From Magic To Science
by Victor J. Stenger

Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law. -- Will Durant

People Without Religion

Early in the first volume of his monumental work, The Story of Civilization, Will Durant notes that some people have no religion. For example, Vedah tribesmen in Ceylon, when asked about God, answer: "Is he on a rock? On a white-ant hill, on a tree? I never saw a god!" A Zulu is asked: "When you see the sun rising and setting, and the trees growing, do you know who made them and governs them?" The answer: "No, we see them but cannot tell how they came; we suppose that they came by themselves" (Durant 1935, p. 56).

These tribesmen instinctively know what Western science, after centuries, has still failed to impress upon the average "civilized" person: the evidence of your two eyes and other senses far outweighs that of any external authority, no matter how exalted.

Fear of Death

So why do most people fervently believe what their eyes fail to confirm? Durant attributes it to fear, particularly the fear of death. He agrees with the Roman poet Lucretius that fear is the mother of gods. Even today, the promise of eternal life remains the primary appeal of religion. Intellectually we are forced to accept the ultimate destruction of our physical bodies, but we still look for a way out of the inevitable. Accepting that our material bodies will not survive forever, we hold out hope that some immaterial part of us -- soul, spirit, psyche, mind, consciousness -- is eternal.

Dreams

We can never know for sure what went on inside the heads of our prehistoric ancestors. Durant speculates on how awareness of death gradually developed, and with it concepts of the supernatural that evolved into the familiar forms of today. Death would have been very puzzling and disturbing to the primal mind (as it is indeed to the modern mind). The suddenness and permanence of death must have seemed strange and unnatural to the first people to develop the intelligence to think about it. Durant notes that "Primitive life was beset with a thousand dangers, and seldom ended in natural decay; long before old age could come, violence or some strange disease carried off the great majority of men. Hence early man did not believe that death was ever natural; he attributed it to the operation of supernatural agencies" (Durant 1935, p. 57).

Besides the puzzle of death, early people must have been frightened and threatened by mental pictures. Awake and in dreams, the most fantastic visions appear in our heads. Durant speculates that "Primitive man marveled at the phantoms that he saw in his sleep, and was struck with terror when he beheld, in his dreams, the figures of those whom he knew to be dead" (Durant 1935, p. 57). A dead person could still be pictured, his voice heard. He was a spirit. But was he dead or not?

A dead body disintegrated, while the thought and dream images -- the spirit -- of the individual who had occupied the body lived on. So the dead began to take on special meaning, eventually to be worshipped. As Durant notes, the word for god among many primitive peoples actually means "dead man."

The Origin of Gods

We take for granted that we are more sophisticated thinkers than our ancient predecessors. Our languages, from East and West, contain many thousand words used to classify the countless phenomena of our experience. This enables us to go beyond the obvious distinctions of earth and sky, grass and trees, humans and animals. We make more abstract divisions of phenomena into real and imaginary, body and spirit, living and nonliving, natural and supernatural.

If our ancestors were anything like the modern people in remote isolated tribes that we call primitive, they would not have organized phenomena into the same or even the same number of cubbyholes as we do. The imagined, the dreamed, the hallucinated would have been as real as the perceptions of eye and ear we call real. The natural and supernatural, body and spirit, would have been indistinguishable.

If our ancestors thought like the Vedah tribesmen quoted earlier, they would tend to believe their eyes -- those inside their heads as well as those outside. Humans and animals would be seen to move and have life. But so would the water in a stream, a cloud in the sky, or a rock tumbling down the side of a hill. They would all be alive.

Causal relationships would be inferred, especially in regard to movement. The notion of force as the instrument of motion would be dimly perceived, and if that force were not seen, then it could be imagined. Further, the unseen force would not be something beyond the realm of normal experience, like the gluon exchange physicists now use to describe the interaction between quarks; rather the cause of motion would be personal, living, human.

So invisible living entities with human characteristics, gods of earth and sky, were invented to account for movements. The weather, changes in seasons, growth and decay, were caused by these gods. Gods or spirits were inside rocks, trees, rivers, wind, and animals, providing the changing, rhythmic motions of a living world. And these gods were inside people's heads too, directing them on what to do.

Fermilab in the Sky

We see in these perceptions the first appearance of a kind of science -- the seeking of causal explanations for the phenomena of the world. In today's physics classes, the first thing students learn about is motion. However, they are taught that motion at constant velocity does not require the action of a force; a force is needed only for changes in velocity, acceleration.

This observation is expressed by Newton's second law of motion: F = ma, where F is the force on a body, m is its inertial mass, and a is the resulting acceleration (the rate of change of velocity). In other words, movement does not require a mover, only a change in movement does. And if no mover is seen, then one does not have to invent one that is unseen. The ultimate prime mover, which Aristotle and Aquinas defined as God, is not required by the data. But perhaps we should allow God to be redefined as the prime accelerator Fermilab in the sky.

So the primitive mind started on the road to science when it began developing causal concepts. In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer argues that science had its roots in the magic of primitive animism. Early shamans and priests were basically magicians whose job it was to interpret and demonstrate the powers of the invisible spirits. The rituals were not always successful, so the magician helped the supernatural along with a degree of knowledge of what we now call natural forces. Of course this knowledge was kept secret; its effects were attributed to the supernatural. But out of it grew astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and physics.

Science is not, as most people think, a recent development of the human mind, springing up in the sixteenth century out of a vacuum. Rather it is as old as conscious thought itself, with roots in charlatanism and pseudoscience. As Will Durant said, "Magic begins in superstition and ends in science" (Durant 1935).

Myth and Science as Metaphors

Many writers regard ancient myths as allegories or metaphors for deeply perceived concepts of reality. However, the myths of the ancients were as real to them as the rocks and trees around them. Only with the development of abstract thought did the explanations for phenomena move out of the realm of everyday experience to invisible causes of events.

Science deals with many notions that are not common sense, that go beyond everyday experience. Is it more sensible that invisible photons interacting with atoms and electrons result in a lightning bolt, or that some god tossed the bolt across the sky? What would a Vedah tribesman say about quarks and leptons? I could take him to the lab and show him the trails of bubbles in a bubble chamber photograph that convinces me of the existence of the electrons and other particles that left the trails, but would he be convinced? I greatly doubt it, unless I could relate the electrons and photons to his own experience.

Today's quarks and leptons can be viewed as metaphors of the underlying reality of nature, though metaphors that are objectively and rationally defined and are components of theories that have great predictive power. And that's the difference between the metaphors of science and those of myth: scientific metaphors work.

We accept scientific explanations today, not because they are in any way more sensible than superstition and myth, but because these explanations provide far more ability to control and manipulate nature. Despite the insensibility of the mathematical equations and abstract models of science, they provide us with a superior description of reality. Unlike myth, we can put the equations to work in predicting future events, and thereby exert some control over nature. We may be uncomfortable with the fact that science has shown us how to destroy a city with one bomb. But the fact is, no supernatural metaphor has any such power, except in the movies.

In the pragmatic view of truth of William James, science is true because it works. Science may not be the only path to the truth, but it is the best one we have yet been able to discover.

From Magic to Myth

In Masks of the Universe, Edward Harrison makes a distinction between magic and myth. In the magic universe of the first thinking humans, the activating agents of the world are creations of the mind but still a part of that world. This is, in a way, quite like modern science. Only now we have particles and symmetries in place of spirits. At some point in the past, the inner mental entities of our ancestors were separated from their original physical forms. They become superphysical, metaphysical (Harrison 1985).

Animistic spirits ultimately evolved into the cosmic gods of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates. The pulsating, living world of the magic universe disappeared and was replaced by the mythical universe peopled by spirits that no longer resided in nature. Thus began religion as we know it today, in which ultimate reality transcends the visible, physical world. Ironically, this backward step happened with the advance of civilization: with the invention of agriculture and then that most terrible of all human inventions -- the city.

Humanity Becomes Social

As people clustered together, first in villages and then in cities, society had to become organized. Instead of roaming freely, either individually or in small bands, in search of game, men had to stay in one place to work the fields and to barter for their other needs; they and their mates were no longer able to supply all of their needs for themselves. Soon the new economy of trade developed, which forced people into greater dependencies on one another. Humanity became social. Leaders were now needed to keep some kind of civil order, and the village shaman and temple priest, with their supposed supernatural powers, proved to be effective in keeping everyone in line.

We can imagine how the gods of the shamans gradually grew more remote from the people, making the shaman more awesome and enhancing his power. Based on the real power of the sword, kings and empires came into being, and the glory of kings provided a new cosmic model for the imagined gods.

The transcendent reality took on different forms in Orient and Occident. As Joseph Campbell points out in The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, the "ultimate ground of being" in the Orient transcends thought itself and is beyond rational consideration. In the Occident, this ground of being is personified as a Creator. Two kinds of pieties, Eastern and Western, develop: the religious pieties of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; and the humanistic pieties of the Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic (Campbell 1964).

The Great Goddess

When human villages were small agricultural communities, the primary deity was the earth itself. Since the earth brought life, this deity was personified as female. With the rise of the first great city at Sumer (c. 3500-2350 B.C.E.), the earth goddess of the neolithic village evolved into the Great Goddess that Campbell calls "a metaphysical symbol: the arch personification of the power of Space, Time, and Matter." In the great civilization of Egypt, Isis was the mother of all things. And for the earliest Hebrews, probably Eve was mother goddess and Adam her son. The more familiar tradition of Eve's creation from Adam's rib is, according to Campbell, an inversion resulting from the later male dominance that occurred with the rise of the warrior kings and their cruel empires of the sword (Campbell 1964).

God as King

The invincible sword was the product of the iron age (c. 1250 B.C.E.) and with it came the dominance of the warrior. It would not do, of course, to have a female deity ruling over a majestic king, so the Great Goddess was replaced by supreme male gods. In Greek myth, Zeus defeats Typhon, child of Gaia (goddess Earth), securing the dominance of the patriarchal gods on Mount Olympus over the Titans, the children of Gaia. Babylonian myth provides a parallel in Marduk's defeat of Tiamat.

But even in these cases, the female originally gave birth to the world. In the Hebrew Bible, however, the transformation to male dominance becomes complete -- a male god creates the universe unaided by any consort, although the Christians would later provide him one in the Virgin Mary.

And so we can trace the development of the idea of the Father/King/Creator of the Judaeo-Christian-lslamic myth. The animistic spirits of the hunter evolve into the earth deities of the farmer, and then into the Great Warrior King who rules heaven just as earthly domains are ruled by their kings. He is an invisible, invincible, frightening god, but not unknowable. God speaks to certain men, who then relay his orders to the rest of humankind. With the development of writing, his word is transcribed into scriptures that then become the source of authorized knowledge of the supernatural realm.

Beyond Comprehension

In the Orient, a somewhat different view of ultimate reality develops. A supreme reality exists beyond the reality of the senses. But it is immensely beyond comprehension, unknowable by the finite human mind. Here for the first time we can rely on written records, rather than inference, for insight into the thinking of ancient people. Other than a few fragments from Egypt, the Upanishads of India are the oldest existing written philosophical tracts of the human race. There we find the message that "the material world [is] nothing but a long-enduring kaleidoscopic deception, the only thing that is worthy of man's aspirations is transcendence" (Sinari 1970).

Further, the human intellect is incapable of understanding something so immense and so complex as the transcendent reality. Thus, it is not by learning, thinking, reasoning that one gains insight into transcendent reality -- states called Atman and Brahmin -- but by cleansing the mind of all thoughts and worldly aspirations.

Unlike the more hopeful philosophies of the West, the teachings of the ancient Indian sages led Indians to find "the world to be continually weary, an unwanted hindrance, a spoke in the wheel of their trans-phenomenal ascent, a bondage" (Sinari 1970). In other words, a philosophy in which the material world is of negligible importance is not of much help in getting by in the material world.

The Natural Order

Fortunately, the Indian view of the futility of intellect and body did not penetrate to the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, then dotted with colonies of Greeks who had fled their homelands ahead of invaders from the north. There, for a brief time, a few individuals were rich and secure enough to contemplate something other than how to get their next meal or avoid massacre by their neighbors.

Astronomers calculate that on May 28, 585 B.C.E., a total eclipse of the sun occurred that would have been visible from this region. Perhaps this eclipse was the one that Thales of Miletus is said to have predicted from Babylonian tables. In any case, about that time Thales became the first human on record to speculate that a natural cosmic order existed that allowed prediction of natural occurrences such as eclipses.

To Thales, water was the basic stuff of the universe, the cause and guiding principle behind all existence. Everything came from water. The most important feature of Thales' concept was that here, for the first time, the basic principle was not some invisible spiritual force, but everyday stuff that we can all see, touch, and taste. It was real, natural.

The new idea was that behind sensible phenomena there exists no personified spirit acting on its own capricious will. Rather, the phenomena happen in a predictable way according to natural law, which still distinguishes the scientific from the religious approach to explaining the universe. If applied science began with the shamans, theoretical science began with Thales and his prediction of the May 28, 585 B.C.E., eclipse.

Most historians flag Thales as the first philosopher of the West. As Durant says, "Here for the first time thought became secular, and sought rational and consistent answers to the problems of the world and man.... Here was the idea of law, as superior to incalculable personal decree, which would mark the essential difference between science and mythology, as well as between despotism and democracy" (Durant 1939, p. 135). The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke.

The Reductionists

Thales' concept of a natural explanation for the universe was not immediately adopted beyond his school in Miletus. But then, a century and a half later, Empedocles of Sicily (c. 495 B.C.E.) made a number of concrete improvements on the vague ideas of Thales that begin to sound like modern science. First, he said that all objects are composed of a small number of basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Not quite ready to discard the concept of soul, he suggested that soul was also made of these elements.

Empedocles recognized that matter passes through solid, liquid, and gaseous stages. Further, he proposed how the elements interacted: by the forces of Love and Hate, which we can recognize as a poetic way of saying attraction and repulsion. And important in terms of our ultimate understanding of normal sensory perception, he suggested that emanations thrown off from bodies penetrated the senses, providing the mechanism for sensation.

Of course, the detailed processes that Empedocles described were wrong, but his basic approach to understanding nature -- reducing it to the simplest elementary objects and forces -- is largely the one followed today by much of science. This reductionism is a key ingredient in our modern models of the universe.

Today particle physicists see everything as quarks and leptons interacting by the exchange of photons, gluons, and other gauge bosons. Most people find it difficult to accept this view as the complete story. They intuitively feel that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, as a cathedral is more than a pile of rocks or a person is more than a collection of atoms.

Collective phenomena such as heat or condensation exist, of course, but these are fully understood from a consideration of the statistics of the large numbers of particles involved. However, the more complex collections of particles that make up the systems of our normal experience, from polymers to people to planets, have properties that emerge as the result of their organization. Are these so-called emergent properties inconsistent with the reductionist view? Do holistic forces exist that can cause violations of the laws of microscopic physics? A later chapter will be fully devoted to this issue, which is fundamental to the theme of this book.

The Atomists

The elements of Empedocles, like those of nineteenth-century chemists, were not invisible particles but the perfectly observable materials earth, fire, water, and air. The concept of atoms -- solid indestructible fundamental objects too tiny to see, moving around in an otherwise empty void -- was first formulated by Leucippus (c. 435 B.C.E.). However, little is known of him and credit is usually given to his associate Democritus (c. 470 B.C.E.), from whom some important writings have survived. In his writings Democritus teaches that all things, even the soul, are atoms. No supernatural agency exists. He even goes so far as to argue that belief in divine power resulted from the apparitions seen in sleep and alarming aspects of nature like lightning, thunder, earthquakes, and floods.

The Materialists

Alfred William Benn has nicely described the contributions of the materialists, who sound so modern to our ears: "They first taught men to distinguish between the realities of nature and the illusions of sense; they discovered or divined the indestructibility of matter and its atomic constitution; they taught that space is infinite.... They held that the seemingly eternal universe was brought into its present form by the operation of mechanical forces.... They declared that all things had arisen by differentiation from a homogeneous attenuated vapour." Their central doctrine was "that the universe is a cosmos, an ordered whole governed by number and law, not a blind conflict of semi-conscious agents." If not science yet, these ideas made science possible, presenting a theory of the universe that "methodised observation has tended to confirm" (Benn 1982, p. 5).

At about the same time in India, a school of Hindu materialists called the "Charvakas" were saying remarkably similar things. They saw no evidence in the world for Atman, for demons, gods, or soul. The one reality was matter, atoms. Mind was matter. They argued that notions of immortality and rebirth were fraudulent, that morality was social convention (Durant 1935, p. 418).

The Founders

Unfortunately, these eminently rational men of East and West did not win over the minds of those thinkers in either region who turned out to be most influential in the history that followed. Living at about the same time as Thales, give or take a generation, were the founders of some of the world's great religions: Zoroaster in Persia, Lao-Tze and Confucius in China, and Buddha in India. Equally influential were the Hebrew scholars then in exile in Babylonia, who put their tribal myths on paper and in the process incorporated the creation and flood myths and other legends of their hosts.

The Pythagoreans

Also at about this time, in southern Italy, Pythagoras (c. 569-c. 507 B.C.E.) founded a brotherhood that provided yet more impetus toward the ultimate victory of supernatural belief in the ancient world. The Pythagoreans developed the view that all things are number, or made out of numbers.

Now this sounds scientific doesn't it? Indeed, where would science be without the Pythagorean Theorem and the other mathematical developments that came from the Pythagorean school? But the Pythagoreans did not simply say that nature is described by numbers, as we do in modern science. Rather, to the Pythagoreans number is the absolute principle of existence: a spiritual power that cannot be seen, like fire or water, but that controls the sensory world.

So a new mystical concept was introduced that was far more sophisticated than the other superstitions of the time. Unlike the materialists, who viewed the soul as being the same stuff as objects in the sensory world, or the animists who made no distinction between spirit and matter, the Pythagoreans introduced into the thinking processes of humanity the separation of soul and body. This duality haunts us to the present day. Further, the notion was introduced that the world of our senses was not the world that really mattered; beyond the sense world was the true, perfect reality to which we should aspire.

The appeal of a world beyond the senses was enormous, and remains so today. The offer of escape from the suffering and imperfection of life, the promise of our participation in some grand cosmic consciousness, are almost impossible to resist. But what if dualism is wrong, just an enduring fantasy of the childhood of humankind? Then what good does it do for us to live that fantasy, to deny reality?

The Dualists

The doctrine that only one ultimate substance or principle exists is called "monism." The idea that everything is matter and nothing more is "materialistic monism." Thales' proposition that water is the source of all existence was the earliest form of materialistic monism. Directly opposed to materialistic monism is the view that everything that exists is an idea of the mind; this form of monism is called "idealism."

The view that two forms of reality exist is called "dualism." Dualism began in the West with the Pythagoreans, was later adopted by Parmenides, and culminated in Plato's theory of forms. But dualism had been formulated much earlier in the East, in the Hindu Upanishads.

Perhaps the idea of dualism trickled into the Hellenic world from the East. Some communication between East and West surely existed in ancient times. A generation after Plato, Alexander the Great would conquer his way to India. So Mediterranean people obviously knew of that ancient land. According to Will Durant, "Pythagoras, Parmenides and Plato seem to have been influenced by Indian metaphysics; but the speculations of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and Empedocles not only antedate the secular philosophy of the Hindus, but bear a sceptical and physical stamp suggesting any other origin but India" (Durant 1935, p. 533).

The Athenians

Most of what we know about the early Greek thinkers has come down to us from those philosophers whose teachings have survived in the greatest quantity: Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.E.) and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.). The sheer bulk of these writings, if nothing more, resulted in the ideas of Plato and Aristotle having a dominant influence upon future generations of philosophers. From Plato we also learned about the first member of the illustrious Athenian philosophical trinity, Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.).

Socrates' great contribution was to teach us the value of clear thinking and skepticism. His barbs were devastating to the "open-mindedness" of the fashionable sophists who applied democracy to the world of ideas in a way not much different from some of today's critics of science.

Socrates was the kind of down-to-earth commonsense kind of guy that we admire so much in America. He disdained the cosmic issues that concerned other philosophers. Feeling that philosophical speculation had gone too far, he said men should focus on human affairs and forget theology, physics, and metaphysics. I find that a shame. I would have loved to have been able to read what Socrates' great mind would have made of the ultimate questions. Or, perhaps we already know: he may have decided they were a waste of time.

His student Plato eloquently passed on to us Socrates' words and ideas, but did not heed the Master's call to ignore metaphysics. Turning back to the idealism of Pythagoras and Parmenides, and rejecting the empiricist notion that the senses are the only source of knowledge, he said that the true reality was "Ideas" or "Forms."

These objects of thought were immortal, living beyond the life of the one who thought them. For example, a geometrical figure drawn in the dirt with a stick will be crooked and imperfect, and can be wiped into oblivion with a sweep of the foot. But the idea of the straight line, circle, or triangle was perfect and everlasting. The laws of geometry applied to the ideal geometric figures, not the ones sketched in the dirt.

The Scientist

Plato's student and the mentor of Alexander the Great, Aristotle, did us an enormous service by returning to the senses as the primary source of knowledge, and setting the pattern for science by establishing systematic observation and experimentation as the foundation of scientific method.

In biology, Aristotle usefully consolidated much previous work, but rejected Empedocles' prescient intuition of what we now recognize as the most important principle of biology: evolution by natural selection. Likewise, in physics, Aristotle failed to grasp the primary principles of motion. While he helped clarify many physical concepts, Aristotle's idea of absolute space and the need of a force for motion were totally wrong.

By the Middle Ages, Aristotle's authority had become so great that progress in science was severely retarded by an adherence to Aristotelean concepts that simple experimentation could demonstrate as grossly incorrect. For example, Aristotle taught that objects fall at speeds in proportion to their weights, a false notion that can easily be shown to be incorrect by the simplest experiment. Only when Galileo and his contemporaries finally asserted the authority of observation over that of revered ancient texts did progress in science finally pick up where it had essentially left off after the time of Aristotle.

Equally significant to the historical development of human thinking, Aristotle formulated metaphysical ideas that were later to be used by Church theologians, especially Augustine and Aquinas, to provide Christianity with a systematic theological structure. In his metaphysical ideas, Aristotle follows Plato's lead. He makes invisible forms or ideas, rather than detectable matter, the essential component of being. Aristotle defined God as the form of the world, the First Cause -- Uncaused, the Prime Mover -- Unmoved. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) would use this same definition in his "proof" of the existence of God.

But, as we have seen, movement does not require a mover, and modern quantum mechanics has shown that not all effects require a cause. And even if they did, why would the Prime Mover need to be a supernatural anthropomorphic deity such as the Judaeo-Christian God? Why could it not just as well be the material universe itself?

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

So several ancient Greek philosophers provided a viable alternative to belief in a supernatural world. But supernatural beliefs were buttressed by other philosophers who became more influential in later history.

The conflict between the two points of view could not be clearer. In the natural view, our only source of knowledge about the world outside our heads is the senses. This includes any knowledge that may be programmed in our genes, since such knowledge would have originated with the sensory inputs received by our ancestors during a billion years of evolution.

It can be argued that other forms of knowledge exist, such as pure mathematics and symbolic logic, that seem to have no dependence on sensory data. If so, then that knowledge resides within the collective consciousnesses of mathematicians and logicians, and need not relate to anything beyond those realms, although this remains a debated point. As they relate to the external world, reason, logic, and mathematics are thinking tools we have developed to describe the observations of our senses. They are not a part of the real world, but are inventions of the human mind, like language. Still, if these tools are inventions, few would deny what these tools describe: objects in the world, which are most immediately known through our senses, and which have some quality we commonly regard as real.

In the view that we can call "supernatural," ultimate reality is beyond the senses. We learn about it through nonsensory, mystical mechanisms: revelation, reason, meditation, pure thought. This is clearly a dualist view, featuring a mental or spiritual component that is beyond body, and special channels to or even direct participation in a cosmic consciousness. Despite thousands of years of progress in human thinking, and the daily demonstration in modern society of the power of materialistic science, the dual universe of matter and spirit remains the unquestioned belief of the great majority of the human race.

Why Did Life Form? Why Not?

How did the human race come to be, if not by the creative act of a transcendent power or being beyond our comprehension? If no such being exists, then why did life form? My answer is another question: Why not?

It often happens in science that the absence of a fact has to be explained, not the existence of one. For example, the great principles of physics, such as the first and second laws of thermodynamics, forbid certain events from taking place. However, they mandate none.

And so with life. When the conditions were right on earth a few billion years ago, atoms floating about in the air or sea stuck together in great numbers to produce large, complex molecules. Just by chance, some molecules happened to develop the ability to copy themselves, using energy and material in their vicinity. So, where originally one molecule existed, soon there were two, and then 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, and so on, in geometric progression.

Only the limitation of available material and energy prevented the world, in a very short time, from being thickly coated with exact duplicates of that original reproducible molecule.

For example, suppose the primordial molecule was a sphere one micron in diameter (10^6 meter, less than a ten-thousandth of an inch) that reproduced at the rate of once per second. With unlimited resources, in only 145 seconds the earth would have been covered with a layer of molecules out to the orbit of the moon, 240,000 miles away. If you think that's fantastic, in another 174 seconds of unlimited reproduction, the micronsized molecules would fill the universe. Such is the power of the geometric progression. In 319 generations, each of which doubles the number of molecules, the original molecule would produce 2^319 or 10^96 new molecules.

But this molecular population explosion was stopped, for the same reason the current human one will eventually be stopped, by limited resources. The molecules quickly leveled off to a large but finite population. Not much else would have happened except for another fact: each molecular copy was not always perfect. An occasional ultraviolet photon from the sun, cosmic ray muon, or other stray energetic particle would knock a random atom out of place in the structure of an individual molecule, or cause the shape of a molecule to skew one way or another. Alternatively, a copying error might occur. These were all chance events, but nevertheless served to produce a variety of structures in the place of the original one, as the new feature appeared in succeeding copies.

If the new feature made it more difficult for the new species of molecule to be copied further, that species became extinct. Most changes were probably neutral. But at least some of the new molecular structures were more successful at copying themselves than others. These species had a distinct advantage, and quickly tended to dominate over less efficient structures in their mutual struggle for the same limited resources.

And so, Darwinian evolution by natural selection began. Undoubtedly, the original structures were simpler and less efficient than the present DNA-based genetic patterns. But eventually the present genetic scheme developed, along with sex for the larger structures, simply because these features facilitated reproduction and enhanced survival. And so, living organisms evolved. The fundamental driving force within them was simply the preservation of the information needed to reproduce faithful copies of themselves.

In each of our cells, information exists that enables the structures of our complex bodies to be maintained, as the atoms that compose our cells are continually replaced. The particular particles of matter that make up our bodies at a given time do not define us as individual organisms. Instead, our true self is the information coded in our DNA.

As Richard Dawkins says in his brilliant and highly entertaining exposition of the natural processes of evolution, The Blind Watchmaker, "What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a 'spark of life'. It is information.... If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" (Dawkins 1987).

The Evolution of Religion by Natural Selection

We have attempted to understand how the idea of a world beyond the senses might reasonably have entered human thinking. However, our understanding of the basis of the supernatural is still incomplete. If supernatural beliefs were simply the product of the unsophisticated thinking patterns of early humans, then they should have largely faded away in our scientific age. Yet every survey of people's beliefs continues to indicate a strong majority who believe in God, angels, the devil, astrology, and various other occult and supernatural phenomena. As philosopher Paul Kurtz has said, "The transcendental temptation lurks deep within the human breast. It is ever-present, tempting humans by the lure of transcendental realities, subverting the power of their critical intelligence, enabling them to accept unproven and unfounded myth systems.... Any impartial observer of human history must be duly impressed by the tenacious character of religious faiths and the persistence of transcendental myths in human history, as well as the ability of the most outrageous myths to sprout and take root, even in the graveyards of defeated and dying systems. Is this a perverse strain, like original sin, but beyond any hope of human redemption?" (Kurtz 1986).

Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race. Here again we can call upon materialism for a reasonable hypothesis: religion evolved by a process analogous to the natural selection that produced us and every other living species. Religious belief may now be deeply programmed in our DNA. This may have happened because, at one time, such beliefs provided a survival advantage for the people who had such coded information in their genes.

In the early days of the human race, we were few in number and struggled in competition with other species to survive. In that precarious situation, special advantage would accrue to those people living in communities with strong tribal rules forbidding behavior patterns threatening to the survival of the community. These ranged from taboos against incest and murder to special dietary prohibitions.

By attributing these taboos to supernatural command, the leaders and their priests could enforce them more effectively. Individuals with a genetic disposition to question or disobey the rules would be suppressed, ostracized, or even killed. So they were less likely to pass their skeptical genes on to the next generation. As William Simms Bainbridge has put it: "The human mind did not evolve in order to create a race of philosophers or scientists" (Bainbridge 1988).

Now the way evolution works -- by means of random events -- does not require the process to be perfect. This is an often-misunderstood feature of evolution. Opponents of evolution argue that if you can find a single counter example, you destroy the whole edifice. Not at all. A genetic characteristic leading to a slightly higher probability for survival than others will generally lead to that characteristic becoming more common as the generations progress. So, the set of particular mental characteristics that led to greater credulity, a slightly greater willingness to believe the preposterous in the face of all evidence to the contrary, was sufficiently enhanced to remain within our genes to the present day. But it need not be so strong in each of us that it cannot be overcome.

Overcoming Our Instincts

The genetic programming in favor of supernatural belief does not have the value for survival it once had -- in fact, quite the contrary. Where once human tribes needed as many members as they could produce in order to survive, the global human tribe today finds its own survival threatened by too many members. And most of these members still hold to the outmoded beliefs that may have helped their ancestors, but hinder us all today. These beliefs threaten our survival rather than aid it, as they mitigate against birth control and the other measures needed to halt the exponential increase in our population.

Believing, despite the overwhelming evidence from biology and astronomy, that humans were made in the image of God and given dominion over the earth, we in the Western World have also found it easy to pollute the earth and wantonly destroy many of its life forms. In the Judaeo-Christian ethic, human life is taken to be sacred. But not all life. Only humans have souls.

Evolution does not guarantee the survival of a species. In fact, it dooms most species. Most of the species that have existed on this planet are now extinct. And our natural instincts, if left to themselves, will probably result in the extinction of our own species before long.

Fortunately, by the same process of evolution, we humans have developed a unique quality that gives us the power to overcome our instincts. This power resides in our intellect. Only through the application of intellect to overcome the dangerous behaviors programmed in our genes can we expect to survive. And our intellect is pointing the way for us to reprogram our own genes, to rid them of the transcendental temptations that now threaten our very existence.

References

Bainbridge, William Simms. Spring 1988. "Is Belief in the Supernatural Inevitable?" Free Inquiry 8:21.

Benn, Alfred William. 1982. The Greek Philosophers. London: Kegan, Paul, and Trench.

Campbell, Joseph. 1964. The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. New York: Viking.

Dawkins, Richard. 1987. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: W. W. Norton.

Durant, Will. 1935. The Story of Civilization I: Our Oriental Heritage. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will. 1939. The Story of Civilization II: The Life of Greece. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Frazer, Sir James. 1962. The New Golden Bough, abridged, edited, and revised by Theodor H. Gaster. New York: Mentor.

Harrison, Edward. 1985. Masks of the Universe. New York: Macmillan.

Kurtz, Paul. 1986. The Transcendental Temptation: A Critique of Religion and the Paranormal. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

Sinari, Ramakant A. 1970. The Structure of Indian Thought. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas.

Reprinted with permission in our November, 1999, issue.
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