March 11, 2007

Clay Nelson

Lent 3     Luke 13:1-9

Since last I was in the pulpit, many of you know I was the victim of imperfect evolution. The night after preaching about being driven unexpectedly into the wilderness I suffered an attack of appendicitis. That Tuesday, this useless organ left over from an earlier stage in human evolution was removed before it removed me from the gene pool.

As a final irony, during my recovery I checked out the Gospel I would be preaching on next. I laughed out loud (which I don't recommend with stitches in your belly) when I saw it was the parable of the fig tree. I quickly identified with the tree that was given a reprieve. The tree would be given another chance to fulfill it calling to produce figs but not before it had been pruned and fertilized. I am personally taking note of my opportunity.

But how to use it now occupies my mind?

I mentioned in my previous sermon that Lent calls us to go willingly into the wilderness as a necessary evil to fulfill our calling. On that occasion I spoke of the wilderness we experience when we speak a prophetic word for justice that goes against the majority view.

But another way we enter the wilderness is by asking ourselves hard questions that lead to places outside our comfort zone. Questions like Glynn asked last week about the divinity of Jesus or questions you have heard before in this pulpit concerning the nature of God or the relevance of the historic creeds or the authority of scripture.

Asking the questions doesn't necessarily put us straight away into the wilderness. The problem is honest questioning generally leads to more questions than answers. Eventually we wake up one day to find that we have meandered into the wilderness.

In my case, working through the questions I have raised in the past has invited even more reading and reflection, which has brought this priest to unexpectedly question whether or not the church as an institution or religion itself has become a barren fig tree? Or perhaps it is more like an appendix that has it outlived its usefulness – if it ever had any, in the minds of some. Would it be best then to chop it down or cut it out?

Questions like this are being much discussed these days in the public arena thanks to the popularity of a recent spate of books like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Sam Harris's The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell. They all pit faith and revelation against science and reason, and conclude that faith beyond reason is more than unreasonable, it is a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident.

While I believe those in opposition to religion raise some important issues that we need to confront, I am struck by the tenor of the debate. In the case of Dawkins, he sounds very much like the religious fundamentalists that he opposes. The public debate has become more emotional than thoughtful. A debate scheduled at the end of March in London between Dawkins and a rabbi has had such a huge response for tickets that the original venue had to be changed to the Great Hall in Westminster where it quickly sold out. It sounds like a Roman circus where the crowd will be calling for blood.

Why at this point in history have those who have approached the issue of the existence of God from a position of reason become as strident and intractable as the fundamentalists they abhor? One reason may be the assault on science by religion since the 1990's as seen in the debate over Intelligent Design being on the same scientific footing as the Theory of Evolution or in the efforts of conservatives to block stem cell research. Another reason surely is the real danger of religious fanaticism to do lasting harm with 21st century technology. However, ultimately the reason may be their frustration that in spite of the lack of evidence behind religious beliefs, people still believe. Dawkins and those who share his views may look at religion like I look at my useless appendix. Considering what we know, why does it still exist?

This has led some scientists, mostly anthropologists and evolutionary biologists, to avoid confronting those of faith, but to explore amongst themselves why people believe. They are looking at the evolution of religion. They are looking at the question of why there seems to be an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. Scott Atran, one of these scientists, points out even atheists cross their fingers during airplane turbulence. While he does not believe God exists himself, he would agree with Charles Darwin's observation in The Descent of Man: “Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since [hu]mankind first started telling stories. A belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies,” he wrote, “seems to be universal.”

Robin Henig in a New York Times article summarizes the issues. “These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive – that is served a necessary purpose for survival – or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.

“Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God – evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there?

“In short,” Henig asks, “are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?”

Those who believe “belief is just a byproduct” are confounded by a 2006 survey at Baylor University that found 92 percent of respondents believe in a personal God – that is, a God with a distinct set of character traits ranging from “distant” to “benevolent.”

When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success. By this standard, these scientists cannot see how religion does this.

To Atran, religious belief requires taking “what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be false.” One example of this is the belief that even after someone dies and the body demonstrably disintegrates, that person will still exist, will still be able to laugh and cry, to feel pain and joy. This confusion “does not appear to be a reasonable evolutionary strategy,” Atran wrote, “Imagine another animal that took injury for health or big for small or fast for slow or dead for alive. It's unlikely that such a species could survive.” In his dismay, he began to look for a sideways explanation.

A gross oversimplification of his conclusions is that as natural selection enlarged the human brain we became conscious of self, which made us aware of that which is not self – “The Other.” Our inherent survival task became knowing whether or not The Other, be it human, beast or nature is friend or foe. Depending on our conclusion we then choose to flee from or seek to control the other. That clearly useful human adaptation however lives alongside a proven aspect of our cognitive development. Until we are three or four to believe others, in particular our parent, are all seeing and all knowing.

We are therefore born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up to believe – whether there is one God, no God or many Gods, whether the soul goes to heaven or reincarnates – are culturally shaped.

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Whatever the specifics, certain beliefs can be found in all religions. Those that prevail, according to the byproduct theorists, are those that fit most comfortably with our mental architecture. Psychologists have shown, for instance, that people attend to, and remember, things that are unfamiliar and strange, but not so strange as to be impossible to assimilate. Ideas about God or other supernatural agents tend to fit these criteria. They are what Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist and psychologist, called “minimally counterintuitive”: weird enough to get your attention and lodge in your memory but not so weird that you reject them altogether. A tree that talks is minimally counterintuitive, and you might believe it as a supernatural agent. A tree that talks and flies and time-travels is maximally counterintuitive, and you are more likely to reject it.

So a God who has a human personality except that he knows everything or a God who has a mind but has no body meets the requirement of being minimally counter-intuitive.

It is not enough for an agent to be minimally counterintuitive for it to earn a spot in people's belief systems. An emotional component is often needed, too, if belief is to take hold. “If your emotions are involved, then that's the time when you're most likely to believe whatever the religion tells you to believe,” Atran says. Religions stir up emotions through rituals – swaying, singing, bowing in unison during group prayer, sometimes working people up to a state of physical arousal that can border on frenzy. And religions gain strength during the natural heightening of emotions that occurs in times of personal crisis, when the faithful often turn to shamans or priests. The most intense personal crisis, for which religion can offer powerfully comforting answers, is when someone comes face to face with mortality.

On the other side of why religion is still with us are the adaptationists. These scientists argue that religion isn't a mere by-product of evolution. It has and does have a purpose. It has helped early humans survive and reproduce. As some adaptationists see it, this could have worked on two levels, individual and group. Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves. As William James put it, religion filled people with “a new zest, which adds itself like a gift to life … an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.”

Such sentiments, some adaptationists say, made the faithful better at finding and storing food, for instance, and helped them attract better mates. On a group level religious groups outlasted others because they were more cohesive, more likely to contain individuals willing to make sacrifices for the group and more adept at sharing resources and preparing for warfare.

The two sides of this scientific debate have major disagreements with each other that present research has not yet sorted out. From my perspective, choosing between them is not as useful as holding both positions in tension. Yes, we may be hard-wired to believe because of evolutionary accidents and religion may have helped us to survive as a species, at least in the past.

Holding these two positions in tension challenges us not to decide which is correct, but to understand the importance of what we believe. Our beliefs about religion to a large degree determine how we will act. Those beliefs further our individual and group well-being or they may not. In other words, not all beliefs are created equal no matter how fervently held or supported by religious institutions.

If those on the by-product side of the argument are right we are biologically incapable of cutting down the fig tree of religion, but we can still challenge what we believe. We can still ask if what we believe is totally out of whack with what we know about our world. Are our beliefs so counter-intuitive as to be useless in practical life?

If the adaptationists are correct that religion exists because it has furthered our survival, we can still prune and fertilize religion so that it continues to benefit the common good. If religion, however, continues fermenting war and terror, raping the environment, depriving others of basic human rights, and dividing humankind into non-cooperative tribes, the evolutionary process may eventually chop it down or diminish its importance and usefulness to that of the appendix.

Examining our beliefs from both perspectives may be as much fun as having an appendectomy, but it is better than the alternative.