00:00:03.03 LN: Welcome to The Really Big Questions. I'm NPR's Lynn Neary. It's something that makes human beings unique. Unlike any other species, we have religion. We also have science, and the two are often in conflict, as each tries to explain the nature of reality and how the world works. Now scientists are studying religion itself, asking why we believe, using the powerful lens of evolutionary theory.

00:00:28.14 Man: People have religion, because their minds work the way they do, and they work the way they do, because natural selection made them in a particular way.

LN: Religion can comfort or punish, inspire great good works or terrible cruelties.

00:00:41.00 Man: We should lay that on evolution, not on religion.

LN: But how did religions evolve? What are they for? And why do they continue to thrive in an age of science?

00:00:50.00 Man: I mean, if somebody said, "Your religion is completely a dream," I would say, "Well, what a beautiful dream. It really serves me well, and I'm enjoying it."

LN: The Science of Religion after this.

[Segment A]

LN: You're listening to The Really Big Questions. I'm NPR's Lynn Neary. Consider this. Why do the vast majority of people alive today believe there are invisible beings with miraculous powers who watch everything they say and do? Why are they willing to sacrifice their time, their wealth, perhaps their lives for them? Why are they even willing at times to kill in their name? Why did they organize their lives, their families, their communities and societies around these beliefs? Why, in other words, are people religious?

00:00:35.11 That's a really big question, and it's one that increasingly science is trying to answer. Our program on The Science of Religion was produced by John Rieger.

JR: For as long as there have been humans, we've felt the need to worship, to venerate certain special beings, objects, and ideas in rites and rituals. And wherever we've been, it seems, most of us have been this way.

Man: The details vary, but we find something like this "religion" in every society we've ever studied.

00:01:05.12 Man: You may not feel an attachment to any of the institutionalized religions out there, but I don't think you can be a human being without a certain religious sentiment.

Man: We found the records and relics of this impulse in every corner of human history. Religions great and small, living and extinct, quiet and contemplative or militant and expansive, each speaking to its people about humanity, the universe and their meaning, purpose, and prospects, why we're here and where we're going.

00:01:34.15 Man: Underneath the veneer of nature and history and our lives, underneath the surface, something really, really momentous is going on.

Man: Religion itself is the process of interpreting, putting a meaning on, making human sense out of this awesome, nonhuman, transcendent by its very definition, not definable reality.

JR: This is a program about religion and science, but it's not a program about whether the earth is actually six thousand years old, whether evolution is a fact or just a theory, or even whether God or gods exist. This is a program about human biology and human experience, about scientific understanding and how we understand our own lives. It's about scientists trying to explain something about human nature, that human beings are religious.

00:02:30.18 Our story could begin practically anywhere on earth, any place on this globe.

[Montage]

00:03:26.27 Religion is everywhere and everywhere different. People have worshipped the sun and the moon, goddesses of fertility and gods of war. Believers invoke the power of sacred relics from ancient texts to human bones, and prayers and rituals call on unseen spirits to spare us from earthquakes, wars, and famine, to soften the pain of loneliness, sickness, and death, even to bring us victory in football games. Let's go on with our tour.

[Montage]

00:04:36.17 What can we make of this Babel of belief? Well, for one thing, that religion appears to be part of human nature. Now for most of history, it was religion itself that answered our questions about nature, both its meaning and its mechanism. But in just a few hundred years, barely the blink of an eye really, that changed. In contest after contest, from Galileo to Darwin, from the age of the earth to the origins of life, religious doctrine was upended by science. Daniel Dennett is an evolutionary theorist.

00:05:08.21 DD: Until science came along in the seventeenth century, let's say, the final authority on all matters of fact was really the church. But today, even religions acknowledge that science is the best way of getting at factual truth.

00:05:24.09 JR: Indeed the scientific method is the most powerful tool ever devised for getting to the facts and refuting false ideas about how things work. But religious beliefs are exceptionally tenacious.

00:05:36.13 DD: And since religions have always had factual claims that they have insisted upon, this creates a zone of serious conflict.

JR: Now scientist are asking questions about religion itself. They're asking how it evolved, why the human psyche is so hospitable to religious ideas, and what's going on in the neurons of the believing brain. Elliot Sober is a philosopher of science.

00:06:01.12 ES: Every religion has its history. Doctrines have changed. There are many religions. They can't all be true. This is just a set of facts about human society and human culture that we need to understand, and science will help us to do it.

JR: These researchers start with the same premises, that human beings are natural organisms, and that all organisms are products are evolution. But they're coming to very different conclusions about religion. Some think it serves an evolutionary purpose, like love or aggression. But others say it's just an evolutionary side effect. And some even believe religion could be a self-perpetuating entity, maybe benign, possibly dangerous, that uses humans as its host like a virus. Daniel Dennett.

00:06:46.10 DD: The common cold is good for itself. It survives, because it can survive. Now maybe religion is like the common cold.

JR: But there are also scientists, scholars, and theologians who believe that religion is something science can't fully comprehend. They talk about meaning and values as if scientists looking for the causes of religion were asking the wrong questions about the wrong things. John Haut is a Catholic theologian.

00:07:13.04 JH: I'm very fascinated by attempts to explain religion in evolutionary terms, but at the same time, and without in any way contradicting the evolutionary explanations, I can say we are religious, because we are drawn towards the horizon of an infinite meaning of goodness, truth, and beauty.

JR: Norman Fischer is a Buddhist priest.

00:07:36.00 NF: I mean, if somebody said, "Well, you know, your religion is completely a dream, I would say, "Well, what a beautiful dream, and it really serves me well. I'm enjoying it."

JR: While scientists still disagree on virtually every aspect of religion, the grip of religion on the human species seems stronger than ever. And for many people in many places, scientific inquiry into the origins of religion is taboo. Daniel Dennett wants to change that. His book is called Breaking the Spell.

00:08:02.15 DD: The spell I want to break is the spell that says, "Don't try," that prohibits that, that says, "That's not nice; that's vandalism. Thou shalt not study religion scientifically."

∂

JR: Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. You might also call it an enlightenment city, one of the first ever built on a rational, pre-planned grid. It's home to the University of Pennsylvania and the neuroscience laboratory of Dr. Andrew Newberg. and I'm here to help him map out the grid of human nature by having my brain scanned.

00:08:41.17 AN: An MRI machine is basically a big magnet.

JR: The MRI or magnetic resonance imaging machine is specifically tuned to detect water, the primary constituent of blood. Because brain activity increases blood flow, the scanner can identify what parts of the brain area working harder during the experiment. Newberg is exploring the effects of religious imagery on the brain. He'll be showing me and other subjects in his current study a series of pictures, some religious symbols, some not, to see where our brains light up.

AN: Have you ever been in an MRI scanner?

JR: No, I haven't.

00:09:15.21 AN: Okay. So it's kind of being shoved into a torpedo tube kind of thing, and it's a little tight. The other main issue is that it's very noisy.

JR: How loud is it?

AN: It's about a hundred and ten decibels.

JR: A hundred and ten decibels is about as loud as a chainsaw.

AN: The earphones work pretty well.

JR: The MRI machine's super conducting electromagnets, cooled by liquid nitrogen, generate huge magnetic fields, powerful enough to realign your protons, powerful enough to suck objects from across the room right into the space occupied by your head. So no belt, no keys, no metal anywhere.

AN: Okay. Here we go. Are you all right?

JR: Ready when you are, Doctor.

AN: Okay, here we go.

00:10:09.16 JR: Against this soundtrack of clanging and banging, simple black and white images flash on the screen in front of my eyes—a crucifix, a circle, a leering skull, an asterisk, Satan, a swastika, a dove of peace. It's like an Expressionist film with an incomprehensible plot. With each image, the scanner records the activity in my brain. Those results are still pending.

00:10:38.27 Newberg began investigating religion and the brain about fifteen years ago. In a series of studies, he scanned the brains of Tibetan monks deep in meditation, Franciscan nuns lost in prayer, Sufis and transcendental meditators. They all showed a similar profile of activity in several brain regions, a tantalizing clue to the components of religious experience.

00:11:02.16 But some people saw more. A blizzard of breathless articles in the mainstream press proclaimed that Newberg and other researchers had found the God module, the part of the brain that causes religion. But what causes what is precisely what isn't clear. Andrew Newberg.

AN: When we did the scans of our Franciscan nun, she looked at me and she said, "Thank you, Dr. Newberg, for showing me how God changes my brain."

JR: But soon afterwards, he heard a different opinion.

00:11:34.10 AN: A few weeks later, I was speaking to someone who considers themselves to be an atheist, and they said, "Oh, Dr. Newberg, thank you so much. You've proven that God is nothing more than a manifestation of your brain's function."

JR: In fact, the brain scans don't say anything about why people are religious. Finding a recurring pattern of brain activity may seem to show that religion is a built-in part of our brain. If we could understand this God module, we would know what makes people religious. But all thought and experience depend on activity in the brain. A group of chess players might all have similar brain activity. But that doesn't mean playing chess is built into the brain.

00:12:24.29 LN: So are human religious by nature or is religion just something we've picked up along the way, like playing chess? To try to find the answer to those kinds of questions, we have to talk about human biology in the broadest possible terms. And in the 21st century, that means talking about evolution, which we'll do when The Science of Religion returns.

To learn more about The Really Big Questions, visit our Web site, trbq.org.

[Segment B]

LN: I'm NPR's Lynn Neary, and you're listening to The Really Big Questions. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection combined with Gregor Mendel's studies of inherited traits and Watson and Craig's discovery of DNA has made evolutionary biology the preeminent science of life. Its ability to explain how things work from the most basic molecular processes to complex social behaviors has vastly expanded our understanding of the world and its creatures including ourselves.

00:00:36.20 But now as evolutionary biologists examine and try to understand humanity's attachment to religion, they may be taking on their biggest challenge yet. John Rieger continues our program on The Science of Religion.

JR: The great naturalists before Darwin were entranced by the appearance of design. For every teeming jungle or icy rock, there were wings or fur or flowers or roots that solved the problems of living there. Darwin showed us how nature did it. Like farmers practicing selective breeding, nature imposes its own natural selection. Only those organisms that lived to reproduce pass on their traits. So traits that help the organism survive and reproduce, that make it more fit, proliferate over time. Traits that don't work disappear. Gradually organisms evolve to become adapted to their environment.

00:01:31.09 But not every feature of every organism is an adaptation. Some traits like the color of your eyes have no effect on fitness either way. And that's what evolutionary biologists want to know about religion. Is religion an adaptation? Did we evolve to be religious?

00:02:03.14 We've landed in Clarksdale, Mississippi in the heart of the Bible Belt, historic cotton country where the deep scars of poverty still mark the flat Delta landscape.  On a sweltering summer afternoon, I visited Charlie and Verna Jones, a devout middle-aged couple who live in a modest Clarksdale neighborhood.

00:02:26.11 VJ: You  know, they call Clarksdale a holy city, you know what I mean, because there's so many churches down there. It seems like everybody down there is holy, you know?

JR: Jim Collier, a twelve year Army veteran, is a minister at Clarksdale's largest church, Oakhurst Baptist.

JC: A pastor or a church man is still highly respected here in Clarksdale. In some areas, in Tampa or in Memphis or maybe in California, people who are in business and professors would carry the reputation of the town or people would refer them to those type of people. But here, it's the pastors. It's the clergy that get to be a part of civic life.

00:03:22.23 JR: Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson is one of the world's foremost living naturalists. Born and raised in Alabama, a Southern Baptist from childhood, Wilson embodies the tension between the passionate pursuit of science and a deep yearning for the sacred. To Wilson, the Christian people of Clarksdale are deeply familiar.

EW: I think I went through the gamut of emotions that bind evangelicals and especially fundamentalists together, and it literally is a sense of communion with the Creator, and that's a powerful feeling. But beyond that comes the deep emotional satisfactions of belonging to a group in a matter that stirs emotions that range from deep peace of mind and exaltation.

00:04:27.27 JR: For Wilson, the deep power of religion stems from something even deeper, the power of natural selection. A world authority on ants and their behavior, Wilson revolutionized the science of human behavior with a series of books in the late 1970s, including the Pulitzer Prize winning On Human Nature and Sociobiology, a work so controversial it provoked public demonstrations, but which eventually gave its name to a new discipline.

Wilson made the bold argument that the whole of human nature—our thinking, our morality, our sexual behavior, our religion—is a product of evolution. Religion evolved, he argued, because it was adaptive. It helped humans to survive.

00:05:12.07 EW: There is an adaptive value to believing in a higher order, in something larger than the self. The advantage comes from the capacity it gives a group to establish moral and legal order, to gather as a group and to be obedient to the established rules and laws of that particular group.

JR: Certainly Clarksdale is a community where Christian belief is profound, widespread, and publicly professed. And in Clarksdale, there are very strong notions of how life should be lived and the kinds of people who are or are not welcome.

RW: We are a practicing body of believers.

00:05:52.25 JR: Richard Webster served sixteen years as mayor of Clarksdale.

RW: If a group of practicing atheists had moved in and tried to establish a retail business or tried to establish some type of a venue, I'm not going to say that they would fail. I'm not going to say that at all, but I'm going to say that the chances are that they're not going to get a lot of support from the community and their ventures.

00:06:22.15 JR: For E.O. Wilson, this wariness towards those who are different is written into our evolutionary heritage.

EW: One of the universals of human history is the struggle between groups, one to dominate the other. History is rife with wars, with tribal conquests, with absorption of one culture by another, which continues to the present time.

JR: In this life and death competition between human groups, Wilson says, only the fittest group survived, perpetuating the traits that made them stronger. By this process of group selection, human beings developed a religious instinct.

00:07:02.23 EW: Yes, I do believe there is a religious instinct, but it's just one form by which the deeper propensity manifests itself, and that is tribalism. When you think that the big guy, the Creator picked you out as his favorite people, you gather the strength, and you gather the purpose needed to prevail against other groups.

JR: Distrust of outsiders, unbelievers, or those who would believe differently. But there's another side to religion, and it's prominently on display here in Clarksdale. Several times a year, this community welcomes groups of young volunteers, mostly middle class kids from up North who come to work for Habitat for Humanity, joining with their fellow Christians to build trim new houses for people who have spent their lives in old sharecropper shacks. Their motto, "God's People Helping God's People in Need."

00:08:03.03 Charles Booth and McKenna Kelly [?] came here from Champaign, Illinois. They held bake sales and babysitting nights to raise money for food and building materials, then piled into a pair of rattling cars with a dozen volunteers for the long drive to Mississippi.

CB: These experiences where everything seems to come together and just make sense, they happen down here. They happen really often down here.

MK: Seeing the Higher Power in action, we get to experience a small part of that when we come, and it really helps us to look at the world differently.

CB: It could be anywhere, any time, anything that sets it off, and also you realize that it's all brought together by Jesus Christ and his love for us and just being surrounded by that care and that love opens your eyes, opens your ears, lets you perceive these—not coincidences, but these purposeful things.

00:08:53.22 JR: Charles and McKenna's hard work and sacrifice for others is admirable, but oddly enough, it represents a central problem for evolutionary theory since Darwin, the problem of altruism. If evolution is really survival of the fittest, how could a behavior evolve in which some individuals sacrifice their time and resources for others?

Elliot Sober is a philosopher of science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

00:09:20.00 ES: There's no puzzle in Darwin's theory as to why tigers should have sharp claws and why zebras should run fast, but it is puzzling why organisms should sacrifice their lives for the sake of other organisms. It seems like these self-sacrificial behaviors are just the sorts of things that natural selection should expunge.

JR: The traditional solution to this problem has been the concept of group selection. Like an army whose soldiers are willing to die for one another, altruistic social groups are stronger than selfish groups. But Darwin himself was wary of group selection, because of the problem of cheaters. Like a tribe member who eats but refuses to hunt or the citizen who uses the city streets but dodges his taxes, the cheater grows fat from the altruism of others, but the altruist gets nothing from the cheater.

00:10:12.24 In an evolutionary sense, the cheaters are more fit. They win the struggle for survival, and altruism should disappear from the group by natural selection, but that hasn't happened, and that's where religion comes in. It makes people stop cheating. Sometimes the faithful are inspired to keep their God's commandments, but stopping cheaters, whether thieves, sinners, apostates, or atheists can also take a darker form—shunning, stoning, crucifixion—in fact, the whole grisly catalog of human cruelty.

David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist at Binghamton University in New York.

00:10:52.05 DSW: You can't just let wanton cheating take place within a group. Something has to be done. Social control is a fact of life, and nobody can say that we'll have a group without social control, because that group ain't going to work. So how is it that you establish this uniformity within groups is not just by niceness. It's sometimes by burning people at the stake. We should lay that on evolution, not on religion.

00:11:24.02 JR: According to sociobiology, religion is an instinct that helps human groups compete with one another. Religion stops cheaters. It promotes altruistic behavior and in the perpetual competition between human groups, altruistic groups are stronger. So the paradox of Christian life in Clarksdale where altruism goes hand in hand with mistrust of unbelievers is no paradox at all. In this view, altruism and tribalism are two sides of the religious coin, the result of group selection.

00:11:59.03 But something glaringly obvious is missing from this account. When humans act religiously, we don't just act from instinct like a colony of ants. We have beliefs about things like duty and morality. We have desires about the welfare of others. We have a whole set of psychological motivations that need to be explained by evolution, and the single most recognizable feature of religious psychology around the world is belief in the supernatural.

JR: Professor Daniel Mengara of Montclair University in New Jersey is a member of the Fang people of Gabon in French Equatorial Africa. Many of the Fangs still live in tiny, remote villages surrounded by dense jungle where their world is filled with the spirits of their ancestors who at death take on extraordinary powers and influence every aspect of Fang life.

00:13:44.04 DM: Once dead, they can do whatever they want. They can travel. They can reincarnate into a baby. There's just no way a medicine man will be able to be a medicine man without the validation of the science by the dead people. He has to work with the ancestors.

JR: Evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer of Washington University in St. Louis was living among the Fang when he began to wonder why human minds everywhere seem so drawn to supernatural agents.

00:14:17.25 PB: If you tell people that there are spirits around and those spirits are invisible creatures that can see what you're doing, they can see what you're up to, they can also do things like make you sick or things like that. I was wondering: What is it that makes this kind of idea so natural, so clear? And I thought the best way to do that is to run experiments.

JR: Boyer hypothesized that some ideas catch on, because they're just naturally more intuitive or more memorable. In a series of experiments in England, America, Africa, and Nepal, he found that certain kinds of fantastical or supernatural ideas just seem to stick.

00:14:56.23 PB: The basic thing that always works is the notion of an agent, a person-like agent that combines two things. One thing is that he is physically counterintuitive, that he defies the ordinary physics of solid objects. For example, ghosts go through walls. They can be in two places at the same time. Gods can attend to all sorts of things at the same time. At the same time, their psychology is very much our psychology. So gods, spirits, ancestors, all of these supernatural agents, they have memories. They have reasoning. They have perceptions, and all of those things are extremely similar to what you find in humans.

JR: Our gods are magical. They violate laws of nature that humans understand instinctively, but they're also very human creations—willful and emotional. Scott Atran is director of research and anthropology at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.

00:15:53.04 SA: I mean, if you look at gods, they're jealous all the time. They get angry or they get happy with what you do, but the only things that can be jealous or angry or have emotions are things with substance. Humans know this innately. So what that does is it in a sense cognitively surprises us.

JR: Experiments show that these surprising paradoxical ideas have a special cognitive appeal for humans. Like the many armed, elephant headed Hindu god Ganesh or the miracle of the resurrection, they're memorable. They're easily passed on, and we find these impossible or paradoxical ideas in religions everywhere. Here's Charlie and Verna Jones in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

00:16:36.11 CJ: See, God is the God that worked through man. See, God don't have no head, no feet, but he's all power. He works through man.

VJ: Yes. See, the Bible let us know, he that comes to God must believe. We have never seen God at any time.

CJ: We don't see him.

VJ: But yet we believe.

CJ: Yet we believe.

JR: Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer argue that human psychology is uniquely receptive to ideas like these. Some researchers believe this is an adaptation, that watchful deities encourage altruism by keeping an eye on cheaters. But Atran won't go that far.

00:17:10.15 SA: One of the differences I have with many evolutionary interpretations of religion is that I don't think religion is a thing that evolved to solve this problem.

JR: Instead Atran says religion is just an accidental byproduct of the way our minds have evolved, but like much in human culture, it's a useful tool. It works. So we use it to solve problems. It's a bit like lipstick, he says. We didn't evolve to use lipstick, but it works, because it pushes our evolutionary buttons. And we use it in everything from dating to embalming. We didn't evolve to be religious either, but they used religion to solve a wide range of uniquely human problems from group cooperation to existential anxieties about the meaning of life, misfortune, and death. Here's Verna Jones of Clarksdale.

00:18:03.09 Go back to the point when Witona [?] got killed. My daughter—my daughter got killed in '98 in a car accident. A truck ran over her. She was on her way to school, and I don't know why God did what he did, but I know one thing. God is still a merciful God and a gracious God. So I trust God that my daughter is with the Lord, no matter what.

LN: Religion can help bring us together, but religion can also drive us apart from one another, sometimes with great violence. It's this last aspect, the dark side of religion, and what science might be able to say or do about it that we'll examine next, when The Science of Religion continues.

[Segment C]

LN: You're listening to The Really Big Questions. I'm NPR's Lynn Neary. Nearly three hundred years ago, the philosopher David Hume wrote that errors in philosophy are ridiculous, but errors in religion are dangerous. He was writing in a time when people had great reason to fear those dangers. The Protestant Reformation had unleashed thirty years of devastating warfare in Europe, pitting Catholics against Protestants and dissenters of all kinds against each other.

00:00:28.29 David Hume was an important contributor to the scientific study of religion, which began in the attempt to understand and control the violent forces of religious turmoil. In our time, some of the leading researchers and authors on the science of religion share the same concern. They worry that religion has become a force for ignorance, disorder, and violence, and some of them hope if people come to understand the real reasons humans have religion, they will be able to contain it or move away from it all together. Others argue that science can't change religion, because science doesn't have the right tools to understand it. John Rieger continues with our program on The Science of Religion.

00:01:11.09 JR: Not so long ago, leading thinkers believed that religion would disappear in the modern age. They had a name for it, the secularization thesis. Indeed in western Europe today, the great cathedrals are filled more with tourists than worshippers. The pronouncements of church leaders are often met with indifference.

And yet in parts of Europe and certainly in the rest of the world, religion today is a vital and growing presence. In the wake of dramatic economic and social upheavals, hundreds of millions of people are strengthening their religious identities, challenging any separation in their societies between church and state and clashing with both secular institutions and other faiths.

00:01:52.16 In the last few years, for many, the most noticeable aspect of religion around the world has been confrontation, anger, and too often, deadly violence. The events of September 11, 2001 and the responses and counter-responses to it have only heightened this sense that religion breeds conflict.

00:02:52.22 Violence and conflict have never been the special province of just one religion. Every culture has its heroes who have willingly gone to their deaths for a higher purpose, and religions have their martyrs. Professor Mark Juergensmeyers is president of the American Academy of Religion and author of Terror in the Mind of God. Violence, struggle, and sacrifice, he says, are part of the heritage of all of the major religions.

00:03:16.17 MJ: Whether it's the ramina [?] and the haparta [?] in the Hindu tradition or even the Buddhist chronicles, the [inaudible] [00:03:22.27] in the Terravata [?] Buddhist tradition or the great struggles in the Hebrew Bible and the imagined end of the world conflict in the Book of Revelation, every religious tradition has these images of battle and struggle.

JR: How does religion become a force for violence? Historian Scott Appleby, director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame says partly out of altruism, the powerful human impulse to sacrifice for others.

00:03:49.25 SA: The religious impulse is to say this. There is something more important, more sacred, if you will, more real than my very life, than the life of my family, and that it's so commanding that compared to it, my own physical existence, my own health, and even in fact, the health of my children is relativized. It's just not as important.

JR: The same altruistic impulse that can unite a religious community for charitable work has the power to galvanize people with economic, cultural, or political grievances into holy warriors, willing to sacrifice all for God's higher purpose. Evolutionary theorist Daniel Dennett.

00:04:34.13 DD: Religion is a very important phenomenon in all of its many guises around the world. If we don't understand it in the twenty-first century, we are in deep trouble, because almost every problem that we face has a dimension in which religion plays a role. If we don't understand what makes religions tick, we're going to make a mistake. We're going to make lots of big mistakes.

JR: Dennett is a prominent and controversial thinker, a respected philosopher who's made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind. His ideas about religion are based in evolutionary theory, but his conclusions are provocative. For instance, Dennett suggests that some ideas are independent entities, things designed by natural selection to inhabit human brains. In effect, Dennett says, religion is a virus.

00:05:20.23 DD: People say, "Oh, you're studying the evolution of religion. What do you think religion is good for? After all, every human group that's ever been studied has religion." And I say, "Yeah, that's true. Every group that's ever been studied also has the common cold. What's that good for?" The common cold is good for itself. It survives, because it can survive.

JR: Dennett has borrowed an idea from influential evolutionary biologist and fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, the theory of memes. Memes are units of culture analogous to genes that compete for people's attention. The catchiest memes spread. The dull memes die out. It's survival of the fittest meme, and religions are some of the fittest memes of all.

00:06:07.18 DD: I think that religions are cultural objects brilliantly designed by natural selection to perpetuate themselves. It's not that people try to have them. It's not that they do people any good It's just that like rats and pigeons and barn swallows and squirrels, they live well in a human world, whether we like them or not. They survive, because they have adaptations for getting people to act as their hosts and protectors and shepherds and to work hard and devote a lot of time and energy to spreading them to other people.

JR: Dennett turns the evolutionary scenario on its head. Humans didn't evolve to have religion; religion evolved to survive in humans.

00:06:43.14 DD: Now maybe religion is like the common cold. Maybe its ubiquity in human cultures is because nobody's been able to figure out a way of getting rid of it. On the other hand, maybe it's more like the flora in your gut, something that we couldn't live without. Maybe it's really good for us. That's another possibility. That's what we need to do the research on.

00:07:08.10 JR: Religion is a virus that inhabits human brains. That's a catchy meme right there, but is this a scientific theory of religion? Many critics say not yet. Some ideas are certainly catchy, like that infectious tune you can't get out of your head, but calling the macarena or the resurrection a meme doesn't tell us why it's so catchy or help us predict what other ideas will catch on under what circumstances. There is no scientific theory here, say the critics, meme is just another name for a catchy idea.

00:07:47.16 But what's excited more comment than Dennett's theory is the anti-religious tone of his book, Breaking the Spell. Matthew Day is an assistant professor of religion at Florida State University. He says Dennett's arguments have crossed over from science to polemics.

MD: Clearly one of the functions of Breaking the Spell is that by explaining religion, he thinks he's done the work of explaining it away, that is to say once you've cast through the fog of cognitive illusions and you discover that religion ends up being natural, you give it up.

JR: But showing that it's natural isn't really an argument against religion. After all, science is also natural. It's something we can do with our brains, thanks to evolution. Again, Matthew Day.

00:08:32.00 So here's a strange case where I think Dan's fear of religion ends up being important, that in a world where religion seems from a certain perspective to be more dangerous than ever, something has to be done about this.

JR: But there are other evolutionary thinkers who worry about the dangerous, violent side of religion and think that science could provide a cure, not be destroying or eradicating religion, but by tempering or modifying it. Among them is the founding father of sociobiology, E. O. Wilson. Humans will always feel the need to believe in a higher truth, he argues. But that truth should come from science.

00:09:12.29 EO: What we need to do—and I think where history will lead us—is to hollow out the dogmatic religions, hollow out their mythologies that present them as a special creation of God and a chosen people, and then accept on behalf of humanity as a whole the best parts of religion and those will probably have to include group competition, but a benign form of group competition that takes the forms of charity, innovation, and peacemaking.

JR: Wilson may be on to something, or he could be a quixotic dreamer. Either way, there are plenty of other researchers and intellectuals who reject his notion that science can modify religion, because they argue science lacks the tools to really understand it. Catholic theologian John Haught of Georgetown University.

00:10:05.27 JH: I have no problem, and I'm very fascinated by attempts to explain religion in evolutionary terms, but at the same time and without in any way contradicting the evolutionary expectations, I can say that we are religious, because we are drawn towards the horizon of an infinite meaning, goodness, truth and beauty.

SA: Religion is about interpretation.

JR: Religious historian Scott Appleby.

00:10:33.15 SA: That is, religion itself is the process of interpreting, putting a meaning on, making human sense out of this awesome, nonhuman, transcendent by its very definition, not definable reality.

JR: We're talking now about the subjective experience of religion, the intuition that there's something that it all means, something that it all adds up to, the sense that there's purpose and value in life, and that some things are sacred, and this is part of the spell of religion that even Daniel Dennett thinks science will not break.

00:11:10.27 DD: I think there is a very good chance that a full scientific understanding of religion will no more break the spell of religion than it will break the spell of music, if we have a full scientific understanding of music. I don't think people who are in love with music as I am are really afraid of a deeper scientific understanding of how music works in our brains, why it's survived, how it's evolved. Music will be just as wonderful and just as spellbinding as ever, once we understand it scientifically. I think the same thing is true of religion.

JR: Perhaps. But religion, as we've seen, involves more than just sublime feelings about the meaning of life. For some, it's a profound personal experience of communicating with God. For others, it's a set of beliefs about saints or spirits or deities who walk the earth, perform miracles, or appear in sacred visions and tell us how to live, beliefs that conflict with science.

Nancy Murphy is a professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. Although she holds a doctorate in the philosophy of science, she insists on the existence of a God who created the material world and remains an active agent in it.

00:12:24.28 NM: When we're talking about God's relation to the world, the world that's being talked about is the same world that all of the rest of us are walking around on and experimenting with. I don't believe Christianity can do without a God who in some sense performs special divine actions in addition to God's constant upholding the whole of the natural process.

JR: And so there is, as Daniel Dennett says, a zone of serious conflict between science and some religious beliefs. To a science of religion, these impossible beliefs look like illusions, tricks of the human brain. They have no more reality than a dream.

00:13:06.12 NF: What do we mean by reality and what do we mean by a dream? I need the unreal. I need the dream.

JR: Norman Fischer is a Buddhist priest and former abbott at the San Francisco Zen Center. If religion is just a dream, he says, he'll take the dream.

NF: I mean, if somebody said that to me and said, "Your religion is completely a dream," I would say, "Oh, what a beautiful dream. It really serves me well, and I'm enjoying it. [laughs] Fine." And we need, I think, that sense of the divinity, to use that term, of the world, because without it, I think we do lose meaning. Our life gets two-dimensional, and it's not enough for us. We become unhappy. We become sick. We become crazy for lack of that.

00:13:45.05 JR: But how can we continue to believe if what we know is unreal? On the other hand, how can we cease to believe if it's part of our nature? We've discovered an evolutionary paradox. It may be adaptive to have false beliefs.

In Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Habitat for Humanity volunteers are moved by their beliefs to great joy and great altruism. Carl Fuller is a construction supervisor.

00:14:12.10 CF: I love being a born again Christian, and a lot of time, I call it "zoning" and "floating" and I'm really in communing with the Lord. I'm really in touch with it. And I'm really out there. They call that faith.

JR: Dorothy Jenkins is the Habitat for Humanity chapter president.

DJ: There's a different type of lifestyle that you live. Once you have accepted Christ as your savior, you can love people that don't love you. You can forgive people for what they do, and I don't just mean in words only, in deeds, and then live it out.

JR: Perhaps the human story can't be told without evolutionary biology, and yet ask any of these people why they're doing what they're doing and no one will say, "It's an instinct" or "It's just the way my brain works." They'll talk about their personal motives, about God, for example, about duty and the love of their fellow man.

00:15:11.22 It's hard to avoid the thought that sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience view us as puppets of our own biology, that they leave out something essential about being human, why we choose, and what it means. Theologian John Haught.

00:15:30.01 JH: Suppose there's a pot of water boiling on your stove and someone comes into the kitchen and says, "Why is that boiling? Explain it to me." Well, at one level, you can say it's boiling, because the molecules of H20 are moving around excitedly, and they're making the transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state. But you could also have answered just as readily, "The pot is boiling, because I turned the gas on," or you could go a little further and say, "The pot is boiling, because I want tea."

Religion, yes, it does—like every living system, it deserves to be treated in an evolutionary way, but to say that now that we have an evolutionary understanding of religion, we can dispense with theology is almost like saying, "Now that I understand how the pot is boiling, because of molecular motion, I can just dismiss as irrelevant the fact that I want tea."

JR: Knowing that people evolve to think and act in certain ways explains a great deal, but it doesn't tell us how we should think and act right now. That's something we have to decide for ourselves by examining our values, by considering what's meaningful in our lives, what's important, what's sacred. Is it God, human rights, tolerance, duty?

00:17:01.07 We all use these touchstones to help us navigate life's decisions. Evolutionary biology may be able to tell us how we got to be this way, but it probably won't be able to tell us what to do about it, how to live, how to love, whether to make war or peace, to seek vengeance or to forgive.

00:17:34.23 LN: Today's program, Religion, was produced by John Rieger and written by John Rieger and Michael Rouse [?], director of the program in History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University. The editor was Gary Covino [?]. This series, The Really Big Questions, was produced by Julie Caine, Gene Brian Johnson [?], and Loretta Williams. Technical engineer and music director was Robin Wise with assistance from Sean Corey Campbell. Our theme music was composed and performed by Steve White, Larry Massit [?], and Lynn Tavin [?] provided additional music. Our executive producer is Bari Scott. I'm Lynn Neary. Thanks for listening.

The Really Big Questions, TRBQ, was created by SoundVision, which also produces The DNA Files and The Science Literacy Project. SoundVision is a nonprofit organization that explores complex subjects related to the humanities, science, and technology. We invite you to participate in the discovery by visiting us on the Internet at trbq.org. You can learn more about today's guests, find a comprehensive list of resources and related links, or even suggest questions for future programs. Major funding for The Really Big Questions was provided by the National Science Foundation, NSF, where discoveries begin. This is a SoundVision production.