How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [157]
On one level it is that very stage of advanced cognitive development that Huston Smith rails against in his book Why Religion Matters, a passionate personal manifesto for why society must return to its more fundamental roots of basic spirituality. While not completely disparaging science (his oncologist did save his life), Smith claims that it has trapped us in a tunnel whose floor is scientism, whose walls are liberal democracy, higher education, and a morally sterile legal system, and whose ceiling is a cowardly media. It is a closed system that excludes old-time religion. To get it back we must exit the tunnel and embrace the sacred. “The sacred world is the truer, more veridical world, in part because it includes the mundane world.” Barnes would describe Smith’s mundane world as an early stage of cognitive development, and that does appear to be the level at which Smith thinks religion should operate. Religion matters, he says, because “there is within us—in even the blithest, most lighthearted among us—a fundamental disease. It acts like an unquenchable thirst that renders the vast majority of us incapable of ever coming to full peace.” Maybe for thee, but not for me. And that’s the problem with Smith’s book. It is, by its nature, personal and anecdotal, and so ultimately can tell us nothing more about why God and religion persist for anyone beyond Smith and those he copiously quotes in support.
What can inform us about these persistent questions? Science. Although it has its limitations, science is the best method ever devised for answering questions about our world and ourselves. Therefore, Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is a penetratingly insightful scientific analysis of religion because as an anthropologist he understands that any explanation must take into account the rich diversity of religious practices and beliefs around the world, and as a scientist he knows that any explanatory model must account for this diversity. Boyer is at his ethnographic best in describing the countless peculiar religious rituals he and his anthropological brethren have recorded, and especially in identifying the shortcomings of virtually every explanation for religion ever offered. You name it, Boyer has an exception to it. To that end, anyone offering a theory of religion should read this book before transducing thought to ink. As a consequence, however, Boyer himself fails to provide a satisfactory explanation because he knows that religion is not a single entity that is the result of a single cause. “There cannot be a magic bullet to explain the existence and common features of religion, as the phenomenon is the result of aggregate relevance —that is, of successful activation of a whole variety of mental systems.” Here the book bogs down in the jargon-laden field of cognitive science, as the author struggles to unite an array of disparate findings, but comes up empty handed. “Is there some religious center in the brain, some special cortical area, some special neural network that handles God-related thoughts? Not really … religious persons are not different from nonreligious ones in essential cognitive functions.” Then what is the origin of religious faith and belief? For Boyer they “seem to be simple by-products of the way concepts and inferences are doing their work for religion in much the same way as for other domains.” in other words, religion requires no special explanation, an answer many will find unsatisfactory.
Whatever its origin, what does the future hold for religion? One avenue for the ever-burgeoning religious landscape is cyberspace, the subject of the aptly titled Give