Scientists have located the portion of the human brain devoted to religion. What remains to be discovered is how religious faith finds a home in our minds.
In a new book, Nicholas Wade, a New York Times science writer, credits an inbred "God gene" — a product of evolution that serves to make us social creatures. Wade titles his book "The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures."
To be sure, he doesn't claim that the possession of such a gene guarantees that God exists or that the claims of religion are legitimate, but only that religious faith works to our welfare as social creatures.
Religions, he argues, are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. Without them we would be a race of selfish, unfeeling loners. Instead, religion overcame tribal barriers so we could treat one another as members of a human family.
The author assumes that evolution works on groups as well as individuals. Other scientists who write popularly about evolution make lesser claims. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, holds that religion is only a happy side effect of natural selection.
Anthropologist Pascal Boyer identifies religion as a byproduct of an overactive human imagination, satisfying our need to ascribe meaning to a random world. Wade refuses to reduce religion to a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He believes faith has a source — not God, but rather a "God gene" in our physical makeup.
According to the author, the actual existence or nonexistence of God is beside the point. We are powerless to resist the tug of faith because it is part of our genetic makeup.
I can only guess at how the current generation of atheists will treat Wade's claim. Atheists find it easy and reasonable to reject the claims of God and religion. Did these naysayers alone somehow escape inheriting the faith instinct? Did they misplace a gene?
The great religions hold faith to be a virtue, not an instinct. It takes effort to be true to religious beliefs. Faith is also considered to be a gift, not just part of the genetic mix. If Wade's thesis is correct, we would all be fervent believers. In actual fact, faith often falters. Even when we believe, our faith is often prone to indifference. Clearly, the "God gene" doesn't ensure that every believer will be a saint.
For Wade, religion is a saga of biological survival. Equipped with the gene, people sense they can forestall short-term personal interests and act for everyone's benefit. Institutional religion develops to enforce this mutual interest, establishing liturgies, commandments and hierarchies.
For him, the stage dressing of worship is the creation of mere humans in support of the mutual interests of all peoples. The gods (assuming they exist) simply enforce what the "God gene" demands.
If Wade's faith instinct indeed hardwires us to love our neighbors as ourselves, why does human behavior fall so short of God's expectations and our own ideals?
David Yount's latest book is "Making a Success of Marriage: Planning for Happily Ever After" (Rowman & Littlefield).