Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

"He calls it Breaking the Spell for a reason. He thinks there is this sanctity about religion which prevents people from asking, ‘Where did it come from in the first place?’ It’s a human construct, after all, it wasn’t given to humanity by God. It couldn’t have been, because we have thousands of different religions. So even religious people recognize the human contribution to religion. At the beginning of the book, he says it could be real. We could be worshipping a real divine being. But we still want to know where this system of beliefs and practices and ceremonies came from — and it’s not off limits. That’s the importance to me of that book. Yes, and one of the reasons Dan is not as vilified as people like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, is because he seems nicer. But his mask sort of slips in the second half of the book. He moves from saying, ‘Let’s study religion objectively as a human construct and there might be something behind it’ to ‘We’re studying it as a human construct and we know there’s nothing behind it.’ That’s OK with me, because I agree with him. I think at the time he wrote the book that might have been true. I don’t want to put words in his mouth but I know Dan pretty well and I’m pretty sure that he thinks religion is inimical to human society. Most of his activities now are spent showing how this is true. As a scientist what I should say is that we don’t know because it arose in the irrecoverable mists of time and we weren’t there. But I can give you my theories of what I find most appealing. First of all, a lot of religion is inherited, because you teach it to your kids. So it spreads that way and you can make a phylogeny, or family tree, for religions like you can for species. You can see them breaking off from each other over time and spreading, with some going extinct. Of course that doesn’t explain its hegemony, it has to appeal to some aspect of the human psyche or we wouldn’t have it. That’s where the question comes in. I don’t know the answer, I have to emphasize that. Dawkins and others have said that humans are evolved to be credulous. When we’re children, it’s much more adaptive for us to listen to our elders than to go out and learn for ourselves. Your parents can say, “Stay away from that lion there,” and if you believe that and listen to them, you’re a lot better off than if you go out and investigate what that lion is yourself. That kind of killing off of people who don’t listen to experience will select for a mindset or brain in which you are conditioned to believe those people that are older and wiser than you are. To me, that seems to play an important role in religion. It co-opts an evolved trait we have to pay attention to what our parents tell us. And, of course, your parents teach you religion. Religion also appeals to the communality of people, their desire to get together. It gives them a sense of security, of community — that may account for it, certainly some people say it does. Pascal Boyer’s theory is that we have an agent-detecting device. This is where Dennett begins his own explanation — that we are evolved to see agency in nature. If a leaf rustles, we’re better off thinking that there’s some animal out there, than saying, “Oh, it’s just the wind.” Because if you think there’s an animal out there, you’re much more likely to live than if you think it’s just the wind and it turns out to be an animal. So we have an agent-detecting device, we see agents wherever we live in nature, at least in our early infantile aspect of humanity. That somehow, in Dan’s account, turns into a theory of the supernatural. I’m not sure I agree with him. There are many, many of these theories and all of these things may play together. Another one is the belief in the afterlife. I don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die. If you give a promise that you’re going to live for eternity in good circumstances, that’s a powerful impetus to believe. Of course there are some religions, like the one I used to have as a Jew, that don’t believe in an afterlife, so that can’t be all of it. As a scientist all I can say is that the origin of religion is an interesting but unsolved question. Dan has opened it up to introspection but I don’t think we’re ever going to know the ultimate reason why humans are religious. That’s one of the motivations for his book. It purports to be a study of that, but the problem is he doesn’t answer this question. He says he’s going to try but then he winds up saying there’s all these theories and we just don’t know. That’s fine, because he’s right. We don’t know. But on that journey, there are other things about religion that you can learn about. Where do people get their beliefs from? That’s something that we can answer logically: They get them from their parents, from their milieu. Why is it in their interests to have these beliefs? These are questions that we can investigate in the here and now and we can answer them. And that has great import for society. Right now, one of our big pressing problems is Muslims who want to impose theocracies on western democracies and who turn violent if they see a cartoon of Mohammed. You can investigate why that is. I think you need to do that if you’re going to combat this kind of theocratic mentality, which I see as directly opposed not just to science, but to rationality and democracy. You need to understand where it comes from. That’s something that we can do. The refusal of western leaders to recognize that religion is behind a lot of this stuff — saying it’s due to political oppression, or disenfranchisement or it’s our fault ultimately — is a real block in trying to do anything about the problem, because we refuse to admit one of the obvious causes which is religious belief. There are analysts in sociology. The problem is if you go into Saudi Arabia and ask people what they believe, they’ll kill you. Look at the Pew study which studied the attitudes of Muslims around the world by asking them questions. Do you think Sharia law should be imposed? Do you favour stoning for adulterers? Do you favour the death penalty for apostates? The results, by the way, were very depressing because even in western countries a substantial fraction of Muslims favoured these oppressive practices. But the countries that weren’t surveyed were countries like Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, because they weren’t even allowed to go in there and ask those questions. Even asking people what they believe is regarded as a form of dissing religion."

"It is the spell of religious belief. Broadly speaking, it is the spell of supernatural belief. The reason I wanted to include this was that we have had this recent phenomenon dubbed the New Atheism which is, of course, like all these labels, a label put upon people from the outside looking in, rather than a self-proclaimed one. The New Atheism has been a very interesting movement, but one which I’m, at the very least, ambivalent about. Of the so-called ‘four horsemen’ of the New Atheist apocalypse— Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—Dennett is far and away the most sober, rational, and fair-minded of them. If people want to read a New Atheist book, they should read this one. That would be a good way of trying to counter some of those myths that contemporary atheists are all just very cross, angry, and belligerent. This is a charge often levelled at Richard Dawkins: the criticism that his target is a view of God as an old man in the sky, pulling the levers, controlling the weather and so on — that he fails to appreciate that there are many more subtle ways of understanding what God is. Dawkins’s answer is that he doesn’t need to attack more sophisticated views, because the inventions of Oxbridge theologians bear no relation to what most people think. Dennett, in contrast, is much more sympathetic and understanding about different views of religion and the nature of God. What he’s trying to do is delve beneath the reasons people give for their beliefs, and try and understand them in a way that makes sense of them as a natural phenomenon. That doesn’t make them true, of course, he doesn’t believe there is a God. But he tries to understand why religious belief is so prevalent, and to diagnose its causes."