Daniel Dennett, my all-time favorite living philosopher, of whose books I’ve said that they are my bibles, talks, among many other things, about bibles in this new book. A holy book is holy for many reasons: one of them is foreclosing all rational inquiry by appealing to a status above that level, and by setting taboos against the attempt to bring it to that level (then I discovered that it was inaccurate to call an authoritative book a bible, for it is authoritative because it invites confrontation and survives it, not because it shies away from it, as a bible does). Another means of “holification” is by mystification (what dennett calls in another context eumerdification: the practice of making roughly 25% of the text be incomprehensible gibberish), which serves two purposes: one is that it inhibits paraphrasing; “I don’t know what the passage means, but it says word-for-word that…”. This improves the fidelity of the copy, because paraphrasing tends to distort the message. The other reason for mystification is that it allures the imagination with impossible paradox, too much of which would be detrimentally boring, but which is, in the right amount, thrilling.
The spell which Dennett attempts to break is the taboo against rational inquiry in religious matters. For this end he takes a candid view point: that of a martian visiting earth and wonder what that weird phenomenon we call religion is all about. How did it originate?. By contemplating the obvious truth that once upon a time there were humans without religions, one gets the sense that maybe religion isn’t as fundamental and unquestionable as it is hyped to be. At least it is not eternal (even though many religions claim to have existed since forever). The ubiquitousness of religion is compared to the ubiquitousness of the flu: not a necessary sign of its benefit to us. But then there is the memetic perspective: maybe religion is a meme, whose ubiquitousness is a sign of its benefit to itself as a meme, a cultural symbiont, which might be good, bad or neutral for us. There’s lots of talk about its benefit to us, but this hasn’t been scientifically proven actually, precisely because of the taboo against rational inquiry. The meme has many tricks, like the holy book, whose eumerdification enhances fidelity of replication (word-by-word quoting). Another trick is ritual congregation for chanting, in which the majority rule allows that even if no-one in the church know the chant, they all as a conglomeration do (if you ignore what a meme is, look it up in wikipedia).
There are lots of tricks, but these too are better understood if looked at in the light of their origin: how might religion have arised in humanity? We have clues about its evolution by comparing different kinds of religious and semi-religious activities in the many cultures alive today in the world (which, by the way are getting extinguished by the dozens daily). For religion to evolve, we first need language. Dennett deals with public religion, not private religion, which is beyond current scientific enquiry and, anyway, is not so important for the most urgent need to understand the potentially dangerous effects of religion on social life, for example in fueling wars. Once we have language, we can communicate our private hallucinations.
When a dog wakes up barking at the air in answer to the noise of a book falling to the ground, it is hallucinating. This kind of hallucination is good, because sometimes it is better to err in the side of caution by thinking that there is an enemy where there is none, instead of making the opposite mistake of a “false negative”. As we become more and more intelligent, our imagination becomes wilder, and we are mixing reality with fantasy all the time, so that we hear a voice and see a tree, so we think up, for a minute: “Wow, a talking tree”. Maybe we forget about this crazy idea, if it is implausible enough: “Wow, an invinsible banana... What? Nah...”. Maybe we can’t stop remembering this fantastical concoction: “Wow, an invisible guy who knows where i can find the only available food and is trying to whisper its location to me”.
This latter type of fantastical being is more difficult to forget because it has strategic information. And it is a believable agent, because most humans have had the experience of just such a kind of agent in their lives: parents. Parents are people that always are trying to help us, in ways that we ourselves didn’t even understand at the moment, when we were children. So it comes naturally to think up a paternal character who wants to help us. And it is natural to think of it as an ancestor: elders are wiser (have the most strategic, useful, relevant information), and most indigenous cultures talk of their gods as ancestors. So this is how the idea of a kind of supernatural character gets established in a private mind.
Then there is shamanism, the practice of healing accompanied by the idea of a supernatural character that is helping in the healing, thanks to its invocation by the healing shaman. At this point we have a potential benefit accrued by the belief in a supernatural agent (the mere fact that it comes naturally to think of it, and remember it, is neutral). By believing that the supernatural agent is helping, the sick patient worries less, and this helps the immune system fight against the disease, and this helps the shaman heal the patient. Something similar might happen in decision-taking. If you are a bunch of indigenous people trying to decide where to cultivate the only seeds left for food in the next year, even if you know the answer (after all, you have done this for a living all your life), the decision might not come, because of the stress associated with a possible failure of judgement, so you make some weird rite through which you ask the gods for guidance, and through divination you seek the answer within yourself, assured by the thought that if you fail, it’ll be the will of the gods, not yours. This might also bring a benefit of believing in gods. And this is not just a curious possibility: it is essential for a theory that wants to explain why religions exist. Religions are weird, expensive traits of human culture, so, by evolutionary reasoning, we should assume that they exist for a reason, and this reason is that the religion has some benefit. In this case, we see how the benefit might be a benefit for us humans. But the benefit might be for the religion itself, regardless, or even maybe in spite of, our human benefit.
One aspect of religions that benefits both humans and religions themselves as memes, is their requirement of gregarious behaviours. From rites and shamanism in tribes, we get cults and religions in big kingdoms, empires and states through a process of stewardship. When we became stewards of aurochs and wolves, we artificially selected them (without anyone knowing it), to obtain cows and dogs. That’s also what happenned when rites that coexisted with us (because they were neutral or beneficial), became religions that we helped shape for our own purposes, to such a point that now we apparently depend on them, much as we depend on cows and dogs. Some people say, after Nietzsche, that religion is a conspiracy of the elite to rule over the people, and some people say that religion exists because it helps build group cohesion. Dennett says there might be some truth to both claims, but the benefit may not just be some individuals or the groups of individuals, but the religions themselves as memes. This memetic fitness comes naturally in big societies with hierarchichal organization, where there are priests who channel the religious teachings to the masses and big gatherings that help the religious memes improve their fitness. It’s not that religions depend on group cohesion directly, but that coherent groups spread ideas better and have mechanisms to normalize and perpetuate them, for instance by means of the computational trick called “majority rule”, or “von Neumann multiplexing”, in which many modules make the same task, and some of them deviate from the right result, while the majority yield the right result, so the errors cancel out. This happens in unison chanting in church congregations, in which no single person needs to know the chant, but they all collectively get the chant right. Or for instance, when the collective group establishes prizes for participation and punishments for non-participation in religious activities.
Does god exist? Not for Dennett, nor for me. I ascribe to his account given in an earlier book:
“The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm’s “Being greater than which nothing can be conceived” it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. The world is sacred”.
Most of the people who say they believe, only believe in belief, without actually believing, that is, they think believing is good, but don’t commit to the most extreme logical extensions of believing. They don’t give their life for a god or follow strictly the moral views of their scriptures. For example, many christians don’t believe the Adam & Eve story of the creation is true, but do believe that bible-believers are better people than atheists. This is, they profess belief, without actually translating this to their behaviour and actions. This is important for the distinction between religious faith and scientific faith: when we say that Einstein’s relativity theory is true, we don’t need to understand it in order to know for sure that it is true, but this is different from religion. For instance, you can build something that depends for its safe operation on the truth of that theory and risk your life trying to fly it to the moon, whereas only crazy people give away all their belongings and climb to some mountain top in anticipation of the imminent End of the World because of their faith.
When people think of a spiritual person they naturally think of a good person, while they consider non-spiritual people to be less good. This is obviously false, since there are many evil spiritists and kind atheists. This moral prejudice is what accounts for the fact that there are no important atheist politicians (it is also prejudice that forbids relative political representation from women, racial minorities and homosexuals). Just as the increase in acceptance of homosexuals has been coupled to the establishment of euphemisms for referring to them (as gays, which means literally “happy”) and also to heterosexuals (as straigths, which mean literally “correct”), so, Dennett proposes euphemisms for atheists, agnostics and in general non-believers (as brights, which means “illuminated”, because not only believers can be illuminated) and for believers (as supers, which is an up word with positive connotations and refers to the fact that they believe in the supernatural). And he invites brights to come out of the closet. If Dennett’s hypothesis that most people in the world are enlisted in a conspiracy of silence because they think religion in general, or their religion in particular is a delusion, but fear the social ostracism of confessing this belief, if this is true, it would be really a shame. And this hypothesis can be studied. Dennett predicts that there would be a statistical difference in the amount of people who answer yes/no/don’t know to the question, Does god exist? vs. the question, Do you believe in god?
Is religion good? Religion is like romantic love: it gets people to think it honorable to take offense at skepticism and attack it fiercely. Their beloved deserves nothing less than this, they think: a total commitment to eradicating the blasphemous apostate. That’s the reasoning behind religious wars. Christians abuse those who question their love for their jesus, but this actually dishonors their faith. Destroying other people’s sacred places brings shame to a people defending their religion. This is a bad aspect of religion, but is religion good also? And if so, do its benefits outweigh its evils? Religion might make us better in the effective sense, and/or in the moral sense. In the effective sense, it might improve health or psychological wellbeing. This is what religions advertise that they do, but this hasn’t been scientifically researched. Statistics show that regular churchgoers have longer lives and are less likely to have heart attacks. Recent researched has investigated, for example, the effects of intercessory prayer, praying with the real hope and real intent that God would step in and act for the good of some specific other person(s) or other entity. Recently, a famous journal of medicine research showed positive results with intercessory prayer, but the research turned out to be a fraud. If the research ultimately turns out to give a definitively negative result, religious people should drop the advertising, and acknowledge this shortcoming. Why? Because their true concern might be the health of the people, and if efforts are better guided to heal them instead of just praying, they will have helped more. Some religious practices could be bad for us in the efficient sense: prolonged exposure to the fumes of incense and burning candles may have some detrimental health effect, concluded one recent study. Of course, improving the morale and giving meaning to the lives of people, are subtle benefits that have not yet been evaluated, and there may be many still unidentified.
But is religion good in the moral sense? We don’t know, and the break which Dennett talks about breaking in the title is the spell of the taboo: we don’t know because it has been considered a taboo to know facts about religion, but it is very important to know them, for the good of mankind. We shouldn’t just assume that religion is good, we need to prove it, or disprove it, scientifically. And the answer may not be so obvious. There is still no convincing evidence to support the claim that people, religious or not, who don’t believe in reward in heaven and/or punishment in hell are more likely to kill, rape, rob, or break their promises than people who do. The available evidence to date supports the hypothesis that brights have the lowest divorce rate in the
A swimming pool is what is known in the law as an attractive nuisance. People who maintain on their property a dangerous condition that is likely to attract children are under duty to post a warning or to take stronger affirmative action to protect children from the dangers of that attraction. It is an exception to the general rule that no particular care is required of property owners to safeguard trespassers from harm. Property owners are held responsible for harms that result when they maintain something that can lure innocent people into harm. Religion is also an attractive nuisance. When a violent fanatic with political agendas uses a religious cloak of respectability to murder, then those who believe in and defend that religion are responsible too, for maintaing its tradition of unquestioning loyalty. Religious terrorism is still religion’s responsibility. Ecumenicists and moderates in all religions, by their good works provide protective coloration for their fanatical coreligionists, who quietly condemn their open-mindedness and willingness to change while reaping the benefits of the good public relations they thereby obtain. The moderates in all religions are being used by the fanatics, and should not only resent this; they should take whatever steps they can find to curtail it in their own tradition.
Education is the key to what we should do about religion. And the first and most fundamental step in this direction is that it should be as mandatory as it is to learn math and biology, to learn facts about the main religions of the world, since childhood. In the sixteenth century germs brought by europeans killed 90% of the amerindians; in this century it will be our memes, both tonic and toxic, that will wreak havoc on the unprepared world. A religion that needs to keep a child ignorant of the truth about religions in the world, ought to go extinct. We should understand religion, and to understand religion, we don’t need to believe in a religious faith. In the end, Dennett’s central policy recommendation is that we gently, firmly educate the people in the world, so that they can make truly informed choices about their lives. Ignorance is nothing shameful; imposing ignorance is shameful.
