The great religions endure. Of the eight billion people alive today, six billion identity as Christian, Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist1. The youngest of those religions, Islam, is roughly 1,400 years old. While the religions' collective influence has waxed and waned, they remain extremely influential. Why has this influence persisted for so long?
One reason the persistence is puzzling is that on many core issues – things like how to live well, how to organize a society, how humanity originated – we understand far more today than when these religions were developed. Unfortunately, the ancient religions have only slowly and somewhat awkwardly integrated that improved understanding. Think of the opposition to the ideas of Galileo and Darwin, not to mention more modern ideas. I believe religion would be much improved if it thoroughly integrated this modern understanding. Unfortunately, despite sincere work by many members of these religions, it is often next-to-impossible to change core texts to integrate those ideas. So while the ancient religions have indeed somewhat faded, what I find much more surprising is that they haven't disappeared entirely, replaced either by some secular tradition or by new dominant religions that integrate and remain current with modern understanding.
In these rough notes I riff on why these religions continue to be so influential. I won't answer the question – I don't know enough to do so. Rather, I explore idiosyncratically, focusing on a few aspects of the question of interest to me, while omitting many other aspects. The exploration is playful, and frankly only loosely related to the overall question – as I explored the notes gradually became at least as much or more about understanding religious texts as literary forms2. The three main groups of questions explored are:
It's perhaps not obvious what these questions have to do with why the ancient religions continue to be so influential. But what these questions have in common is that all are about identifying ways in which it's surprisingly hard to construct religions with the qualities we might desire in a modern religion. That perhaps goes part of the way to explaining why the ancient religions are still around: they do a surprisingly large number of good things for human beings, in ways harder to improve upon than might at first appear.
There are many great stories in the ancient religious texts. I want to briefly reflect on story, to better understand how it works as a carrier both of ideas and of people's experience of the world. One big benefit of stories is that they don't just describe, they also help us empathize. Roger Ebert once described movies as "machines for generating empathy", and this is true of stories in general. They let us share other people's experience: we see what they see; what they feel; what their problems are; what makes them happy, sad, angry, elated; how they understand the world; and why they act the way they act. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has pointed out that no matter how well we describe a bat – its physiology, behaviour, neuroanatomy, and so on – it won't convey what it is it like to be a bat. There is a gap between description and experience. But while pure description, no matter how good, doesn't convey what it is like to be the other, great storytelling enables us to emphathize with a protagonist who is very different to ourselves. The better the storyteller, and the deeper their art, the more we can empathize with beings unlike ourselves, to understand what it is to be them. Good stories change and expand our consciousness3.
A famous example is Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita". We are horrified by the point of view character, the rapist pedophile Humbert Humbert. But part of the horror is finding we can empathize at least a little with parts of his personality. Often in life we cope with evil by rejecting it completely – we demonize the Ted Bundy's and Adolph Hitler's and Humbert Humberts' of the world. Finding that they are in some ways quite similar to us is unpleasant and troubling. A second example, even more ambitious (!) than "Lolita", is Ted Chiang's short "Story of Your Life". This gives us a convincing experience of the consciousness of someone who can see through time. I find it so compelling that at times I become quite disoriented as I read. It's extraordinary.
Of course, story isn't just about giving us an empathetic experience. When a character understands powerful ideas, story can provide us with the experience of someone with that understanding. The great religious texts use this possibility repeatedly, sometimes brilliantly. As just one example, the Christian Bible doesn't merely advise us in the abstract of the value of sacrifice for others, or offer descriptions of why and when sacrifice can be a good thing. No, it directly shows us the experience of people making sacrifices: why they do it, when they do it, what it feels like, and what the consequences are. Most powerfully, we see Jesus's fear and pain as he approaches his death, as well as his underlying motives of love for humanity and obedience to God; and the redemption that results in. You can reasonably question whether the ideas make sense – there's a good critical essay to be written about the game theory and political economy of the Crucifixion – but emotionally the story of the passion of Jesus is far more powerful than purely descriptive content, while still carrying the descriptive content embedded.
How and when can we provide an experience of our best modern ideas in such a narrative form? In certain domains this is already often done well. For instance, our great writers not only show psychology superbly well, they've originated many of the deepest insights. Shakespeare, Austen, Tolstoy, and their colleagues often exceed not just ancient religious texts but also modern psychology texts in explaining human experience. Can we provide similarly deep experiences of understanding our best modern ideas across all domains? To pick just one example: is it possible to tell a superb story that doesn't merely explain relativity descriptively, but actually enables us to see and experience the world as Einstein (and his successors) saw it? This is perhaps too much to ask: very few people have a mind of Einstein's capability! But it is interesting to ask how deeply we can go? Would you rather hear Albert Einstein's ideas? Or have Einstein's experience, to even be Albert Einstein, at least in some small measure?
How would religion would have been changed if Jesus or the Buddha or Muhammad had deeply understood the ideas of Einstein, Darwin, Adam Smith – indeed, all the best ideas of modern economics, sociology, biology, cosmology, behavioural genetics, history, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and so on? I do know I would have loved to hear their response to deeply understanding any or (especially) all of these. I suspect they4 would have had very surprising things to say. And I wonder how the religious texts – and the religions they helped spawn – would have been changed. I suspect they would have been much improved. So many of our best ideas are in very strong tension with the ancient religious texts. I often wonder how much sooner abolitionism would have taken hold if the Bible had taken a stand against slavery and racism. Or, consider more subtle questions, questions we're still struggling with. Many of the religions have some notion of personal responsibility and reward for merit – should those be modified by modern behavioural genetics? What about in another century, when we can say far more still about how your genome – something you didn't choose, but which was given to you – influences your behaviour. We'll never know how Jesus or the Buddha or Muhammad would have thought about IVF or behavioural genetics or human rights law or Big Bang cosmology. I wish we did.
It's unfortunately certainly possible to use stories poorly as carriers for ideas5. The challenge is to uncover powerful stories that also provide a compelling experience of understanding deep ideas and their implications. People often discuss the "problems" of combining science and religion, or of combining science and art. But I think a more urgent problem is fusing story and science. (I'm using "science" here very broadly, to mean pretty much any descriptive understanding of the world.) I suspect such a fusion would let us write stories to give powerful answers to questions like: "What is it like to understand Einstein's ideas? Not just a little; not even merely a surface-level symbolic understanding; but truly, deeply, emotionally, into your gut, in a way integrated with all your experience of the world?" "What is it like to understand Charles Darwin's ideas? What is it like to understand deeply the animal origins of humanity, and its influence on our behaviour? What is it like to understand genetic influences on our lives? How does it change your judgements of other people's actions? Of your own?" "What is it like to understand mathematics?" "What is it like to have your theory refuted by experiment?" "What is it like to go to the stars?" Using story to answer such questions in a compelling way would expand most people's consciousness. Yet this problem of fusing story and science hasn't yet been well-solved. And so these ideas aren't well integrated into our shared story of humanity. That said: Chiang and Nabokov were also solving extremely difficult narrative problems! They were conveying very foreign consciousnesses – not as foreign as a bat, true, but very foreign, perhaps as foreign in some regards as Einstein's and Darwin's. So perhaps a good fusion of story and science is possible.
I don't have a well-tested solution to this problem. However, a related literary form I have experimented with is discovery fiction. In discovery fiction the writer constructs a narrative of how we could have discovered some complex idea or ideas: "an arc of small questions and ideas, false starts and backtracking, incremental steps eventually leading to [the target idea]. None of these things should come out of thin air: they should all be simple, almost-obvious steps." For instance, I've written a piece of discovery fiction about how to discover cryptocurrency; there are many more examples of discovery fiction here.
Discovery fiction gives us an experience of how an idea comes about. The benefit is that it starts where the reader is, with what they already understand, and then gradually changes their consciousness, to that of a person who can see why the idea is the way it is. But powerful ideas don't just stand alone, they remake our experience of the world. Suppose you've just understood some powerful idea – let us pick the idea of comparative advantage, just for concreteness – perhaps through discovery fiction. But ideally you won't just understand the idea abstractly. You'll learn to see the many varied places comparative advantage arises in the world, and you'll learn to infer consequences. And so well-fortified discovery fiction shows not merely the discovery of the basic form of an idea, but also this process of learning to see the idea in the world, and of learning to see many of the consequences. Not all the consequences, since we are never fully done integrating deep ideas into our experience. But of at least getting a sense of how the idea may remake our experience of the world.
Discovery fiction is not usually beautiful in the conventional sense a story (or non-fiction) is beautiful. Such beauty usually arises when a text reveals powerful and surprising relationships with vividness and clarity. By contrast, discovery fiction involves lots of detailed routine analysis and wrong turns. It is only after that meat-and-potatoes process of exploration that we can boil understanding down, showing the surprising relationships our exploration has uncovered. This limitation seems to be inherent in discovery fiction. On the other hand, the experience of coming to understand has its own beauty. And discovery fiction can at the least include beautiful distillations of an an idea, once it has been understood.
Moving away from discovery fiction, conventional stories can sometimes fuse story and science when understanding the scientific ideas is truly forced by the story. This happens to some extent in "Story of Your Life"; a stronger example is Carl Sagan's novel "Contact". The protagonist of "Contact" is an astronomer, Ellie Arroway, who makes first contact with an alien civilization. As we read we come to understand much of her experience of the world: how large the universe is; how tiny humanity is; how much remains unknown, still to be discovered. She doesn't just understand mathematics and astronomy as dry fact. They deeply permeate her entire life in ways directly relevant to the story. And so as we read we understand better what having such an understanding would be like; it expands our consciousnes to encompass those ideas.
Of course, there are tight limits on the use of conventional fiction in this way. In conventional fiction there is a (believable, interesting) problem facing a protagonist who we empathize with. Explaining how they understand the world is not the primary purpose of the story; rather, we're trying to see how the protagonist overcomes the problems of the story. Authors who try to center explanation of ideas will ruin their own story. Still, when the author has identified a genuinely good story to tell, as in "Contact", this can be a powerful approach to fusing story and science. By contrast, discovery fiction is both more flexible and also able to sustain a much deeper involvement, since the up-front purpose is to discover some interesting idea or set of ideas – something like comparative advantage, or quantum mechanics, or behavioural genetics. This can require some considerable care to motivate. But once a reader is bought in, there is real force to it.
A third approach to fusing story and science is narrative non-fiction, pioneered by writers such as Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, and Joan Didion. Such works often tell a story of some world-leading expert and their work – a nuclear physicist and nuclear weaponry, in McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy", or the most daring fighter pilots and astronauts, in Wolfe's "The Right Stuff". It's an embodied form of discovery fiction, where instead of discovering an idea we discover a person. That person's deep expertise often makes them strange and foreign at first, but as we gradually come to understand the person, we also come to understand the ideas underpinning their experience of the world.
Summing up: stories provide an experience of being. Of what it is like to understand certain things, and to experience the entire world through that lens. This is very different, and can be far deeper, than a traditional descriptive non-fiction explanation. This matters because we've so profoundly deepened our understanding of the world since ancient times, but much of that deepened understanding isn't incorporated into the grand narrative stories of humanity. Would Jesus or the Buddha have been the same if they'd deeply understood the origins of humanity in the animal kingdom? Or modern cosmology? Or the modern theory of justice? Or where abundance comes from? I suspect they would have been profoundly different. And so one reason the ancient religions persist is because we haven't yet found ways to narrativize our improved understanding; we haven't yet fully solved the problem of fusing story and science. But approaches like discovery fiction, narrative non-fiction, and even conventional fiction (with considerable limitations), seem promising ways of doing so.
A religious canon isn't just a collection of good stories organized around a few important themes. The Christian Bible, the religious text I know best, may be viewed as a single grand story of how humanity was saved from its original sin. This story has many sub-stories which are themselves grand stories: a story of humanity; a story of what it is like to be enlightened; a story of humanity's relationship to God; a story of the universe, and how humans relate to it. And all the still smaller stories told along the way serve those (overlapping) grand overarching stories; the overarching stories, in turn, give far more meaning to the individual stories. In general, the different religions tend to mix different grand stories in different proportions, and of course in some of the texts story only plays a subsidary role. A few commonly-occurring grand stories:
By "grand story" I mean (roughly): (a) an overarching story which is addressed through a mosaic of smaller stories and other commentary; and (b) a story addressing a problem of deep widespread and arguably intrinsic interest. If I made first contact with an uncontacted tribe, I would not be surprised if they had stories of all the types listed above. Inded, I would not be surprised if alien intelligences had such stories! Not all alien intelligences. But some. And so a playful definition of a grand story is a story addressing a problem of broad sentient interest7.
Religious texts aside, many of my favorite books (and other media) are grand stories. Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" is the story of the universe, of humanity's place within it, and how we've come to know it. Olaf Stapledon's "Last and First Men" is the story of the future of humanity. Stapledon's "Starmaker" is the story of the universe. Melodysheep (John Boswell) creates videos that are often grand stories – a history of the past of the universe; of the future of the universe; of the variety of alien civilizations. I say "story" here, and it's a curious fact: none of these are classic narrative pieces, even Stapledon's work, which is usually shelved as fiction. And yet each is principally an emotional journey, focused on deeply personal questions, with the descriptive element secondary. It is perhaps for this reason that I feel that "The story of…" is the most apt description. Consider the open lines of the second chapter of "Cosmos":
All my life I have wondered about the possibility of life elsewhere. What would it be like? Of what would it be made? All living things on our planet are constructed of organic molecules—complex microscopic architectures in which the carbon atom plays a central role. There was once a time before life, when the Earth was barren and utterly desolate. Our world is now overflowing with life. How did it come about? How, in the absence of life, were carbon-based organic molecules made? How did the first living things arise? How did life evolve to produce beings as elaborate and complex as we, able to explore the mystery of our own origins? And on the countless other planets that may circle other suns, is there life also? Is extraterrestrial life, if it exists, based on the same organic molecules as life on Earth? Do the beings of other worlds look much like life on Earth? Or are they stunningly different—other adaptations to other environments? What else is possible? The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question—the search for who we are.
These are not dry, descriptive, textbook questions. These are deeply personal questions, setting up a mystery and emotional journey for the writer and the reader alike. Sagan's form often suggests non-fiction, but his text really conveys "a personal voyage" (also his chosen subtitle), a memoir of his changed emotional understanding which carries the reader along too.
Having nebulously defined grand story, let me switch to another hard-to-define term: myth. I don't claim to understand what myth is. But one useful and plausible meaning is that a myth is a grand story which helps define a shared identity for a people. In this sense, all these ancient religions have the character of myth or collections of myths8910.
What's this got to do with why ancient religions persist? A speculative answer: maybe there are serious obstructions to constructing good myths today. Of course, many individual grand stories are published: the self-help genre contains thousands of books on the story of you; modern pop cosmology is all about the story of the universe and its origins; and so on. But few books today contain an overlapping mosaic of grand stories sufficient for a well-formed shared identity. Most writers lack the breadth to write in such a way: someone who can write the story of you likely can't write the story of the origins of humanity or the story of the relationship between humans and the universe. (Something I admire about Sagan's "Cosmos" is that a single paragraph will seamlessly weave through science to the arts to religion to history to psychology and then to another branch of science; few writers have the catholicity of understanding required to pull this off.) By contrast, the writers of the ancient religious texts developed an amazing mosaic of overlapping grand stories; some of their ideas now appear naive; but many of us are forgiving of such lapses, appreciating that they engage with the big questions in a unified way. Put another way: the bar of understanding for myth today is, I suspect, simply much higher. The ancient religious texts get grandfathered in: members of a religion give the text tremendous credit when it is insightful (as they often are), and give them a pass when they are not. But would-be makers of new myths for humanity aren't extended the same leniency.
One of humanity's greatest inventions is institutions designed for radical change. Democracies make the overthrow of power not rare and traumatic, but routine and orderly, done on a schedule. Capitalism is built around competition and creative destruction, with startups replacing incumbents, or originating entirely new product categories. Science is built around competition11 and the creative destruction of ideas, with improved ideas replacing incumbents, or originating entirely new fields. In each case, the relevant institutions are built around some process of replacement. I say "institutions", but I don't mean a single, centralized organization, which may bottleneck change; rather a set of norms and processes and organizations that collectively help decentralized change happen. These institutions don't work perfectly. But over the long run all have done a remarkable job of enabling human progress.
By contrast, the ancient religions are not designed for change, they are designed for stasis. This is historically unsuprising: when the religions originated, change was often in the form of war, famine, or disease. The modern notion of progress – change leading to improvement – was still nascent. And so while the ancient religions of course have changed, they've often made those changes kicking and screaming. An emblematic example: it wasn't until 1992(!) that the Catholic Church apologized for trying Galileo on charges of heresy, and imprisoning him. In Islam, innovation in religion, known as bid'ah, is considered a sin12. The mere fact notions such as heresy and bid'ah exist is suggestive of a default suspicious stance toward change. My understanding is that Hinduism and Buddhism are somewhat less rigid, but still hew pretty closely to ancient doctrine. By contrast, science, capitalism, and democracy all celebrate their innovators, at least in theory, and often in practice.
What elements make a system able to change? Let me make two observations. One is that the system needs some mechanism for identifying and amplifying improvements. The better the identification and the amplification, the more effective; conversely, if the identification or amplification is weak, it won't be very effective. In democracy the mechanism is voting; in capitalism it's the market and consumer demand; in science it's the test of experiment and a sort of market in ideas among the broader scientific community. It's not so obvious what the analogous mechanism could be for progress in religion. But it's fun to think about potential mechanisms! I'll come back to this shortly.
Second, one force for stasis is the strong orientation around a fixed canonical text or texts. I sometimes think of Christianity as a large group of people reading the Bible really deeply together. Yes, it's also a large collection of communities and institutions – but that collective reading is at the core of it. I don't mean that every person participates in the reading, but a core of people do read very deeply, and together13. And while this is a lovely image and idea, that centralized focus also inhibits change. Although there are canonical books about science or capitalism or democracy — think of Hobbes's "Leviathan", say, or Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" – they are far less central to the community. Reading and believing in Hobbes or Schumpeter isn't central to your identity as a citizen in a democracy or as a capitalist. And even the greatest books of science – say, Newton's "Principia", or Darwin's "Origin of Speces" – tend to eventually be superseded. By contrast, the orientation of religions toward fixed, central canonical texts is a large inertial force, preventing change.
Can we design dynamic religious systems? Or, as a less ambitious version: what about for questions like: what does it mean to lead a good life? Of course, many communities do try to answer this latter question in some dynamic, decentralized way. Efforts such as positive psychology, developmental economics, effective altruism (EA), moral philosophy, and much of the entire political sphere, are oriented around providing answers to the question: "what does it mean to lead a good life?" Indeed, I have noted elsewhere that "EA is, in some sense, an attempt to do for the question 'what is the good?' what science has done for the question 'how does the world work?'. Instead of providing an answer it is developing a community that aims to continually improve the answer." In a different (but overlapping) way this is also true of positive psychology and developmental economics. Each community may be split into two parts: a part that is concerned with developing an abstract notion of good (happiness scales, DALYs and QALYs, discounted future utility, and similar); and a part that then uses those measures to study the "goodness" of different actions. In some sense, this division enables it to reduce ought as much as possible to is, with the second part being mostly concerend with "is" questions. And on questions of is we have relatively good decentralized approaches to progress. This is aided by a reasonably robust discussion in both online forums, and the academic literature. Unfortunately, that conversation is still subject to considerable distortions by charisma, and by centralization of money and power in a small number of organizations. It remains to be seen how dynamic those organizations and those communities will be.
My thinking about these issues have been influenced by conversations with hundreds of people. But this piece was especially influenced by: Fawaz Al-Matrouk, Nadia Asparouhova, Laura Deming, Andy Matuschak, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Grant Sanderson.
Of course, the degree of identification is wildly varied – some people are deeply involved in their religion, while others have only a cursory involvement. Still, no matter how you look at it, these four religions have been enormously influential for more than a millenium.↩︎
For decades I've been mystified at what texts like Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and Olaf Stapledon's "Star Maker" were doing. One unexpected side effect of writing these notes is that I now understand much, much better.↩︎
One might wonder: is this merely an illusion? I won't engage that question here, beyond noting that it is fascinating. I suspect that even with people very, very different to ourselves we really can get some sense of what it is like to be them. With a bat I'm much less certain!↩︎
At least, their literary form.↩︎
The writers of certain libertarian and socialist fiction illustrate this point. More generally, there are many lifeless just-so "stories" that artlessly illustrate some scientific idea, usually failing as both narrative and as science. Small wonder so many people today still prefer to live in what Carl Sagan memorably called "the demon-haunted world".↩︎
It's rather adorable that humanity has come up with this notion. We have gone from chimpanzees – incredible animals, but with many flaws – to some notion of the perfect being as something achievable. How remarkable!↩︎
I'm aware of the dangers of anthropomorphization, and perhaps this runs afoul of that danger. It's also difficult, at present, to check the alien hypothesis, though I expect this century we will make alien sentiences.↩︎
Werner Herzog's notion of an "ecstatic truth" is related. Herzog is very much in the myth-capturing business. And so what matters most is how much he captures and helps define an identity, not whether it is literally true.↩︎
It's interesting to consider how well effective altruism (EA) fulfills these criteria. Although EA is not a religion, I've met a fair number of people for whom being EA is a core part of their identity, and so it is interesting to consider how well it can support an identity. My sense is that it's very strong in certain ways – perhaps too strong – and utterly inadequate in others, causing a kind of lopsided development that for most people is maladaptive.↩︎
Something I'm fascinated by is the sincerity (or otherwise) of story. Often, when people tell ancient myths it is with an air of being "above it all". We don't really believe in Enki or Adam and Eve or Krishna. And so the stories are told with a knowing air, "I am too sophisticated to really believe this, but there is some virtue to telling the story". By contrast, the ability to truly suspend disbelief seems to me tremendously important. We begin Lord of the Rings by believing in Frodo and Sam and Gandalf and Sauron. Somehow, we treat them as real – we demand certain kinds of fidelity in the story, and feel annoyed when it fails to meet those demands.↩︎
I wince a little as I write this. It's something that I personally loathe about science, and I've tried to find ways of contributing that avoid it. Unfortunately, there's a lot of truth to it.↩︎
The issue is somewhat complicated, and I don't fully understand it. There is not a prohibition on all types of innovation. For instance, technological innovations enabling the spread of Islam are not sinful. A simple example: the Quran was only compiled into a single book after the death of Muhammad; obviously, this was not regarded as sinful, despite being a religious innovation.↩︎
It's interesting to contrast this to fandoms, such as Harry Potter or Star Trek or Lord of the Rings. They also have a canonical book or media form (sometimes subject to occasional extensions, e.g., a new Star Trek movie), and communities that read deeply together. In some cases, members of the community may even construct an identity around it. "I'm Hufflepuff!" "I'm Gryffindor!" And yet (for the most part) we do not think of them as myth, nor do we attempt to construct more than a weak shared identity around them. "I'm a Trekkie" may be fun to share with a friends, but most people would not consider this to be a strong strand of their identity. I expect the reason is simply this: those are clearly fictional, while religious texts make at least some claim to be true.↩︎