The happy harmony of science and faith is too often and too glibly proclaimed. The real picture is far more interesting: culture wars, religious fears, evangelical atheism, good and bad science, good and bad theology, art, books, cartoons, dogs and cats, and the unpredictable, inexhaustible grab-bag of life itself. S Word scrapes skepticism against authority, freedom against constraint, desire against logic. It goes wherever it likes in that shifty country where the relationship between science and religion is strained, funny, disturbing, suggestive, or just plain weird. Mission: trespass.

blogs :: S Word :: November 20, 2009

God, Unplugged

by Larry Gilman

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Did God evolve?  (Darwin in the sky with doubtings:
a combination of two public-domain images.)

An adult friend of mine entered the living room on Christmas morning and found the tree lit.  Yet there before her eyes was the plug for the light string, lying on the floor next to an empty outlet.  She looked back and forth from lights to plug, from plug to lights, no doubt with her jaw hanging down, and the thought formed:  It’s a miracle!  A Christmas miracle!

And then she saw the other plug, firmly inserted into the other outlet.  There were two strings of lights, one plugged in, the other not.  No miracle; just the power company.

Is this an image of all religion?  Is religion believable, real, or significant only as long as we think it’s not plugged in? — that is, as long as we can imagine that it doesn’t have causes, a background, a history, isn’t part of the world around it?  If someone shows us that it is plugged in, is it all over?  Plausibility zero?  Christmas miracle kaput?

An elusive grain of this kind of thinking rolls around in my own head.  It manifests as a jolt of suspicion or unease whenever I first glimpse a text that purports to reveal the “origins of religion” — to show me where my own faith is plugged in.  I am touched by a fleeting, sheepish apprehension that someone is about to explain away my favorite stuff.  Ah, but then, if their explanation is true (I sternly admonish myself), I must accept it — no compromise on intellectual honesty — so forward, dear heart, forward into the Truth, whatever awaits, etc.

There has been a spurt of publicity lately for the idea (very not new) that religion is an evolved behavior—perhaps, according to some theorists, a genetically programmed one.  I’ve seen a good survey article in Science (Elizabeth Culotta, “On the Origin of Religion,” Science 326, 6 Nov. 2009, 784–787), a column in the Washington Post by Nicholas Wade (one of the theorists mentioned in Science), and a column on Wade’s book by blogger John Tierney at the New York Times.  [Add to this list a second column on Wade’s book in the Times, Dec. 27, 2009, this one by Judith Shulevitz: here.]

As a loyal servant of Truth, I read these things. And invariably, having read, I realize that they are no big deal. They’re interesting (everything is interesting, except professional sports), but they have nothing essential to say about whether religion is crap or glory or both.

But how can it not matter whether the lights are plugged in?

First, and least importantly, because nobody really knows anything about this subject.  All agree on the bare, no-duh fact that some form of religion has apparently been universal in human societies, at least until very recently: from there, it is a short step to the notion that religion must be good for something.   If religion were a net liability, it would presumably be rare.  But it’s common, so it must be useful.  For what?  Well — social cohesion, maybe.  The tribe that prays together stays together.   But there are no hard data.  It’s all talk, all plausible speculation — a fine place for scientific ideas to begin, a lousy place for them to end.

Second, the plug is not a problem because, as the Beatles chant on Magical Mystery Tour, “everybody’s got one.” (If you want to be picky, it was chanted by the Mike Sammes Singers, whom the Beatles hired for the backup vocals.) Everything, including science, including religion, has got an historical origin — yet almost everyone seems embarrassed, even outraged by this fact, eager to rub someone else’s nose in it while denying it for themselves. Almost everyone seems to feel that if we know the “humble origins” of a thing (Darwin’s phrase), then that thing is somehow discredited, demoted.   Creationists reveal this assumption when they mock evolution for making you “a monkey’s uncle,” ha ha, or a descendant of “slime.”   Evangelical atheists expose it when they point out, as they so indefatigably do, that you are in fact a monkey’s cousin (so ha-ha to all your  stupid made-in-God’s-image stuff).   In my own case, it manifests as a flash of unease whenever someone promises to show me where my own faith is plugged in.  

But the underlying assumption that beliefs or values can be debunked by exposure of their roots (or plugs) is wrong.   It has no logic.  All systems of belief, thought, and value have humble origins.  All human behaviors are either specifically evolved (breathing, nipple-sucking) or arise as learned uses of evolved equipment (science, disco dancing, perhaps religion) or as some combination of the two (perhaps religion).  Everything we do is plugged in, connected causally to the world before us and around us via evolution and the whole history of things.  Every point of view has been conceived, gestated, and splatted out into the world in the same messy, undignified way.

Which doesn’t mean that all points of view are equally valid (they aren’t), or even that they are competing for the same kind of validity (they aren’t).  It means, ultimately, that you can’t discredit somebody’s ideas just by pointing at the outlet.  The same objection would hold against your objection, and so on, ad infinitum.

As I’ve said, however, the theories about religious origins really are interesting. According to some scientists, including Darwin (who speculated on briefly on the subject), religion arises as a side effect of normal human cognition, especially our tendency to see narratives and personal motives absolutely everywhere, particularly in childhood.  There is some evidence that children naturally prefer “creationist” or teleological explanations of phenomena, and this suggests that seeing person-like agencies (read “gods”) behind every rock and flower may go back to the earliest human thought patterns.  Maybe.

Then there is Nicholas Wade, who says he believes there is an “instinct” for religion, a tendency to make gods that is “implanted in the neural circuitry”: “When a human behavior is ancient and universal, it’s reasonable to suspect it may be part of the mind’s innate furniture, placed there by evolution because it favored survival.”

To his credit, Wade recognizes that, even if true, this does not necessarily invalidate the content of religion, does not prove that religion is not about anything.

But as a science-educated person I am struck by the feebleness of the hard evidence for such views, as for so much evolutionary psychology.  There is precious little data on causality here: no particular neural circuits to point to, no actual genes, no experiments, just the observation that religion is ubiquitous, “universal,” plus a Just-So story about how it might be universal because natural selection has wired it into our heads.

Except — DZZZZT!  Wade is wrong: religion isn’t “universal.”  The world teems with millions of perfectly sweet people who simply don’t care about religion or who have embraced outright atheism, all descended from religious ancestors.  Consider Europe: in a bio-historical strobe flash of time, while its gene pool has not changed significantly, it has gone from one of the most religious societies in the world to one of the most secular.  In Sweden, once intensely Protestant, only 23% of the populace believes in God today (compare, for the heck of it, 92% in the USA, 73% in Ireland).  Whatever our DNA has to say about God, it must be weak enough to allow such shifts, since they do occur, and rapidly at that.  Which means that it must be pretty darn weak.   There may be a neural circuit for vague piety, but there cannot be a neural circuit specific to God or the gods: atheism is just too easy.  I can’t help it — I must cling to my belief that Richard Dawkins exists!

No matter how plausible a notion is, plausibility is not enough in science. The deeply hypothetical nature of evolutionary claims about religion, whether they favor alleged neural circuits or cultural evolution based on less-specific biological substrates, must be underlined, highlighted, and sky-written.

In any case, for those who hunt God, whether to adore or kill, the trail leads elsewhere.

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As always, I will send a PDF of the Science article (not available without subscription or university-library access) to anybody who requests one: lnpgilman [ a t ] wildblue [ d o t ] net.

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