The Varieties of Scientific Experience

Seven

Cast your mind back some hundreds of thousands of years. Those who can do that readily will have demonstrated some of the issues that I considered dubious earlier, but apart from reincarnation let's try to think about what were the circumstances of the greater part of the tenure of the human species on Earth. That surely is relevant to any attempt to understand our present circumstances.

The human family is some millions of years old, the human species perhaps one million, with some uncertainty. For the greater part of that period by far, we did not have anything like present technology, present social organization, or present religions. And yet our emotional predispositions were powerfully set in those times. Whatever our feelings and thoughts and approaches to the world were then, they must have been selectively advantageous, because we have done rather well. On this planet we are certainly the dominant organism of some fair size. An argument could be made for beetles or bacteria at smaller scales as being the dominant organism on the planet, but at least on our scale we have done quite well.

Now, what were those characteristics, and how 'would we know what they are? Well, one way we can know is by examining the groups of hunter-gatherers that are still tenuously alive on the planet today. These are small groups of people whose way of life predates the invention of agriculture. The fact that we know them means they must have made some contact with our present global civilization-and that immediately implies that their way of life is in its last days. They are the essence of humans. They have been studied by dedicated anthropologists who have lived with them, learned their languages, been adopted into the group in those cases that permit outsiders to have such an experience, and we can learn something about them. They are by no means all the same. This is a large topic, called cultural anthropology. I do not pretend to be expert in it, but I have had the benefit of spending a fair amount of time with some of the anthropologists who have been at the forefront of studying some of these groups. And I think it's relevant to the task before us.

There are, as I say, different kinds of groups, including some that we might consider absolutely horrendous and some that we might consider astonishingly benign, and I'll try to give a sense of each.

For the latter let me say just a few words about the!Kung people in the Kalahari Desert in the Republic of Botswana. These are a people who now have been drafted into the army of apartheid South Africa, and their culture has been irrevocably abused. But up until some twenty years ago, they had been well studied. We know something about them.

They are hunter-gatherers, which mainly means that the men hunt and the women gather. There is a kind of sexual division of labor, but there is very little in the way of social hierarchy. There is not a significant male dominance of women. In fact, there's very little in the way of social hierarchy at all.There is specialization of labor. That's different from social hierarchy. Children are treated with tenderness and understanding. And there is very little in the way of warfare, although occasionally they run into difficulties because of misunderstandings.

For example, there was a famous case, sometime ago, in which a hunting party came back and said that there was the most astonishing good fortune-a completely new creature had been discovered, and you could actually creep up to it with your bow and arrow and get within a meter of it, and it would not run away. And then you could shoot it dead. And here it is. And it was a cow. The neighboring Herero people protested, and this conflict between two groups, one that had not yet left the hunter-gatherer stage and the other that had domesticated animals, then had to be settled.

Another interesting question has to do with the hunt. Who owns the prey that is killed? It turns out it is not the hunter who killed the animal, it is the artisan who made the arrow. It is his kill. But this is merely a matter of bookkeeping, because everyone gets part of the kill, except that the arrowsmith has a right to a favored part. In fact, there is very little in the way of property. They are a nomadic people and can own only what they can carry with them-except for pots and some pieces of clothing and hunting apparatus and things of that sort. And even some of that (there is no personal property) is community property. There is no head man or head woman per se. And there is a cosmology, there is a kind of religion, there is the active encouragement of the religious experience which is obtained, as in many cultures-in fact, all cultures as far as I know-partly by the use of chemical hallucinogens and partly through the use of particular kinds of behavior: dance, trances, and so on. They recognize other levels of consciousness, of conscious experience. They consider these religious experiences or hallucinations as highly valuable, as not something to be laughed at or put into a category of beliefs of the weak-minded. This is a culture in which there has traditionally always been enough to eat. Mainly mongongo nuts, the staple provided by the women, with the men providing the occasional appetizers of meat.

Now, it's interesting to compare such cultures with other cultures that, in a certain sense, because of the biases of our own culture, we know much better. And these are cultures like the Ji-varo of the Amazon Valley, in which there are in this world and the next, very striking dominance hierarchies in which there is always someone above someone else, except of course for the Supreme Creator God, above whom there is no one else. These are people who torture their enemies, who do not hug their children-in fact, brutalize their children-who are dedicated to warfare, whose sacrament is not some exotic hallucinogen but instead is ethanol, ordinary ethyl alcohol (I mean, ordinary in our society). And in virtually all the aspects that I just mentioned, there is a completely different way of looking at the world.

Now, these two views-we might call one with a powerful social hierarchy and the other with an almost nonexistent social hierarchy-cut through the anthropological literature. And there's an extremely interesting statistical study by the American social scientist James Prescott, in which he has looked at the compilation by Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor of hundreds of different societies, not all of them still extant. In some cases, for example, from Herodotus, you can get the key characteristics of some society now long dead. And Textor just puts the various categories down as a compilation. What Prescott has done is to do a multivariant analysis, statistical correlation- what goes with what. And the things that apparently go with each other are essentially the two sets of characteristics I just described. It is Prescott's view that there are causal relations. That, in fact, in his view the key distinction has to do with whether cultures hug their children and whether they permit premarital sexual activity among adolescents. In his view those are the keys. And he concludes that all cultures in which the children are hugged and the teenagers can have sex wind up without powerful social hierarchies and everybody's happy. And those cultures in which the children are not permitted to be hugged because of some social ban and a premarital adolescent sexual taboo is strictly enforced wind up killing, hating, and having powerful dominance hierarchies.

Now, you cannot prove a causal sequence from a statistical correlation. And you could just as well argue that what the religious forms are determines everything or what the sacrament is has a powerful connection, between societies with alcohol and the societies that torture their enemies and abuse women and so on. But these correlations at least show that there are two and probably a multiplicity of ways of being human. That these cultures, which as far as we can tell have not been powerfully influenced by Western technical civilization, are yet strikingly different, and the reason for that difference-whatever other reasons there are-must be within us.

And, in fact, if you look at nonhuman primates, you find that some of them have this pecking-order dominance hierarchy and others don't. And it is very likely that built in to humans are both ways of behaving; that is, a hardwired circuit in our brains that permits us to fit effortlessly-or with little effort-into some dominance hierarchy. After all, the military establishments of all nations work, and part of the reason they work is that we must have some predisposition to fit into a dominance hierarchy. And at the same time, we must also have some predisposition for the antithesis, which for short I will call democracy. They lead a kind of uneasy coexistence you can find in any democracy that has a military or a caste system or a class system. Now, if you grant me that much, let us then go on to the issue of the early function and origins of religion. Clearly there are no observers in our time who were present hundreds of thousands of years ago, and there can be no confident assertions on this subject. All we can have is differing degrees of plausibility. But I think this is, whether you agree with each point I'm making or not, a very useful way to look at the origins of religion. And I'm certainly not the first person to do so. Democritus is quoted as having said in the fifth century B.C.,

The ancients seeing what happens in the sky, for example, thunder and lightning and thunderbolts and conjunctions of the stars and eclipses of the Sun and Moon were afraid, believing gods to be the cause of these.

This is what is sometimes called "animism," the idea that there are intelligent forces of nature that exist in everything. The Greeks put a minor god in every tree and stream. All of this has been brilliantly discussed by a former Gifford lecturer, Sir James Frazer, in his book The Golden Bough. One thing we do if we believe that there is a god of the thunderbolt and do not wish to be hit by a thunderbolt is to propitiate the god of the thunderbolt, to do something to calm him down, to explain that while there may be other targets of thunderbolts deserving of his attention, we are not among them. And we then have to do something to show our respect for him, that we are not talking back to him, that we humble ourselves before him, that we are reverent before him. And many cultures have such institutionalized propitiation, which sometimes goes as far as human sacrifice; that is, to really show you how reverent I am, I will kill what is most dear to me, because you sure couldn't think that I was only playacting if I do that.

The story of God's commandment to Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, is an example of the transition from human to animal sacrifice. After a while people decided it really wasn't worthwhile killing their own children in this way; they would symbolically kill their own children by just getting a goat and killing it. In fact, the general decline in the practice of human and animal sacrifice in the evolution of religion is worth some attention. The Judaic and therefore also the Christian-Islamic religions began when human and animal sacrifice was all the rage.

What does that kind of propitiation mean? It is a wish for the course of nature to be different from what it otherwise would be. It provides the illusion that by some sequence of ritual actions we are able to influence forces of nature that are otherwise inaccessible to us. And therefore it involves a change from the usual course of nature, which was described very nicely by Ivan Turgenev as follows: "Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: 'Great God, grant that twice two be not four.'" And from a different tradition, let me quote a Yiddish proverb, which goes, "If praying did any good, they would be hiring men to pray."

Now, does prayer do any good or not? It certainly is still with us. It certainly is connected with those activities of our ancestors, and, as I will argue in a moment, it's certainly connected with the behavior of all of us when we are children. Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, said, "Here we've been praying for all these years and nobody seems to know if it does any good or not. Is there a statistical test of the efficacy of prayer?" And he concluded that of course there is. Especially in Britain, because not only do people pray in Britain but people pray differentially. Some people are more in the prayer business than others. Do those who pray more get favors from heaven more? This is in late Victorian times, when these particular views were still more outrageous than they are today. So here is just a little hint of Galton's approach, his sense of scientific protocol:

There are many common maladies whose course is so thoroughly well understood as to admit of accurate tables of probability being constructed for their duration and result. Such are fractures and amputations. Now, it would be perfectly practicable to select out of the patients at different hospitals under treatment for fractures and amputations two considerable groups. The one consisting of markedly religious and piously befriended individuals, the other of those who were remarkably cold-hearted and neglected. An honest comparison of their respective periods of treatment and the results would manifest a distinct proof of the efficacy of prayer, if it existed to even a minute fraction of the amount that religious teachers exhort us to believe.

And then he goes on to say,

An enquiry of a somewhat similar nature may be made into the longevity of persons whose lives are prayed for. Also, that of the praying classes generally.

And so he then goes on to compare the mean longevity of sovereigns with that of other classes of persons of equal affluence and gives a table of the results. And the conclusion he states as follows:

The sovereigns are literally the shortest-lived of all who have the advantage of affluence,

from which he deduces that the efficacy of prayer is not yet demonstrated.

Now, this has not led to a school of people who do statistical tests of the efficacy of prayer. Hard to know why not. Except that people who don't believe in prayer perhaps are not very interested in this, and those who do are convinced of its efficacy and therefore do not need to go to statistical tests. There is no question that there is something about prayer that seems to work. Surely it provides solace and comfort. It's a way of working through problems. It's a way of reviewing events that have happened, of connecting the past with the future. It does something good. But that doesn't mean that it is as alleged. It doesn't say anything about the existence of a god. It doesn't say anything about the external world. It is a procedure, which on some level makes us feel better.

I maintain that everyone starts out with that sort of attitude. We all grow up in the land of the giants when we are very small and the adults are very large. And then, through a set of slow stages, we grow up, and we become one of the adults. But still within us, surely, is some part of our childhood that hasn't disappeared and hasn't grown up. It's just there. In your formative years, you then learn from direct experience, absolutely incontrovertible, that there are much larger, much older, much wiser, and much more powerful creatures in the universe than you. And your strongest emotional bonds are to them. And, among other things, they are sometimes angry with you, and then you have to work through the anger. And they ask you to do things that you may not want to do, and you must propitiate them, you must apologize, you must do a set of things. Now, how likely is it that after we are all grown up we've fully detached ourselves from this formative experience? Isn't it much more likely that there remains a part of us that is still in the practice of this kind of childhood dealing with parents and other adults? Could that have something to do with prayer specifically and with religious beliefs in general?

Well, this is in fact the scandalous view of Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion, and other famous books of the first few decades of the twentieth century. And Freud's view was that "at bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father." Of course Freud was living in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, in a very patriarchal kind of Judeo-Christian tradition, and therefore it was a very patriarchal kind of god. So it may be that his conclusions do not apply to all religions and all societies, but it's very easy to understand that those religions and those societies lent themselves very much to the Freudian hypothesis.

To say it still more explicitly, the view here is that we start out with the sense that our parents are omnipotent and omniscient, we develop certain relations with them-different degrees of mental health in those relationships, depending on the nature of the relationship between the parents and the child- and then we grow up, and as we do so, we discover that our parents are not perfect. No one is, of course. There is a part of us that is deeply disappointed. There's a part of us that has been inducted into a dominance hierarchy and doesn't like the uncertainty of having to deal with things for ourselves. You know, one of the many reasons that are given for the advantages of military life and other powerfully hierarchical societies is that it's not required to think for oneself very much. There's something calming about that. And so, according to Freud, we then foist upon the cosmos our own emotional predispositions. You may or may not think that this explains a great deal about religion, but it is something I believe worth considering. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov,

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

I would like now to turn to a related subject, and that has to do with the influence of molecules on the emotions and perceptions. By molecules I just mean chemicals-natural chemicals in the environment or synthetic chemicals made in laboratories. We, of course, all understand that behavior is modified by molecules. Humans all over the world have had experience with substances like ethanol that certainly produced changes in behavior and attitudes and perceptions of the world. We know about tranquilizers that likewise do that. But let us consider a very specific case, and that is manic-depressive syndrome. It's a terrible disease. The manic-depressive swings between two extremes, and it's hard for me to see which is more ghastly: one in the utter pit of despair and the other a kind of high-flying exaltation in which everything seems possible-to the extent that many sufferers of this disease when they are at the manic end of the pendulum believe that they are God. And this is, of course, disabling. Both ends of the swing are disabling, and you don't spend much time in the middle, just like a pendulum, in which you move more slowly at the ends than you do through the middle. It's a disease found in every human culture, and until the last two or three decades there was no effective treatment. Well, there is now a material that powerfully ameliorates manic-depressive syndrome in many patients, provided the dose of this material is administered very carefully. People who have taken this substance in regularly controlled doses, many of them, find that they are able to function again. Their lives are normalized, and they consider it a great blessing. What is this material? It is lithium, a salt. Lithium is a chemical element, the third simplest after hydrogen and helium. It's astonishing that such a simple material could have so profound an effect on a subset of the human population and change not just behavior; if you talk to ex-manic-depressives-that is, manic-depressives whose disease is controlled by regular administration of lithium-their account from the inside of how transforming this treatment is, is really stunning.

Now, bearing this in mind, who will say that there are human emotions that will not, at least one day, be understood in some fundamental manner in the language of molecular biology and neuronal architecture? If you run through our own society and other societies, you find a vast range of substances, many of them chemically very distinct, that powerfully affect mood and emotion and behavior. Not just ethanol but caffeine, mushrooms, amphetamines, tetrahydrocannabinol and the other cannabinoids, lysergic acid diethylamide-known as LSD- barbiturates, Thorazine. It's a very long list.

This prompts certain questions: Are all human emotions to some extent mediated by molecules? If a molecule ingested from the outside can change behavior, is there generally some comparable molecule on the inside that can change behavior? This is now a field that has made remarkable progress. I'm talking about the enkephalins and the endorphins, which are small brain proteins.

In labor, women are amazingly strong in bearing pain, and of course there is a great deal of pain in childbirth. But in that case and in many other traumatic situations, the human body produces a particular molecule that reduces our susceptibility to pain. And it does it for very good survival reasons, which are not hard to understand. There are specific receptors in the brain for these small brain proteins, and it turns out that the opiates ingested from the outside are extremely similar chemically to a particular enkephalin having to do with resistance to pain that is produced on the inside; that is, it is looking as if every time a molecule on the outside does something about human emotions, there is a related molecule on the inside that is naturally produced, which is how it is that we have a brain receptor for this particular kind of molecular functional group.

Let me be a little less abstract and speak from personal experience. I go to the dentist, and he gives me an injection of Adrenalin. It is a molecule. It's a molecule produced in your body, but it's also produced outside. And every time I've had this injection, I'm almost overcome with two contradictory emotions, one of which is to attack the dentist and the other is to leave the dentist's office, both of which I suppose could be understood just on purely rational grounds, considering the circumstances. But this is what adrenaline, the hormone epinephrine, does under any circumstances, under the most benign circumstances. It's called the fight-or-flight syndrome. This molecule makes you either aggressive or, if you want to think about running away, cowardly, one or the other. Very remarkable that two such apparently contradictory emotions can be brought about by the same molecule. But more important than that, it's extremely interesting. They just put this molecule in your bloodstream, and suddenly you feel things. It's just a function of the molecule being there. It's nothing, necessarily, in the external world. And we can understand the reasons for that. Consider our remote ancestors faced with, let us say, a pack of hyenas, not having yet deduced that hyenas with fangs bared are dangerous. It would be too inefficient to have our ancestor consciously stop and think, "Oh, I see those beasts have sharp teeth; they probably can eat somebody. They're coming at me. Maybe I should run away." By then it's too late.

What you need is one quick look at the hyena, and instantly the molecule is produced, and you run away, and later you can figure out what happened. And you can see two populations, one of whom has to slowly think the matter out, the other of whom can rapidly respond to the adrenaline. After a while these guys leave lots of offspring, those guys don't. Everybody winds up generating adrenaline. Natural selection. Not hard to understand how that comes about. And there are, of course, many other molecules like that.

Another one is testosterone, which is produced in males at adolescence and instigates all sorts of bizarre behavior that we all know. I don't want to suggest that at the same age I was immune from it. I personally know the consequences of testosterone poisoning. You might imagine that our distant ancestors could figure out that it was useful to propagate the species and leave offspring and had an intellectual understanding of how it comes about. But this is very iffy. It's requiring a great deal of intellectual activity and cerebration, and it's much better to simply have the whole thing hardwired in the brain and triggered by this molecule after the biological clock has ticked away for a certain period of time. And so the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex immediately leads to this sequence of events, and the species continues.

There are many other such molecules. Of course, females have estrogen and other hormones. The number of sex hormones is more than one each. Statistics on the subjects that adults of all ages dream about most have sex very high up, and everything else is far below. It's clear the more interested in sex people are, generally speaking, the more offspring they tend to leave, at least before the invention of birth-control devices, and so there is a selective advantage for each species to have this kind of internal machinery.

In just the same ways as the enkephalins and the endorphins and sex hormones influence our sexual activity, what about hormones and religion? People certainly have spontaneous religious experiences. Sometimes they're brought about by deprivation, as with the fasting monks in the desert. There are a number of ways in which sensory deprivation can bring about these experiences. They also happen spontaneously to people in many different cultures, always using the language of the indigenous culture to describe the experience. But also they can be brought about in a molecular way. And certainly the uniform experience, especially in the 1950s and '60s-pioneered by Aldous Huxley and others-was that LSD and other such molecules produce religious experiences. And there were many religionists who objected to this, because they thought it was too easy; that is, you're not supposed to have a religious experience without doing some significant personal deprivation. Just taking, whatever it was, five hundred micrograms of a tablet, was considered too easy.

Let's say there's a molecule that produces a religious experience, whatever the religious experience is. How does that come about? Virtually every time someone takes that molecule, he or she has a religious experience. Does that not suggest that there is a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion? What could that molecule be like? Let's give it a name, since nobody's discovered it yet, and of course it may not exist-a good one would be "theophilline," but that has already been preempted for an antiasthma drug. And I think "theotoxin" would be biasing the issue too strongly. So let's call it "theophorin," a material that makes you feel religious.

What could the selective advantage of a theophorin be? How would it come about? Why would it be there? Well, what is the nature of the experience? The nature of the experience has, as I say, many different aspects. But one uniform aspect of it is an intense feeling of awe and humility before a power vastly greater than ourselves. And that sounds to me very much like a dominance-hierarchy molecule or part of a suite of molecules whose function it is to fit us into the dominance hierarchies-to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey.

Now, what's the good of that? Why would that have any selective advantage? If for no other reason, it would produce social conformity, or, put in more favorable terms, it would ensure social stability and morality. And this is, of course, one of the principal justifications of religion. Any cosmological aspect of the deities is an entirely separate attribute. Consider how we bow our heads in prayer, making a gesture of submission that can be found in many other animals as they defer to the alpha male. We're enjoined in the Bible not to look God in the face, or else we will die instantly. Submissive males of many species, including our own, avert their eyes before the alpha male. In the court of Louis XIV, as the king passed, he was preceded by courtiers crying "Avertez les yeux! Avert the eyes! Don't look up. He's passing." And to this day many animals with a taste for dominance can be made aggressive simply by looking them in the eye.

Well, I don't claim that this is the same as all aspects of the religious experience. I think there is as much difference between the religious experience and the bureaucratic religions as there is, say, between sex with love and sex without love. And of course humans have added something profound and beautiful in both cases to the molecular reflex. Perhaps this account will sound tasteless or unpalatable to many, and if so I apologize. But if we treat the question of the origin of religion and the religious experience as a scientific question, then we must ask, "What essential aspects of the religious experience are left out by this hypothesis?" and note that it is at least in principle testable by finding the theophorin, and you could then of course see a large number of controlled experiments to test that out in great detail.

Now, whether or not this explanation is right, there is no question that religions have historically played the role of making people contented with their lot. And it is customary even today to argue that the actual truth or falsity of the religious doctrine does not matter so much as the degree of social stability it brings about. People who through no fault of their own have much less in the way of material goods or respect in a society are told in many religions, "It doesn't matter in this life. Yeah, it looks like you're getting a bad deal, but this is just the twinkling of an eye. What really matters is the next life, and there an implacable cosmic justice awaits you. All those who seem unjustly enriched by the rewards of this life will be punished greatly in the next, whereas you who are the hewers and carriers, the humble people who are content with your lot in this life, will be raised to glory in the next."

Maybe it's true. But it's not hard to see that such a doctrine would be very appealing to the ruling classes of a society. It calms any revolutionary tendencies or even mild complaints and therefore has powerful utility. Many societies, for this reason alone, encourage the contentment with your lot that the religious promise of heaven affords.

Many religions lay out a set of precepts-things people have to do-and claim that these instructions were given by a god or gods. For example, the first code of law by Hammurabi of Babylon, in the second millennium B.C., was handed to him by the god Marduk, or at least so he said. Since there are very few Mar-dukians today, perhaps no one will be offended if I suggest that this is a bamboozle, that it's a pious hoax. That if Hammurabi had merely said, "Here's what I think everybody ought to do," he would have been much less successful, although he was king of Babylon, than if he said, "God says you should do this."

I recognize that the next step, saying that other lawgivers who are better known today are in the same situation, might produce some degree of outrage at the impiety, but I ask you to nevertheless think it through. Is it not likely that in earlier times, in less sophisticated circumstances, those who wished to impose a certain set of behavioral tenets claimed that they had been handed them by a god or gods.

Now, as soon as you say that religious belief and conventional morality are necessary to keep the society going, you raise the suspicion that these are tools by which those who control the country tend to keep everybody else in line.

And I would like to jump headfirst into a contemporary issue just to make this a little less abstract. Everyone knows about what's going on in apartheid South Africa. I would merely like to draw your attention to something recently produced, called the Kairos Document, derived from a Greek word meaning "the moment of truth." It was written by committed Christians of many races who are opposed to the apartheid system in South Africa. And in the context of what we were just talking about, let me just paraphrase a couple of paragraphs to get a feel about this. It says that state theology in South Africa employs almost exclusively the apostle Paul's view of the state as a power "ordained by God" and commanding obedience. It comes from the remark, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," without there being any detailed explication as to how you go about doing that. The regime elevates the concept of law and order above every other sort of morality. It goes on to state that in the present crisis and especially during the State of Emergency, "State Theology" has tried to reestablish the status quo of orderly discrimination, exploitation, and oppression by appealing to the conscience of its citizens in the name of law and order.

And then later on,

This God is an idol. It is as mischievous, sinister and evil as the idols that the prophets of Israel had to contend with… Here we have a God who is historically on the side of the white settlers, who dispossesses black people of their land and gives the major part of the land to his "chosen people."… It is the God of teargas, rubber bullets, sjamboks, prison cells and death sentences. Here is a God who exalts the proud and humbles the poor, the very opposite of the God of the Bible……

How rare it is that religions-especially established religions- take the lead in confrontation with the civil authorities when a monstrous injustice is being done. How often it is that the religious authorities take the safe way and temporize or talk about the afterlife or talk about moving slowly or talk about this not being the proper function of religion. And then, on the other side, how often is it that the established religions make authoritative pronouncements on matters of science, matters of fact, matters where they run the desperate risk of being disproved by the next discovery?

This idea was very nicely summed up by Pierre-Simon, the marquis de Laplace, one of the great scientists in the post-Newtonian age, and also a partisan of the French Revolution. In his System of the World, in 1796, he said, "Far from us be the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes useful to mislead, to deceive, and enslave mankind to ensure their happiness."

Well, I have tried in this talk to give a further sense of how it is possible in various sorts of ways, ranging from brain chemistry to the wish of the political establishments to maintain power, to understand some of the key aspects of religious belief. By no means does it follow that religions thereby have no function, or no benign function. They can provide in a very significant way, and without any mystical trappings, ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in time of bereavement, continuity with the past, and faith in the future. But there are many other things that they do not provide.

I would like to conclude with a quote from Bertrand Russell, from his Skeptical Essays, published in 1928. I should warn you, this is redolent with irony.

I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system. Since both are at present faultless this must weigh against it.