The Faith Instinct (3 page)

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 needs religion for the maintenance of moral law and order.”
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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.

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 notori
ously 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 ex
ert 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.

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 of
ficials 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.

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.

 

 

THE COMPLEXITY OF RELIGION—its intricate role in human history, the strong mix of emotions it raises in participants’ hearts—all seem to some degree explicable in terms of the forces that shaped the emergence of religious behavior during the dawn of human evolution. It is these
shaping forces that must now be explored. But before examining religious behavior itself, it is pertinent to consider an essential human faculty that is a pillar of religion, though also separable from it, and that is the moral instinct. At the social level, religion has long been seen as essential to morality and probably still is. For even though individuals can behave morally without religion, most atheists and agnostics take good care to observe the moral standards of their community, which even in highly secular countries are influenced by religion.

Religion and morality share a common feature that reflects their origins as evolved behaviors: both are rooted in the emotions. Religious knowledge is not like knowing the day of the week; it is something a person feels and is deeply committed to. Moral intuitions usually appear in the mind as strong convictions, not as neutral facts. Religious and moral beliefs can be discussed in a rational way, but both have emotion-laden components that are shaped in regions of the brain to which the conscious mind does not have access. Natural selection has tagged them with a compelling quality of which mere facts are free.

Morality is older than religion—its roots can be seen in monkeys and apes—and religious behavior was engrafted on top of it in the human lineage alone. Understanding how the moral instincts evolved makes it easier to see that religious behavior too has an evolutionary origin.

THOMAS JEFFERSON
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E
veryone knows the difference between right and wrong. But where does that sure knowledge come from? From reason, as some philosophers have taught? Or from divine revelation, as theologians say?

In the last few years a startling new idea has been introduced to the age-old debate about the nature of morality. Biologists have come to realize that social animals, in interacting with other members of their community, have developed rules for restraining their self-interest. It is these rules of self-restraint, which are likely to have a genetic basis, that make up the social fabric of a baboon troop or band of chimpanzees.

No one is imputing morality to animals, but observers have found that monkeys and apes show many behaviors, such as empathy and a sense of reciprocity, that could be building blocks of the moral sense that is so evident in people. Humans would have inherited these building blocks from their apelike ancestors and developed them into moral instincts.

Biologists thus began to see that they might be able to construct a new explanation of morality: moral behavior does not originate from outside the human mind or even from conscious reasoning, the sources favored by theologians and philosophers, but rather has been wired into the genetic circuitry of the mind by evolution.