It‘s a bedrock idea of modern physics that, even if you define “ultimate reality” as the ultimate scientific reality-the most fundamental truths of physics- ultimate reality isn’t something you can clearly conceive.
Think of an electron, a little particle that spins around another little particle. Wrong! True, physicists sometimes find it useful to think of electrons as particles, but sometimes it’s more useful to think of them as waves. Conceiving of them as either is incomplete, yet conceiving of them as both is...well, inconceivable. (Try it!) And electrons are just the tip of the iceberg. In general, the quantum world-the world of subatomic reality-behaves in ways that don’t make sense to minds like ours. Various aspects of quantum physics evince the property that the late physicist Heinz Pagels called quantum weirdness. The bad news for the religiously inclined, then, is that maybe they should abandon hope of figuring out what God is. (If we can’t conceive of an electron accurately, what are our chances of getting God right?) The good news is that the hopelessness of figuring out exactly what something is doesn’t mean it doesn‘t exist. Apparently some things are just inconceivable-and yet are things nonetheless.
At least, some physicists believe electrons are things. The fact that nobody’s actually seen an electron, and that trying to imagine one ties our minds in knots, has led some physicists and philosophers of science to wonder whether it’s even accurate to say that electrons do exist. You could say that with electrons, as with God, there are believers and there are skeptics.
The believers believe there’s something out there-some “thing” in some sense of the word “thing”-that corresponds to the word “electron”; and that, though the best we can do is conceive of this “thing” imperfectly, even misleadingly, conceiving of it that way makes more sense than not conceiving of it at all. They believe in electrons while professing their inability to really “know” what an electron is. You might say they believe in electrons even while lacking proof that electrons per se exist.
Many of these physicists, while holding that imperfectly conceiving subatomic reality is a valid form of knowledge, wouldn’t approve if you tried to perform a similar maneuver in a theological context. If you said you believe in God, even while acknowledging that you have no clear idea what God is-and that you can‘t even really prove God per se exists-they would say your belief has no foundation.
Yet what exactly is the difference between the logic of their belief in electrons and the logic of a belief in God? They perceive patterns in the physical world-such as the behavior of electricity --and posit a source of these patterns and call that source the “electron." A believer in God perceives patterns in the moral world (or, at least. moral patterns in the physical world) and posits a source of these patterns and calls the source "God." “God” is that unknown thing that is the source of the moral order, the reason there is a moral dimension to life on Earth and a moral direction to time on Earth: “God“ is responsible for the fact that life is sentient, capable of good and had feelings, and hence morally significant; “God" is responsible for the evolutionary system that placed highly sentient life on a trajectory toward the good. or at least toward tests that uttered the opportunity and incentive to realize the good: in the process “God" gave each of us a moral axis around which to organize our lives, should we choose to. Being human, we will always conceive of the source of this moral order in misleadingly crude ways, but then again you could say the same thing about conceiving electrons. So you‘ll do with the source of the moral order what physicists do with a subatomic source of the physical order, such as an electron-try to think about it the best you can, and fail. This. at least, is one modern, scientifically informed argument that could be deployed by the believer in God.
The Atheist Strikes Back
There are plausible rejoinders that an atheist scientist who believes in electrons could make, because there are places where the analogy between God and an electron breaks down. In particular, the scientist could say, “But something like an electron is necessary to explain patterns we see in the physical world. In contrast, something like God isn’t necessary to explain the moral order of the universe.”
It’s a good point. This book’s account of the moral direction of history has been a materialist account. We’ve explained the expansion of the moral imagination as an outgrowth of expanding social organization, which is itself an outgrowth of technological evolution, which itself grows naturally out of the human brain, which itself grew naturally out of the primordial ooze via biological evolution. There’s no mystical force that has to enter the system to explain this, and there’s no need to look for one.
Indeed, when the religious believer talks about the “source” of the moral order. the scientist could reply that the source of the moral order is. . . the electron- or, strictly speaking, other subatomic particles that are more fundamental than the electron.
After all, the primordial ooze ultimately consisted of subatomic particles; if the expansion of the moral imagination can be explained in materialist terms. then its deepest explanation is the deepest explanation for the material world in general-the grand unified theory that physicists have been looking for. So why start talking about God?
The believer has a reply, and it takes us back to chapter 18. There we saw something that modern biologists and the nineteenth-century Christian theologian William Paley agree on: the existence of animals-compared to, say, the existence of rocks-demands a special kind of explanation. And the reason isn’t that the creation of an animal can’t be explained in material terms; indeed, with growing success scientists understand how an animal’s intricately integrated functionality (organs of digestion, of perception, and so on) grows from a fertilized egg via explicable physical processes. Rather, the idea is that this emphatically material process-the emergence of integrated functionality via biological maturation seems like the kind of physical system that wouldn’t “just happen”; it must be the result of a creative process that imbues things with functionality-either a designer (such as a god, as Rev. Paley argued) or a “designer” (such as natural selection, as Darwin later argued).
Turns out it was the latter-a “designing” process, not a designing god. But, however big a setback that fact is for Rev. Paley’s religious beliefs, there is a moral to this story that modern believers will want to emphasize: biologists agree that a strictly physical system or process whose workings can be wholly explained in mate~ rial terms-can have such extraordinary characteristics that it is fair to posit some special creative force as its source and ask about the nature of that force. Darwin inquired into the creative force behind plants and animals, and his answer was evolution. Surely the believer is entitled to ask the same question about evolution: Where did the amazing algorithm of natural selection come from?
Such a believer, by the way, would not here be making an argument for “intelligent design,” the idea that natural selection isn’t adequate to account for human evolution. On the contrary, the idea here is that natural selection is such a powerful mechanism that its origin demands a special explanation; that evolution by natural selection has patterns and properties every bit as extraordinary as an animal‘s maturation toward functional integration.
We spelled out some of those patterns in chapter 18: as natural selection ground along, creating more and more intelligent forms of life, it eventually created a form of life so intelligent as to give birth to a second creative process, cultural evolution; and as cultural (especially technological) evolution proceeded, the human species exhibited larger and larger expanses of social organization, and eventually this expanse approached global proportions; and in the process there appeared a moral order, linkage between the growth of social organization and progress toward moral truth. This moral order, to the believer, is among the grounds for suspecting that the system of evolution by natural selection itself demands a special creative explanation.
This suspicion may be wrong, but the argument behind it is intelligible and legitimate-parallel in structure to the argument that, before Darwin, provided motivation to search for the theory of natural selection. And if the believer, having concluded that the moral order suggests the existence of some as-yet-unknown source of creativity that set natural selection in motion, decides to call that source “God,” well, that’s the believer’s business. After all, physicists got to choose the word “electron.”
Of course, you could ask why the believer is entitled to suspect a creative source as exotic-sounding as a “god,” when the creative source of organic life turned out to be a mere mechanical process known as natural selection. To which the believer might reply that a physical system exhibiting moral order demands a more exotic explanation than a physical system exhibiting only a more mundane form of order.
Even if the atheist scientist found this argument persuasive, the believer would still have some work to do. For there’s a formidable argument the scientist could make against the whole idea of comparing the conjectured existence of God to the conjectured existence of the electron.... Granted we believe in the existence of the electron even though our attempts thus far to conceive of it have been imperfect at best. Still there's a sense in which our imperfect conceptions of the electron have worked. We manipulate physical reality on the assumption that electrons exist as we imperfectly conceive them and - voila- we get the personal computer.
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To answer this question (how did religion get built from the ground up) we have to view cultural evolution at a tine-grained level. We have to think about individual units of culture--beliefs and practices, in this case-and how they spread. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” for units of culture, in part because it sounds a bit like “gene,” and he wanted to stress some parallels between cultural and biological evolution. For example: just as genes are transmitted from body to body, down the generations, memes are transmitted from mind to mind. And just as newly minted genes “compete” for a place in the gene pool, newly minted memes “compete” for the finite space in the world’s supply of human brains. In this constant struggle of meme against meme, what kinds of memes will have a “selective advantage”? Newspapers are a good place to look for clues. Newspaper editors work hard to figure out what kinds of information people want. and to fill that demand. They are accomplished meme engineers, and thus students of human nature. One thing you’ll notice about newspapers is that they have a bias toward good things and bad things. The headlines “Stock market rises by 5 percent“ and “Stock market drops by 5 percent” will get better play than the headline “Stock market does nothing in particular.” Here religions, and certainly “primitive” religions, are like newspapers. In every hunter-gatherer society. Religion is devoted largely to explaining why bad things happen and why good things happen- illness, recovery; famine. abundance: and so on.
There is also devotion to raising the ratio of good to had. The Andaman Islanders, convinced that whistling at night attracts bad spirits whereas singing repels them, do more singing in the dark than whistling in the dark. People naturally try to exert control over their environment, and believing that they have such control naturally makes them feel good. So people’s minds are open to ideas that promise to give them such control. This doesn’t mean people uncritically embrace every such idea that comes their way. But it does mean that these ideas get their attention-and for a meme, that’s the first step toward acceptance. While the Andaman Island meme asserting that thunderstorms are divine punishment for melting beeswax was hardly guaranteed a place in the society’s religion, it had a big head start over memes saying, “Thunderstorms just happen-there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Another thing you’ll notice in newspapers is that the strange and novel wins out over the ordinary and expected. Tuberculosis and the West Nile virus are both bad news, and in terms of the number of people killed, tuberculosis is the worse of the two. Yet the headline “Outbreak of deadly new virus puzzles experts” easily crowds out “Usual number of people expected to die of tuberculosis this year” (except, perhaps, in the humor magazine The Onion, which earns its laughs by violating this pattern). As journalism sages famously put it: “Dog bites man” is not a story; “Man bites dog" is a story.6
It makes sense that human brains would naturally seize on strange, surprising things, since the predictable things have already been absorbed into the expectations that guide them through the world; news of the strange and surprising may signal that some amendment of our expectations is warranted. But one property of strange surprising claims is that the're often untrue. So if they get preferred access to our brains, that gives falsehood a kind of advantage-if a fleeting advantage over truth. In the days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. one widely circulated story was that a man at the top of one of the twin towers had survived by sliding down the rubble as it formed. It was a story so incredible that it virtually compelled you to click the “forward” icon on your e-mail-and a story so incredible that it wasn’t true. It was an example of the famous dictum that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.
Of course, in the long run, the truth often does get its boots on, and people often welcome it upon its arrival. Indeed, if the attraction to surprising news weren’t balanced by an attraction to claims that survive subsequent scrutiny, the average human ancestor wouldn’t have lived long enough to become a human ancestor. Imagine a local sage, 200,000 years ago, saying that eating a certain berry will let you live forever. Now imagine that the first two people who follow his advice drop dead. Genes that counseled continued faith in advice thus besieged by countervailing evidence would not long remain a part of the species, whereas genes that inclined the brain to take account of such evidence might. This natural human respect for evidence is the reason convincing someone that one plus one equals three, or that water flows uphill, takes real work.
But some kinds of beliefs are harder to test than those two. And hard-to-test beliefs could do well in the process of cultural evolution that gave birth to religion. Indeed, hunter-gatherer religious belief-like religious belief generally-consists largely of claims that resist falsification. The Haida, a people indigenous to the northwest coast of North America, when caught in a storm while out at sea, would try to appease the relevant authorities (killer whale deities) by pouring a cup of fresh water into the sea or putting some tobacco or deer tallow on the end of a paddle. Many people no doubt returned from sea to report that these measures had kept them from drowning. No one, presumably, ever reported that they had taken these measures but drowned anyway.
To be sure, some religious beliefs can be put to a clearer test.
If the Andaman Islanders were right, and melting beeswax was a leading cause of thunderstorms, then a melting moratorium should cut down on thunderstorms. But how can you be sure that, in the days preceding a thunderstorm, no one in your village melted a smidgen of wax -or engaged in some other thunder-inducing activity. such as making a loud noise while the cicadas were singing?
Such loopholes are found in modern religions, too. If you pray for someone to recover from illness, and they don’t, then prayer would seem to have lost credibility. But religions usually have ways of explaining such failure. Maybe you or the sick person had done something horribly wrong, and this is God’s punishment. Or maybe God just works in mysterious ways.
So far, then, we would expect the following kinds of memes to be survivors in the dog-eat-dog world of cultural evolution: claims that (a) are somewhat strange, surprising, counterintuitive; (b) illuminate sources of fortune and misfortune; (c) give people a sense that they can influence these sources; (d) are by their nature hard to test decisively. In this light, the birth of religion doesn’t seem so mysterious.
But doesn’t our attraction to strangeness have its limits? It’s one thing to believe that a man could survive a slide down a crumpling skyscraper through a series of lucky breaks. It’s quite another to believe, with the Inuit (in chapter I), that a sudden shortage of game is the work of a pouty female deity who lives at the bottom of the sea. In other words, “Man bites dog,” however unlikely, seems more plausible than “God bites man.”
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