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Imagine a World of Religions that Naturalism Might Indeed Be Able to Explain

JamesGeorgeFrazer.jpgCognitive scientist Steven Pinker recently told CNN, "We don't throw virgins into volcanoes any more."

No? Why not?

Regarding the phenomenon of religion, here are two curious things: When naturalists (materialists) study religion, they get so many basic facts wrong, one wonders why they bother, except to bolster their own view. Second, they mainly study "revealed" religion, where the world is interpreted through a divine message (or some would say, an acute insight), revealing a higher order of reality. The recognized principal purpose of religion in that case is understanding of reality, not control over it.

But it was not always so. Closing this series on the human mind, I would like to take you on a journey back to a time much closer to the Stone Age, when our ancestors' perceptions of how the world works were very different from ours today.

Science-Fictions-square.gifOur guide will be British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), author of The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890). Frazer (pictured above) collected, organized, and published a vast amount of information about premodern ways of thinking. He was tactful in expressing his own "scientific" agnosticism, a fact that enabled him to gain much information from missionaries. He certainly has his detractors, past and present. His major achievement was to open up for us a way of thinking about life that has now largely vanished, except for the occasional glimpses we get in popular superstitions.

From what we can tell by analyzing surviving customs and artifacts, ancient religions were chiefly focused on magical thinking. Magic is an exploded form of physics (Frazer calls it "a spurious system of natural law"):


Thus one could cause good or harm by imitating a desired result. The voodoo doll survives in popular culture but most instances were probably intended to produce good, in the form of health or prosperity. Second, because things once joined continue to exert an influence on each other, one might put salve on the tool that caused a cut wound as well as on the wound itself, to speed healing. Some of these folk beliefs persisted into the modern period. Frazer notes:




Animals and plants certainly had souls, souls that must be placated if their bodies are used. A human soul, sometimes conceived of in animal form, could travel, especially during sleep or illness, and had to be prevented from escaping altogether. It could be stolen, or else stored for safekeeping in, say, a tree. Its health might depend on that of a plant or animal. A shadow, reflection, or representation of the body was thought to at least potentially be a manifestation of the soul.


These ancient magical systems or religions were not systematically interwoven with ethics. In many cultures, sacredness and uncleanness were equivalent. Both were sources of power, to be handled, like fire, with care. Thus, ritual prostitution of women considered respectable was normal, and sometimes even required.


Darwinian "explanations" of religion have focused comparatively little on these more ancient belief systems. They focus rather on modern ones that may not have "evolved" at all but are the outcome of sudden insights or revelations.


The old worldview survives submerged within modern superstitions. For example, breaking a mirror is bad luck for some unknown reason. Anciently, it was because one's soul might be the image in the mirror.

We sometimes hear terms like "irrational superstition." Strictly speaking, superstition is irrational because we do not accept or even understand the worldview it echoes. When people honestly believed that their soul might be in the mirror, then risking breaking it would be irrational. Frazer puts the matter thus:




There is a delicate irony in the fact that the oldest way of trying to understand the world (magical thinking) is in certain ways similar to the beliefs of metaphysical naturalists today. And different from those of the adherents of any "revealed" religion, whether they be, say, Christians, Mormons, Buddhists, Hare Krishna, etc.

Granted, these religions are disparate. But no science-based reason has been found for thinking that none offer insight or that all can be fully accounted for by naturalist claims. Naturalist claims can more easily account for magical thinking they replaced, a world where everything, even the gods, was just nature. And as the naturalist will tell you, nature is all there is.

I started this series of Science Fictions about the human mind by asking a simple question: Is there a good reason to believe that the human mind is and must be a fully natural object? We looked at many possibilities from neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, genetics, and so forth. But in the end, consciousness is immaterial, as the great physicists have said. If it is indeed natural, then nature is far beyond what we now think it is. Perhaps informational realism can help, by exploring the problem in a way that respects the nature of the human mind and does not simply try to jam it into material categories.

For the great physicists, after all, counseled no surrender. Perhaps they were more in the frame of mind of T.S. Eliot in the Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

That, perhaps, is the greatest achievement we can hope for.


Image: Sir James George Frazer, contemporary photograph [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.