The Faith Instinct

by Wade, Nicholas

  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.

  NOTES

  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.Here are lists of universal religious behaviors compiled by two anthropologists:Religious or supernatural beliefs

  Conflicts structured around in-group/ out-group antagonisms

  Divination

  Rituals including rites of passage

  Dream interpretation

  Dance and music

  Taboos on certain utterances and foods. (Donald E. Brown, Human Universals [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991],139-40).

  Afterlife

  Beings with special powers

  Signs and portents

  Spirit possession

  Rituals

  The Sacred

  Deference

  Moral obligation

  Punishment and reward.

  (Harvey Whitehouse in The Evolution of Religion, ed. Joseph Bulbulia et al. [Santa Margarita, California: Collins Foundation Press, 2008], 32).

  Following are some statements from various authorities about the universal aspects of religious behavior:

  “The psychological foundation [of religion] is universal among human populations but very flexible. It consists of elements of the human mind which make it easy to learn the local religion and other local commitment devices and signals.” (William Irons in Bulbulia, ed., Evolution of Religion, 55).

  “Throughout the world the developmental
period deemed most appropriate for ‘learning religion’ is adolescence. Adolescent rites of passage are found in 70% of the world’s societies ... all share a common structure, and all include music as a common element.” (Candace S. Alcorta in ibid., 265).

  “In all human cultures, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that ritual can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by a variety of invisible personlike entities.” (Steven Pinker in Where God and Science Meet, ed. PatrickMcNamara [Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2006], 1).

  “The rituals that accompany all religions almost always include music and other sorts of voluntary rhythmic stimulations.... Prayers in all religions involve the same gestures of submission: outstretched arms with chest exposed and throat bared, genuflection, prostration and so on.” (Scott Atran in ibid., vol. 1,183).

  “These three structural features of religion—belief in supernatural agents, music-based communal ritual, and the emotional significance of the sacred—are elements common to all religions.” (Candace S. Alcortain ibid., vol. 2, 63).

  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.

  57 Harvey Whitehouse, “Cognitive Evolution and Religion; Cognition and Religious Evolution,” in The Evolution of Religion, ed. Joseph Bulbulia et al. (Santa Margarita, California: Collins Foundation Press, 2008), 31.

  58 Jesse M. Bering and Dominic D. P. Johnson, “O Lord ... You Perceive My Thoughts from Afar: Recursiveness and the Evolution of Supernatural Agency,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 5.1—2(2005): 118—42.

  59 Psalm 139:1-2, 23-24.

  60 Laurence R.Iannaccone, “Why Strict Churches Are Strong,” AmericanjournalofSociology 99 (1994): 1180—1211.

  61 Ibid., 1204.

  62 William Irons, “Religion as a Hard-to-FakeSign of Commitment,” in Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, ed. Randolph M. Nesse (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 293.

  63 RichardSosis, “Religious Behaviors, Badges, and Bans: SignalingTheory and the Evolution of Religion,” in McNamara, ed., Where God and Science Meet, vol. 1 (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2006), 61—86.

  64 Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 267.

  65 Pascal Boyer, “Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-products of Brain Function,” Trends in Cognitive Neuroscience 7 (2003): 119-24.

  66 Steven Pinker, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion,” in McNamara, ed., Where God and Science Meet, vol.1,1-9.

  67 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 161-207.

  68 Darwin, Autobiography, 135.

  69 David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology,” Quarterly Review of Biology 82 (2007): 327-48.

  70 Dan Levin, “A Display of Disapproval That Turned Menacing,” New York Times, December 16, 2007, 49.

  71 Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions and Evolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 467.

  72 Samuel Bowles, “Group Competition, Reproductive Leveling, and the Evolution of Human Altruism,” Science 314 (2006): 1569-72.

  73 David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). The theory is presented in summary form in Table 2-2 on p. 51.

  74 David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone (New York: Delacorte Press, 2007), 256.

  75 Owen Chadwick, A History of Christianity (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 1998), 219.

  76 William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2.

  77 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 251 52.

  78 Bruno Nettl, “An Ethnomusicologist Contemplates Universals in Musical Sound and Musical Culture,” in The Origins of Music, ed. Nils L. Wallin et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 466.

  79 Amy Waldman, “Word for Word/Taboo Heaven,” New York Times, December 2, 2001.

  80 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1898), 582.

  81 Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets (New York: Holt, 2007), 15.

  82 Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York: Collier, 1909), 475.

  83 Darwin, Descent of Man, 585.

  84 Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 534.

  85 Sandra Trehub, “The Developmental Origins of Musicality,” Nature Neuroscience 6 (2003) 669—73.

  86 Geoffrey Miller, “Evolution of Human Music Through Sexual Selection,” in Wallin, et al., eds., Origins of Music, 331.

  87 Ibid., 351.

  88 W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Biology and Evolution of Music: A Comparative Approach,” Cognition 100 (2006): 173-215.

  89 Rodney Needham, “Percussion and Transition,” Man 2 (1967): 606—14, , reprinted in Reader in Comparative Religion, 4th ed., edited by William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt (New York: HarperCollins, 1979), 311-17.

  90 Lorna J. Marshall, Nyae Nyae !Kung Beliefs and Rites, Peabody Museum Monographs No. 8 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 79.

  91 Darwin, Descent of Man, 585.

  92 The point is made in Fitch, “Biology and Evolution of Music,” 198.

  93 This suggestion has been advanced by the paleoanthropologist Richard Klein, who argues that some kind of “neurological change” gave behaviorally modern humans an adaptive advantage over the Neanderthals and others; see Richard G. Klein, The Human Career, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 452.

  94 Erika Bourguignon, “Possession and Trance,” in Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, ed. Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember (Philadelphia: Springer, 2004), 137-45.

  95 Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 14.

  96 Ibid., 175.

  97 Mickey Hart, Drumming at the
Edge of Magic (New York: HarperCollins, 1990),176.

  98 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937),162.

  99 McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, 42.

  100 William J. Broad, The Oracle (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 173.

  101 Rick Doblin, “Pahnke’s ’Good Friday Experiment’: A Long-Term Follow-Up and Methodological Critique,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 23 (1) (1991): 1-28.

  102 David E. Nichols and Benjamin R. Chemel, “The Neuropharmacology of Religious Experience: Hallucinogens and the Experience of the Divine,” in Where God and Science Meet, vol. 3, ed. Patrick McNamara (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2006), 1—33.

  103 Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1992), 39.

  104 Lars Fogelin, “The Archaeology of Religious Ritual,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007): 55—71.

  105 Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 67-69.

  106 Lorna J. Marshall, Nyae Nyae !Kung Beliefs and Rites, Peabody Museum Monographs No. 8 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 63-90.

  107 Megan Biesele, “Religion and Folklore,” in The Bushmen: San Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa, ed. Phillip V. Tobias and Megan Biesele (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1978); quoted in Yosef Garfinkel, Dancing at the Dawn of Agriculture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 69.

  108 Wade, Before the Dawn, 87.

  109 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 250.

  110 Ibid., 253.

  111 Ibid., 328.

  112 Georgi Hudjashov et al., “Revealing the Prehistoric Settlement of Australia by Y Chromosome and mtDNA Analysis,” Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (2007): 8726-30.

  113 Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (New York: Dover, 1968 [originally published 1899]), 272.

  114 Ibid., 271.

  115 Ibid., 321.