The Faith Instinct (7 page)

All religions include some way of gaining access to the gods, even though the gods live in a different world, and of influencing their behavior through rituals, sacrifice or prayer, even though eternal beings might seem likely to have little interest in quotidian human concerns.

Access to the supernatural realm may be gained through trance in primitive societies, and through revelation in advanced societies. In some primitive societies, anyone may enter the trance state, either through hour-long dancing or by taking hallucinogenic drugs. In others, trance specialists known as shamans venture out on special journeys to the spirit world. In advanced societies, control of religion often rests with a religious hierarchy which monopolizes access to the supernatural. In some religions, access is confined to the occasions in the distant past when the founding prophet received communications from the deity or his surrogates.

In many societies rules of morality are part of the pact with the supernatural powers, an understanding that elevates moral behavior from an individual to a collective matter. Conformance with the gods’ wishes entitles society to their favors. Conversely, if anyone misbehaves and is not punished, the group as a whole stands to suffer divine retribution.

All or almost all religions share the belief that the soul survives after death, and that the gods control both fortunate and unfortunate events.

Even though the gods enjoy eternal lives in their supernatural realm, they are intensely interested in human affairs down to the minutest detail. They are aware of everything and can know a person’s thoughts. They may punish remorselessly every infraction of their rules, with penalties meted out in the form of disease, death or disaster in this world or as sanctions on the soul when it joins the supernatural world.

The divine rules include codes of moral behavior, as well as largely arbitrary ritual requirements, such as taboos on certain foods or on speaking certain words.

The gods can be propitiated with appropriate rituals, which usually include sacrifices of various kinds. The prayers that accompany these propitiatory rituals are accompanied with gestures used in human and other mammalian societies to indicate submission—bared throat or chest, kneeling or prostration.

Central to many religions is the idea of sacrifice, of valuable gifts made to the gods to influence their behavior. As in relationships among people, the gifts impose on the divine recipients the obligation of repayment at a later date. The gods are expected to provide the things people need of them, such as good fortune, good health, good harvests, and victory in war or at least the avoidance of defeat. Sacrifice is a principal means of influencing the gods’ behavior and, along with prayer, of negotiating the expectations between the gods and society as to how each party should behave.

“Beneath the diverse forms it takes,” Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss wrote in their classic essay, sacrifice “always consists in one same procedure, which may be used for the most widely differing purposes. This procedure consists in establishing a means of communication between the sacred and profane worlds through the mediation of a victim, that is, of a thing that in the course of the ceremony is destroyed.”
³⁶
Every sacrifice, in their view, is a contractual arrangement based on the principle of
do ut des
—“I give that you may give.”

Among the Nuer, for example, a pastoral Nilotic people of the lower Sudan, explicit bargaining negotiations are conducted with the spirits as to how serious a sacrifice is required for their favors. The Nuer spirits, writes the social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “require bloody offerings. And if they are not given animal sacrifices they seize their devotees and make them sick. Nuer, therefore, do not hesitate to bargain with these spirits, speaking through their mediums, in a downright way which astonished me. The sense of the bargain is always the same: if we give you an ox or a sheep or a goat will you leave the sick man alone that he may not be troubled by you?”
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The sacrificed animal is the intermediary between the sacrificer in the living world and the gods in the supernatural world. In some religions the sacrificer sacrifices himself, but this, Hubert and Mauss note, can only happen when the sacrificer is himself a god. In Christianity, the sacrifice has become the death of Jesus, and is performed by the priest metaphorically in the communion rite. Jesus was killed by men of ill will “but by a complex transformation this has retrospectively become a sacrifice, in that the murder was willed by God,” writes the social anthropologist Edmund Leach. “The sacrifice is now a persisting channel through which the grace of God can How to the devout believer. The donor of the sacrifice is Christ himself and the priest, in offering the bread and wine to the congregation as ‘the body and blood of Christ,’ is, by implication, timelessly repeating the sacrifice at the behest of the divine Donor.... The Christian Mass, as a whole, is a transformation of the Jewish Passover and the crucified Christ ‘is’ the sacrificial paschal lamb, ‘the Lamb of God.’ ”
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The remarkable variety of the world’s religions can thus be seen to depend on a handful of common behaviors. Foremost among them is the belief in the gods as awesome governors of society and enforcers of moral standards. Though the gods are known to live in the supernatural realm, people believe that they closely follow events in this world and can be swayed by prayer, sacrifice and appropriate rituals. Societies whose members embraced such beliefs would have been more cohesive and united in attaining difficult goals, whether in peace or warfare. Because an instinct for faith would have promoted survival, genes that favored such an instinct eventually became universal in the early human population.

The universality of religious behavior suggests that, as with language, it is mediated by specialized structures in the brain. Language is known to
be supported by neural circuitry in certain regions of the bra
in because, if these regions are damaged even minutely, specific defects appear in a
patient’s linguistic abilities. No such dedicated regions have yet been ident
ified with certainty for the neural circuitry that may underlie
religious behavior. Excessive religiosity is a well-known symptom of temporal lobe
epilepsy and could reflect the activation of neural circuits associated with religio
us behavior. But there is no agreement on this point, and the s
earch for such circuitry in people who don’t suffer from epilepsy is “su
ggestive but not conclusive,” according to the neurologist Steven Schachter.
³⁹
It could be that religious behavior itself does not require a dedicated brain region large enough to be detectable by present methods.

The fact that religious behavior is universal strongly suggests that it is an adaptation, meaning a trait shaped by natural selection. If it is an adaptation, it must have a genetic basis, such as a suite of genes that are activated during development and wire up the neural circuits needed to induce the behavior. Identification of such genes would be the best possible proof that religious behavior has an evolutionary basis. The lack of any progress in this direction so far is not particularly surprising; the genes that underlie complex diseases have started to be identified only recently and funds to support such expensive efforts are not available for studying nonmedical complex traits.

An indirect approach to the genetic basis of religious behavior is through psychological studies of adopted children and of twins. Such studies pick up traits that vary in the population, such as height, and estimate how much of the variation is due to environmental factors and how much to genetics. But the studies cannot pick up the presence of genes that don’t vary; genes for learning language, for example, are apparently so essential that there is almost no variation in the population, since everyone can learn language. If religious behavior is equally necessary for survival, then the genes that underlie it will be the same in everyone, and no variation will be detectable.

Religious behavior itself is hard to quantify, but studies of religiosity—the intensity with which the capacity for religious behavior is implemented—have shown that it is moderately heritable, meaning that genes contribute somewhat, along with environmental factors, to the extent of the trait’s variation in the population. “Religious attitudes and practices are moderately influenced by genetic factors,” a large recent study concludes.
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Another survey finds that “the heritability of religiousness increases from adolescence to adulthood,” presumably because the influence of environmental factors decreases in adulthood (when you leave home you go to church if you want to, not because your parents say so).
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The aspects of religiosity that psychologists measure include factors like the frequency of church attendance and the importance assigned to religious values. Their studies show that there are genetic influences at work on the intensity of religious behavior, but do not yet reach to the heart
of the issue, that of probing the neural circuitry for learning and practicing the religion of one’s community.

In the absence of direct evidence about the genes underlying religious behavior, its evolutionary basis can be assessed only indirectly. The effect of cultural learning in religion is clear enough, as shown by the rich variety of religions around the world. It’s the strong commonalities beneath the variations that are the fingerprints of an innate learning mechanism. These common features seem very unlikely to have persisted in all societies for the 2,000 generations that have elapsed during the 50,000 years since the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland, unless they have a genetic basis. This is particularly true given the complexity of religious behavior, and its rootedness in the emotional levels of the brain.

To no less an observer than Darwin himself it seemed that relig
ion was like an instinctive behavior, one that the mind is genetically primed to lea
rn as indelibly as the fear of heights or the horror of incest.
His two great books on evolution,
Origin of Species
and
Descent of Man,
have nothing directly to say about religion but in his autobiography, written in hi
s old age, he was more explicit about this controversial topic. He wrote, “Nor
must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation i
n a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inheri
ted effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it wou
ld be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to thr
ow off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.”
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To understand how the instinct for religious behavior evolved, it is necessary to explore the circumstances in human development in which it first arose.

For most of their existence, modern humans have lived as small bands of hunters and gatherers. Only 15,000 years ago did people begin to settle down in fixed communities, forming the large societies that are commonplace today. Religious behavior evolved in hunter gatherer society, well before settlement. The social structure of these hunter gatherer bands therefore has considerable bearing on the nature of religion.

Five million years earlier, human social structure was very different and probably resembled that of chimpanzees today. In chimpanzee societies everyone knows their precise rank. There is a male hierarchy and below it a female hierarchy. The alpha male rules the male hierarchy and gets most of the mating opportunities, a common arrangement in primate societies. Probably because of chimpanzees’ unusual intelligence, the alpha male can rarely rule alone and has to share power by building coalitions with a few close allies who get cut in on the mating system.

Chimps, unlike humans, seem to have changed rather little in the last 5 million years, perhaps because they have always occupied the same forest and woodland habitat, whereas humans had to learn how to survive on the ground and in a range of different environments. Hence the joint ancestor of chimps and people was probably quite chimplike. If so, it would probably have had a chimplike social structure based on dominance by the alpha male.

Fast-forward from the joint ancestor to the first human hunter gatherers, and the social structure has changed completely. To judge by the living hunter gatherer societies studied by anthropologists, the social order would have been fiercely egalitarian. Hunter gatherers have no headmen or chiefs, and no one is willing to give or take orders. Men like power and will seize it if they can. But if they can’t rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them.

The egalitarianism of hunter gatherers is not a passive preference but a system that is aggressively maintained because it is under constant challenge. From time to time strong individuals emerge and try to dominate a group. But their efforts invariably provoke a coalition against them. Others in the group will mock them or ignore their orders. If they persist, they will be shunned or even evicted from the group. If they are too intimidating, they will be killed. To avoid blood feuds, the group that has decided to eliminate a domineering leader will often assign one of his own relatives to kill him.

A perennial threat to the egalitarianism of the hunter gatherer band was a skillful hunter who might try to dominate the band through his success. So hunter gatherers impose a rule that all meat must be distributed. Bragging and stinginess are the two social errors that bring instant disapproval. The !Kung decree that an animal belongs to the owner of the arrow that brought it down, who is usually not the hunter. The owner then distributes the meat while the hunter makes light of his achievement.

Primitive farmers too will take steps to kill those who disrupt social harmony. Behavior judged as disruptive can consist of merely causing envy through success or just being hard to get along with. Among the Tsembaga, slash-and-burn farmers of central New Guinea, a man whose pigs and gardens do conspicuously better than those of his neighbors may be betrayed to the enemy so that through sorcery they will be able to kill him in the next battle.