Stephen Phelan

CONSIDER the brain of Albert Einstein, which wasn’t noticeably bigger than anyone else’s. It was, if anything, slightly smaller than average, weighing in at a comparatively light 1.23 kilograms when removed from Einstein’s skull after his death in 1955. Fellow scientists have since been cutting into neural tissue samples from that brain, looking for the physical roots of genius and finding nothing conclusive. They cannot, as yet, explain why this particular complex of cells generated one of the greatest minds in human history. They haven’t precisely located the source of the “peculiar religious feeling” that Einstein spoke of when contemplating “the mystery of life, and the marvellous harmony manifest in the structure of reality”. But they’re working on it.

And one day, science may be able to prove beyond doubt that all such feelings are by-products of biochemistry, that belief systems emerge out of cognitive functions, and that God himself exists only in our heads. In the meantime, ever more advanced theories and books will emerge to this effect, the latest of which is Professor Daniel C Dennett’s forthcoming work Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon. The title, says Dennett, refers to “the spell which creates an invisible moat around religion”. “The one that whispers, ‘Science Stay Away’. Because religion interacts with every major problem we have – injustice, the environment, discrimination, economic imbalance and potential genocide. If we fail to understand how religions tick, then we will never solve those problems.”

Dennett is an eminent American philosopher and director of the Center For Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, and his career and reputation as a thinker have long been established by his sustained argument that human consciousness is a physical process. And if this means we don’t have souls, it must be because we don’t need them. “That’s right, ” says Dennett. “Free will doesn’t have to be some kind of miracle, some break in the fabric of causation. The good old physical reality of the material brain might be sufficient to account for it.”

In 1995, Dennett wrote Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which described the theory of evolution by natural selection as “a universal acid which eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionised world view”. As Karl Marx would surely have told him, however, revolutions depend on the will of the people, and if the masses are opiated by religion, they’re not likely to rise up against God. A Mori poll taken last month, some 150 years after Charles Darwin first published his theory, suggested that 52-per cent of Americans still favour creationism, or the newly-fashionable pseudo-scientific notion of “intelligent design”, over evolution as explanations for the origin of the species.

Dennett is “not depressed, but often exasperated” by such statistics. He looks like Darwin himself – the flowing white beard may be obscurely symbolic of their shared intellectual heritage – and he sounds as relaxed as a California hippy. But Dennett is wilfully advancing his field to the point of confrontation, with a new book which traces the first transmissions of religion back to electricity in the primitive mind, rather than lightning from divine fingertips. “The confrontation between religious faith and the modern scientific world is already underway, ” he says. “And it won’t stop.” Breaking The Spell opens with a preemptive challenge to those true believers who will inevitably accuse Dennett of typical liberal hubris.

“I for one am not in awe of your faith, ” he writes. “I am appalled by your arrogance, by your unreasonable certainty that you have all the answers. I wonder if any believers in the End Times will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book through.” Those who do may find it, in the end, a wholehearted and serious-minded attempt to enlighten through “reverse-engineering”.

“I’m basically an optimist, ” says Dennett. “That’s why I wrote this book. The impulses of most religious people are deeply moral, and they believe they are reasonable. I want to appeal to those characteristics and see if I can get them to think about these matters in a slightly different way.”

THERE are, as it turns out, many different ways to think about these matters. Some of them are so complicated that even Dennett’s non-believing readers may suddenly find a renewed appeal in the earliest, most elementary function of religion – to provide potent myths which act as substitutes for incomplete knowledge and limited understanding. Such basic explanations for the evolution of religion seem to make sense on an intuitive level. It’s probable, for example, that early humans needed to develop what Dennett calls an “intentional stance” towards the strangeness of the prehistoric world. They saw spirits inside everything, from the clouds to the corpses of their own dead relatives, and took a comfort from this which boosted their ability to cope, and their fitness to survive, even to this day. It’s also easy to imagine faith as a social phenomenon, “designed by evolution to improve co-operation within human groups”. But it’s not necessarily as simple as any of that.

The human brain has since evolved to such a point of complexity that it may never be completely unpacked, and the study of evolution itself has become a confusion of angles and perspectives. “I want to open up the game to everyone, ” admits Dennett. “There are theories on religion, and there are alternatives. I have presented what I think are the best candidates and I have various personal hunches about how true they are. I’m not necessarily an expert in any of them.”

Other names invoked in Breaking The Spell include the geneticist Dean Hamer, who has observed a microscopic factory at work in our DNA called VMAT2, which processes proteins into thought and behaviour signals, and may function as a possible nerve-centre for spiritual beliefs. The anthropologist Pascal Boyer has identified various “concepts” which might have combined to create religion in the human mind: “agent-detector, memory-manager, cheater-detector, moral-intuition-detector, a sweet tooth for stories . . . ” And the prominent biologist Richard Dawkins has developed the idea of “memes” – units of information which spread and adapt in human culture by using the same basic survival mechanism as genetic evolution. Successful memes flourish through songs and languages, memes which are no longer useful die out like the old sky gods.

In his recent BBC TV series The Root Of All Evil? , and his own forthcoming book The God Delusion, Dawkins describes modern religious faith as a particularly persistent, insidious and dangerous meme which has outlived its evolutionary purpose to become a “mind-virus”. Dennett is broadly inclined towards the same conclusion.

“Well, sure, ” he says. “Most people are now aware that a genetically-engineered micro-organism could get out of control despite the efforts of its creators to quarantine it. We have to start thinking about culture in the same terms as genes – as a very volatile source of novelty and competition – and recognise that sometimes ideas that are not useful may get a hold of us. Of course I’m sure that some people would say these are the kinds of ideas I myself am trying to spread.” No honest scientist could deny holding certain beliefs of their own. The universe remains such a mystery that we don’t even know what it’s made of, and the professional opinion that everything will be illuminated is in itself a demonstration of faith.

But the difference between scientific and religious belief may be substantial, in that science has no intrinsic moral content, and is subject to a constant process of analysis and correction that has yielded what Dennett calls “an ongoing wave of exquisitely detailed positive results”.

A negative result does not undermine the whole endeavour. Thales of Miletus became the first scientific mind on record when he applied objective critical thought to the fundamental questions of nature in the sixth century BC. His spectacularly erroneous conclusion – that the Earth is a flat disc floating on a vast sea – only served to open the scope of enquiry. And all the subsequent findings have inevitably affected the perception of religious doctrine.

They have made “fundamentalists” of those Christians who continue to accept the literal truth of the biblical calculation that God commanded the universe into being approximately 6000 years ago, despite all evidence that Babylonians were brewing beer in the desert, under the light of distant stars, two full millennia before that. “Moderates” by contrast, have been characterised by neuroscientist Sam Harris, in his book The End Of Faith, as those believers who have “assimilated some of the last 2000 years of human thought”. “Religious moderation, ” writes Harris, “is a product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.”

Thus the concept of God has evolved into someone or something more metaphorical, less anthropomorphic than the descriptions given in old holy books, and scientists have redefined their positions accordingly. Knowing what he knew in the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton remained a believer. In discovering that gravity was an inverse square law, he had merely revealed “the frame of the world” that God had designed.

Charles Darwin, for his part, was troubled into agnosticism by his own studies, unable to detect the hand of a benevolent creator in the sight of a wasp laying her eggs inside a live caterpillar, but equally unwilling “to view this wonderful universe and conclude that everything is a result of brute force”. Albert Einstein described the cosmos as “the Old One”, and his attitude towards it as “deeply religious non-belief”.

Richard Dawkins calls himself an “atheist” because that word has the most political impact in his ongoing argument against the global faithful. And Daniel C Dennett has recently coined the term “bright” as a noun to describe himself and everyone else who accepts that human beings are nothing more or less than “cultural primates with material brains”. “I think that the vision you get from life as a bright, ” he says, “is more awesome, more breathtaking, more inspiring than religion allows for. I look around at other brights and they are living wonderful, meaningful lives. They are engaged and moral and working to solve the world’s problems, while many self-styled religious people are complacent, myopic, and kidding themselves that they lead lives of great morality, just because they adhere to a series of taboos which really aren’t all that important.”

But if religion is a product of evolution, and these “brights” have realised they can survive fitter and better without it, does that make them in some way more highly evolved?

“No. That’s not the way sound evolutionists think. Everything that’s alive today, every blade of grass, every worm, every fish, is advanced. There they are. Some of them have been on this planet longer than we have, and none is any more or less evolved than us. I would only say that like every other living thing, the design of a religion can become obsolete, and it takes time for the world to catch up. Sometimes things don’t evolve fast enough to avoid becoming problems. Now others would say let’s scrap religion altogether, but I’m not ready to do that because I think there may not be anything remotely as good to replace it with yet.”

All of this, of course, is academic. All the theories in the world about the true nature of religious belief have neither proved nor disproved the existence of God. Andrew Slorance, producer and presenter of the current BBC2 documentary series Among The Believers, has spent time on the invisible line between faith and despair, and he knows which side he would rather be on.

“Even if we could just wipe out all religion, ” says Slorance, “I think it would be a terrible sin, simply because it so obviously helps so many people.” The programme bears witness to one religious experience after another, as Slorance takes part in a Bar Mitzvah in Glasgow and an evening procession at Lourdes, fasts for Ramadan, watches a Govan alcoholic find salvation, and confronts the sheer preternatural calm of a dying young Baha’i woman and her husband. “We went round to film there, ” Slorance says, “and the guy was in the garden making his wife’s coffin. When I got to know them and understand their belief I could see death wasn’t a dark or terrible thing for them.”

SYMPATHETIC as most of them are, not one of these interview subjects can make either Slorance or the viewer feel the presence of God. If anything, they seem to be case studies in the entirely natural and explicable core benefits of faith, which kicks in like a survival instinct to generate a sense of hope or meaning as required. Slorance himself becomes a more interesting and recognisable figure, in his particular inability to relate to their experience.

He is what Daniel C Dennett describes as a “believer in belief” – one of the millions who can’t sense the divine but would wish they could. “I’ve met so many people who have told me what it feels like, ” he says, “and I really want to feel it for myself.” Slorance has been paralysed and confined to a wheelchair since he was 14, and has sought “that glow of belief” since the nurses in the spinal unit told him his accident was the will of God.

“I didn’t really believe it, ” says Slorance. “I didn’t even get angry about it. It had never even occurred to me to pray, not even when I was lying on the striker bed in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. I have prayed a few times since, and and I think I’ve come pretty close to really getting it, but I still can’t quite believe that someone or something will intervene to help. Perhaps my problem is that I need some kind of proof. Maybe I’m too analytical.”

Slorance is trapped then, somewhere between believer and bright, and he’s hardly the only one. Professor Dennett argues that reason alone will be our salvation. But what if those irrational genes or memes behind music, love, beauty, and God exist in other undisclosed parts of the brain, which are now being phased out through evolution?

“Well, ” says Dennett, “it’s true that nobody quite understands where these things came from, or what purpose they serve, although there are interesting theories and sketches out there. And it would be foolish indeed to become obsessively concerned with how love works, for example. But you can’t help paying attention to it, and some of it you will naturally work out. Does love survive a reflective consideration? Yes, wonderfully, it does. Does it always? No. But if it doesn’t, perhaps it’s a good thing that you got to the bottom of it and realised it was just infatuation, or a mid-life crisis. Sometimes it’s good to take a hard look at these things.”

If there remains any doubt that science and religion might somehow be reconciled, consider again the brain of Einstein, where both were accommodated without any significant compromise between wonder and analysis.

“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious, ” he once wrote. “It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in the most elementary forms – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude.”