Six Impossible Things: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief by Lewis Wolpert (Faber)
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett (Allen Lane)
These are hard times for those who question mainstream religion. We live in a world inflamed by the godly, from rabble-rousing Christian fundamentalists to Muslim fanatics. In the 1960s and 1970s, doubters may have run the show, but today the God squad rules. Only the foolhardy risk its wrath.
Hence the surprise at the appearance of books published by two non-believing intellectuals. Both look at religion as if it were a small, unpleasant growth: not an approach likely to win many Vatican medals.
”By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse,” admits Daniel Dennett, a philosopher. ”Yet I persist. Why? Because I believe it is very important to look at the question: Are people right that the best way to live a good life is through religion?”
Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist, is more outspoken. ”I know of no good evidence for the existence of God,” he writes. ”I am an atheist reductionist materialist.” (Yes, but which kind, I wondered, recalling an old joke: a Protestant atheist reductionist materialist or a Catholic atheist reductionist materialist?)
Not that committed Jews, Muslims or Christians will have much truck with Dennett or Wolpert. Only believers can understand religion, they argue, a pre-emptive disqualification summed up by Emil Durkheim: ”He who does not bring to the study of religion a sort of religious sentiment cannot speak about it!”
This, as the authors point out, is nonsense and deservedly gets short shrift from both.
What new insights can Dennett and Wolpert bring to the understanding of belief in God by looking at it as if from an evolutionary perspective?
For Wolpert, the line is direct and simple. Religion is a by-product of the mental changes our species went through as we evolved. It has much to do with our urge to seek explanations.
”An inability to find causes for important events and situations leads to mental discomfort so there is a strong tendency to make up a causal story,” he says.
Deities were, therefore, invoked to fill in gaps in our knowledge, to explain thunderstorms to a species with a need to understand the natural world. Belief can be seen as a form of mental protection against the intolerable reality of not knowing.
But why did religious ideas stick so persistently, in the face of more convincing explanations? That is a trickier issue. Here, Dennett has an answer, of sorts. He invokes the idea of memes. Memes are persistent, convincing ideas that have the ability to evolve and pass from one individual to another, through generations. ”It is not surprising religion survives,” says Dennett. ”It has been pruned and revised so it has features that appeal to people.”
Thus, God is no longer invoked to explain thunderstorms or comets but to explain our existence and the creation of the universe.
There has to be more to religion than evolutionary opportunism. Consider the Bible. This is really a lifestyle guide for surviving thousands of years ago. It condones slavery (Leviticus), exonerates murder for not observing the Sabbath (Exodus), and reviles those with eye defects (again Leviticus). Nevertheless, hundreds of millions of decent, law-abiding, not to mention short-sighted, people claim every word in it is true.
Both authors are careful to paper over such cracks in their arguments and have packed their books with a mass of intriguing detail.
However, neither author really pins down the beast, which is scarcely surprising given its intractable, amorphous nature.
We doubters can live with that. Most religions look the same to us — only the holidays are different. But what is not really tackled by either author is the fact that a belief in the existence of deities invariably comes with an intense urge to shove that conviction down everyone else’s throats and to proselytise.
This can lead to tensions. A point succinctly made by Katharine Whitehorn, the former Observer columnist. As she once wrote: ”Why do born-again people so often make you wish they’d never been born the first time?” But then, some religious questions can never be answered. — Â