The Faith Instinct

by Wade, Nicholas

  People in all kinds of situations are far more cooperative, even with total strangers, than biologists would expect. This behavior seems deeply embedded in human nature, but there are few good biological explanations for cooperation other than with a person’s close kin.

  Scholars from several disciplines have suggested that such a high level of natural cooperativeness could not arise unless those who deviated from this expected behavior could count on inexorable punishment.

  But the problem then arises as to who would have meted out the punishment. In small societies, the person who takes on the role of enforcer exposes himself to general resentment, not to mention retaliation from the miscreant or his relatives. Hunter gatherer societies punish deviants quite carefully, often by securing everyone’s agreement beforehand and preferably getting one of the offender’s own kin to kill him so as avoid revenge.

  In a series of recent papers the evolutionary psychologist Dominic Johnson has pointed out that every community possesses a highly effective punishment mechanism in the form of supernatural agents. In societies throughout the world, the gods or the spirits of dead ancestors are reputed to be keenly interested in people’s observance of prevailing laws and taboos. The gods punish infractions unfailingly, either in this world or in the next or both. The religions of advanced societies are no less emphatic. The Hebrew Bible makes clear that sin will be punished. Christianity promises admission to heaven for obeying divine law, eternal damnation for defying it. Hinduism and Buddhism prescribe reincarnation as a lower species for disgracing oneself as a human.

  A system of supernatural punishment carries enormous advantages for a primitive society. No one has to assume the thankless task of meting out punishment and risk being killed by the offender or his relatives; the gods perform this chore willingly and vigilantly.

  No legislation is needed: the list of offenses and associated punishments is set out in the religious ritual and kept well in mind by all believers. No police force is required; believers restrain their own behavior, and are consumed by fear of divine retribution for any sin they commit.

  That the supernatural punishment may have been imaginary did not destroy its deterrent value as long as people feared it, and there was ample stimulus for such fears. In the belief systems of many primitive societies, the evidence of the gods’ retribution is plain for all to see, in the form of disease or disaster. People who suffer misfortune are believed to have incurred it through their own misdeeds. And those who commit some sin fully expect misfortune to befall them.

  Belief in moralizing gods would have been a fine solution to the problem of discouraging deviancy. Johnson’s proposal accounts well for a puzzling feature of the world’s religions: almost all take for granted that the gods in their supernatural realm care deeply about events in the real world. Why should human sexual affairs or dietary preferences matter in the least to immortal beings living in a spirit world? The assumption makes little sense unless the gods are viewed as embodying a society’s moral authority and its interest in having all members observe certain rules of social behavior. From this Durkheimian perspective, the gods are of course minutely interested in human moral conduct—it’s their raison d’être. Gods die when people no longer worship them.

  Many of the rules the gods enforce, such as those concerning tabooed foods or prescribed dress, may be arbitrary in substance but they serve to signal adherence to belief in the prevailing religion. And all religions include rules that affect the social fabric, such as regulation of marriage and the prohibition of murder and theft. Moral obligation, and punishment and reward, are among the religious traits that are “probably found, in some shape or form, in all human societies—or at least are very widespread and historically recurrent,” according to the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse.57

  Religious belief may have become particularly advantageous as humans developed language and the ability to gossip about one another. Earning a bad reputation in a small society is a poor idea. Even excelling at some skill or another could stir envy and invite accusations of being a witch, with consequent execution. Those who behaved with extreme care, scrupulously following the gods’ apparent wishes, could well have left more progeny. Religious behavior could therefore have been favored by natural selection, Johnson suggests. He and psychologist Jesse Bering write: “We have inherited the general template for religiosity because those early humans who abandoned the prospect of supernatural agents, or who lacked the capacity to represent their involvement in moral affairs, likely met with an early death at the hands of their own group members, or at least reduced reproductive success. Those who readily acquiesced to the possibility of moralizing gods, and who lived their lives in fear of such agencies, survived to become our ancestors.”58

  Another quite curious aspect of many religions is that they impute omniscience to their supernatural agencies, including even detailed knowledge of people’s thoughts. Several scholars have noted the similarity of this divine faculty with the human capacity, known as theory of mind, for inferring what other people are thinking.

  Evolutionary psychologists consider that the brain is not a general-purpose calculating machine but rather a set of neural systems, each of which evolved to solve a specific problem important to survival. People have an extraordinary ability, for example, to see someone’s face, perhaps just once, and recall it decades later. A general-purpose memory system would surely get overloaded if it had to remember every image recorded by the retina over a lifetime. It’s reasonable to suppose that the brain is not constructed this way. Rather, it has a dedicated face-recognition module which evolved, doubtless early in primate history, because of the extreme importance of being able to recognize other individuals in a small society. The module is superb at recognizing faces and, in conjunction with other brain systems, at deciding which of its memory traces are worth storing.

  The “theory of mind” module is another inferred brain circuit for which there is reasonably good evidence. Its utility and survival advantage are evident; almost every social situation requires a forecast of how others may react to one’s words or deeds.

  Johnson and Bering argue that people, being familiar with their own abilities to infer other people’s thoughts, would have assumed the gods too possessed theory of mind capabilities, ones so penetrating that they could read people’s thoughts. Gods from Zeus to the Babylonian Enlil are credited with the ability to read minds. “O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me,” says the psalmist. “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.... Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”59

  People who imputed a thought-reading version of their own theory of mind to the gods inferred that the gods could not be deceived, and came to fear their supervisory powers all the more.

  The genetically shaped neural circuits that underlie religious behavior may have stayed much the same since hunter gatherer days but, as the cultural aspects of religion change, the various parts of the behavioral circuitry may be invoked to different extents. Early people may have felt chiefly fear for the gods since they had daily proof of divine vengeance in the form of disease and natural calamities. But for many people today the personal and positive aspects of religion are at least as important as the social and punitive. Religion’s harsher beliefs, such as assuming disease is divine punishment for past sins, are no longer held. Faith is now more a source of solace than of fear: there are rituals to control unpredictable forces, prayers to seek success or relief from sickness and danger, and the personal satisfaction of being part of a moral community.

  Important as these solaces are, they can have direct evolutionary significance only if they lead to a person’s having more surviving progeny, the coin by which evolution measures success. It’s hard to make the case that any personal aspect of religion does have such an effect. Many studies have been undertaken of the effect of r
eligion on health but without any decisive result so far. The mild benefits seen in some studies seem unlikely to have any great impact or to lead to someone’s leaving more surviving children.

  The personal aspects of religious involvement probably matter for an indirect reason. From an evolutionary point of view, religious behavior can be seen as a necessary biological drive, as imperative for survival—at least in hunter gatherer days—as was eating or reproduction. Natural selection makes food and sex highly rewarding or pleasurable because the individuals who pursue them most energetically leave the most progeny.

  Eating and reproduction are fundamental drives that appeared at the dawn of animal evolution; natural selection instituted rewards that make people want to do them. Religious behavior is a very recent faculty and its reward system is perhaps for that reason positioned at a far higher cognitive level. Whatever the exact train of cause and effect, the bottom line is that religious behavior had to be perceived as deeply satisfying. Otherwise people would have practiced it insufficiently, or not at all. Many forms of religion are highly demanding in terms of time or effort; few people would adhere to them without a strong personal motivation.

  The pleasure of eating makes one eat but is distinct from the evolutionary reason for eating, which is to provide sustenance for the body. The satisfactions of religious belief make people practice religion, but are far removed from the evolutionary function of religion, which is to bind people together and make them put the group’s interests ahead of their own.

  Costly Signaling

  Belief in punitive supernatural agencies is one universal feature of religion. Another is that most religions impose costs of some kind on membership.

  Some religions demand tithes, some require donations of time, others ban certain foods or working on certain days. Why do religions impose such costs? And why do people join very demanding religions, such as Mormonism or Orthodox Judaism, when softer options like the Episcopal church are available?

  Religions impose costs on members, it seems, in order to deter people who seek to enjoy a religious community’s benefits without contributing to its costs. Free riders can be highly corrosive to a community’s cohesion. “Winter Shakers,” who took food and shelter from Shakers but departed in the spring, were a heavy burden. But systems to monitor people’s level of commitment and enthusiasm tend to destroy the property being measured. A better solution is to make the religion costly to join, whether by fees, donation of time, or requiring distinctive diet and dress.

  Economists and anthropologists who have studied the question conclude that these costs serve several critical functions. By raising the cost of entry, a religious community excludes free riders and ensures that its members are committed. A high price of entry also raises the level of trust among its members, because by obeying all the required rules and taboos, congregants signal to one another that they have bought into the religion’s moral code and can be relied on to behave accordingly. An extra benefit of distinctive dress or dietary habits is that members find it harder to associate with nonmembers and so devote more time to the community.

  “If strictness increases costs, why should anyone join a strict church?” asked the economist Laurence Iannaccone. Many psychologists have sought to analyze strict religious behavior as if it were some kind of mental aberration. Applying the economic approach known as rational choice theory to church attendance in the United States, Iannaccone arrived at a quite different answer. “Strictness reduces free riding,” he said. “It screens out members who lack commitment and stimulates participation among those who remain. Rational choice theory thus explains the success of sects, cults and conservative denominations without recourse to assumed abnormalities, irrationality, or misinformation.”60

  There is an optimum level of strictness, Iannaccone observes. Many sects are too strict and fail. Others are not attractive to outsiders, and thrive only if they maintain high fertility and accommodate sufficiently to change. The Amish, an Anabaptist order with settlements in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, are an example of the latter strategy. They have high fertility and retention. They ban most new technology but allow telephones in public places, though not in homes, and let cars be hired but not owned.

  For an injudicious adjustment of strictness, Iannaccone offers the example of the Catholic church, which relaxed many of its distinctive rules after the Second Vatican Council of 1962 but adhered to hard-line positions on birth control and the celibacy of priests. “The Catholic church may have managed to arrive at a remarkable, ‘worst of both worlds’ position—discarding cherished distinctiveness in the areas of liturgy, theology and lifestyle, while at the same time maintaining the very demands that its members and clergy are least willing to accept,” Iannaccone writes.61

  The anthropologist William Irons came to much the same conclusion about the virtues of costliness. A religion, he noted, is “basically a commitment to behave in a certain way without regard to self-interest.” The costly rituals enable members of a community “to monitor one another’s commitments to the community and its moral code, thereby facilitating the formation of larger and better united groups.”

  A high degree of commitment was vital to the survival of groups that were locked into fierce competition with one another. Because religious commitments are more powerful than any other kind, “evolution has built into human beings a strong propensity to seek a religious orientation toward life and to hold this orientation to be of the highest value,” Irons wrote.62

  Biologists who study animal signaling have noted that cheap signals can be imitated and thus lose their value. Trustworthy signals are those that are very costly to produce and cannot be counterfeited. Only very healthy peacocks can afford to grow a magnificent tail, so peahens can rely on this signal in choosing mates. When Thompson’s gazelles spot a leopard, some will jump up and down in a conspicuous movement known as stotting, instead of just running away. This true signal of fitness advertises to the leopard that it needn’t waste its time and would do better to hunt some less healthy gazelle.

  Religious behavior too serves as a true signal because religions are learned only in arduous initiation rites and demand a heavy commitment of time. The signals are important to other members of the community. They cannot watch an individual’s movements all the time, but they can assess his sincerity in the ritual.

  The signals, it should be noted, are symbolic, and they convey their message far more effectively than could mere words. A man may say “You can trust me!” but greatly more credible is his participation in whatever rituals are required by the group’s religion.

  The members of a Jewish sect in Israel known as the Haredim continue to wear the thick black coats and fur hats of their eastern European homeland. “By donning several layers of clothing and standing out in the midday desert sun,” writes the anthropologist Richard Sosis, “these men are signaling to others, ‘Hey! Look, I’m a Haredi Jew. If you are also a member of this group, you can trust me because why else would I be dressed like this? Only a lunatic would spend their afternoon doing this unless they believed in the teachings of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism and were fully committed to its ideals and goals.’”

  Because of trust among group members, not only is the problem of free riders eliminated, but members benefit from mutual help. During his study of Haredi communities, Sosis notes, he often saw Haredi travelers being offered free meals, lodging and rides by Haredi hosts who did not know them. “On several occasions I witnessed cars being loaned to complete strangers, and interviews revealed a surprising number of interest-free loans offered and accepted between people who had previously not known each other.”63

  Trust and cooperation of this strength are invaluable. It is easy to imagine that cohesiveness of this kind could make a critical difference for small groups constantly at war with one another. Irons, for one, believes that this aspect of religion has been too little appreciated by skeptics because of their focus on religious texts and beliefs rather t
han on ritual. He writes, “The theory of religion as it applies to commitment emphasizes the vital importance of religion to most human communities and the fundamental [role] that religion plays in the lives of most human beings. The theory also suggests that the core of religion is not belief (which most scientists and intellectuals are prone to criticize), but rather, for the most part, commitment to socially constructive behavior.”

  Given the costliness of religious behavior, and its salient role in determining a primitive society’s ability to deal with foes both internal and external, the forces of natural selection seem very unlikely to have ignored it. If religious behavior offered no benefit, groups that wasted time and resources this way would have been eliminated by groups that did not bear such a handicap in the struggle for survival.

  Is Religion Adaptive or Just a By-product of Evolution?

  Despite the strong likelihood that religious behavior has helped people survive, several biologists deny that it has emerged because of natural selection.

  Most of the few biologists who have written on the subject of religion seem to agree that it has an evolutionary origin. But some contend that religious behavior is merely an accidental by-product, dragged into existence in the wake of some other feature favored by natural selection. By this account, religious behavior arose as an inadvertent consequence of some other process and not because it conferred any evolutionary advantage. In other words religious behavior, in biologists’ parlance, is nonadaptive, meaning it was not favored by natural selection.

  The anthropologist Scott Atran, for example, argues that people use their theory of mind module, together with the brain’s system for detecting unseen agents, to infer the existence of supernatural agents. The agency detection system, always on the alert for potential predators, especially of the human kind, is easily triggered. “The evolutionary imperative to rapidly detect and react to rapacious agents encourages the emergence of malevolent deities in every culture, just as the countervailing evolutionary imperative to attach to caregivers favors the apparition of benevolent deities,” he writes.64