A provocative study asks whether religion is a product of evolution. Inside a quest for the roots of faith
By Jeffrey Kluger
It’s not hard to see the divinity behind the water temples that dot the rice terraces of Bali. It’s there in the white-clad high priest presiding in the temple at the summit of a dormant volcano. It’s there in the 23 priests serving along with him, selected for their jobs when they were still children by a bevy of virgin priestesses. It’s there in the rituals the priests perform to protect the island’s water, which in turn is needed to nurture the island’s rice.
If the divine is easy to spot, what’s harder to make out is the banal. But it’s there too-in the meetings the priests convene to schedule their planting dates and combat the problem of crop pests; in the plans they draw up to maintain aqueducts and police conduits; in the irrigation proposals they consider and approve, the dam proposals they reject or amend. “The religion has a temple at every node in the irrigation system,” says David Sloan Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. “The priests make decisions and enforce the code of both religion and irrigation.”
Ask true believers of any faith to describe the most important thing that drives their devotion, and they’ll tell you it’s not a thing at all but a sense-a feeling of a higher power far beyond us. Western religions can get a bit more doctrinaire: God has handed us laws and lore, and it’s for us to learn and practice what they teach. For a hell-raising species like ours, however-with too much intelligence for our own good and too little discipline to know what to do with it-there have always been other, more utilitarian reasons to get religion. Chief among them is survival. Across the eons, the structure that religion provides our lives helps preserve both mind and body. But that, in turn, has raised a provocative question, one that’s increasingly debated in the worlds of science and religion: Which came first, God or the need for God? In other words, did humans create religion from cues sent from above, or did evolution instill in us a sense of the divine so that we would gather into the communities essential to keeping the species going?
Just as a hurricane spins off tornadoes, this debate creates its own whirlwind of questions: If some people are more spiritual than others, is it nature or nurture that has made them so? If science has nothing to do with spirituality and it all flows from God, why do some people hear the divine word easily while others remain spiritually tone-deaf? Do such ivied-hall debates about environment, heredity and anthropology have any place at all in more exalted conversations about the nature of God?
Even among people who regard spiritual life as wishful hocus-pocus, there is a growing sense that humans may not be able to survive without it. It’s hard enough getting by in a fang-and-claw world in which killing, thieving and cheating pay such rich dividends. It’s harder still when there’s no moral cop walking the beat to blow the whistle when things get out of control. Best to have a deity on hand to rein in our worst impulses, bring out our best and, not incidentally, give us a sense that there’s someone awake in the cosmic house when the lights go out at night and we find ourselves wondering just why we’re here in the first place. If a God or even several gods can do all that, fine. And if we sometimes misuse the idea of our gods-and millenniums of holy wars prove that we do-the benefits of being a spiritual species will surely outweigh the bloodshed.
Far from being an evolutionary luxury then, the need for God may be a crucial trait stamped deeper and deeper into our genome with every passing generation. Humans who developed a spiritual sense thrived and bequeathed that trait to their offspring. Those who didn’t risked dying out in chaos and killing. The evolutionary equation is a simple but powerful one.
Nowhere has that idea received a more intriguing going-over than in the recently published book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes by molecular biologist Dean Hamer. Chief of gene structure at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, Hamer not only claims that human spirituality is an adaptive trait, but he also says he has located one of the genes responsible, a gene that just happens to also code for production of the neurotransmitters that regulate our moods. Our most profound feelings of spirituality, according to a literal reading of Hamer’s work, may be due to little more than an occasional shot of intoxicating brain chemicals governed by our dna. “I’m a believer that every thought we think and every feeling we feel is the result of activity in the brain,” Hamer says. “I think we follow the basic law of nature, which is that we’re a bunch of chemical reactions running around in a bag.”
Even for the casually religious, such seeming reductionism can rankle. The very meaning of faith, after all, is to hold fast to something without all the tidy cause and effect that science finds so necessary. Try parsing things the way geneticists do, and you risk parsing them into dust. “God is not something that can be demonstrated logically or rigorously,” says Neil Gillman, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. “[The idea of a God gene] goes against all my personal theological convictions.” John Polkinghorne, a physicist who is also Canon Theologian at England’s Liverpool Cathedral, agrees: “You can’t cut [faith]
down to the lowest common denominator of genetic survival. It shows the poverty of reductionist thinking.”
Is Hamer really guilty of such simplification? Could claims for a so-called God gene be merely the thin end of a secular wedge, one that risks prying spirituality away from God altogether? Or, assuming the gene exists at all, could it somehow be embraced by both science and religion, in the same way some evolutionists and creationists-at least the less radicalized ones-accept the idea of a divinely created universe in which evolving life is simply part of the larger plan? Hamer, for one, hopes so. “My findings are agnostic on the existence of God,” he says. “If there’s a God, there’s a God. Just knowing what brain chemicals are involved in acknowledging that is not going to change the fact.”
Whatever the merits of Hamer’s work, he is clearly the heir of a millenniums-long search for the wellsprings of spirituality. People have been wrestling with the roots of faith since faith itself was first codified into Scripture. “[God has] set eternity in the hearts of men,” says the Book of Ecclesiastes, “yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
To theologians in the 3rd century B.C., when Ecclesiastes is thought to have been written, that passage spoke to the idea that while all of us are divinely inspired to look for God, none of us are remotely capable of fully comprehending what we are seeking. Scientists in the 21st century may not disagree, provided that “hearts of men” is replaced with “genes of men.” The key for those researchers is finding those genes.
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