Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Chapter 4 Extrapolating back to human prehistory with the aid of biological thinking, we can surmise how folk religions emerged without conscious and deliberate design, just as languages emerged, by interdependent processes of biological and cultural evolution. At the root of human belief in gods lies an instinct on a hair trigger: the disposition to attribute agency—beliefs and desires and other mental states—to anything complicated that moves.

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Chapter 5 The false alarms generated by our overactive disposition to look for agents wherever the action is are the irritants around which the pearls of religion grow. Only the best, most mind-friendly variants propagate, by meeting—or seeming to meet—deep psychological and physical needs, and then these are further refined by the incessant pruning of selection processes.

CHAPTER FIVEReligion, the Early Days

1 Too many agents: competition for rehearsal space

I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound—if I can remember any of the damn things.

—Dorothy Parker

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What start as useful luxuries that give you an edge in a fast-moving world have a way of evolving into necessities. Today, we all wonder how we could live without our telephones, our driver’s licenses, our credit cards, our computers. So it once was with language, and the intentional stance. What started as a Good Trick rapidly became a practical necessity of human life, as our ancestors became more and more social, more and more linguistic. And, as already noted for the simpler case of the HADD, there is the possibility of too much of a good thing. The continued experience of the presence of departed acquaintances as ghosts is not the only overshooting of the intentional stance in the lives of our ancestors. The practice of overattributing intentions to moving things in the environment is called animism, literally giving a soul (Latin, anima) to the mover. People who lovingly cajole their cranky automobiles or curse at their computers are exhibiting fossil traces of animism. They probably don’t take their own speech acts entirely seriously, but are just indulging in something that makes them feel better. The fact that it does tend to make them feel better, and is apparently indulged in by people of every culture, suggests how deeply rooted in human biology is the urge to treat things—especially frustrating things—as agents with beliefs and desires. But if our bouts of animism today tend to be ironic and attenuated, there was a time when the desire of the river to flow to the sea, and the benign or evil intent of the rain clouds, were taken so literally and seriously that they could become a matter of life or death—for instance, to those poor souls who were sacrificed to appease the insatiable desires of the rain god.

Simple forms of what we might call practical animism are arguably not mistakes at all, but extremely useful ways of keeping track of the tendencies of designed things, living or artifactual. The gardener who tries to discover what her different flowers and vegetables prefer,

or tricks a dogwood branch into thinking it’s spring and opening its buds by bringing it indoors, where it is warm, doesn’t have to go overboard and wonder what her petunias are daydreaming about. Even undesigned physical systems can sometimes be usefully described in intentional or animistic terms: the river doesn’t literally want to return to the ocean, but water seeks its own level, as they say, and lightning searches for the best path to ground. It is not surprising that the attempt to explain patterns discerned in the world has often hit upon animism as a good—actually predictive—approximation of some unimaginably complex underlying phenomenon.