BELIEVERS

An anthropologist mounts a defense of the religious impulse as biological and cultural imperative.

Think of Konner (Anthropology and Neuroscience/Emory Univ.; Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, 2015, etc.) as an anti–Richard Dawkins. Though, as he notes, “the most religious countries are the least developed ones” and the level of religious belief is declining rapidly among millennials in both Europe and the U.S., there’s something to religion. But what is it? Ranging broadly among traditions and talking with believers, the author identifies a few of its characteristics. One rabbi tells him, for instance, that it packs a healthy sense of awe, an ego-tempering sense that we are not the be-all and end-all of the universe, while Konner himself holds that a central factor of religion is its power to forge community and companionship. As a scientist, the author fully acknowledges that religion eludes scientific study and addresses questions that science perhaps cannot. The fact that so many of our kind have a religious impulse to begin with suggests, as an Indian neurologist memorably writes, that “when God made us, he put an antenna into our brains so we could find him, and it just happens to be in the temporal lobe.” But there’s more to religion, as Konner gamely admits, as an instrument of social control, of instilling norms of social behavior that open with the tenet, “People behave when they think they are watched." Of course, people don’t always behave—it sometimes seems that the more overtly religious a person is the more heinous their transgressions. Konner doesn’t venture much in the way of the definitive, but he urges coexistence and even partnership, noting that the days of religion’s attempting to stamp out science are coming to an end, the behavior of fundamentalist politicians notwithstanding. “Science and faith,” he writes, “are candles in a darkness that is vast compared to the light that either sheds.”

A humane, appropriately qualified argument that provides aid and comfort for believers—and that should also interest fair-minded nonbelievers.