The Science of Discworld IV

on culture in a dramatic way. In the United Kingdom, about 40% say they have no religion, 30% align themselves with one but do not consider themselves in any way religious, and only 30% say they have significant religious beliefs. An even smaller proportion attends some kind of place of worship regularly. In the United States, over 80% identify with a specific religious denomination, 40% say they attend servicesweekly, and 58% say that they pray most weeks. It’s an intriguing difference between cultures that have such a lot in common.
    Most religious activity, for the last few thousand years, is based on belief in a god or gods that acted to create the world, human beings, the beasts of the field, plants – everything. We discussed some of these creator gods in chapter 4 ; they used to resemble human beings or animals, but nowadays they are often abstract and ineffable; either way, they have supernatural powers. They are believed to be in daily contact with the world, making thunderstorms, providing good and bad luck for individual people, acting as a source of wisdom and authority through oral tradition (maintained by a shaman, a priest, or a priesthood). And, in the last few thousand years, Holy Books. Such theist beliefs contrast with deist beliefs, in which there is no overt anthropomorphic god, but some entity, or process, looks after the whole caboodle in deep background.
    Such beliefs can be very powerful, and they form the basis of most people’s views of the world and of our lives. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a strong movement among intellectuals to reform the structure of society, by basing it on reason, rather than on faith and tradition. This movement, known as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, was highly influential throughout Europe and America. It played a role in the formulation of constitutional declarations of human rights, among them the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
    Since then, the proportion of non-believers has increased throughout the Western world, especially among those who are well educated and well heeled financially (as a survey in the United States has clearly shown, for example). Such people, among whom we count ourselves, agree with Dawkins, though perhaps not so publicly: they maintain that there is no god, or God, out there: it’s all done by laws of nature, sometimes ‘transcended’ by changing the context for those laws.Good and bad ‘luck’ come from our own actions and the general cussedness of nature; there’s no supernatural entity that consciously affects our lives.
    Why do so many people believe in a god? Dennett’s
Breaking the Spell
is an attempt to examine that question, for Christian fundamentalists, Islamic teachers, Buddhist monks, atheists, and others. He begins by pointing to the commonality of pre-scientific answers in groups of people: ‘How do thunderstorms happen?’ answered by ‘It must be someone up there with a gigantic hammer’ (our example, not his). Then, probably after a minimum of discussion, a name such as ‘Thor’ becomes agreed. Having successfully sorted out thunderstorms, in the sense that you now have an agreed answer to why they happen, other forces of nature are similarly identified and named. Soon you have a pantheon, a community of gods to blame everything on. It’s very satisfying when everyone around you agrees, so the pantheon soon becomes the accepted wisdom, and few question it. In some cultures, few dare to question it, because there are penalties if you do.
    J. Anderson Thomson Jr’s book
Why We Believe in God(s)
devotes each chapter to a different reason for the existence of beliefs. It makes a good case for a Dennett-style system, and is persuasive enough that we’d expect aliens, if they have anything like the kind of social life we have, to have believed in god(s) during at least the early growth of their culture. The aliens would have to have had nurturing parent(s), tribes with a big alien as boss, and so on, but that’s a reasonable expectation if they are extelligent.
    People in all cultures grow up and acquire a set of beliefs. One way of looking at this is to call the beliefs that are inherited ‘memes’. Just as ‘genes’ code for hereditary traits, so memes are intended to show the inheritance of individual items, rather than a whole belief system. A tune like ‘Happy Birthday’, a concept like Father Christmas,