The Faith Instinct Read online

  To understand the influence exerted by religion in early societies, it helps to distinguish between its personal aspects, which are probably more familiar to people today, and its role as a social force.

  The Social and Personal Nature of Religious Belief

  Asked to define religion, many people will describe the personal importance of their belief, whether as a feeling of communion with the sacred, a source of hope and solace, a compass of moral behavior, an explanation of misfortune, or a wellspring of meaning in life. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychologist William James emphasized the personal above any other element of religion. Religion, as he defined it, “shall mean for us 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. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.”5

  But however strongly religion may seem to grow out of people’s personal beliefs, the practice of religion is heavily social. It is because of their personal beliefs that people desire to worship together with others of the same faith. People may pray alone, but religious services and rituals are communal. A religion belongs to a community and shapes members’ social behavior, both toward one another (the in-group) and toward non-believers (the out-group). The social aspect of religion is extraordinarily significant because the rules for behavior toward others are in effect a society’s morality.

  One need look no further for a reason why people are so attached to their religion. The quality of a society—its cohesiveness, its freedom from crime, its members’ willingness to help others, the rarity of lying, cheating and freeloading—is shaped by the nature of its morality and by the strength of people’s adherence to community standards. Both of these—standards of morality, and the extent of compliance with them—are set or heavily influenced by religion. People will defend their religion because it undergirds so much else of what gives life quality.

  Those standards of morality underwritten by religion have a curious feature about them, one that is not generally acknowledged by moral philosophers who see morality as being based on universal principles. Practical morality is not universal. Compassion and forgiveness are the behaviors owed to one’s in-group, but not necessarily to an out-group, and certainly not to an enemy.

  Toward hostile societies human behavior is steely, implacable and often genocidal. Foes may be demonized or regarded as subhuman, and the moral restraints owed to members of one’s own society need not be extended to them. And religion is often intimately involved in warfare because it is invoked by leaders to justify aggression, to sustain morale, and to spur soldiers to the ultimate sacrifice.

  From this perspective, one can begin to see how crucial religion may have been over the centuries in ensuring a society’s survival. It enhances the quality of a society and makes it worth fighting for, and it inspires people to lay down their lives in the society’s defense. Other things being equal, groups with a stronger religious inclination would have been more united and at a considerable advantage compared with groups that were less cohesive. People in the more successful groups would have left more surviving children, and genes favoring an instinct for religious behavior would have become commoner each generation until they had swept through the entire human population.

  The social function of religion, as opposed to the personal, is the one that seemed significant to Émile Durkheim, a founder of sociology. Durkheim saw religion as playing a mediating role between people and the society in which they live. “The faithful are not mistaken when they believe in the existence of a moral power to which they are subject and from which they receive what is best in themselves. That power exists, and it is society,” Durkheim wrote in his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, first published in 1912. He went on to note that “religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it.”6

  People do not of course worship society directly. Durkheim’s insight was that the relationship between religion and society could be seen to work in two directions, at least in terms of their functions. Religion imbues a society with moral standards and belief in a supernatural enforcer behind them; society embraces religion and follows its dictates, while shaping them toward solving current problems. Religion is far more than belief in supernatural powers, in Durkheim’s view. Magicians and sorcerers, after all, summon unearthly forces to do their bidding, but they do not draw people to one another—there is no church of magic. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are shared, and bind together all those who hold them.

  This line of thought led Durkheim to his well-known definition: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them.”7 In showing that religion and church are inseparable, Durkheim added, the definition underlines that religion “must be an eminently collective thing.”

  For those familiar with thinking of religion in personal terms, it may seem strange to conceive of religion as an agent of society’s collective will, in addition to whatever else it may be. But consider how intimately religion is involved in important social functions, such as the rite of marriage. In the Anglican branch of Christianity, toward the conclusion of the service, the priest joins together the right hands of the man and woman, and issues the solemn warning, “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.”

  These are powerful words because at that moment, in their own eyes and in those of society, the man and woman indeed become married, and their union is spiritually indissoluble. The arrangement is one that all in the community recognize, whether they were present or not. “There are hardly any words in the Prayer Book which more solemnly declare the faithful conviction of the Church that God ratifies the work of His priests,” writes John Henry Blunt, author of The Annotated Book of Common Prayer.8 And of course society too, through the priest’s words and the communal service, ratifies the marriage.

  There may be a civil procedure as well, but it does not carry the same weight. It is the religious ceremony that evokes the emotional conviction that two people have been truly married.

  In the initiation rites observed by many peoples, which commonly occur as part of a religious ceremony, a boy becomes a man, not just metaphorically but because his community thereafter treats him like a man. In coronation rites, whether by anointment or the placement of a crown or diadem on his head, a man becomes a king. Religions are powerful creators of social fact. And it’s not merely facts they create, but a binding emotional knowledge that these facts are sacred truths.

  It’s easy to underestimate the remarkable nature of the effect achieved by religious belief, just as it is easy to underestimate language, since we take both faculties for granted. Language lets people convey precise thoughts from the mind of one individual to that of another, an extraordinary feat of biological engineering achieved by no other living species. Equally unparalleled, religion binds a group of individuals together in beliefs and principles they consider so sacred and inviolable that they feel compelled to submit their usually lively sense of self-interest to that of the group. Just as language achieves almost perfect communication, religion brings about an emotional commitment so powerful that people will make almost any sacrifice that their religion requires, including that of their life.

  Durkheim’s work strongly influenced social anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, both of whom reached much the same conclusions. “Religion needs the community as a whole so that its members may worship in common its sacred things and its divinities,” Malinowski wrote, “and society n
eeds religion for the maintenance of moral law and order.”9

  Durkheim’s views on religion later fell out of favor with social scientists for several reasons, including reinterpretation of the early ethnographic data about Australian Aborigines, on which Durkheim’s theory was largely based. But his ideas have recently become an inspiration to biologists seeking to understand the role of religion in early human evolution. The reason is that they point strongly to the survival value of religious behavior. A society that develops a strong moral fabric, whose members are emotionally committed through powerful rituals to their community’s well-being, is likely to prevail in warfare over a society with weaker bonds. Groups that used religion to coordinate collective activities, such as planting fields at the right time or managing natural resources, would have been more effective and better able to survive.

  Natural selection, a motive force of evolution, is about survival and who leaves more children. Many of the social aspects of religious behavior offer advantages—such as a group’s strong internal cohesion and high morale in warfare—that would lead to a society’s members having more surviving children, and religion for such reasons would be favored by natural selection. This is less true of the personal aspects of religion. Religion may help people overcome the fear of death, or find courage in facing disease and catastrophe, but these personal beliefs seem unlikely to enable them to have more surviving offspring, natural selection’s only yardstick of success. Rather, the personal rewards of religion are significant because they draw people to practice it, without which the social benefits could not have been favored by natural selection.

  Defining Religion

  What then is religion? The word itself has a range of meanings, referring sometimes to a set of beliefs in the supernatural, sometimes to an organized community of adherents to a faith. Religion has been notoriously hard to define, perhaps because each observer seeks to emphasize a different aspect. Even the great sociologist Max Weber ducked the task. He opened his essay on the sociology of religion by warning readers they must wait to hear exactly what it is—“Definition can be attempted, if at all, only at the conclusion of the study”—yet he provided none at the end either.

  But if, as argued here, religious behavior emerged because of its evolutionary role, definition becomes less elusive. From the evolutionary perspective, as laid out in the chapters ahead, the essential elements of religious behavior may be summarized as follows. Starting around the age of adolescence, people learn and become emotionally committed to the rituals, religious practices and sacred symbols of their community. The rituals involve rhythmic activity, whether singing and vigorous dancing, as in hunter gatherer religions, or just singing, as in many modern religions. They may include painful initiation rites that induce lasting emotional memories and commitment. The rituals evoke a sense of awe as celebrants feel that they or their priests are in contact with agents of the supernatural realm.

  Through moving or singing in unison, in a state of emotional elevation, individuals develop a fervent sense of togetherness, a desire to put the group’s interests above their own and to do whatever is needed, up to the sacrifice of their own life, in the group’s defense.

  In practicing their religion, people come to know what is right for themselves and their community: it is what the supernatural powers have decreed.

  In every religion, the supernatural powers live in a different realm and yet, strange as this may be, they are not unreachable. Their behavior can be influenced by appropriate rituals, prayers and sacrifice. A religious community thus implicitly negotiates with its supernatural lawgivers. The negotiators who interact with the gods are the whole community in the case of primitive societies, the ecclesiastical hierarchy in larger ones. Through reference to precedent (the wisdom of the ancestors) and discussion among themselves, the negotiators implicitly decide on the behaviors they want their society to follow and they then seek the gods’ endorsement of their ideas. The gods set the rules or courses of action that are indicated to them, along with rewards or punishments for compliance or disobedience. The divine requirements habitually include common standards of morality within the group, and readiness to unite in response to external challenges such as aggression from other societies.

  Communities would not gain the social benefits of religious behavior unless people had strong personal motivations to participate. And indeed religion is attractive because it does bring many deep personal satisfactions. It is the source of some of the deepest emotions of which people are capable, such as feelings of awe, of exaltation, of transcendence, of rightness and harmony with the world. It gives people hope in adversity, because the faithful believe that through prayer and ritual they can exert some measure of control over unpredictable disasters like disease or bad weather.

  The personal aspects of religious behavior, however, are not all rewards. There is fear of punishment, too, the knowledge that retributive deities are watching for infractions of their rules and will deliver harsh penalties in this world or the next, perhaps for even contemplating a forbidden act. Fear of an omnipresent supervisor is of utmost practical benefit to a group, particularly in primitive societies that lack courts and police forces. Fear of divine retribution keeps almost everyone in line with the prevailing rules and moral code; and these laws, though always attributed to supernatural decree, as recorded by previous generations in sacred sayings or texts, can in fact be shaped by society.

  From an evolutionary perspective, therefore, the following definition emerges: Religion is a system of emotionally binding beliefs and practices in which a society implicitly negotiates through prayer and sacrifice with supernatural agents, securing from them commands that compel members, through fear of divine punishment, to subordinate their interests to the common good.

  Cultural Development of Religion

  The religion that evolved among hunter gatherers tied a clever knot. It enabled a society to impute to the gods its collective wisdom as to how members should behave so as best to ensure the society’s survival; and through initiation rites and communal dancing it induced in everyone the emotional commitment to obey the gods’ rules and fear their sanctions. Without a police force or prison guards or judiciary, in any case impossible for hunter gatherers, early societies achieved through religion both social cohesion and effective compliance with the dictates of an invisible government.

  Once religion had evolved among early people, it underwent a long and extensive cultural development into the very different forms of religion that are familiar today. The nature of that development, as is laid out in the chapters ahead, can now for the first time be reconstructed, even if only in outline.

  The initial step is to infer the general form of early religion from the rites of contemporary hunting and gathering societies whose way of life has not changed for millennia. The appropriate societies can be chosen by genetic criteria that point to their relative degree of isolation. Next, with the help of archaeology, it is now possible to trace the steps by which early religion developed into the forms found in settled societies. Hunter gatherer religions involved the whole community as equal participants in interaction with the gods. In settled societies, a class of priestly officials emerged between the people and their gods. Religious power became more exclusive and began to serve as a pillar of archaic states, which were often ruled by a priest-king. The cohesive power of religion also began to be applied to other tasks requiring collective action, such as the unaccustomed hard labor required by societies first taking up agriculture. The principal rites of these religions were tied to the farming calendar, and these ceremonies were co-opted by the more sophisticated religions that arose in advanced states.

  From one of these states, that of the Canaanites and their Israelite descendants who lived in the Near East in the second millennium B.C., the first great monotheism emerged. Scholars can now reconstruct in reasonable detail the historical context in which Judaism was shaped and some of the motivations of its shapers.
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  As for the second great monotheism, the origins of Christianity are still shrouded in considerable mystery. The religion first flourished among the Greek-speaking Jews dispersed through the cities of the Roman empire. Though the roots of Christianity are Jewish, all its earliest documents and liturgy are in Greek, and in its new linguistic home the religion adopted its distinctively non-Jewish themes. Christianity was so successful that within just over 300 years it had become the state religion of the Roman empire.

  Islam, by contrast, did not climb to an imperial role but was born into it. The third great monotheism burst into history as the official sect of the Arab state that inherited the Byzantine empire’s holdings in the Near East. Scholars, both Muslim and non-Muslim, have for years assumed that the truth about the origins of Islam can be found somewhere within the rich field of Islamic writings. Only recently has a small band of researchers developed a new premise, that Islamic writings should be regarded primarily as sacred literature, not as history. These revisionists are in the process of constructing an alternative and somewhat surprising history of Islam. Their account has not yet received the attention or the testing it may merit but would, if supported, provide another instance of how the cohesive power of religion can be skillfully adapted to political ends.

  These cohesive powers are evident in most collective activities of ancient societies and remain surprisingly visible in modern societies, despite the profusion of secular institutions that have taken over many of religion’s former roles. In marriage and reproductive practices, in enforcing standards of morality, in political movements, in generating the bonds of trust essential for commerce, and in warfare, religion continues to play many of its ancient roles as effectively as ever.