The last of God

 By R Wright

Back into Time 

That religious ideas naturally appeal to the human mind doesn’t, by itself, explain how religion got off the ground. Granted that religious “memes” have a “selective advantage” in cultural evolution, how exactly would a given meme—a particular religious belief — first take shape and gain momentum? We’ll never know for sure, but human nature makes it easy to sketch a plausible scenario. 

First, people like to command attention, and one way to do that is to place yourself at the center of dramatic events. In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer runs away with his friends Huckleberry Finn and Joe to play pirates on the Mississippi River, and the townspeople conclude that the boys have drowned. Twain describes their friends gathering and talking in reverent tones of how Tom did so-and-so, the last time they saw him, and how Joe said this and that small trifle (pregnant with awful prophecy, as they could easily see now!) —and each speaker pointed out the exact spot where the lost lads Stood at the time, and then added something like ‘“‘and I was astanding just so—just as I am now, and as if you was him—I was as close as that—and he smiled, just this way—and then something seemed to go all over me, like—awful, you know —and I never thought what it meant, of course, but I can see now!” 

Then there was a dispute about who saw the dead boys last in life, and many claimed that dismal distinction, and offered evidences, more or less tampered with by the witness; and when it was ultimately decided who did see the departed last, and exchanged the last words with them, the lucky parties took upon themselves a sort of sacred importance, and were gaped at and envied by all the rest.?? 

There is no reason to think that this incentive to claim special witness to high drama was any less powerful among hunter-gatherers circa 30,000 BCE than among midwestern Americans circa 1900 CE. Imagine that you are one of those hunter-gatherers and you walk past a place where someone died mysteriously, and you hear leaves rustle eerily. That’s a story that will get people’s attention, and you can heighten the attention by stressing how exquisitely timed the rustling was. And, by the way, didn’t you catch sight of a shadowy — almost ethereal —creature out of the corner of your eye? 

The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie has suggested that huntergatherers would be encouraged to make just such false sightings by standard human mental equipment — something called a “hyperactive agent-detection device.” Because the costs of failing to detect a predator lurking in the woods are much higher than the costs of detecting one that isn’t there, natural selection, he plausibly argues, may have biased our brains toward “false positives”: you hear a rustling, your mind flashes the vivid hypothesis of some generic animal that’s doing the rustling, and you turn toward it expectantly. Did you actually see something? Kind of. 

In any event, if upon recounting your eerie encounter you get caught up in the spirit of the story and say you saw an ethereal being, then you may convince not just your audience, but yourself. One notable finding of modern psychology is how systematically misleading memory is. People often remember events wrongly from the get-go, and even when they don’t, their memory can later be steered toward falsehood. In particular, the act of reporting false details can cement them firmly in mind. You don’t just recount what you remember, you remember what you recount.”4 (Football star O. J. Simpson’s former agent was sure Simpson had killed his ex-wife and also sure that Simpson believed he didn’t.)*5 This built-in fallibility makes sense from a Darwinian standpoint, allowing people to bend the truth self-servingly with an air of great and growing conviction, And, clearly, bent truths of a religious sort could be self-serving. If you were a Close friend or relative of the deceased, then the idea that his powerful spirit is afoot may incline people to treat you nicely, lest they invite his wrath. 

Another gem from social psychology: publicly espousing something not only helps convince you of its truth; it shapes your future perception, inclining you to see evidence supporting it but not evidence against it.7° So if you speculate that the strange, shadowy creature was the disgruntled spirit of the deceased, you’! likely find corroboration. You may notice that one of his enemies fell ill only a week after your sighting, while forgetting that one of his friends fell ill a few days earlier. 

If you’re a person of high status, all of this will carry particular weight, as such people are accorded unusual (and often undue) credibility. If, in a hunter-gatherer band of thirty people, someone widely esteemed claims to have seen something strange — and has a theory about what it was—twenty people may be convinced right off the bat. Then the aforementioned tendency of people to conform to peer opinion could quickly yield unanimity.’ 

The number of mental tendencies involved in the creation and nourishment of religious falsehoods shouldn’t surprise us. After all, the mind was built by a process that is, strictly speaking, indifferent to truth. Natural selection favors traits that are good at getting their bearer’s genes into the next generation, period. If saying something false, or believing something false, often furthered that goal dur ing human evolution, then the human mind will naturally encoulage some kinds of falsity. This systematic muddle isn’t an exclusive property of the “primitive” mind, as John Lubbock (chapter I) suggested: all of the above delusory tendencies have been documented in people living in modern societiesmany of them students at fine universities! 

So why are people in modern societies so often aghast at “primirive” religion, so unable to comprehend how “primitive” belief got started? In part, it is the classic human failure of objectivity —an inability to see that your own beliefs may seem as strange to others as theirs seem to you. (An African Pygmy once responded to a missionary’s description of heaven by asking, ““How do you know? Have you died and been there?’’) And in part it is a failure of imagination. Imagine that you are living in a smal] encampment surrounded by jungle or woodland or desert, entirely untouched by science and modern technology. Within the encampment, the social universe operates by largely intelligible laws; people don’t generally, say, fly into a rage and assault their neighbors without a cause of some sort or another. But from outside this universe come mighty and momentous forces—storms, droughts, deadly animals, fatal illness. You are viscerally interested in explaining and controlling these things; you readily absorb and repeat any news or conjecture bearing on this goal. And, above all, you are only human. The rest is history. 

Thinking and Feeling 

This view of religion’s origins—the view from modern psychology—is in some ways just an updated version of Edward Tylor’s view: people first conceived of gods and spirits to explain the unexplained. Indeed, Tylor even seemed to vaguely anticipate the modern focus on reciprocal altruism: “Spiritual beings are held to affect or control the events of the material world, and man’s life here and hereafter; and it being considered that they hold intercourse with men, and receive pleasure or displeasure from human actions, the belief in their existence leads naturally, and it might almost be said inevitably, sooner or later to active reverence and propitiation.”?* 

Still, there is a difference of emphasis. When Tylor says belief in gods “leads naturally” to their propitiation, he seems to mean that this progression was logically natural—that extended reflection led eventually to the conclusion that giving gods respect and foodstuffs would satisfy them. An evolutionary psychologist, 1n contrast, might stress how viscerally natural this propitiation 1s; it feels like the right thing to do. Tylor’s oft-ridiculed reference to “ancient savage philosophers” (see chapter 1) does indeed connote more in the way of cool, detached reflection than was probably operative — and than is operative generally in human beings. Some features of the mind that undergird religious belief are “cognitive” traits that guide our “intellectual” lives but are also shot through with feeling.