The Faith Instinct (42 page)

Religion is not entirely unique. There is another cultural creation that stirs the emotions, conveys wordless meaning, and exalts the mind to a different plane. This strange parallel to religion is music. Like the propensity for religious behavior, the appreciation of music is a universal human faculty. Like religion, music is primarily a social activity, though it can be pursued privately too. As with religion, music draws people together. And religion of course draws heavily on music, from which it may once have developed.

Those who head religions today have a task analogous to that of the producers of operas. Both stage public performances that involve music and the singing of a libretto. But the bishop has fewer freedoms than the opera director. No one minds if the plots of operas are ridiculous—their only purpose is to provide the context for emotions too deep for speech. But the librettos sung in church express sacred truths; the church must stick to the sacred text century after century, regardless of the changes in society and advances in knowledge.

Conservatism has its virtues. People like their religion to embody values and principles that do not shift or yield. But culture has changed vastly since the advent of the three monotheisms. Secularism is on the march because religions, within the framework of their sacred narratives, are losing their hold on people’s belief. They endure more because people want to believe in something than through the plausibility of their historical assertions.

Is there not some way of transforming religion into versions better suited for a modern age? The three monotheisms were created to meet conditions in societies that existed many centuries ago. The fact that they have endured for so long does not mean they were meant to last forever, only that they have become like some favorite Mozart opera that people are happy to hear over and over again. But the world of music did not achieve final perfection in Mozart.

Religion can be seen, from one perspective, as a high form of creativity. Music appeals to the auditory part of the brain, poetry to the language faculty, dance to the centers of rhythm and movement, art to the visual cortex. Religion plays on all these faculties, and through them arouses the deepest emotions of which the mind is capable, inspiring people to look beyond their own self-interest to something they may value more, the health and survival of their society, culture or civilization.

As a product of human culture, the three monotheisms seem long ago to have reached the limits of their development, lagging behind the increasing complexity of human societies and the vast growth of organized knowledge. Many people no longer develop their innate propensity for religious behavior, leaving unfulfilled a substantial component of human nature. Is this their fault, or society’s fault, or perhaps the fault of the unchanging religions on offer?

Religious behavior evolved for a single reason: to further the survival of human societies. Those who administer religions should not assume they cannot be altered. To the contrary, religions are Durkheimian structures, eminently adjustable to a society’s needs. They are shaped in implicit negotiation with supernatural powers who then give instructions to promote society’s interests. Much of course depends on the craft and inspiration of the negotiators. But first it is necessary to understand that negotiation is possible.

Maybe religion needs to undergo a second transformation, similar in scope to the transition from hunter gatherer religion to that of settled societies. In this new configuration, religion would retain all its old powers of binding people together for a common purpose, whether for morality or defense. It would touch all the senses and lift the mind. It would transcend self. And it would find a way to be equally true to emotion and to reason, to our need to belong to one another and to what has been learned of the human condition through rational inquiry.

1
Edward O. Wilson,
Consilience
(New York: Vintage, 1999), 281.

2
Karen Armstrong, A
History of God
(New York: Knopf, 1993), xix.

3
Roy Rappaport,
Ritual and
Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.

4
Roy Rappaport, “The Sacred in Human Evolution,” Annual Review of Ecology
and
Systematics 2 (1971): 23-44.

5
William James, The Varieties
of Religious
Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1982 [first published 1902]), 31.

6
Emile Durkheim,
The
Elementary Forms
of Religious Life,
transl. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 227.

7
Ibid., 44.

8
John Henry Blunt, The Annotated Book of Common Prayer (London: Rivingtons, 1885), 455.

9
Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science
and
Religion (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1992 [reissue of 1948 edition]), 54.

10
Letter to Peter Carr, 1787.

11
Edward O. Wilson,
Sociobiology
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000 [first published 1975]), 562.

12
Edward O. Wilson,
Consilience
(New York: Vintage, 1999), 290.

13
Ibid., 272.

14
Ibid., 277.

15
Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814-834.

16
Jerome Kagan, “Morality and Its Development,” in Moral Psychology, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 299.

17
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas-Gage/.

18
Nicholas Wade, “An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong,”
New York Times,
October 31, 2006, F1.

19
Nancy Howell, Demography
of the Dobe‘Kung
(London: Academic Press, 1979), 119.

20
Bronislaw Malinowski, The
Sexual
Life of Savages in
North- Western
Melanesia (London: Routledge, 1932), 219.

21
Marc Hauser, Moral Minds (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 128.

22
Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Marc Hauser, “The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgments: Testing Three Principles of Harm,” Psychological Science 17, no. 12 (2006): 1082—89.

23
Charles Darwin, The
Descent of Man,
2nd ed. (New York: Appleton and Company, 1898), 105.

24
George Williams, quoted by Frans de Waal in Primates
and Philosophers
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 9.

25
George C. Williams,
Adaptation and Natural
Selection (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966).

26
Lawrence H. Keeley,
War Before
Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

27
Frans de Waal, Good-Natured (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 18.

28
Richard D. Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1987), 142. Alexander should probably have conceded that in many ant species too the principal threat is from other ant colonies.

29
de Waal, Good Natured, 61.

30
Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Monkeys reject unequal pay,” Nature 425 (2003): 297-299.

31
Jessica C. Flack and Frans B. M. de Waal, “‘Any Animal Whatever’: Darwinian Building Blocks of Morality in Monkeys and Apes,” in Evolutionary Origins of Morality, ed. Leonard D. Katz (Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic, 2000), 69.

32
Donald E. Brown, Human
Universals
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), 108.

33
Hauser,
Moral Minds,
48.

34
Edward O. Wilson,
Consilience
(New York: Knopf, 1998), 286. 34A. I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic
Religion
(London: Routledge, 3d ed., 2003), 15.

35
Several observers have attempted to specify the universal elements of religious behavior, but tend to differ as to its components. This is perhaps to be expected. Because most genetically based human behaviors are flexible, not deterministic, it is probably unrealistic to require that abehavior be exhibited by every known society in order to be accepted as having a genetic basis. Avoidance of incest, for instance, is almost certainly under genetic influence, yet cases of incest occur nonetheless.
If a behavior is ancient and reported from a preponderance of societies, that is sufficient to consider it likely to have a genetic basis. Religious behavior in general is clearly universal, and it should not be surprising if its various components are expressed to different degrees in various societies, leading observers to differ somewhat in their descriptions of what is found universally.

36
Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature
and
Function (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 101.

37
E. E. Evans-Pritchard,
Nuer Religion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 283.

38
Edmund Leach,
Culture and Communication
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 92—93.

39
Steven C. Schachter, “Religion and the Brain: Evidence from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,” in Patrick McNamara, ed.,
Where
God
and
Science Meet, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2006), 171-88.

40
Brian D‘Onofrio et al., “Understanding Biological and Social Influences on Religious Affiliation, Attitudes, and Behaviors: A Behavior Genetic Perspective,”
Journal of Personality
67, no. 6 (1999): 953-84.

41
Laura B. Koenig et al., “Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religiousness: Findings for Retrospective and Current Religiousness
Ratings,”Journal of Personality
73, no. 4 (2005): 1219-1256.

42
Charles Darwin, Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1969), 93.

43
Roy Rappaport,
Pigs for
the Ancestors (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 2000 [first published 1984]), 131.

44
Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 69.

45
Lawrence H. Keeley,
War
Before Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 25.

46
Ibid., 93.

47
Ibid., 174.

48
Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
(New York: Pearson Longman, 2008), 83.

49
Raymond C. Kelly,
Warless Societies and the Origin of War
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 160.

50
Ibid., 159.

51
Steven A. LeBlanc,
Constant Battles
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 8.

52
Keeley,
War Before Civilization,
158.

53
Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 69.

54
Evans-Pritchard, Nuer
Religion,
18.

55
These facts about ant wars, as well as the quotation from Forel, are taken from Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson, The Ants (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 392-418.

56
Kelly Bulkeley, Dreamt in the
World’s
Religions (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 3.