Nicholas Wade's "The Faith Instinct" (2009): A Good Writer's Bad Book

Of the several thousand books I’ve read, one of my favorites is a summary of then-current knowledge about the Paleolithic by science journalist Nicholas Wade, called Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (Penguin, 2006). So I am reluctant to write this rather sour review of his next book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Penguin, 2009). 

I’m doing so anyway, because The Faith Instinct is a particular kind of unhandsome volume that I consider bad for the public because it encourages people to think they know what they don’t know at all. In the opening pages, Wade quite helpfully admits “That the mind has been prepared by evolution to believe in gods neither proves nor disproves their existence” (p. 5), and “Religious behavior can be studied for its own sake, regardless of whether or not a deity exists” (p. 6). While this is welcome circumspection, the book repeatedly opposes “the supernatural world” to what it calls “the real world” (e.g., pp. 94, 109, 117, 127, etc.), begging the question of whether the rites of the devout have any actual referents outside their own minds. It continually suggests that they do not.

“The existence of special neural circuitry in the brain dedicated to moral decisions is further evidence that morality is an evolved faculty with a genetic basis” (p. 22), writes Wade, with the vague implication that no evolved faculty can disclose eternal verities. Well... the existence of special neural circuitry in the brain dedicated to arithmetic is evidence that mathematics is an evolved faculty with a genetic basis—but numbers are nevertheless an indestructible part of reality. Though mathematicians differ as to whether the integers are invented or discovered, our evolved capacity to calculate is valuable because it connects us to essential features of the universe, features whose physical embodiments are just one aspect of their ultimate nature. 

Wade repeatedly throws out bogus generalizations as if no reasonable person would question them. Several examples follow. 

The dubious “conflict theory” of the Neanderthal extinction is cited as an obvious truism: “But the people of the Upper Paleolithic were hardly pacifists. They would not have been in Europe in the first place had they not wrested it from the grip of the fearsome Neanderthals and driven them to extinction” (p. 50). But Clive Finlayson’s superbly humane reconsideration of that story showed what an open question it really is, in The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived (Oxford, 2009). 

Wade writes about the brutal male dominance hierarchy of chimpanzees of the species pan troglodytes, to draw inferences about humans’ differentiation from a common ancestor we surely share with them. Very well, but he ignores the other chimpanzee species, whose social habits are markedly different, and far less conducive to Wade’s inferences. This was already popularized in Jared Diamonds 1991 bestseller, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (Hutchinson Radius, 1991). 

On p. 95 we hear of “the brain’s outer cortex, the seat of consciousness…” Fairness to Wade’s 2009 book restrains me from citing Mark Solms’ great work The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2021), which only appeared a dozen years later, and discredited this “cortical fallacy.” Consciousness is not the exclusive possession of the mammalian neocortex, and is enjoyed by all vertebrates by virtue of a much older evolutionary achievement we call the brainstem. 

  

The Faith Instinct is primarily about religion, not primatology or neuroscience, but it makes several big errors there, too: “Modern religions like Judaism or Christianity emphasize creeds and intellectual belief over rituals and emotional engagement” (p. 87). Millions of Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, Quakers, and Chassidic Jews can be properly offended by this silly claim about emotional engagement. But the glib conflation of “Judaism or Christianity” as interchangeably emphasizing “creeds and intellectual belief over rituals” is appalling ignorance. Ritual and right conduct are the heart of Jewish piety, grounded in a covenantal relationship with the God that chose the Hebrew people to receive the Torah which enumerates His commandments. A great gulf separates this religion of deeds from Luther’s religion of “faith alone,” which explicitly disavowed the importance of “outer works” and “the law,” sweeping them away with an almost gleeful contempt. 

And Wade steps in this same pothole elsewhere: “Christianity promises admission to heaven for obeying divine law, eternal damnation for defying it” (p. 54). No one who has read any theological work of the Protestant Reformation could hold such a view, and Lutheran theology—firmly based on the ancient Letters of Paul—is the precise opposite of what Wade says here. 

“In advanced societies, control of religion often rests with a religious hierarchy which monopolizes access to the supernatural” (p. 40). Can anyone name an example of this? Jews and Catholics and Protestants and Muslims all have their mystics at the margins of the community, but they also have their mainstream practices designed to give common people firsthand experiences of the holy in their everyday lives. 

Sometimes Wade contradicts himself, as if he’d rushed to publication without time to reread the work. On page 32 he cites sociobiologist Richard Alexander thus: “Only in humans is the major hostile force of life composed of other groups in the same species.” But later on, we are told: “‘The greatest enemies of ants are other ants, just as the greatest enemies of men are other men,’ observed the Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel” (p. 52).

That is quite enough about The Faith Instinct.