Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (37 page)

Similar reasoning leads to another set of hypotheses involving adaptive overshoot and/or by-products, involving other immediate (proximate) effects of religious observance. Let’s note, first, that although scholars tend to focus on the intellectual or doctrinal aspects of religion, most people who actually practice a faith seem to be more aware of their subjective experience, how they feel when praying, singing, making what they see as personal contact with the divine. Darwin himself had trained for the Anglican
ministry and, as a young novitiate biologist aboard the
H. M. S. Beagle
briefly anchored off Australia, he had witnessed the ecstatic side of religion as practiced by a group of aboriginals and was shocked, shocked by the “nearly naked figures, viewed by the light of blazing fires, all moving in hideous harmony … .”

It isn’t surprising that a typical representative of buttoned-down Victorian religious practice should have found such rites disturbing. But almost certainly, rituals of the sort witnessed by Mr. Darwin are far closer to the many traditional, animistic, pantheistic, and diversely experiential kinds of religious practice that characterize “primitive” religions, and that, in one form or another, still engage practitioners today. Singing, dancing, and swaying; engaging in prayers whether ritualistic or extemporized; taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of religious observance, often in special places with unusual colors, patterns, or architecture; and repeating phrases whose exact meaning may be completely unknown but that are nonetheless deeply satisfying, nearly always in concert with others: These are typically the flesh-and-blood stuff of religion, far more than the fine points of theological doctrine. What may look like “hideous harmony” to an intellectualized, emotionally buttoned-down 19th-century European observer can be downright ecstatic for a participant.

Reacting to what he saw as the excesses of the Enlightenment, William Blake wrote his great poem, “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” which continues with the lines: “Mock on, mock on: ’tis all in vain!/You throw the sand against the wind,/And the wind blows it back again,” and ends: “The Atoms of Democritus/And Newton’s Particles of Light/Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,/Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.”

For Blake, and likely for the great majority of religious practitioners, the rationality of science and the arcane details of theological doctrine are merely sand compared to the bright, shining allure of Israel’s tents. The emotional heat of Jerusalem is more seductive than the cold rationality of Athens.

Although religions often entail demanding, painful, and even sometimes life-threatening initiation rituals (more on this later), for the most part, believers report that their religious practice makes them feel good: cleansed, purified, relaxed, at peace, made whole, renewed, refreshed, connected, and so forth. Maybe the
adaptive value of religion lies here, in the ecstasy or simply the “inner peace” so often promised—and frequently provided. Bear in mind, however, that it doesn’t work simply to say that religion exists and persists because it provides spiritual fulfillment, ecstatic joy, inner peace, etc.—because this posits a need (for spiritual fulfillment, and so forth) that in itself has no evident evolutionary payoff. It is like saying that religion exists because people have a need for it, which doesn’t help us at all.

On the other hand, the panoply of personally satisfying religious payoffs begins to make sense in the light of adaptive overshoot and by-products. As noted by psychiatrist Michael McGuire and anthropologist Lionel Tiger, religious ritual can result in heightened levels of certain pleasurable brain chemicals, such as oxytocin and vasopressin, which in turn generates a kind of physiological “brain soothing.” This is consistent with the views of path-breaking American philosopher and psychologist William James, who argued that the key to religion lies in its personal impact: In his masterpiece,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, James defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” What really matters, for James, is religious “experience” and how good it feels.

Freud may accordingly have missed the boat when he averred that religion “comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but … in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.”
²⁵
Or rather, perhaps he didn’t take his observation seriously enough: If an experience is sufficiently blissful, whether illusory or not, then rather than disavowing reality, it becomes its own reality, one that is subjectively and powerfully compelling.

As for
why
this happens, why religion so often feels so good, once again there is uncertainty. Thus, it is one thing to identify brain regions that “light up” during communal singing, repetitive chanting, ecstatic devotions, or even quiet, meditative prayer, and ditto for identifying the neurochemicals likely to be released—and, moreover, it isn’t surprising that people find themselves inclined to engage in activities that activate those brain regions and release those chemicals, so long as they are perceived,
subjectively, as pleasurable. But it is quite another thing to figure out why those brain regions and neurochemicals, along with their pleasurable sensations, are activated as a result of these devotions.

Back once again to the example of hunger: It occurs as a mechanism that induces people to do something (eat) that is ultimately in their evolutionary interest (nourish their bodies). So, two other possibilities present themselves. For one, maybe religion represents not so much an overshoot or by-product as a hijacking of neuroanatomic and neurochemical mechanisms that exist for other, more clearly adaptive reasons, in the same manner that chemical addictions, for example, may arise when certain substances (marijuana, cocaine, and so forth) evoke brain pathways that have evolved for other reasons. Call it the addiction hypothesis.

Or for another, maybe—like hunger—the subjective gratifications of religious practice exist because religions provide a proximate route toward genuinely fitness-enhancing activities. Accordingly, we now turn to some more adaptive possibilities.

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A history of God
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A Mencken chrestomathy: His own selection of his choicest writing.
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How the mind works
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The God gene: How faith is hardwired into our genes.
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4364–4368.

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The New York Times
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Reader in comparative religion
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29–34.

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C
HAPTER
E
IGHT
Religion II: Social Bonding
and Morality

S
CIENCE IS QUITE NEW
. Until recent times, it probably didn’t pay to spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out the natural world, since its secrets just weren’t very accessible. To be sure, our ancestors were well advised to know where game is likely to be found and how to avoid enemies, make a spear, prepare a meal, court a mate, and so forth, but the overwhelming reality is that the deeper aspects of reality itself were simply not penetrable to early
Homo sapiens
. Insofar as this is true, religion—during its formative eons—may have been adaptive as essentially a labor-saving device, a way of keeping our ancestors from wasting their time, beating their heads against the stone walls of their own ignorance and impotence.

The labor-saving hypothesis resembles the anti-dithering and grand inquisitor hypotheses discussed earlier, in that all three take as their starting point the downside of an otherwise adaptive human trait: intelligence. They differ, however, in that the
labor-saving hypothesis imagines that early religion contributed more positively (adaptively) to human success rather than simply developing as a response to one of our species-wide liabilities—namely, sometimes being too smart for our own good.

The Book of Job provides an especially powerful indictment of human ignorance. Toward the end of the story, God appears as a voice out of a whirlwind and forces Job to confront how little he (and all people, especially 3,000 or so years ago) actually know of the world: “Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this” (Job 38:16–18). “What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth”? (Job 38:24). “Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?” (Job 38:33). The voice of God goes on to describe various mysterious aspects of natural history, ranging from “leviathans” and “behemoths” to birds and the number of grains of sand on a beach. Most important, Job raises the ancient problem of theodicy—how to reconcile the existence of pain and suffering in the world with God’s presumed goodness and omnipotence. To this, God’s answer is simple: Don’t ask!

Better to stop all the vain theorizing, the wondering and worrying, the half-assed attempts to figure things out and simply believe and do as you’ve been told! Stick with the tried and true? Not exactly. In fact, the “answers” from religious authorities—at least when it comes to explaining objective phenomena of the natural world, from the structure of the solar system to the matter of human origins—have more often been
untrue
. But at least they have a long history of having been tried, with no great harm having resulted. The labor-saving hypothesis could as well be called the “stop worrying about things you won’t understand and in any event can’t do anything about hypothesis.”