the existence of something whose objective reality you accept but cannot see, touch, hear, or smell. In other words, you may well have taken a consequential step toward accepting something close to the Roman Catholic catechism, which describes the soul as “a living being without a body, having reason and free will.”

In addition, as anthropologist Pascal Boyer has emphasized,
¹⁷
early human beings faced a particularly daunting problem when it came to death of a loved one, even beyond the practical issues of missing that person, losing his or her company, assistance, advice, and so forth: What to do with the corpse? The exigencies of microbiology make it impossible to keep a dead body around
indefinitely, but once all that ToM has been generated—and not merely toward clouds and trees—how were our ancestors to turn off their assumptions and expectations about the dearly departed? After the body is buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of, what to do with the likely persistence of memory on the part of those left behind? One convenient ploy would be to argue that some part of the deceased person—moreover, a part that corresponds to the memory retained by the living—still persists, thus, perhaps, belief in the ongoing vitality of “souls” or “spirits” of the recently dead.

It probably didn’t hurt that such belief also helped soothe anxiety among the living that some day, they too would join the dead. The prospect of literally being worshiped once dead might have been additionally reassuring, although at least some people, anticipating this outcome, have been rather cynical about it:
Vae puto deus fio
(“Dammit, I seem to be becoming a god”), the Roman emperor Vespasian is said to have complained on his deathbed. More important, however, than enabling the elderly to anticipate becoming a god, or at least, a venerated ancestor in the hereafter, might well have been the prospect of payoff in the here and now. If someone is getting close to becoming a powerful ghost or presiding spirit, it would seem wise to treat this person with deference and to cater to his or her needs and desires. And this, in turn, could motivate such people to urge the reality of ghosts and spirits.

It’s only a small step from mollifying one’s ancestors (living or dead) to propitiating or otherwise manipulating other underlying agents, not only ghosts and spirits but also other forces—human shaped or inchoate—that more closely approximate most people’s conception of God. Of course, rivers and mountains, the sun and stars, not to mention rain and winter and summer don’t have an obviously godlike appearance, so it is not altogether unreasonable to assume that they are manipulated by gods that, like the Wizard of Oz, pull the strings offstage. And of course, human faces are especially important to human beings, starting, we now know, in early infancy and continuing into adulthood as “pareidolia,” the perception of patterns where none exists. The result is a widespread human tendency to see human faces and features in the most nonhuman of things: the Virgin Mary in a spilled ice cream
cone, “Pope-Tarts,” the face of Jesus in a tortilla—and we’re on our collective way, not only to “primitive” religion, but to increasingly elaborate theology, with all the fixings.
¹⁸
“If by ‘God,’” wrote Carl Sagan, “one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. But this God is emotionally unsatisfying … it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”
¹⁹
Perhaps people pray, instead, to a God they see in a cloud.

Or elsewhere, maybe in the stars. It seems likely that our ancestors have been powerfully rewarded for recognizing patterns in the natural world: changes in the seasons, the flow of rivers, the migrations of animals. And indeed, it isn’t surprising that we have a strong species-wide predisposition for “pattern recognition,” for extracting genuine meaning from the world around us. Sometimes, those patterns may even be purely arbitrary and nonsignificant, such as those stars as seen from earth, the ones that are grouped—purely via human imagination—into constellations. It is most unlikely that there is a genuine Hercules up there, or Orion, or Leo, but there is undoubtedly a strong temptation to see “something” nonetheless—a temptation that is all the more italicized by the fact that for most of us, it takes real effort even to identify these presumed patterns!