eating does provide a valid explanation for illness, and that not asking a spirit for help doesn’t. It’s not enough to be told that you got stomach cancer because you inherited variant 211 of the PX2R gene; that’s unsatisfying and leaves you helpless; maybe instead it was because of your diet. Traditional people seek cures for illness, just as we do today when doctors’ cures fail. Often those traditional cures do appear to be beneficial for many possible reasons: most illnesses cure themselves anyway; many traditional plant remedies do prove to have pharmacological value; the shaman’s bedside manner relieves the patient’s fear and may provide a placebo-based cure; assigning a cause to an illness, even if it’s not the right cause, makes the patient feel better by letting him adopt some action rather than waiting helplessly; and if the victim does die, it may mean that he sinned by violating a taboo, or that a powerful sorcerer was responsible who must be identified and killed.
Still another form of our search for causal explanations is to seek explanations for events about which modern science just gives us the unsatisfying answer “It has no explanation, stop trying to find an explanation.” For instance, a central problem in most organized religions is the problem of theodicy, the theme of the book of Job: if a good and omnipotent god exists, then why does evil happen in the world? Traditional peoples, ready to discuss for an hour the explanation of a broken stick in the ground, will surely not fail to discuss why a good person apparently obeying the society’s rules nevertheless became injured, defeated, or killed. Did he break a taboo, or do evil spirits exist, or were the gods angry? People will also surely not fail to try to explain why someone who an hour ago was breathing, moving, and warm is now cold and not breathing or moving, like a stone: is there a part of the person, called a spirit, that has escaped and entered a bird or is now living somewhere else? Today, you might object that those are searches for “meaning” rather than for explanations, and that science provides only explanations, and that you should either turn to religion for meaning or else acknowledge that your thirst for meaning is meaningless. But everybody in the past, and still most people today, want their demand for “meaning” answered.
In short, what we now term religion may have arisen as a by-product of the human brain’s increasing sophistication at identifying causal explanations and at making predictions. For a long time there wouldn’t have been a recognized distinction between the natural and the supernatural, or between religion and the rest of life. As for when “religion” arose in the course of human evolution, I would guess: very gradually, as our brain became more sophisticated. Over 15,000 years ago, Cro-Magnons were already sewing tailored clothing, inventing new tools, and creating superb paintings of polychrome animals and humans on the walls of the Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet caves, in deep chambers where the paintings would have been visible only by candlelight, and which fill many modern visitors with religious awe (Plate 25). Whether or not arousing awe was the actual intent of the prehistoric painters, they surely had sufficiently modern brains to be capable of holding beliefs qualifying as religious. As for our Neanderthal relatives, for whom there is evidence that they decorated with ocher pigments and buried their dead—maybe. It seems to me safe to assume that our ancestors have had religious beliefs for at least the 60,000-year-plus history of behaviorally modern
Table 9.2. Examples of supernatural beliefs confined to particular religions
| 1. There is a monkey god who travels thousands of kilometers at a single somersault. (Hindu) |
| 2. You can obtain benefits from the spirits by spending four days in a lonely place without food and water and cutting off a finger joint from your left hand. (Crow Indians) |
| 3. A woman who had not been fertilized by a man became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, whose body eventually after his death was carried up to a place called heaven, often represented as being located in the sky. (Catholic) |
| 4. A shaman, who is paid for his efforts, sits in a house in dim light together with all of the village’s adults, who close their eyes. The shaman goes to the bottom of the ocean, where he pacifies the sea goddess who had been causing misfortunes. (Inuit) |
| 5. To determine whether a person accused of adultery is guilty, force-feed a poisonous paste to a chicken. If the chicken does not die, that means that the accused person was innocent. (Azande) |
| 6. Men who sacrifice their lives in battle for the religion will be carried to a heaven populated by beautiful virgin women. (Islam) |
| 7. On Tepeyac Hill north of Mexico City in 1531, the Virgin Mary appeared to a Christianized Indian, spoke to him in Nahuatl (the Aztec language, at that time still widely spoken there), and enabled him to pick roses in a desert area where roses normally can’t grow. (Mexican Catholic) |
| 8. On a hilltop near Manchester Village in western New York State on September 21, 1823, the Angel Moroni appeared to a man named Joseph Smith and revealed to him buried golden plates awaiting translation as a lost book of the Bible, the Book of Mormon. (Mormon) |
| 9. A supernatural being gave a chunk of desert in the Middle East to the being’s favorite group of people, as their home forever. (Jewish) |
| 10. In the 1880s God appeared to a Paiute Indian named Wovoka during a solar eclipse, and informed him that in two years buffalo would again fill the plains and white men would vanish, provided that Indians took part in a ritual called the Ghost Dance. |
Supernatural beliefs
Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to that religion. That is, a religion’s adherents firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of that particular religion. Table 9.2 offers a sample of such beliefs, to which innumerable other examples could be added. No other feature of religion creates a bigger divide between religious believers and modern secular people, to whom it staggers the imagination that anyone could entertain such beliefs. No other feature creates a bigger divide between believers in two different religions, each of whom firmly believes its own beliefs but considers it absurd that the other religion’s believers believe those other beliefs. Why, nevertheless, are supernatural beliefs such universal features of religions?
One suggested answer is that supernatural religious beliefs are just ignorant superstitions similar to
