He was a wise man who invented God.
– Plato
Most modern Christians, Jews and Muslims would be quite surprised to learn that the Yahweh worshipped by Abraham (also called El, Elohim and Jehovah) was quite different than the almighty God we know today. Abraham's God was made of flesh-and-blood. He was a god of war, jealous and vengeful, more than ready to commit genocide, wipe out humanity with a flood, and many other deeds that made him quite the opposite of the loving, Almighty God we know today. Abraham would have a hard time believing that his Lord and the modern God Almighty are one and the same.
Not only that, but Abraham, as well as all of his descendants down to Moses' time and even beyond, were polytheists, that is, pagans. To them, Yahweh was just one god among many. There were so many other gods competing for (and getting) their attention that Yahweh had to make a special deal with them: He offered his military protection, and in return the Israelites had to forgo their other gods and worship only Yahweh. In the days of Abraham, Yahweh simply didn't command the same unquestioned loyalty that He does today.
The loving, omnipotent, fatherly God we learn about today is the result of the longest and best "marketing makeover" in history – four thousand years of changes and improvements to Yahweh's image, from Abraham's time to today. Yahweh has evolved into the Almighty God, the God of everything, the loving, forgiving God, the only God. The Yahweh makeover is so complete that we just call him "God" now, with a capital "G". We don't have to distinguish God from the other gods, because most Westerners are monotheists. Yahweh completely dominates Western religions. The other gods that Abraham and Moses believed in are either forgotten, or are grouped together under the dismissive title "mythology."
How did this happen? Did someone in Abraham's time, or Moses' time, realize that Yahweh had an "image problem" that needed polishing up? How did Yahweh change from Abraham's god-of-armies into our God Almighty?
Religious scholars might tell us that Yahweh was always the God we know today, that only our understanding of God has changed. Noah, Abraham, and Moses lived in simpler times, so God presented himself to them in a simpler way, one they could understand. Over the millennia, as our societies and culture matured, God was able to reveal more and more of his all-knowing, loving, all-powerful self to us. These religious scholars might tell us that God guided His prophets through divine intervention to shape our Bibles, Torahs or Qur'ans, so that today, we can hold God's actual words in our hands, and have a true understanding of God's greatness.
But we're here today to offer a different version of Yahweh's makeover, a different way of looking at this history. This is the story about how humans shaped God's image, not the other way around. We're going to learn how the transformation of Abraham's god-of-armies to our God Almighty is the result of an evolutionary process, the powerful and inexorable forces known as "survival of the fittest." But it was cultural evolution, not biological evolution, that was at work, changing and improving Yahweh's image over the millennia. And it wasn't just Yahweh who was shaped by cultural evolution; these same forces created and refined all of our religious beliefs.
So just what is "cultural evolution," and how does it work?
God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh – Voltaire (1694-1778)
"Why did the chicken cross the road?" What a dumb joke. But you've heard it, right? And you know the retort. Why is this stupid joke one of the most pervasive and reliable bits of verbal information ever passed from one human to another? Why is it passed, with extreme accuracy, to virtually every child? What makes children tell it to each other, year after year, generation after generation?
This is not a trivial question; it illustrates a deep and profound insight into human culture, that some ideas can be passed verbally and with high fidelity, but additionally, that these facts are passed along whereas other ideas fade into history. Something about the chicken joke causes it to reproduce itself. The joke itself contains the means for its own survival – it makes children want to repeat it.
The chicken joke is a perfect example of a self-replicating idea, an idea that makes you want to repeat it to someone else. Whether it's a joke, an urban myth, a great story, or a hard lesson you've learned that you want to tell your children, each of these things carries within it the "seed" that causes it to be retold, to be copied from one human brain to another. In other words, each of these carries more than just the message itself; it also carries a motivation that makes you want to retell it. The message is the obvious, overt part of the joke, urban myth or lesson. The motivation is a consequence of the message's contents, yet it is equally important. Without the motivation, the idea would die out.
Notice that this is a lot like how our genes work: Genes carry information, just as a joke carries information. In the case of DNA, the information is chemical instructions telling a cell how to build certain proteins, a "blueprint" if you will, for the stuff your body needs to live. But the DNA's "motivation" is just as important: Those proteins ultimately cause the lifeform, whether it's a bacterium or an elephant, to copy itself, to make more copies of the DNA. Without this motivation, the DNA would die out in short order.
So your DNA shares a fascinating trait with jokes, urban myths and hard-learned lessons: They all contain a message and a motivation to reproduce.
Richard Dawkins was the first to recognize the parallels between ideas and genes, but he didn't think it was just an amusing analogy. Dawkins realized there was something deeper, that even though biological life and ideas are radically different, there is an important underlying theory that ties the two together. Because these self-replicating ideas were so much like genes, Dawkins coined the term meme (a "mnemonic gene").
A long time before Dawkins, Albert Einstein realized that energy and matter were really one and the same thing, just different aspects of a single concept. Before Einstein, the physicists Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell realized that electricity and magnetism, two seemingly different phenomena, were really just two different faces of a single thing. And even earlier still, René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat showed that algebra and geometry, which might seem like two entirely different studies, were essentially the same thing, just seen from different perspectives. In each of these cases, a great mind recognized that two seemingly different ideas have a single underlying principle that, once discovered, unifies the two concepts into one and gives a deeper understanding of both.
Dawkins realized that it was the replication of information that was the underlying principle common to genes and ideas (memes). A century earlier, Charles Darwin had spelled out the principles of natural selection, which in spite of the staggering amount that has been written, boil down to three simple ideas: reproduction, mutation, and natural selection (survival of the fittest). If we rephrase these three ideas in information-theory terms, we would call it transcription (copying), transcription errors (mutation), and filtering (natural selection). And these concepts apply to both genes and memes. With this "grand unification" of the two disciplines, Dawkins laid the foundation for the study of memetics, which uses Darwin's evolution science to predict and explain the very foundations of human culture and knowledge.
Memes come in all flavors and sizes, but jokes are especially good examples of memes. A joke is simple, a nice little self-contained unit of information, and jokes are fun to study. They illustrate the basics of "memology" quite nicely.
The world's worst symphony conductor heard that his job was going to be given to his greatest rival. In a fit of jealousy, he murdered the rival. But, being a musician, he didn't cover his tracks very well and the police immediately caught, convicted and sentenced him to death in the electric chair. When they strapped him into the chair and turned on the juice, nothing happened! He just sat there happily humming Beethoven's Ninth. They tried again and again, to no avail. Finally, he called out, "Give it up, you fools. You can't electrocute me. I'm the world's worst conductor!"
The joke reproduced itself as you read this page, so its population just increased by one.
When I tell you a joke, I am essentially carrying out the joke's version of sex: I am using your brain to make a copy of the joke meme that was in my brain. It uses your brain's resources to keep itself alive (stored in your neurons), and if it's funny enough, you'll want to repeat the joke to someone else, thereby increasing the joke's population by one more. This sounds a lot like a virus, doesn't it?
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. ... It happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
– Carl Sagan
Elephants are (very roughly) 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1018 ) times larger than bacteria, yet they are connected by an amazing fact: Both the bacterium and the elephant contain DNA, and the ultimate goal of each elephant or bacterium is the same: To make more copies of its DNA. Even more amazing is that ultimately, DNA is just information. Although DNA's information is "written" as particular sequences of base pairs on the DNA strand, it's still nothing more than information, like the words on this page. Without a person to read the words on this page, it's just so many atoms. Without a living cell to interpret the gene's sequence on the DNA, it's just another chemical. A dog can't tell a page of a book from toilet paper, and a rock can't tell DNA from LSD. But with a person to read the page, or a cell to read the DNA, the information is unlocked.
And that's all a joke is: Information. But jokes, a bacterium's DNA, and an elephant's DNA have another important feature that distinguishes them from ordinary information: The very information they contain causes them to make copies of themselves. Everything else about the life of these three things is incidental to the act of copying themselves, so that their information can "live long and prosper."
Although jokes are useful to illustrate the basic idea of a meme, don't be fooled by their simplicity. Memes can be incredibly rich, complex, intertwined, and interdependent.
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic
– Bertrand Russell
Here's a more modern self-replicating bit of information. While writing this book, I got the following e-mail from a relative:
Hi,
I just got this, pass it on. This is serious. Be careful you guys!
New Driving Fines for 2007
1. Carpool lane - 1st time $1068.50 starting 7/1/07 (The $271 posted on the highway is old). Don't do it again because 2nd time is going to be double. 3rd time triple, and 4th time license suspended.
2. Incorrect lane change - $380. Don't cross the lane on solid lines or intersections.
3. Block intersection - $485
4. Driving on the shoulder - $450
5. Cell phone use in the construction zone. - Double fine as of 07/01/07. Cell phone use must be "hands free" while driving.
6. Passengers over 18 not in their seatbelts - both passengers and drivers get tickets.
7. Speeders can only drive 3 miles above the limit.
8. DUI = JAIL (Stays on your driving record for 10 years!)
9. As of 07/01/07 cell phone use must be "hands free" while driving. Ticket is $285. They will be looking for this like crazy - easy money for police department.
Sounds pretty awful, and I (like so many others) took this seriously. For a day or two, that is, until it turned up on a well-known rumor-busting web site. The whole email was a fake! All nine "new driving fines" are incorrect. Yet this email spread far and wide. Just about everyone in my own circle of family and friends received it, which means that, in a span of a few days, this "urban myth" meme went from a population of one to something like tens of millions. Wow!
This meme was perfectly crafted. It has everything that an urban myth needs:
Because it was so well crafted, the "New Driving Fines" urban myth became epidemic, and spread with exponential growth throughout the state.
This is a really good example of a meme, a self-replicating idea. It is information that, by its very nature, causes it to be copied over and over in people's minds and computers.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it... He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should be spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.
– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
This is a remarkable quote by the brilliant statesman, scientist and philosopher, Thomas Jefferson, because it encapsulates the very idea of a meme, and predates Dawkins by nearly a century and a half.
We already learned that the definition of a meme is pretty simple: It's an idea, a concept, that is capable of being passed from one mind to another, and that produces the motivation that makes you want to pass it on.
Many other authors have spent varying amounts of space and intellectual energy trying to define the term, each with a slightly different skew on the subject. Is a meme strictly linguistic, or can it be a song, a painting, or the act of demonstrating how to flake obsidian to make an arrowhead? Is a meme a meme if it's stored on paper? Or in your computer? What is the difference between a meme and a memeplex? If we can't define it, how can we study it?
Careful definitions of terms are important in the erudite circles of academic philosophy, sociology, and information theory, but this is an informal book, not a scholarly tome. In my view, a meme is any bit of information that can be passed from one mind to another, by any mechanism. If I teach a secret handshake to a friend, and the friend thinks it's a pretty cool handshake and teaches it to you, then the secret handshake could be a meme. The key point is this: Both memes and genes are self-replicating information. They reproduce very differently, one via biochemical processes, and the other via person-to-person communication, but at their core, both memes and genes are just information. More importantly, the very information contained by a gene or meme is the motivating force for its own reproduction.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
– Epicurus
There are three fundamental sources of knowledge for humans: Instinct, experience, and culture.
Instinct is knowledge that is inborn. Nobody has to teach you to be afraid of heights, to go to your mother in a time of danger, to fear snakes, or that bitter foods shouldn't be eaten. Nobody has to tell a teenager to have sex (quite the contrary!). This knowledge is "hard wired" into our brains, and also into the brains of many animals.
Experience teaches you that grass feels nice under your feet, that thorns hurt if you prick your finger, and that fire is hot. Experiential knowledge is information that you learn by interacting with the world and the people around you. The knowledge itself isn't inborn.
Cultural learning, our highly developed ability to transmit ideas (memes) from one person to the next, is a uniquely human ability, one that makes humans truly distinct from other animals. There has been some work showing that other animals such as chimpanzees and gorillas also pass information culturally, but their abilities are primitive compared to humans.
From this, we can clearly see that our religious beliefs qualify as memes. When you were born, you didn't know anything about religion or gods (it's not instinctive knowledge), and you didn't learn about religion by interacting with nature (it's not experiential knowledge). Someone taught you about religion and god. Even if you don't believe in God, you still have a god meme in your head. It's a meme that was put there by your parents and community, and they got it from their parents and community, and so on down through history.
With this new memetic view that treats ideas as self-replicating pieces of information, we can now see that religion is a virus, one that infects your brain. "Right," you're probably thinking, "He means that allegorically, or metaphorically, or something. Religion is a belief system, not a germ!" But in fact, when I use the phrase religion virus, I mean it in a very literal sense. The religion virus isn't a physical entity, with DNA and proteins and such, but in every other sense, it is a true virus. The parallels between the viruses that infect your body and the viruses that infect your mind are truly astonishing. By the end of this book, I hope to give you a detailed understanding of the infective, reproductive, parasitic nature of the religion virus and its effect on culture, society, politics, and the future of humanity.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. –Voltaire (1694-1778), "Epitres, XCVI"
We will study three paths in parallel. The first is classical Evolution Science, first elucidated by Charles Darwin, one of the greatest minds in history. Darwin's Evolution Science is astonishing in its explanatory powers; with a single book, Darwin founded what is arguably the most important science in human history. We'll just skim the surface; a full treatment requires volumes, but it's important to our story.
Second, we'll learn more about memes, the field of study called memetics. We'll learn how memes follow nearly the same evolutionary rules as the physical lifeforms that Darwin studied, as these ideas and concepts "live and reproduce" in our brains, and we'll extend Evolution Science to see how it also sheds light on cultural evolution.
And third, we'll study religion itself. We'll show that religion is explained clearly and completely by memetics and by the lessons learned from Darwin's Evolution Science. Darwin showed that God did not create Man, and now through the study of memetics, we will see that God did not even create religion. Using Darwin's principles of evolution, applied to culture via meme theory, we'll see that modern religions are the inevitable result of Darwinistic evolution of culture and ideas. In this case, survival of the fittest does not necessarily mean survival of the truest.
Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle.
-- Galileo Galilei
Most readers are familiar with Darwin's basic premise: That species evolved via a process of natural selection. Species are subject to random changes in their genome, and over millions and billions of generations, this process, which Darwin called "survival of the fittest," has given rise to the amazing diversity of plants and animals on this Earth.
We saw in the first part of this chapter that memes and genes are both examples of self-replicating information. It should come as no surprise, then, that the concept of "survival of the fittest" applies to memes just as it does to biological life. An idea can mutate (change) as it is passed from one person to the next; ideas compete with each other for "space" in your brain; and ideas compete for "reproduction time" by being told to the next person. The best jokes are the survivors, the worst jokes become "extinct."
As we will see, this same principle applies to religious ideas: The fittest religious ideas survive, and the unfit ones become extinct. And by "fittest" we do not mean the ideas that are true. Rather, these are the ideas that make people want to believe them, whether true or false, beneficial or harmful. An idea can be a survivor because it appeals to our hopes, our vanity, or the promise that Heaven awaits. But an idea can also be a survivor because it preys on our fears and prejudices. We're afraid of eternal punishment in Hell, we need protection from our enemies, we're afraid of dying, and we are afraid of the unknown. Ideas that prey on these fears can be just as "fit," that is, they survive just as well, as those that appeal via positive emotions.
When memes evolve, it is always towards these survivors – the memes that are more believable, more compelling are the ones that survive and reproduce, while the memes that are less believable and compelling fade from memory. This is the classic "survival of the fittest" rule. Keep this in mind as we begin our tour through the natural history of The Religion Virus.