Perhaps, then, religious superstitions are just further evidence of human fallibility, like belief in black cats and other non-religious superstitions. But it’s suspicious that costly commitments to belief in implausible-to-others religious superstitions are such a consistent feature of religions. The investments that the 10 groups of adherents listed in Table 9.2 make or made to their beliefs are far more burdensome, time-consuming, and heavy in consequences to them than are the actions of black-cat-phobics in occasionally avoiding black cats. This suggests that religious superstitions aren’t just an accidental by-product of human reasoning powers but possess some deeper meaning. What might that be?
A recent interpretation among some scholars of religion is that belief in religious superstitions serves to display one’s commitment to one’s religion. All long-lasting human groups—Boston Red Sox fans (like me), devoted Catholics, patriotic Japanese, and others—face the same basic problem of identifying who can be trusted to remain as a group member. The more of one’s life is wrapped up with one’s group, the more crucial it is to be able to identify group members correctly, and not to be deceived by someone who seeks temporary advantage by claiming to share your ideals but really doesn’t. If that man carrying a Boston Red Sox banner, whom you had accepted as a fellow Red Sox fan, suddenly cheers when the New York Yankees hit a home run, you’ll find it humiliating but not life-threatening. But if he’s a soldier next to you in the front line and he drops his gun (or turns it on you) when the enemy attacks, your misreading of him may cost you your life.
That’s why religious affiliation involves so many costly displays to demonstrate the sincerity of your commitment: sacrifices of time and resources, enduring of hardships, and other costly displays that I’ll discuss later. One such display might be to espouse some irrational belief that contradicts the evidence of our senses, and that people outside our religion would never believe. If you claim that the founder of your church had been conceived by normal sexual intercourse between his mother and father, anyone else would believe that too, and you’ve done nothing to demonstrate your commitment to your church. But if you insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he was born of a virgin birth, and nobody has been able to shake you of that irrational belief after many decades of your life, then your fellow believers will feel much more confident that you’ll persist in your belief and can be trusted not to abandon your group.
Nevertheless, it’s not the case that there are no limits to what can be accepted as a religious supernatural belief. Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer have independently pointed out that actual religious superstitions over the whole world constitute a narrow subset of all the arbitrary random superstitions that one could theoretically invent. To quote Pascal Boyer, there is no religion proclaiming anything like the following tenet: “There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But he exists only on Wednesdays.” Instead, the religious supernatural beings in which we believe are surprisingly similar to humans, animals, or other natural objects, except for having superior powers. They are more far-sighted, longer-lived, and stronger, travel faster, can predict the future, can change shape, can pass through walls, and so on. In other respects, gods and ghosts behave like people. The god of the Old Testament got angry, while Greek gods and goddesses became jealous, ate, drank, and had sex. Their powers surpassing human powers are projections of our own personal power fantasies; they can do what we wish we could do ourselves. I do have fantasies of hurling thunderbolts that destroy evil people, and probably many other people share those fantasies of mine, but I have never fantasized existing only on Wednesdays. Hence it doesn’t surprise me that gods in many religions are pictured as smiting evil-doers, but that no religion holds out the dream of existing just on Wednesdays. Thus, religious supernatural beliefs are irrational, but emotionally plausible and satisfying. That’s why they’re so believable, despite at the same time being rationally implausible.
Religion’s function of explanation
Religion has changed its functions with time over the course of the history of human societies. Two of its oldest functions have variously decreased or almost disappeared among citizens of Westernized societies today. Conversely, several of its major modern functions scarcely existed in small-scale hunter-gatherer and farming societies. Four functions that were formerly weak or non-existent rose to peak importance and have now been declining again. These changes of religion’s functions during its evolution are similar to the changes of function of many biological structures (such as fish electric organs) and forms of social organization during biological evolution.
I shall now discuss what are proposed by various scholars as seven major functions of religion, to conclude by asking whether religion is becoming obsolete or is likely to survive and, if the latter, which functions will sustain its persistence. I’ll consider these seven functions roughly in the inferred sequence of their appearance and disappearance during the history of societal evolution, starting with functions prominent early in human history but less so now, and ending with functions originally absent but prominent recently or now.
An original function of religion was explanation. Pre-scientific traditional peoples offer explanations for everything they encounter, of course without the prophetic ability to distinguish between those explanations that scientists today consider natural and scientific, and those others that scientists now consider supernatural and religious. To traditional peoples, they are all explanations, and those explanations that subsequently became viewed as religious aren’t something separate. For instance, the New Guinea societies in which I have lived offer many explanations for bird behavior that modern ornithologists consider perceptive and still accurate (e.g., the multiple functions of bird calls), along with other explanations that ornithologists no longer accept and now dismiss as supernatural (e.g., that songs of certain bird species are voices of former people who became transformed into birds). Origin myths, like those of tribal people and of the book of Genesis, are widespread to explain the existence of the universe, people, and language diversity. The ancient Greeks, who identified correct scientific explanations for many phenomena, incorrectly invoked gods as supernatural agents to explain sunrises, sunsets, tides, winds, and rain. Creationists, and the majority of Americans today, still invoke God as a “First Cause” who created the universe and its laws and thus accounts for their existence, and who also created every plant and animal species, including the human species. But I’m not aware of creationists continuing to evoke God to explain every sunrise, tide, and wind. Many secular people today, while attributing to God the universe’s origin and its laws, accept that the universe, once thus created, has thereafter run with little or no divine interference.
In modern Western society, religion’s original explanatory role has increasingly become usurped by science. The origins of the universe as we know it are now attributed to the Big Bang and the subsequent operation of the laws of physics. Modern language diversity is no longer explained by origin myths, such as the Tower of Babel or the snapping of the lianas holding the New Guinea ironwood tree, but is instead considered as adequately explained by observed historical processes of language change, as I shall discuss in Chapter 10. Explanations of sunrises, sunsets, and tides are now left to astronomers, and explanations of winds and rain are left to meteorologists. Bird songs are explained by ethology, and the origin of each plant and animal species, including the human species, is left to evolutionary biologists to interpret.