I’ve been reading Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and two early passages have led me to see religion in a whole new way. Unfortunately, neither epiphany is ultimately flattering for religion, but at least one thought from the book got me thinking that religion was a useful tool in our development.

The first realization comes from the argument religionists make about the existence of morality being ultimately due to the existence of a law-giver that created a conscience in us all that is somewhat similar. Murder, theft, and lying seem to be universally bad — how could this be unless some god “wrote that on our heart” to use a Christian apologist metaphor. Harari points out, however, that because we Homo sapiens walk upright, our hips have to be narrower, which led to an evolutionary preference to earlier birth. But human babies need much more care and development time than babies of other species, and this necessitated help from others. This need, in turn, led to evolutionary selection for people more likely to cooperate and live together peacefully. And this would eventually result in a moral system that prized compassion and cooperation — without the need for a god.

The second realization came from Harari’s contention that Homo sapiens development into a species that can coexist in large groups, much larger than our closest evolutionary relative, the chimp, has to do with our ability to use language to describe things that aren’t actually there. To create fiction, in other words. He writes, “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.” He continues,

Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag.

This common myth enables large-scale cooperation that doesn’t appear in the societies of other apes.

The problem, though, is that we are at a point in our development in which the competing myths can go to war with each other with catastrophic effects for the entire plant…