The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures

During the first few years of ScienceBlogs there was a lot of talk about religion. Yes, there's talk about religion now, but it's toned down in the wake of the ebbing of the publicity around The God Delusion. Naturally in the wake of the New Atheism a raft of conventional apologetics have been published, The Dawkins' Delusion being a typical example. More recently more nuanced books which wend the middle ground between militant atheism and conventional apologetics have taken center strage. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God approaches this from a philo-theistic angle, while Robert Wright's The Evolution of God is predicated on materialist presuppositions. Nicholas Wade's The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures is of the same genre as Robert Wright's The Evolution of God, though of its own particular flavor (see Wade's review of Wright's book). In particular, Wade admits that the The Faith Instinct fleshes out aspects of his earlier contribution, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. With his bailiwick at The New York Times in evolution and geneticsBefore the Dawn is an explicable extension of his reporting. What does religion have to do with evolution and genetics in any constructive sense (as opposed to Creationism)? In Wade's telling quite a bit. In fewer than 300 pages you are treated to a weaving together of evolution, genetics, psychology, history, philosophy and sociology. Many books on religion tend to put the lens on one particular manifestation of the phenomenon, and often treat the rest as somehow marginal or deviations from the type. In Karen Armstrong's The Case for God it seems that she considers philosophical mystics as the apotheosis of the religious. In Religion Explained and In Gods We Trust cognitive anthropologists Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran explore religious phenomenon as an outgrowth of our innate psychologies. In Darwin's CathedralDavid Sloan Wilson attempts to resurrect functionalism. Other scholars focus on the specific details of the emergence of ethical monotheism, the explosion of Islam in the world of Late Antiquity, the swelling of secularization in the our own times. There is of course so much to cover because religion is an incredibly expansive and diffuse behavioral phenomenon, which in many societies pervades nearly all of life. To approach this tractably Wade divides religion at its joints into its distinctive parts. He distinguishes between the horizontal function of religious faiths in cementing group identities and reflecting group will, as well as the individual level psychological predispositions and biases which lead many to supernatural intuitions. The former is the reality of behavior operating visibly, rituals. Rites, communal revivals, and symbolic markers. The latter is the more subtle aspect of the interface between one's inner world, one's mental representation of the universe, and the sensory cues and inputs one receives from the outside world. Many specific behaviors obviously operate at the intersection of the two categories. Early on in The Faith Instinct there is a chapter on our innate moral intuitions, what Jonathan Haidt and Marc Hauser explore in their research programs. Innate cognitive reflexes have a clear effect on our external action, and these moral reflexes seem to be genetically specified on some level. Though the relationship between religion and morality is not a necessary one, historically it has often been intimate. Wade points to how our genes shape our behaviors, and how those behaviors are integrated into the phenomenon of religion. It may not be a seamless web, but the patches of the narrative are stitched together by common threads. Moral intuitions and how they bleed into the religious domain is not a novel topic. Rather, perhaps the most original chapters in The Faith Instinct are those which focus on music and dance. The ecstatic and communal aspect of faith is one of the most salient visible manifestations, from the cult of Dionysus in the ancient world down to the circuit riders of the early 19th century Second Great Awakening. This sort of populist religion ebbs and flows, erupting onto the scene for a few decades, but eventually fading into the background. Religious professionals, from their literal ivory towers, tend to be fearful of it because of its bottom-up revolutionary power. In the United States where state religion was less of a force than elsewhere populist religion shunted elitist denominations to marginality (Congregationalism), and fostered the rise of other sects to central prominence (Methodism). Through ethnographic surveys of small-scale Wade suggests this sort of religion, in which dance and music in a collective context are the primary manifestations of worship, was the ancestral religion. The ur-religion if you will. It is notable that both music and dance are human universals, and like language there are forms of brain damage which can selectively impair one's appreciation or perception of music (and, there are forms of brain damage which can impair speech but leave singing intact!). But is this all incidental? Moral & supernatural intuitions, facility for music and dance, these things are not necessarily associated with religion as such. No, rather, it seems that Wade believes that these traits tend to be associated with religion, can be co-opted by religion, and that religion itself is a phenotype which was subject to natural selection. That is, religion is an adaptation. There is of course an alternative view, and that is that religion is a byproduct of other traits which have survival value. It is here that the cognitive anthropologists emerge, because they make a compelling case that the sub-components of religious belief, an ability to engage in abstraction, intuitions about agency and teleology, as well instincts such as a fear of death, all synthesize together to generate a strong religious intuition as a byproduct. To use an analogy, the components of a car's engine operate in sync to generate power which drives it forward, but the nature of combustion is such that heat is produced naturally out of the chemical processes. It may be that a normal and intelligent human being who is sociable and inclined toward imagination finds supernatural concepts extremely plausible, and will converge upon these concepts through group socialization even without outside indoctrination. In this telling the gods naturally emerge in the normal course of events not through any benefit to the belief in gods, but to the benefit in other instincts which make such beliefs probable. Indoctrination's role, and more generally organized religion, is to channel and constraint these beliefs and impute specific characteristics to the intuitions. Wade is having none of this. His refutation of this admittedly speculative model is rather thin, verging on incredulity and skepticism as to the motives of militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, who no doubt as an adaptationist might prefer that religion was not an outcome of the Darwinian process of selection which he has built his career around. But the primary rejoinder is an alternative mode, a speculative one in its own right, that religion is a trait which aided humans in vicious intergroup competitions in the pre-modern era. It is a vision of tribes who worship together, propitiate the gods together, and die together. Though surely religion has a role in giving one individual solace in the face of death, Wade's primary adaptive focus is on the level of the group, and the role religious activities and beliefs play in cementing bounds and coordinating collective action more coherently. In a multilevel selection framework those who were not favored by the gods of war died, while whose who held faith in their gods flourished. Here The Faith Instinct draws upon Samuel Bowles' models which combine within group altruism and between group conflict. Religion then is a trait which at the group level fosters altruism and coherency to tribes, who then go out and slaughter their enemies, who they naturally may dehumanize as followers of alien gods. It is a brutal hypothesis cloaked in the language of evolution and ethology. I think back to Matthew 10:34, where Jesus asserts, "I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword." Perhaps this was the "Prince of Peace" reverting to type? These basic units of psychology and ethology, selection operating at higher levels of organization, are scaled up then in the second half the narrative, as Wade races from the transformation of the Hebrew tribal god into the God, the rise of Christianity and Islam, and the early modern relationships between religion, state and nationalism. Some of the historical material is almost out of place in The Faith Instinct, for example the fascinating but tendentious Hagarism Hypothesis for the origin of Islam. While the traditional model is well known, a central Arabian prophet founding a new faith, and the believers crashing the gates of Persia & Byzantium and founding a new empire as well as religion. Hagarism argues that what we believe about Islam is false, that in reality the religion was constructed in the 8th century, and that the first "Muslim" century was not a Muslim one at all, but dominated by a heretical Arab Christian dynasty, the Umayyads. The evolution of Islam in the 8th century was a matter of politics, with the Arab ruling class seeking a new and distinctive religion. Though I found this interesting, I was a bit curious as to what this material had to do with the faith instinct. Additionally, though there is time to explore this obscure and provocative thesis about the origins of Islam, there very little on the religions outside of the Abrahamic tradition. This is a conventional oversight, as it disrupts the linear Western progression from tribal paganism to modern monotheism, but religion is by its nature complex and I believe that a cross-cultural survey can be very informative of both inevitabilities and contingencies as they serve as "independent experiments." As the narrative approaches its denouement you are treated to ancient customs in modern garb. Yiddish speaking Orthodox Jews do not engage in violent intergroup competition, but they look to each other's needs and live apart from the rest of society. "Cults" aroused to mass paranoia and hysteria are driven to such irrational self-sacrificing heights that they occasionally are witness to mass suicides. Mormons with high fertility rates and a strong communitarian tradition are arguably the first new world religion to emerge since Islam. The modern world is rife with illustrations of ancient dynamics. As the subtitle asserts, religion evolves, and, it endures. It is clear that Wade approaches the topic as a nonbeliever in the tenets of specific religions, but admiring of the outcomes and actions of many believers. Like David Sloan Wilson he seems to look to a future when a religion arises which is rid of its primitive legacies of Bronze Age sky gods. E. O. Wilson has also expressed a hope for this sort of evolution. Call it religion without the superstitious silliness. Wilson grew up an evangelical, and was Born Again at one point in his life, and he has claimed that even today Baptist church services can arouse his emotions and inspire awe. And at these services he knows once more that he is "among his people." Carl Sagan once spoke of a "God Shaped Hole" in our brain, but it seems rather more accurate to speak of numerous holes into which the pegs of religion pit, allowing the gods to hitchhike along where our brains lead. For the mystical there is withdrawal and communion with God, for the philosophical there are arcane texts, for the emotional there are revivals, for the bloody-minded there are subhuman unbelievers, and so forth. The psychologists who are skeptical of religion being an adaptation, such as Scott Atran, nevertheless argue that the basal intuitions make supernaturalism compelling to the human race in a way that is impossible to eliminate. I have pointed to data which shows that though organized religion has collapsed in much of Europe, the slack has been taken up more by unaffiliated theism than atheism. The star in The Faith Instinct is the horizontal and integrative dimension of religion, but it seems that in the developed world a combination of rampant pluralism as well as a general weakening of organized religions is breaking bonds which tie people together in a sacred body. Rather, it is a more atomistic faith instinct on the individual level which persists once the communal aspect is stripped away, a world of ghosts, energies and spirits. The future may be Sedona and not Ethical Culture