Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  It might well be that believing in God (and engaging in all the practices that go with that belief) improves your state of mind and thereby improves your health by, say, 10 percent. We should do the research to find out for sure, bearing in mind that it also may be true that believing that Earth is being invaded by space aliens who plan to take us to their planet and teach us all how to fly (and engaging in all the behaviors that are appropriate to that belief ) improves your state of mind and health by 20 percent! We won’t know until we run the experiments, but since the world’s literature is overflowing with stories of people who have benefited greatly from being deceived by well-wishing acquaintances, we shouldn’t be surprised to find positive effects for well-chosen falsehoods, and if such concoctions were more effective than any known religious creed, we would have to confront the ethical question of whether any amount of health benefits could justify such deliberate misrepresentation.

  The results so far are strong but in need of further investigation.4 Since the benign effects that religions do seem to be having would probably diminish if skepticism took hold, regardless of whether it was justified, caution is called for. Many effects studied by psychologists depend on naïve subjects who are relatively uninformed about the mechanisms and conditions of the phenomena. The effects are diminished or entirely obliterated when subjects are given more information. We should be alert to the possibility that the good effects, if they hold up to further scrutiny, might be jeopardized by anything that throws too strong a light of public scrutiny on them. On the other hand, the effects may be robust under a barrage of skeptical attention. We will just have to see. And, of course, if the results tend to evaporate as we study them more intensively, we can anticipate that those who are sure that the effects are real will protest that the “climate of skepticism” is inimical to the effects, making perfectly real phenomena vanish under the harsh light of science. And they may be right. And they may be wrong. This, too, is indirectly testable.

  Here, more than in any other area of conflict between science and religion, those who are dubious about, or fearful of, the authority of science will have to search their souls. Do they acknowledge the power of science, properly conducted, to settle such controversial factual questions, or do they reserve judgment, waiting to see what the verdict will be? If it turns out that, in spite of the anecdotal evidence, and mountains of testimonials, religion is no better than alternative sources of well-being, will they be willing to accept that result and drop the advertising? Some major pharmaceutical companies are currently under fire for trying to suppress the publication of studies they funded that fail to show the effectiveness of their products. In the future, it now seems clear, these companies will be obliged to consent in advance to the publication of all the research they fund, however it comes out. That is the ethos of science: the price you pay for the authoritative confirmation of your favorite hypothesis is risking an authoritative refutation of it. Those who want to make claims about the health benefits of religion will have to live by the same rules: prove it or drop it. And, if you set out to prove it and fail, you are obliged to tell us.

  The potential benefits of joining the scientific community on these issues are enormous: getting the authority of science in support of what you say you believe with all your heart and soul. Not for nothing have the new religions of the last century or two been given names like Christian Science and Scientology. Even the Roman Catholic Church, with its unfortunate legacy of persecution of its own scientists, has recently been eager to seek scientific confirmation—and accept the risk of disconfirmation—of its traditional claims about the Shroud of Turin, for example.5

  One strand in the current wave of research on religion raises a much more fundamental issue, in undeniable terms. Studies are now under way on the efficacy of intercessory prayer, “praying with the real hope and real intent that God would step in and act for the good of some specific other person(s) or other entity” (Longman, 2000). These are quite unlike the studies mentioned above in their import. As we have just noted, scientists have plenty of resources already well in hand that could explain general health benefits to those who pray and practice and tithe; no supernatural forces would need to be invoked to account for such ambient health benefits. But if a properly conducted, double-blind, rigorously controlled test with a sufficiently large population of subjects were to demonstrate that people who are prayed for are significantly more likely to get well than people who get the same medical treatments but are not prayed for, this would be all but impossible for science to account for without a major revolution.

  Many atheists and other skeptics are so confident that no such effects could possibly exist that they are eager to see these tests performed. Those, in contrast, who believe in the efficacy of intercessory prayer have a tough call here. The stakes are high, since, if the studies are performed properly and show no positive effect, the religions that practice intercessory prayer would be obliged by the principles of truth in advertising to renounce all claims to its efficacy—just like the pharmaceutical companies. On the other hand, a positive result would stop science in its tracks. After five hundred years of steady retreat in the face of advancing science, religion could demonstrate, in terms that the scientists would have to respect, that its claims to truth were not all vacuous.

  In October 2001, the New York Times reported a remarkable Columbia University study that purportedly showed that infertile women who were prayed for became pregnant twice as often as those who were not prayed for. Published in a major scientific journal, the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, the results were worth the headlines, since Columbia University is not a Bible Belt college that would be instantly under suspicion in many quarters. Its medical school, a bastion of the medical establishment, supported the results in a news release that described the safeguards that had been taken to ensure that this was a properly controlled investigation. But, to make a long and sordid story short, it has subsequently turned out that this was a case of scientific fraud. Of the three authors of the study, two have now left their positions at Columbia University, and the third, Daniel Wirth, who had no connection with Columbia, has recently pled guilty, in an unrelated case, to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud—and turns out not to have any medical credentials at all (Flamm, 2004). One study is discredited, and others have been severely criticized, but there are still others under way, including a major study by Dr. Herbert Benson and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School funded by the Templeton Foundation, so there is no verdict yet on the hypothesis that intercessory prayer actually works (see, e.g., Dusek et al., 2002). Even if studies eventually show that it doesn’t, there will still be plenty of evidence of less miraculous benefits of being an active member of a church, which is all that many churches have ever maintained. The Reverend Raymond J. Lawrence, Jr., director of pastoral care at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, expresses the liberal view:

  There’s no way to put God to the test, and that’s exactly what you’re doing when you design a study to see if God answers your prayers. This whole exercise cheapens religion, and promotes an infantile theology that God is out there ready to miraculously defy the laws of nature in answer to a prayer. [Carey, 2004, p. 32]

  Prolonged exposure to the fumes of incense and burning candles may have some detrimental health effect, concluded one recent study (Lung et al. [I’m not kidding], 2003), but there is plenty of other evidence that active participation in religious organizations can improve the morale, and hence the health, of participants. Moreover, the defenders of religion can rightly point to less tangible but more substantial benefits to their adherents, such as having a meaning for their lives provided! People who are suffering, even if their morale is not improved in measurable ways, may well gain some solace from nothing more than the knowledge that they are being acknowledged, noticed, thought about. It would be a mistake to suppose th
at these “spiritual” blessings have no place in the inventory of reasons that we skeptics are trying to assay, just as it would be a mistake to suppose that the nonexistence of an intercessory-prayer effect would show that prayer is a useless practice. There are subtler benefits to be evaluated—but they do need to be identified.

  Chapter 9 Before we can ask the question of whether religion is, all things considered, a good thing, we must first work through several protective barriers, such as the love barrier, the academic-territoriality barrier, and the loyalty-to-God barrier. Then we can calmly consider the pros and cons of religious allegiance, looking first at the question, Is religion good for people? And the evidence to date on that question is mixed. It does seem to provide some health benefits, for instance, but it is too early to say whether there are other, better ways of delivering these benefits, and too early to say if the side effects outweigh the benefits.

  Chapter 10 The more important question, finally, is whether religion is the foundation of morality. Do we get the content of morality from religion, or is it an irreplaceable infrastructure for organizing moral action, or does it provide moral or spiritual strength? Many think the answers are obvious, and positive, but these are questions that need to be re-examined in the light of what we have learned.

  CHAPTER TEN Morality and Religion

  1 Does religion make us moral?

  Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.

  —Mark 10:21

  The Lord trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth. Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest, this shall be the portion of their cup.

  —Psalms 11:5–6

  Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.

  —Charles Darwin, Life and Letters

  Non-Muslims love their life too much, they can’t fight, and they are cowards. They don’t understand that there will be life after death. You cannot live forever, you will die. Life after death is forever. If life after death were an ocean, the life you live is only a drop in the ocean. So it’s very important that you live your life for Allah, so you are rewarded after death.

  —A young mujaheed from Pakistan, quoted by Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God

  Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion.

  —Steven Weinberg, 1999

  Religion plays its most important role in supporting morality, many think, by giving people an unbeatable reason to do good: the promise of an infinite reward in heaven, and (depending on tastes) the threat of an infinite punishment in hell if they don’t. Without the divine carrot and stick, goes this reasoning, people would loll about aimlessly or indulge their basest desires, break their promises, cheat on their spouses, neglect their duties, and so on. There are two well-known problems with this reasoning: (1) it doesn’t seem to be true, which is good news, since (2) it is such a demeaning view of human nature.

  I have uncovered no evidence to support the claim that people, religious or not, who don’t believe in reward in heaven and/or punishment in hell are more likely to kill, rape, rob, or break their promises than people who do.1 The prison population in the United States shows Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and others—including those with no religious affiliation—represented about as they are in the general population. Brights and others with no religious affiliation exhibit the same range of moral excellence and turpitude as born-again Christians, but, more to the point, so do members of religions that de-emphasize or actively deny any relationship between moral behavior “on earth” and eventual postmortem reward and punishment. And when it comes to “family values,” the available evidence to date supports the hypothesis that brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest (Barna, 1999). Needless to say, these results strike so hard at the standard claims of greater moral virtue among the religious that there has been a considerable surge of further research initiated by religious organizations attempting to refute them. At this time, nothing very surprising has emerged, and nothing approaching a settled consensus among researchers has been achieved, but one thing we can be sure of is that if there is a significant positive relationship between moral behavior and religious affiliation, practice, or belief, it will soon be discovered, since so many religious organizations are eager to confirm their traditional beliefs about this scientifically. (They are quite impressed with the truth-finding power of science when it supports what they already believe.) Every month that passes without such a demonstration underlines the suspicion that it just isn’t so.

  It is clear enough why believers might want to come up with evidence that belief in heaven and hell has benign effects. Everybody already knows the evidence for the countervailing hypothesis that the belief in a reward in heaven can sometimes motivate acts of monstrous evil. Nevertheless, there are many in the religious community who would not welcome the demonstration that a belief in God’s reward in heaven or punishment in hell makes a significant difference, since they view this as an infantile concept of God in the first place, pandering to immaturity instead of encouraging genuine moral commitment. As Mitchell Silver notes, the God who rewards goodness in heaven bears a striking resemblance to the hero of the popular song “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

  Like Santa, God “knows if you are sleeping, he knows if you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good”…The lyrics continue “so be good for goodness’ sake.” Catchy but a logical solecism. In logic the song should have continued “so be good for the sake of the electronic equipment, dolls, sports gear and other gifts you hope to get but will get only if the omniscient and just Santa judges you worthy of receiving.” If you were good for goodness’ sake, the all-seeing Santa would be irrelevant as a motivator of your virtue. [In press]

  Moral philosophers who have agreed about little else, from the days of Hume and Kant through Nietzsche to the present, have regarded this pie-in-the-sky vision of morality as something of a trap, a reductio ad absurdum into which only the most unwary moralist would fall. Many religious thinkers agree: a doctrine that trades in a person’s good intentions for the prudent desires of a rational maximizer shopping around for eternal bliss may win a few cheap victories, luring a few selfish and unimaginative souls into behaving themselves for a while, but at the cost of debasing their larger campaign for goodness. We see an echo of this familiar recognition in the derision heaped by many commentators on the Al Qaeda hijackers of 9/11 for their purported goal of luxuriating in heaven with seventy-two virgins (each) as the reward for their martyrdom.2

  We may shun this theme as a foundation of our morality today yet still honor it for having played a founding role in the past, as a ladder that, once climbed, may be discarded. How could this work? The economist Thomas Schelling has pointed out that “belief in a deity who will reward goodness and punish evil transforms many situations from subjective to secured, at least in the believer’s mind” (quoted in Nesse, ed., 2001, p. 16). Consider a situation in which two parties confront each other with a prospect for cooperating on something both parties would want, but each is afraid the other will renege on any bargain struck, and there are no authorities or stronger parties around to enforce it. Promises can be made and then broken, but sometimes they can be secured. A commitment may be secured by being self-enforcing; for instance, you can burn your b
ridges behind you so you can’t escape even if you change your mind. Or it may be secured by your greater desire to preserve your reputation. You may have good reason to fulfill your side of a contract even if your reason for signing it in the first place has lapsed, simply because your reputation is also at stake, a valuable social commodity indeed. Or—and this is Schelling’s point—a promise made “in the eyes of God” may well convince those who believe in that God that a sort of virtual escrow account has been created, protecting both parties and giving each the confidence to move ahead without fear of reneging by the other party.

  Consider the current situation in Iraq, where a security force is supposed to provide a temporary scaffolding on which to construct a working society in post-Saddam Iraq. It might actually have worked from the outset if the force had been large enough and well enough trained and deployed to reassure people without having to fire a shot. With insufficient forces, the credibility of the peacekeepers was diminished, however, and a positive feedback cycle of violence was put in motion, destroying confidence in security. How can you break out of such a downward spiral? It is hard to say. The flawed and fragile democracy that has been installed may still overcome its corrupt and violence-ridden beginnings, if the world is lucky, however forlorn it looks today. Failed states have a way of perpetuating themselves, and perpetuating both the misery of their inhabitants and the insecurity of their neighbors. In the distant past, the very idea of an overseeing God might often have permitted an otherwise chaotic and ungovernable population to bootstrap itself into a working state, with enough law and order so that credible promising could take hold. Only in such a climate of trust can investment and commerce and free passage, and all the other things we take for granted in a working society, flourish. Such a meme would be vulnerable to collapse if its credibility was threatened, just as surely as the occupying forces in Iraq depend on their (problematic) credibility for their own effectiveness. The rationale for incorporating whatever doubt-suppression devices could be found would have been obvious (to the blind forces of cultural selection, and probably to the authorities themselves).