Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Both Boyer and Atran present the work of a small but growing community of researchers in relatively accessible terms.³ Their central thesis is that in order to explain the hold that various religious ideas and practices have on people, we need to understand the evolution of the human mind. For many centuries, most philosophers and theologians contended that the human mind (or soul) was an immaterial, incorporeal thing, what René Descartes called a rescogitans (thinking thing). It was in some sense infinite, immortal, and utterly inexplicable by material means. We now understand that the mind is not, as Descartes confusedly supposed, in communication with the brain in some miraculous way; it is the brain, or, more specifically, a system or organization within the brain that has evolved in much the way our immune system or respiratory system or digestive system has evolved. Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection. Driven by the demands of a dangerous world, it is deeply biased in favor of noticing the things that mattered most to the reproductive success of our ancestors.

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Some of the features of our minds are endowments we share with much simpler creatures, and others are specific to our lineage, and hence much more recently evolved. These features sometimes overshoot, sometimes have curious by-products, sometimes are ripe for exploitation by other replicators. Of all the quirky effects generated by the whole bag of tricks—our set of “gadgets,” as Boyer calls them—a few happen to interact with one another in mutually reinforcing ways, creating patterns observable in all cultures, with interesting variations. Some of these patterns look rather like religions, or pseudo-religions, or proto-religions. The by-products of the various gadgets are what Boyer calls concepts:

Some concepts happen to connect with inference systems in the brain in a way that makes recall and communication easy. Some concepts happen to trigger our emotional programs in particular ways. Some concepts happen to connect to our social mind. Some of them are represented in such a way that they soon become plausible and direct behavior. The ones that do all this are the religious ones we actually observe in human societies. [p. 50]

Boyer lists more than half a dozen distinct cognitive systems that feed effects into this recipe for religion—an agent-detector, a memory-manager, a cheater-detector, a moral-intuition-generator, a sweet tooth for stories and storytelling, various alarm systems, and what I call the intentional stance. Any mind with this particular set of thinking tools and biases is bound to harbor something like a religion sooner or later, he claims. Atran and others offer largely concurring accounts, and the details are well worth exploring, but I am just going to sketch some of the big picture so that we can see the overall shape of the theory, not (yet) assess it for truth. It will take decades of research to secure any of this theory, but right now we can get a sense of what the possibilities are, and hence what questions we ought to be trying to answer.

3 How Nature deals with the problem of other minds

We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.

—David Hume, The Natural History of Religion

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“I saw you take his kiss!” “’Tis true”

“Oh Modesty!” “’Twas strictly kept:

He thought me asleep; at least I knew

He thought I thought he thought I slept”

—Coventry Patmore, “The Kiss”

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