Faith No More?

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (Basic, 375 pp., $27.50)

Your college professors probably told you that belief in God is little more than a useful fantasy: It meets the need some people have for a simple explanation of life's mysteries, and offers others a comfort against the fear of death. But as Pascal Boyer-a professor at Washington University in St. Louis-points out, there are problems with this conventional view. To begin with, religious explanations often are more complicated than the problems they claim to solve; furthermore, many religions give a rather scary picture of what comes after death. In this book, Boyer is at his clearest and best when debunking the efforts of these less sophisticated debunkers.

But he too wants to debunk religious faith, albeit in a somewhat fresher way. According to Boyer, evolutionary psychologists and cultural anthropologists like himself have figured out scientifically where religion comes from. They have, in his words, reduced religion to "just another set of difficult but manageable problems." (This is known in the vernacular as "chutzpah.")

Boyer says that evolution has fitted human beings with the ability to experience certain illusions we call "supernatural." These illusions are similar to a computer parasite: A worm like the recent Code Red can attack a PC running Windows 2000, but not one that hasn't yet been updated from Windows 95 or 98, or one that runs a different operating system altogether, such as a Mac. Only a very specific operating system can support the parasite. So, too, with religion: The process of evolution has constructed the human animal in such a way that, like parasites, religious concepts or "memes" find an agreeable place in the brain's "cognitive architecture." If that architecture were different, religion-as-virus would have nowhere to latch on.

The brain is constantly running a variety of "inference systems." Aspects of culture are retained through the evolutionary process if they are "rich in inferences." Between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, religion came along-with its specific characteristics, including gods, rituals, and a fixation on dead bodies, followed by doctrines, exclusivity, and sectarian violence. Because it was "rich in inferences," religion spread among human beings the world over. According to this view, one of the key aspects of morality-which existed before religion-is "strategic information": You can know whether a thing is right or wrong only if you have all the information about the context in which the act is being carried out. Gods make sense to us because they possess full access to strategic information, and are therefore likely to know what's right or wrong. Thus the idea of "gods" latched parasitically onto the preexisting structure of moral intuitions.

All of this sounds vaguely plausible, but Boyer's talk of "religion" is suspiciously generic. Many of us would say there is a world of difference between the beliefs of modern pagan peoples such as the Kwaio of the Solomon Islands and the Fang of Cameroon, which get heavy play in this book, and the three Abrahamic monotheistic traditions, which do not. Though Boyer knows a great deal about primitive faiths, his acquaintance with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam seems less assured. For instance, the reader is brought up short when at one point Boyer refers to "religious codes like the Christian Commandments." The what? Possibly he means the Ten Commandments.

But let's grant Boyer the questions he begs. Let's say that all religions are somehow the same, and that the evolution he describes really happened through the play of chance, as opposed to being guided by a force determined that man be open to religious belief. One problem with his thesis is that if the supernatural is all an illusion, as he assumes, then the "inferences" that are drawn from religion, however "rich," should also without exception be false. He stresses how "practical" a matter religion is, how it is not fundamentally about abstract theology but about dealing in real terms with supernatural entities like gods and ancestors. But such a practical endeavor that produced only false inferences should never have been embraced at all.

Another problem is that what's most precious in religious faith goes beyond "inferences." I don't know any Kwaio or Fang persons, but I know plenty of Jews and Christians. What many of them cherish above all in their spiritual life is the feeling of a relationship with God, a presence that's always around, shaping their daily lives in palpable ways. Boyer says that our evolutionary history, with its theme of human beings at the mercy of predators, has made our minds ultrasensitive to lurking unseen "agents." If that's true, God's illusory presence should be felt entirely as a threatening chill.

What, then, are we to make of the experience-shared by so many people- of a very different kind of presence? This summer, when the Code Red worm was infesting mainframes and Pascal Boyer was solving the "manageable problem" of religion, I was reading Herman Wouk's terrific World War II novel The Winds of War. The book's hero is Victor "Pug" Henry, a naval officer who one night finds himself on the deck of a battleship steaming across the North Atlantic.

The broad dark ocean, the streaming pure air, the crowded stars arching overhead, always made him feel what the Bible called the spirit of God hovering on the face of the waters. Down the years even more than his childhood Bible training, this religious awe inspired by night at sea had kept Captain Henry a believer. He spoke of this to nobody, not to ministers who were his old friends; he would have felt embarrassed and mawkish, for he was not sure how seriously even they took the Lord. On this voyage, the Almighty was there for Victor Henry as always in the black starry universe, a presence actual and lovable, if disturbingly unpredictable.

Boyer suggests that such feelings may result from a "microseizure" in the brain, a neurological glitch that has been scientifically measured and associated with mystic or "spiritual" experiences.

Between debunkers like Boyer and believers like Victor Henry, it's hard to imagine a possible mediation or resolution. Each can easily dismiss the other's convictions: Boyer can tell us that Pug is just experiencing a microseizure, or the happy sensation of a set of inference systems on full fire; somebody like Pug might speculate that debunkers have their own unconscious motivations (to undermine religious faith, after all, is to set oneself free of its many inconvenient strictures). Modern folk who don't fall into either of these opposing camps, who find it hard to choose between the debunkers and the believers, might try reading Boyer's book alongside Wouk's brief but powerful evocation of one man's faith.

Looked at this way, between the majestic accessibility and plain reality of Pug Henry's God, and the professorial noodlings of Pascal Boyer's inference systems, the choice seems clear enough.