The Faith Instinct

Nicholas Wade, “The Faith Instinct (How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures), The Penguin Press, 2009, 285 Pages

For the past 50,000 years all societies have practiced religion in one form or other. Nicholas Wade maintains that religion has been implanted in human nature because it helped people survive. The purpose of his book is to “try to understand religious behavior from an evolutionary perspective.” This interesting theory seems entirely possible; but I do not believe the authors’ position that an instinct for faith is hardwired into human nature is actually proven.

My Notes:
Pg. 3: So indelibly and distinctively does religion shape the fabric of societies that it has become the defining feature of the cultures around which great civilizations are built, such as those of Western Christianity or Islam or Hinduism.

Pg. 15: The early hunter gatherers did not and could not have a police force or prison guards or judiciary. Religion provided both social cohesion and effective compliance with the dictates of an invisible government.

Pg. 17: Morality is older than religion—its roots can be seen in monkeys and apes—and religious behavior was engrafted on top of it in the human lineage alone. Understanding how the moral instincts evolved makes it easier to see that religious behavior too has an evolutionary origin.

Pg. 24: Returning to moral intuition and moral reasoning, the two basic psychological processes that underlie morality, the question arises as to why evolution has so generously equipped us with two processes, when one might seem plenty. The most plausible answer is that the two processes emerged from different stages of human evolution. Moral intuition is the more ancient system, presumably put in place before humans gained either the power of reasoning or the faculty of language. After the evolution of language, when people needed to explain and justify their actions to others, moral reasoning would have developed.

Pg. 38: The human form has undergone extraordinary changes since its lineage split from that of chimpanzees some 5 to 6 million years ago. Our brain tripled in size, our body hair was shed, we downsized our teeth, shriveled our gut and gained an appendage for conserving moisture in dry climates—the nose.

Pg. 88: It seems likely that the context in which language evolved was affected by dance, music and religion, the other systems of communication that were emerging in our distant ancestors. These four kinds of social communicative behavior may in some way have coevolved. The archaeological record at present holds little evidence to help set dates on the emergence of music, language and religion, all of which must have been in place before the modern human exodus from the African homeland 50,000 years ago. So far, the oldest musical instrument found is 36,000 years old.

Pg. 99: Evidence of art and of burials implying ritual processes 45,000 years ago has been found in Europe.

Pg. 139: Providing somewhere to sit through the parson’s sermon is only the secondary purpose of pews. They were placed in European churches from the sixteenth century onward to stop people dancing. The introduction of pews, McNeill writes, ‘restrained spontaneous muscular responses to the most fiery of preachers and, by isolating one person from another with wooden barriers, introduced a new quiescence into public worship.’

Pg. 148: With the advent of literacy some 5,000years ago, the character of religion changed yet again. With the help of written texts, beliefs could be shaped to more specific purposes, like nation building. The sacred texts further increased the distance between believers and the supernatural. Direct experience of the interface with the supernatural world, as experienced by hunter gathers in their trance dances, was long gone.

Pg. 150: Early Israelite religion seems to have been polytheistic just as was its Canaanite predecessor. Monotheism was imposed much later in the sixth century B.C. by the priestly caste in Jerusalem and during the Babylonian captivity, but the priests then devised an ancient pedigree for their new religion which back-projected its origins into the distant past.

Pg. 154: The central theme of the Hebrew Bible is the Yahweh intervened in history in order to free the Israelites form captivity in Egypt, lead them across the desert and deliver the Promised Land into their hands. But the uplifting theme is not supported by the available historical and archaeological evidence. It appears there was no Egyptian captivity at all.

Pg. 166: If the books of the New Testament had been arranged in order of their date of composition, the letters of Paul would have come first, given that all the authentic ones were written before A.D. 70, and the four gospels, all of which were written after A.D. 70, would follow. But that would have given the impression, that Paul shaped Christianity as a religion for gentiles and loosely tied it to the person of Jesus, an orthodox Jew interested only in making a minor adjustment to Judaism. By placing the lives of Jesus first, the compilers lent support to the official story, that Jesus was the founder of Christianity.


Pg. 172: Only recently have a few researchers started from the position that all Islamic writing are suspect as historical accounts and that the historical origins of Islam first must be sought in non-Islamic sources.

Pg. 191: Religion plays a vital role in societies old and new because it shapes morality and trust and the institutions that depend on them, such as trade and commerce; it strongly influences reproductive behavior and demographic growth rates; and it is intimately involved in many aspects of a society’s severest test, that of warfare.

Pg. 219: The only prolonged improvement in living conditions in European economies seems to have occurred after terrible plagues. The explanation for the very high living standards of Europeans in the years 1350-1600 was undoubtedly the arrival of the Black Death in 1347. Its first onslaught in the years 1347-49 carried away 30-50 percent of the population of Europe. After its initial onset the plague offered Europeans a greatly enhanced material lifestyle at small cost in terms of the average length of life.

Pg. 236: A long series of wars within Europe took place between Catholic and Protestant powers. Christian states then gradually learned an important lesson, that wars fought in the name of absolute beliefs are hard to settle by negotiation. From this experience emerged the solution of separating the powers of church and state, beginning with the Peace of Augsburg of 1555; each ruler was allowed to choose the religion for his region.

Pg. 268: Science has provided an increasingly comprehensive explanation for the material world, one which is now largely complete, in principle if not in detail, except for singular events such as the origin of the universe and the origin of life on earth. This knowledge, a soaring triumph of the rational mind, has for the seventeenth century onward eroded a major intellectual pillar of religious belief, that of religion’s claim to explain the natural world.

Pg. 272: “Religion is a central defining characteristic of civilizations, “ Huntington writes. He sees the world as divided into seven principal civilizations—Western (Europe and the U.S.), Confucian (China), Japanese, Islamic, Hindu (India), Slavic-Orthodox (Russia) and Latin American. These civilizations, he says “are differentiated form each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.”