Religion
Overall Purpose
Plato and Aristotle have had huge influences on religion, particularly the Christian religion. They had their say many times earlier in this book, so focus now on the attitude of the Darwinian. One temptation, in the tradition of Lucretius, is to dismiss it all as a dreadful mistake and move on. Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists would be happy to do this. Let us take our time and ask especially how religion plays out with respect to questions about purpose. Obviously, thinking first about Christianity, we have answers both at the individual level and at the historical, big-picture level. Going first with the latter, to put things in context, God created humans to have what are essentially his children, to love and to cherish and in return to have them thank and adore and (not quite like human children in my experience) worship. The idea is that we should spend eternity in blissful joy with him. In many versions—the Augustinian version particularly—we humans rather spoiled things through our disobedience, but God in his boundless love sacrificed his son on the cross, and once again salvation is made possible. In both versions—Plan A, when we didn’t sin and Plan B, when we did—purpose, teleology, final cause is the underlying theme throughout. God did not create just for laughs or because he was bored. He did it so that he could have creatures made in his own image to love and cherish. He wanted good for us, and he had plans that we would spend eternity with him. You cannot understand the Christian religion without this seizing on its end-directed vision. It is all a matter of values. God’s values.
There are other non-Augustinian versions of Christianity,1 Eastern Orthodoxy, for instance, not to mention variants in the West, like the Quakers and others more extreme, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. These latter have little truck with traditional views, starting with a very iffy relationship with the Trinity (not for nothing are they called “Jehovah’s Witnesses”). Perhaps unfairly—partly for economy and partly because they were often not central to the workings out of science-and-religion relationships—I have rather ignored these other versions. So let me mention them now and stress just how far end-directed their theologies always are. There is no more eschatologically focused religion than that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are obsessed with the end of time and the subsequent 144,000 who are going up to heaven to rule with Jesus.
The same commitment to ends and values is true of other religions, both those sophisticated and those less so. Famously, Buddhism has no Creator God, but it too is purposeful throughout.2 Central to Buddhism is the idea of reincarnation—that we have multiple lives in succession (samsara)—and that actions and thoughts in this life can have implications for the life that we will live next. There are levels of existence—down at the bottom is the hellish realm, niraya, and then up through the petas (ghostlike creatures), animals, humans, and to gods. Ultimately, the aim is to break out of this ongoing cycle of existences—one is released from suffering (dukkha)—and one achieves something called nibbana (also called “nirvana”). It is often thought that nibbana is a form of nonbeing, but this is not quite true, at least not quite true in all versions of Buddhism. As with other religions (notably Christianity), it is stressed that one is talking of the ineffable, the unspeakable, but then as with other religions (notably Christianity), people do go on to speak about it. Nibbana is endless and wholly radiant, the “further shore,” the “island amidst the flood,” the “cool cave of shelter” (no small thing given the Indian climate), the “highest bliss.”3 This doesn’t sound altogether different from the Christian idea of heaven, except—what many would say makes for complete difference—there is no God there to share things with you. What is not different is that, in having the goal of nibbana, Buddhism is as clearly purpose-driven as is Christianity—or Islam with its seventy-two virgins and so forth. It is all a matter of values.
Going back before Christianity, and, indeed, most of today’s major world systems, one finds various primitive or folk religions. Often these go under the generic name of “paganism,” although the term is a little too generic if one simply means someone who falls outside the major religions.4 It seems a little odd to link up Plato and Aristotle with people in what is now Norway who worshipped reindeer and did rather rude things under oak trees. One thing that did link many of these belief systems, not just with each other but with many of our philosophers, was a thoroughgoing commitment to a living earth, something of reverence and awe. Today, in Western society, there are revived elements of this kind of thinking. Some combine it with forms of Christianity. This is true of the Austrian polymath and clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner—founder of the Waldorf system of education—and of his followers (anthroposophists).5 Thinking and working at the beginning of the last century, influenced in equal parts by Naturphilosophie and Eastern religions (especially through the theosophists like Madame Blavatsky), Steiner was totally committed to the Earth-an-organism view of nature. Through her intimate friendship with Steiner-follower Marjorie Spock (younger sister of the doctor), Rachel Carson—author of the very influential Silent Spring (1962)—showed his influence in her attack on those poisoning Mother Earth. Through his intimate friendship with Steiner-follower William Golding, James Lovelock of the Gaia hypothesis showed his influence in his insistence that the earth is alive in some very real sense.6
Steiner was open about the pagan roots of much of what he believed. One doubts either Carson or Lovelock have ever thought quite in these terms, although Lovelock has an impish sense of humor and he might enjoy the label—he laughed when I wrote a book on Gaia with the subtitle “Science on a Pagan Planet.” Whatever they are called, and if indeed Carson and Lovelock can be called genuinely religious—toward the end of her life Carson wrote (in a private letter) that “there is a great and mysterious force that we don’t, and perhaps never can understand,”7 and my impression of Lovelock is of a man who, in a totally nonprissy way, is deeply spiritual—we are looking at thinkers who live within purpose-laden worlds. There is the goal of a healthy, functioning planet. The same holds for others of today’s nature worshippers who more openly identify with a non-Christian paganism. This is true of many “ecofeminists”: “The physical rape of women by men in this culture is easily paralleled by our rapacious attitudes toward the Earth itself. She, too, is female,”8 and “The planet, our mother, Grandmother Earth, is physical and therefore a spiritual, mental, and emotional being.”9 It is true also of those who set themselves up overtly as pagan or neopagan wizards and witches. Thus, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (born Tim Zell): “It is a biological fact (not a theory, not an opinion) that ALL LIFE ON EARTH COMPRISES ONE SINGLE LIVING ORGANISM! Literally, we are all ‘One.’”10 And obviously uniting all of these people is a teleology no less thorough than that to be found in conventional religions. There is perhaps not the focus on distant ends—the hereafter—but our lives occur within a universe where nothing makes sense except we see ourselves as parts of a functioning whole. “The blue whale and the redwood tree are not the largest living organisms on Earth; the ENTIRE PLANETARY BIOSPHERE is.”11 Individual organisms are the cells of Terrabios (Zell-Ravenheart’s name for Gaia). The deserts and the forests and the prairies and the coral reefs (the “biomes”) are the organs. “ALL the components of a biome are essential to its proper functioning, and each biome is essential to the proper functioning of Terrabios.”12 There is purpose throughout.
Individual Purpose
Moving now down in scale, in all of these big-picture scenarios, the individual has to do his or her bit. It is often stressed, at least for Christians, that one should do things now because they are right, not with the intent of piling up brownie points in order to get into heaven. One should do good now, not because of hope of future reward but because God wants you to, or (as Augustine stressed) as a thankful response to God for his goodness. That said, the end of things does figure not just in the imaginations of many believers but also in the theology. Think of America’s most famous sermon. “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”13 If this isn’t something telling you to watch your step because if you don’t some pretty unpleasant times are on the way, then I don’t know what is. There wouldn’t have been one of Jonathan Edwards’s congregation—it was preached in 1741—who would not have left church that morning thinking that they had better mend their ways because otherwise trouble lies ahead. All of them from that point on would have believed that the purpose of their lives was to keep from that fate.
Part of the trouble with Christianity is that of knowing just what will get you out of trouble. We have seen that this was a major concern of Augustine. Edwards’s congregation apparently interrupted his sermon, crying out, “What shall I do to be saved?” Edwards, a good Protestant, knew the answer—justification by faith. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph. 2:8–9). Other parts of the Bible contradict this flatly. “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?” (James 2:14). There are deeply sincere Christians who think that works are everything. They have always been for me, raised as I was in the Religious Society of Friends. Remember the hungry and the strangers and the poor and the sick and the prisoners. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40). There follows a rather juicy passage about what happens to you if you don’t do these things. Belief doesn’t enter into the equation.
Why should you be good? For the Christian, morality and its foundations are all a matter of design, or rather Design. God set the rules and it is for us to follow them. “Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me” (Job 41:11). There are well-known problems with morality being God’s design, most prominently the Euthyphro problem. Is something good because God so willed it, or is God’s will following that which is independently good? If one accepts the first half of the dilemma, then God seems somewhat capricious. If one accepts the second half, then God is not the ultimate authority. There are responses. Job responds to the first. God’s answer to Job: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?” (Job 38:4–5). Many would respond that the way God treats Job shows precisely the problem with this kind of approach. More acceptable in the eyes of many is a natural-law position, going back to Aquinas and thence to Aristotle (with a good shot of Cicero along the way), saying that the way God created the world and the way God expects us to act are at one.14 Thus, for instance, heterosexual intercourse is in principle a good thing, because this is natural. Beating babies on the head is not a good thing, because it is unnatural. The point is that God sets the ends, the purposes, and expects us to follow them.
Under all versions of Christianity, your actions are judged and conclusions drawn about your future fate. Nothing is without purpose. It is the same in other religions. Buddhism is as end-directed as Christianity, although it does seem that if you mess up, you are going to descend a level or two, but then have the chance to climb back up again. The Four Holy (or Noble) Truths point the way. We start with self-examination, understanding the unsatisfactory nature of our lives—our greed and the like and how this leads to suffering. We must understand dukkha. Next we must understand the reasons for dukkha and our incomplete and selfish natures. We must grasp how it is that we can never feel full happiness in our lives. Third comes understanding how dukkha can be ended and nibbana achieved: “This, monks, is the holy truth of the cessation (nirodha) of dukkha: the utter cessation, without attachment, of that very craving, its renunciation, surrender, release, lack of pleasure in it.”15 Finally, we have what is known as the eightfold path of action—seeing reality as it is, renouncing desires, speaking truthfully, doing no harm, living in a wholesome way, trying to improve, making an effort to see oneself clearly, meditating. This is all part of karma, the actions taken that can affect the future lives. And obviously means that our lives are as full of purpose as anything to be found in Western religions.
The same is true even more obviously for all versions of nature worship. Rachel Carson was way too skilled a science writer to make explicit her beliefs in living earths—she knew that the established powers were going to be highly critical without giving them the opening of going after flaky notions like anthroposophy—but it is there underlying all of the exhortations. From her writings that she wanted read at her funeral service: “We come to perceive life as a force as tangible as any of the physical realities of the sea, a force strong and purposeful, as incapable of being crushed or diverted from its ends as the rising tide.”16 Continuing: “We have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.” Little wonder that: “The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.”17 Very explicitly writing in this tradition—“For women making the connections between the masculinist ravaging of nature and the rape of women, Carson was a forerunner”—the ecofeminists openly urge environment-protecting strategies upon us. “With no sense of consequence in the scant knowledge of harmony, we gluttonously consume and misdirect scarce planetary resources.”18 And the same is true of the pagans. Our place here is “to act as the steward of the planetary ecology.” This is our destined role: “Man’s purpose in Terrabios, his responsibility, is to see that the whole organism functions at its highest potential and that none of its vital systems become disrupted or impaired.”19 These are the values we must embrace.
Religion as False
Not everyone is religious. There are those of us who are agnostic or atheistic. My concern now, however, is not with what I believe, or with what you believe, but how one analyzes religion on the Kantian-Darwinian perspective. New Atheists like Richard Dawkins think that Darwinian evolution disproves religious claims. He points out truly that children need to learn things quickly—to fear fire, for instance, and that natural selection has made us susceptible to conditioning. “Be fantastically gullible; believe everything you’re told by your elders and betters.”20 Which, of course, is fine much of the time but open to invasion by parasites with their own interests in mind. It is very much the same sort of thing that happens with computers. Viruses invade with their own agendas, not necessarily in the interests of the hosts. Unfortunately, religion is right up there with the worst of the invaders. Dawkins thinks that humans are wide open to such silly ideas as, “You must believe in the great juju in the sky” or “You must kneel down and face east and pray five times a day.” He worries that ideas like these then get passed down through generations, without anything impeding their progress. Even worse is the fact that those viruses that are really good at infiltrating minds are precisely those with the most awful and dangerous messages. “So, if the virus says, ‘If you don’t believe in this you will go to hell when you die,’ that’s a pretty potent threat, especially to a child.”
To say the least, this is all pretty emotive with the talk of viruses, something we immediately think about negatively. Perhaps Dawkins is right—Lucretius probably has another poem coming on—but one would like a little more reason for thinking religion false. Oxford-based Justin Barrett offers a no less naturalistic argument than Dawkins, claiming that religion comes from the overactivity of what he calls “agency detection devices” (ADDs). “Our ADD suffers from some hyperactivity, making it prone to find agents around us, including supernatural ones, given fairly modest evidence of their presence. This tendency encourages the generation and spread of god concepts and other religious concepts.”21 Interestingly and pertinently, however, Barrett is a committed Christian thinking that this could all simply be God’s way of getting religion naturalistically. “Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me—should I then stop believing that she does?”
To disprove religion one needs to turn to reasons drawn from the realm of philosophy and theology, and perhaps anthropology, rather than from evolutionary biology. Most obviously there is the problem that there are so many religions making contradictory claims. Why should one believe the Christians rather than the Muslims or the Jews or the Buddhists or the pagans? Why should one believe the Catholics rather than the Mormons? John Calvin, and following him Alvin Plantinga,22 says that his religion carries the mark of its own authenticity, but we have heard that before—from just about every other religion. Then, compounding negative issues, with respect to Christianity there are already-raised problems about melding its Greek and its Jewish roots. Is God a necessary being, outside time and space, eternal? Or is God a person, like the father in the story of the prodigal son, who welcomes his long-lost son but who also has understanding and sympathy for the boy who stays home? The two conceptions don’t fit well together, and sometimes lead to horrendous conclusions, as when Anselm tells us that God does not feel some of the most basic of human emotions: “For when thou beholdest us in our wretchedness, we experience the effect of compassion, but thou dost not experience the feeling.”23 Or when Aquinas says: “To sorrow, therefore, over the misery of others does not belong to God.”24 Many of us just don’t want a God like that. Or indeed, a God who allows so much evil into the world. The Christian worships an all-powerful, all-loving God. What price love now? Of course, Christians have their answers. For the poet John Keats, for instance, our world is the “vale of soul making,” where suffering and hardship ennoble us. Others find this and related responses inadequate. Does one even want to believe in a God who let Anne Frank die in Bergen-Belsen? If someone starts trotting out the old chestnut that God gave us the great gift of free will and this made moral evil possible, one can only stand in horror at a deity who thinks the free will of Heinrich Himmler outweighs the pain and suffering of Anne Frank, or of Sophie Scholl whose life ended on the guillotine, because she belonged to the White Rose group opposing Hitler.
Other religions may not have all of the problems of Christianity—a religion like Buddhism without a Creator God is already one step ahead in simply not needing an explanation of evil—but they are hardly without difficulties of their own. Philosophers have pointed out that it is difficult to know quite how one maintains continuity for the individual if in the middle of existence there is a gap—between death and the Day of Judgment. Who is to say that the first Michael Ruse, professor, is the same chap as the second Michael Ruse, trying to persuade Saint Peter to open the gate? It has been suggested that perhaps consciousness is the software to the hardware of our physical bodies and that God, as it were, keeps us on file?25 But what then is to stop him making two, three, or even a hundred copies of Michael Ruse? Dizzying thought. And if it is difficult to think of making a repeat human Michael Ruse, imagine the difficulties if Michael Ruse is now a codfish. Perhaps it is psychically satisfying to think that Adolf Hitler is now a dung beetle in a galaxy far, far away, as one might say, but does it really make much sense? Nor for that matter is there much more sense in the pagan practice of “drawing down the moon,” where the witch goes into a trance and has the Moon Goddess speak through her. I have considerable sympathy for the pagans—they are gentle folk who take the environment very seriously—but what they believe has no more connection to reality than reading golden plates through one’s hat in Upstate New York or riding off in the middle of the night on a magic horse to have a few words with God about how often we should pray every day.
Does Religion Have a Purpose?
The conclusion thus far is that if religion is false, it is not obvious that Darwinism—certainly not Darwinism alone—is able to show this. I am talking now of a fairly sophisticated religion, one that has gone beyond the need to insist on a literal worldwide flood and such things. I don’t dismiss the importance of Darwinism (and evolution more generally). I suspect that problems like the historical authenticity of Adam and Eve raise more difficulties than most Christians realize, but there are very traditional answers to such problems. Orthodox Christianity has never bought into the Augustinian take on original sin, involving Christ’s substitutionary atonement on the cross. Rather, it sees humans developmentally, in a state of becoming, and it is Christ’s incarnation and sharing of death with us in solidarity that counts. A historical Adam and Eve are not demanded.
Even if religion be false, we still have purpose within the system. Taken literally, the characters in David Copperfield—Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Dora Spenlow—do not exist, but one still has purpose in the novel. David ran away to Dover to find his aunt. Aunt Betsy concealed the extent of her losses to test David. Mr. Peggoty set out to find his fallen niece, Little Emily. But if religion be false, there is a new range of purpose questions. Why did it start and why does it persist? Does it have a real purpose? Both Dawkins and Barrett in their ways suggest that religion started as a by-product of useful adaptations. This is a line of thought that goes back to before the coming of evolutionary thinking. In his Natural History of Religion, Hume wrote, “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to everything, that hurts or pleases us.”26 In other words, religion begins in mistaken identification of the inanimate with the living—indeed, a point we saw made almost two millennia earlier by Lucretius. Darwin, who as a young man had read Hume’s essay, argued something similar. By the time of the Descent in 1871, Darwin had slid into a comfortable agnosticism. He dealt with religion briskly, arguing that it was all a matter of chance and confusion, thinking that the “tendency in savages to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences” was illustrated by the mistaken actions of his dog (a beast, Darwin tells us, who is “a full-grown and very sensible animal”). Snoozing on the lawn, the dog was upset by a parasol moving in the wind. Going on the attack “every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and that no stranger had a right to be on his territory.”27
In line with this approach, recently anthropologist Scott Atran has proposed a similar kind of by-product explanation of religion. It is all to do with our mechanisms for detecting danger and showing fear. “Natural selection designs the agency-detection system to deal rapidly and economically with stimulus situations involving people and animals as wired to respond to fragmentary information under conditions of uncertainty, inciting perception of figures in the clouds, voices in the wind, lurking movements in the leaves, and emotions among interacting dots on a computer screen.”28 This kind of adaptation can all too easily go astray. “This hair-triggering of the agency-detection mechanism readily lends itself to supernatural interpretation of uncertain or anxiety-provoking events.”29
Why does religion persist? Here most people turn to a functional explanation—one invoking purpose—more or less of the kind proposed by the great sociological pioneer Emile Durkheim. With religion, we have a culture binding people and helping people and giving hope to all. Durkheim wrote, “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”30 Giving this an evolutionary spin, Edward O. Wilson—no believer but much more sympathetic to religion than many—thinks religion is adaptive because of its power to confer group membership. “In the midst of the chaotic and potentially disorienting experiences each person undergoes daily, religion classifies him, provides him with unquestioned membership in a group claiming great powers, and by this means gives him a driving purpose in life compatible with his self interest.”31 Wilson does admit that there may be something to cultural causes, but essentially he thinks that it all comes back to biology. “Because religious practices are remote from the genes during the development of individual human beings, they may vary widely during cultural development. It is even possible for groups, such as the Shakers, to adopt conventions that reduce genetic fitness for as long as one or a few generations. But over many generations, the underlying genes will pay for their permissiveness by declining in the population as a whole.”32 Culture can play variations on the themes, but ultimately these themes are biological.
Is any of this well taken? One feels that there must be something to this way of thinking. Religions are such a prominent feature of human cultures, it would be very odd if they had no purpose at all, and conferring some kind of group solidarity seems as plausible as anything. It is not essential. Britain did not stand alone against the Third Reich in 1940 because of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. For all that, religion can be important and a positive force. In line with what has been discussed earlier, historians have long made the case that Protestant Christianity was tremendously significant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in defining and giving a sense of self-worth to Britons against the powerful forces on the continent.33 Perhaps, even in 1940, the Church had its role in national pride and fortitude in making the V-sign to the Jerries, as the Germans were known. Many, like Darwin himself—Durkheim spoke of a “moral community”—thought religion essential to articulating and bolstering morality. One may perhaps have less confidence in this. Scandinavian countries, where religion has notoriously withered on the vine, score significantly higher on levels of well-being (including moral well-being) than countries with high levels of religiosity.34 To take just murder rates: El Salvador (homicide rate of 71 per 100,000 inhabitants), Colombia (33 per 100,000 inhabitants), Brazil (26 per 100,000), and Mexico (18 per 100,000); Sweden, Japan, Norway, and the Netherlands (all with homicide rates that are less than 1 per 100,000). From a moral viewpoint, the American North is significantly more caring than the American South, and yet it is in the South where excessive evangelicalism thrives. No big surprise, for too often evangelicals spend time promoting the hate-filled prohibitions of the Old Testament rather than the love-filled prescriptions of the New.
One could go on searching for functional attributes of religion. Surely, with refined sentience giving the knowledge of personal death, the promises of religion have been important. The important thing is even if religion is false, there are many reasons to think that it generates enough purpose for its survival. This is not to say that, as happens with adaptations sometimes—one thinks of the peacock’s tail feathers—it might not overstep the mark. Sometimes it is positively counterproductive. In the name of Jesus, priests and pastors on both sides of the trenches in the Great War urged young men on to their deaths in Flanders. Few equaled the truly dreadful Arthur Winnington-Ingram, bishop of London, who (in a 1915 sermon) urged his congregation “to kill Germans: to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant.”35 But they were all cut from the same moral and theological cloth. One hardly has to be an enthusiastic eugenicist to think that killing off the best and brightest is probably not the best way to improve the human gene pool.
More recently, the dreadful instances of sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy suggest that group cohesion is not prominent in future prospects for that religion’s survival. It is hard to think of purposes and values at a point like this. Although the human power of self-deception never ceases to amaze.
What? I? “Ruined their lives”?
Wait a minute, let’s get this straight—
my passion gave them a life, gave them
something rich and ripe in their green youth,
something to measure all intimate flesh against,
forever. After that,
they ruined their own lives, maybe.
But with me they were full of a love
firmer than anything their meager years
had ever tasted.36