The Faith Instinct Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1 - THE NATURE OF RELIGION

  Chapter 2 - THE MORAL INSTINCT

  Chapter 3 - THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR

  Chapter 4 - MUSIC, DANCE AND TRANCE

  Chapter 5 - ANCESTRAL RELIGION

  Chapter 6 - THE TRANSFORMATION

  Chapter 7 - THE TREE OF RELIGION

  Chapter 8 - MORALITY, TRUST AND TRADE

  Chapter 9 - THE ECOLOGY OF RELIGION

  Chapter 10 - RELIGION AND WARFARE

  Chapter 11 - RELIGION AND NATION

  Chapter 12 - THE FUTURE OF RELIGION

  NOTES

  Acknowledgements

  INDEX

  ALSO BY NICHOLAS WADE

  The Nobel Duel: Two Scientists’ 21-Year Race to Win the World’s Most Coveted Research Prize

  Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science (with William Broad)

  Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

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  First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,

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  Copyright © Nicholas Wade, 2009 All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Wade, Nicholas.

  The faith instinct : how religion evolved and why it endures Nicholas Wade.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references andindex.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15567-7

  1. Religion—Philosophy. I. Title.

  BL51.W133 2009

  201—dc22

  2009028497

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  1

  THE NATURE OF RELIGION

  Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people and expressed by the people.

  ERNEST RENAN

  To call religion instinctive is not to suppose any particular part of its mythos is untrue, only that its sources run deeper than ordinary habit and are in fact hereditary, urged into birth through biases in mental development encoded in the genes.

  EDWARD O. WILSON’

  For the last 50,000 years, and probably for much longer, people have practiced religion. With dance and chants and sacred words, they have ritually marked the cycles of the seasons and the passages of life, from birth to adolescence, to marriage and to death.

  Religion has brought meaning to millions in their personal lives. Its rituals have given believers assurance of control over unpredictable adversities. In the face of daunting fears, of famine, sickness, disaster or death, religion has always been a wellspring of hope. “Though thou art worshipped by the names divine Of Jesus and Jehovah,” wrote the poet William Blake, “Thou art still The son of morn in weary night’s decline, / The lost traveler’s dream under the hill.”

  Religions point to the realm of the supernatural, assuring people that they are not alone in the world. Most religions teach that there is an afterlife and some promise a better existence there, often for lives lived correctly in this world or to compensate for its misfortunes. The Wana people of Sulawesi believe that as they are last on earth, so they will be first in paradise.

  Faith brings personal rewards but it is as a social force that religion carves its place in history. In religion’s name, people have fed the hungry, cared for the sick, founded charities and hospitals. Religion creates circles of trust whose members may support one another in calamity or find hosts and trading partners in distant cities. In societies throughout the world, religious rites are intimately associated with the communal activities of music and dance. Religion has fostered and inspired artists’ expressions of shared devotion, from medieval cathedrals, to the painters of the Renaissance and the masses of Palestrina, Bach and Haydn.

  Religion, above all, embodies the moral rules that members of a community observe toward one other. It thus sustains the quality of the social fabric, and did so alone in early societies that had not developed civil authorities. It binds people together for collective action, through public rituals that evoke emotional commitment to a common cause.

  There is no church of oneself. A church is a community, a special group of people who share the same beliefs. And these are not ordinary, matter-of-fact views but deeply held emotional attachments. By expressing the common creed together, in symbolic rituals, in group activities involving song and movement in unison, people signal to each other their commitment to the shared beliefs that bind them together as a community. This emotional bonding is captured in the probable derivation of “religion” from religare, a Latin word meaning to bind.

  Religion may tie together the members of a village church, or of an entire country. It can unite people who may share neither common kinship, nor ethnicity nor even language. When nations feel their existence is at stake, they often define their cause by religion, whether in Europe’s long wars with Islam, or Elizabethan England’s defiance of Catholic Spain, or the Puritans’ emigration to New England, or the foundation of Israel.

  So indelibly and distinctively does religion shape the fabric of societies that it has become the defining feature of the cultures around which great civilizations are built, such as those of Western Christianity or Islam or Hinduism.

  Religion has a darker side too, drawn from excesses of the fierce loyalty it inspires. Acts of particular cruelty have been committed against internal foes, the perceived disrupters of orthodoxy. Under religion’s banner, societies have conducted inquisitions, murdered people deemed to be heretics or witches, and tortured or exi
led those who worshipped different gods.

  Religion is almost always prominent in a society’s response to external foes. It has routinely been invoked to justify and sustain wars, and has helped foment many, between Christian and Muslim, Protestant and Catholic, Shi’a and Sunni. Few religious wars have been more atrocious than the Aztec empire’s ravenous search for victims who were sacrificed every day, sometimes by the thousands in a single ceremony, so that the streams of their blood could nourish the Aztec sun god.

  What is religion, that it can evoke the noblest and most sublime of human behaviors, yet also the cruelest and most despicable? Is religion just a body of sacred knowledge bequeathed from one generation to the next? Or does religion, being much more than just a cultural heritage, spring from a deeply ingrained urge to worship?

  “Like any other human activity,” writes the historian of religion Karen Armstrong, “religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity.”12

  Religion is so natural to humanity that it seems to be part of human nature, as if a propensity for belief in the supernatural were genetically engraved in the human mind, and expressed as spontaneously as the ability to appreciate music or to learn one’s native language. “No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion, even those such as the former Soviet Union which have made deliberate attempts to extirpate it,” wrote the anthropologist Roy Rappaport.3

  Given the time, energy and treasure spent on building religious monuments, fighting holy wars and offering sacrifices to the gods, Rappaport wrote, he found it hard to imagine that religion had not contributed positively to human adaptation, the process of genetic change that occurs in response to natural selection. “Surely so expensive an enterprise would have been defeated by selective pressures if it were merely frivolous or illusory.... Religion has not merely been important but crucial to human adaptation,” he wrote in 1971.4

  But Rappaport’s insight was not followed up for many years, in part because of a reluctance by anthropologists to believe that any part of human behavior might be genetically shaped.

  The Nature of Religion

  The emergence of religious behavior has long been hard to reconstruct because of the severe lack of evidence. The people of 50,000 years ago, the period when modern humans dispersed from their African homeland, have vanished, leaving behind no material trace of their existence, let alone of their religious beliefs. People at that time lived as hunters and gatherers, and continued to do so until 15,000 years ago. Only then were the first permanent settlements built, by which time religion had long been an established feature of human societies.

  But many new strands of evidence have been accumulating. These now make it possible at least to sketch out a possible origin for this most mysterious of human behaviors, as well as a rough time line for its development. Recent work by students of human evolution has provided the context in which a new form of social coordination would have been needed, a requirement that religion would have filled well. By analyzing the DNA of living people around the world, it is possible to identify societies that have long been isolated from others and whose religious behaviors may reflect those of the ancestral human population. New interpretations by archaeologists record how this early form of religious behavior, practiced by hunters and gatherers, was modified for the more sophisticated needs of settled societies.

  Thus from a growing body of work by researchers in several different fields, it is now possible to piece together a reasonable account of how and why religious behavior evolved to be an ingrained part of human nature, and to trace some of the cultural innovations by which the early religion of hunter gatherers was shaped to the different needs of settled societies.

  The purpose of this book is to try to understand religious behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Some of the implications that emerge from this approach may be unwelcome to believers, others to atheists. People of faith may not warm to the view that the mind’s receptivity to religion has been shaped by evolution. Those who regard religion as an obscurantist obstacle to rational progress may not embrace the idea that religious behavior evolved because it conferred essential benefits on ancient societies and their successors.

  Despite these understandable attitudes, the evolutionary approach to religion does not necessarily threaten the central positions of either believers or atheists. Believers would be right to take the view that Darwin’s theory specifies no purpose for the biological process it explains and cannot trespass into whatever religions have to say about the meaning of life. Evolution describes how the human body and behavior have been shaped, but has nothing to say about any ultimate purpose behind this process. Biological drives for all functions essential to survival are embedded in the human brain; it need surely be no scandal to people of faith that an instinct for religious behavior is one of those necessities. That the mind has been prepared by evolution to believe in gods neither proves nor disproves their existence.

  Atheists, for their part, may not at all welcome the idea that religious behavior strengthens the moral fabric, enhances social cohesion and was so central to the survival of early human societies that all that lacked it have perished. But even that perspective does not compel them to acknowledge the hand of a deity in shaping human values. Religious behavior can be studied for its own sake, regardless of whether or not a deity exists.

  THE THEME OF THE pages ahead is that an instinct for religious behavior is indeed an evolved part of human nature. Because of the decided survival advantage conferred on people who practiced a religion, the behavior had become written into our neural circuitry by at least 50,000 years ago, and probably much earlier.

  To see why religion is likely to be an evolved behavior, it helps to compare it with language. Like language, religion is a complex cultural behavior built on top of a genetically shaped learning machinery. People are born with innate instincts for learning the language and the religion of their community. But in both cases culture supplies the content of what is learned. That is why languages and religions differ so widely from one society to the next, while remaining so similar in their basic form.

  Just as language operates on top of many other behaviors that had evolved earlier, such as neural systems for hearing and generating sounds, religious behavior too depends on several other sophisticated faculties, such as sensitivity to music, the moral instinct and of course language itself. Like language, religious behavior in all societies develops at a specific age, as if an innate learning program is being triggered on cue.

  As with language, religion is most significant as a social behavior. One can speak or pray to oneself, but both are most meaningful when done in company. That is because both faculties are instruments of communication.

  Many human behaviors are shared with other animals, especially our fellow mammals, leaving little room for doubt that traits like a mother’s urge to protect her children have a strong genetic basis. And it is easy to envisage that mothers who watch closely over their young will leave more surviving offspring than will less vigilant mothers. So over the course of a few generations genes that promote protective instincts will displace genes allowing maternal indifference, and the upshot will be development of a strong instinct for maternal care.

  The same argument applies to the development of language and religion, though is less demonstrably true because they are uniquely human behaviors and there are no other species in which these faculties can be directly studied. Still, it has long seemed likely on grounds of general plausibility that language has a genetic basis. The rules of sentence formation are so complex that babies must presumably possess an innate syntax-generating machinery, rather than having to figure out the rules for themselves. The existence of such a neural mechanism would explain why infants learn to speak so effortlessly, and at a specific age, as if s
ome neural developmental program is being rolled out at that time. Evolution has not yet had time to engineer similar programs for reading and writing, which is why they must be taught so laboriously in school.

  Arguments about the innateness or otherwise of language have been hard to resolve because so little is known about the genes that define the architecture of the human brain. But with recent advances in decoding the human genome, the first genes affecting language have started to come to light, beginning with the discovery in 2001 of the FOXP2 gene which affects several neural and muscular skills underlying the articulacy of speech.

  People survive as social groups, not as individuals, and little is more critical to a social species than its members’ ability to communicate with one another. Because of the primacy of language the effectiveness of the other modes of communication, such as religion or gesture, often goes unappreciated. Just as language is a system for communicating thought, religious behavior is a way of signaling shared values and emotions. Any genetic variation that made these systems more effective is likely to have been quickly favored by natural selection. This is particularly true if natural selection operates on groups of individuals as well as at the level of individuals alone, as is more usual. Group level selection is controversial among evolutionary biologists, but even its sternest opponents do not say that it cannot exist, only that it is likely to be insignificant in most cases. There are special circumstances in human evolution, discussed below, that would have allowed group selection to operate much more powerfully than usual.

  It’s easy enough to see why natural selection would have favored genes underlying the faculty of language, given the immense advantage to members of a social species of being able to share thoughts and information. But why should religious behavior have evolved? What benefit does religion confer, other than spiritual fulfillment? How can religious behavior make a difference on the only scale measured by natural selection, that of leaving more progeny?