Tania Lombrozo recently wrote this beautiful piece meditating on the push/pull factors that encourage or discourage Americans’ belief in human evolution. Her conclusion is that human evolution as it’s usually presented does not necessarily offer the existential benefits of religion, so it is a less attractive choice psychologically speaking, and since it’s in competition with religious belief in some cases, religious belief periodically wins out for its benefits. She then suggests that the presentation of evolution to the average person could be tailored to better emphasize the elements which offer existential benefits similar to those of religious belief.
I deeply appreciate Lombrozo’s work here because it is so carefully researched and because it plays up the potential for beauty in the story of nature, which is sometimes thread of the scientific tapestry that is neglected. She is also quite careful in her presentation of religion: unlike in most general discussions of religion as a category, Lombrozo does not present religion as content neutral. Like science, she submits, religions are not all equal in their capacity to comfort or suggest order. I think this is quite true, and I think it’s a part of the conversation about religion that is usually excluded from discussion, because it requires a great deal of certitude to begin comparing religions on that front.
Her work seems another in an interesting tradition of investigating the ideologies that touch what William Connolly called the “visceral register” of human experience in his book Why I Am Not A Secularist. Sociologists have found ideologies mirroring religious belief in everything from Star Trek to sports, and in The Faith of the Faithless Simon Critchley finds parallels and possibilities in certain types of politics.
Here I mean only to further some of her discussion. So, I’ll take up her question: can science deliver the benefits of religion? If so, would those benefits be enough to draw a person toward belief in human evolution, and/or away from religious belief? In imagining the benefits of science as a superior substitute for religious belief, Lombrozo writes:
There is something deeply satisfying in broadening the scope of what we understand. And that is part of the seductive grandeur of science.
I wonder if this is a stone left unturned by Lombrozo. She is very much focused (as one has to be, as articles do have word limits and must come to some conclusion at some point) on a particular aspect of the attraction of religion. The explanations and meaning that give rise to feelings of order and control and human exceptionalism are no doubt among the psychological benefits of religion, but could it not also be the case that the mysteries of religion — those ‘black box’ areas which defy and resist full excavation — also be among the attractions of religious belief?
In his very famous ‘Science as a Vocation’, Max Weber borrows the term ‘disenchantment’ from Friedrich Schiller, and describes it thus:
“… it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. ”
Weber acknowledges that disenchantment is usually correlated with progress, and that it is attractive in that way. Yet he also points out that science is, by its very nature, an association of methods that tend to destabilize truth, and to constantly demand more unsteady progress toward understanding. In that way, he argues, science can uproot a person’s ability to feel settled, as it were, with the elements of life that are and remain mysterious to her. Comfort with mystery and enchantment, he points out, have been relegated instead to the realm of personal interaction and mysticism, the realms of the dogmatic, inscrutable, and private. When it comes to constructing new spheres to support engagement with and peace in enchantment, Weber warns:
“And academic prophecy, finally, will create only fanatical sects but never a genuine community. ”
So if Weber is correct and there is some satisfaction to be gained by drawing a perimeter around some questions and taking pleasure in their wonder and eternal mystery, then science can by its very nature never provide benefits of that sort. Science ruthlessly questions, investigates, and interrogates its own conclusions. Its truth values are neither private nor intimate and its valor relies upon its capacity to be reproduced ad infinitum, without relation to the individuals involved in the reproduction, or their experiences of it. Science may be able to provide some peace — Lombrozo provides studies to this effect — but parameters exist around those situations: subjects being asked to contemplate the comfort of science in one situation, e.g. the experience of pain or illness, are likely different than subjects living with unending destabilization of beliefs on a day-to-day basis.
But to investigate particular benefits of religion — and many have been proposed outside the somewhat murky category of establishing a sense of control or order; a 1991 paper by Chris Ellison titled ‘Religious Involvement and Subjective Well-Being’ ran through a litany of them, from the social to the individual, as have many studies on prayer and certitude of belief to follow — is to accept the notion that people gravitate toward religion based on the benefits it offers for them.
This is a widely disputed aspect of the ‘rational choice’ theory of religion, which seems quite attractive at first glance. Religions must be attractive to gain adherents, because if religions added no quality to people’s lives and/or subtracted from them, then people would either find different religions to adhere to, or would depart from religion altogether in favor of some other similarly beneficial ideology. Were this the case, we would expect to see competition between religious groups for adherents, e.g., ‘supply side’ religious pluralism, with different sects competing to offer the best ‘packages’ to converts. And, if the diversity of religious options really did result in more attractive packages of belief, we would expect to see strengthening of religious vitality correlate with religious pluralism. But does it?
Some sociologists, like Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have argued that it does. But the data doesn’t support those claims. Here’s Mark Chaves and Phillip Gorski in a 2001 paper titled ‘Religious Pluralism and Religious Participation’, published in the Annual Review of Sociology:
“The empirical evidence does not support the claim that religious pluralism is positively associated with religious participation in any general sense. There may be times and places where increased religious pluralism produces increased levels of overall religious participation. But as Stark et al (1995, p. 436, emphasis in original) remind us, “the theory [including the proposition that pluralism increases overall levels of religious mobilization] is not about today, nor is it about the United States—it purports to be general.” This aspiration to generality is not sustained by a comprehensive and dispassionate review of the empirical evidence.”
That is to say, competing packages of belief, even when primed and sweetened to offer the benefits that religions should offer, don’t actually seem to increase religious participation in people in general. Why might this be? Gorski and Chaves suggest a number of reasons, but among the most compelling is the following:
“…in settings where religious membership is more like modern citizenship than like membership in a voluntary association, religion often becomes intertwined with political, social, and cultural conflict between states, classes, and national or ethnic groupings; religious allegiances become markers or signals of nonreligious allegiances; and religious competition means struggles over cultural, political, and territorial influence and power.”
Needless to say, this can be a wonderful or terrible thing. On one hand, religion can help a person fit her own narrative into a broader narrative about progress, hope, and the future. She can imagine herself in a web of relationships spanning back thousands of years, a member of a group that has strong and noble roots. But it also means that religion tends to become entwined — as in the terrible case of the Slavo-Christianity that so powerfully underpinned the genocide of Bosniak Muslims in the 1990s — with ethnic and cultural narratives whose significance cannot be replaced by the general themes of science. In this case, science may not be able to reproduce religion’s benefits or its harms. Moreover, even if it could — it wouldn’t necessarily mean that more people would adopt a belief in human evolution.
Lastly, it may also be the case that the selection of religions based on their benefits is a perilously external way to imagine religious belief/affiliation/participation. That is to say — is it fair to imagine that people move from truth-claim to truth-claim without any real investment in their truth? Religious people themselves cannot, by definition, adhere to their religion because it benefits them; this would be to directly contradict the truth claims of religion, and to render instrumental to people what people should, in theory, be instrumental to. As Chaves and Gorski point out, religion is far too complicated of an experience to be so easily boiled down to rational choices.
After all, even for Augustine, the moment of conversion is not a moment of successful argumentation, though he does frame his approach to Christianity from Manichaeanism in terms of debunking in many cases. Instead, he frames it in the mysterious and subjective terms of experience:
“…Suddenly I heard a voice from some nearby house, a boy’s voice or a girl’s voice, I do not know: but it was a sort of sing-song, repeated again and again, ‘take and read, take and read.’ I ceased weeping and immediately began to search my mind most carefully as to whether children were accustomed to chant these words in any kind of game, and I could not remember that I had ever heard such a thing…I arose, interpreting the incident as quite certainly a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the passage at which I should open…in that instant, with the very ending of the sentence, it was as though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart, and all the darkness of uncertainty vanished way.”
A cynical reading of Augustine would be that he simply tired of wondering and investigating and gave himself up to enchantment, willing to accept ignorance and mystery for a little peace, and, as Lombrozo may have it, a sense of order, uniqueness, and destiny in the world. Alternatively we could read him as having had a genuine moment of insight, and take his refusal to come to a ‘rational’ conclusion on the matter as entirely sincere. Because, as Lombrozo points out, science automatically imagines experiences of the inexplicable to be, in fact, explicable, this is yet another arena in which science and religion cannot be interchanged. Science may offer a comforting explanation, but may in its dissection painfully misconstrue the singular, intimate moment of experience.
Lastly, I wonder if the narrative momentum of religion — the ability of a religious community to frame a member as a meaningful, unique agent in an ongoing story with a particular endgame — is perhaps another arena in which religion differs considerably enough from evolution to occupy its own sort of authority. Religion and science may overlap in some of their work; religion may provide explanation and so may science, and their benefits may converge — but religion ultimately has a direction, a movement, a broader story, a motion toward a goal. Human evolution, on the other hand, continues on without an easily discernible goal in mind, and at punctuated paces. In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker writes:
“Are we still evolving? Biologically, probably not much. Evolution has no momentum, so we will not turn into the creepy bloat-heads of science fiction. The modern human condition is not conducive to real evolution either. We infest the whole habitable and not-so-habitable earth, migrate at will, and zigzag from lifestyle to lifestyle. This makes us a nebulous, moving target for natural selection. If the species is evolving at all, it is happening too slowly and unpredictably for us to know the direction.”
Religion, on the other hand, brings with it a story, and a story with a punchline at that.
Yet because of this departure in movement, I can easily imagine a person happily and healthily adopting both religious beliefs and a belief in human evolution, so long as she understands that the one contains an understanding of where we’re going, and the other how we’re getting there. Like religion itself, human evolution is best understood and appreciated on its own terms, I think, without being expected to provide more than it’s really obligated to. What it provides in terms of benefits is distinctly beautiful and discretely valuable without parallel to or comparison with religion or any other ideology.