Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question ...
By Paul Bloom
The Atlantic, December 2005
When I was a teenager my rabbi believed that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who was living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was the Messiah, and that the world was soon to end. He believed that the earth was a few thousand years old, and that the fossil record was a consequence of the Great Flood. He could describe the afterlife, and was able to answer adolescent questions about the fate of Hitler's soul.
My rabbi was no crackpot; he was an intelligent and amiable man, a teacher and a scholar. But he held views that struck me as strange, even disturbing. Like many secular people, I am comfortable with religion as a source of spirituality and transcendence, tolerance and love, charity and good works. Who can object to the faith of Martin Luther King Jr. or the Dalai Lama—at least as long as that faith grounds moral positions one already accepts? I am uncomfortable, however, with religion when it makes claims about the natural world, let alone a world beyond nature. It is easy for those of us who reject supernatural beliefs to agree with Stephen Jay Gould that the best way to accord dignity and respect to both science and religion is to recognize that they apply to "non-overlapping magisteria": science gets the realm of facts, religion the realm of values.
For better or worse, though, religion is much more than a set of ethical principles or a vague sense of transcendence. The anthropologist Edward Tylor got it right in 1871, when he noted that the "minimum definition of religion" is a belief in spiritual beings, in the supernatural. My rabbi's specific claims were a minority view in the culture in which I was raised, but those sorts of views—about the creation of the universe, the end of the world, the fates of souls—define religion as billions of people understand and practice it.
The United States is a poster child for supernatural belief. Just about everyone in this country—96 percent in one poll—believes in God. Well over half of Americans believe in miracles, the devil, and angels. Most believe in an afterlife—and not just in the mushy sense that we will live on in the memories of other people, or in our good deeds; when asked for details, most Americans say they believe that after death they will actually reunite with relatives and get to meet God. Woody Allen once said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." Most Americans have precisely this expectation.
But America is an anomaly, isn't it? These statistics are sometimes taken as yet another indication of how much this country differs from, for instance, France and Germany, where secularism holds greater sway. Americans are fundamentalists, the claim goes, isolated from the intellectual progress made by the rest of the world.
There are two things wrong with this conclusion. First, even if a gap between America and Europe exists, it is not the United States that is idiosyncratic. After all, the rest of the world—Asia, Africa, the Middle East—is not exactly filled with hard-core atheists. If one is to talk about exceptionalism, it applies to Europe, not the United States.
Second, the religious divide between Americans and Europeans may be smaller than we think. The sociologists Rodney Stark, of Baylor University, and Roger Finke, of Pennsylvania State University, write that the big difference has to do with church attendance, which really is much lower in Europe. (Building on the work of the Chicago-based sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley, they argue that this is because the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in which churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their product, whereas European churches are often under state control and, like many government monopolies, have become inefficient.) Most polls from European countries show that a majority of their people are believers. Consider Iceland. To judge by rates of churchgoing, Iceland is the most secular country on earth, with a pathetic two percent weekly attendance. But four out of five Icelanders say that they pray, and the same proportion believe in life after death.
In the United States some liberal scholars posit a different sort of exceptionalism, arguing that belief in the supernatural is found mostly in Christian conservatives—those infamously described by the Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf in 1993 as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command." Many people saw the 2004 presidential election as pitting Americans who are religious against those who are not.
An article by Steven Waldman in the online magazine Slate provides some perspective on the divide:
"As you may already know, one of America's two political parties is extremely religious. Sixty-one percent of this party's voters say they pray daily or more often. An astounding 92 percent of them believe in life after death. And there's a hard-core subgroup in this party of super-religious Christian zealots. Very conservative on gay marriage, half of the members of this subgroup believe Bush uses too little religious rhetoric, and 51 percent of them believe God gave Israel to the Jews and that its existence fulfills the prophecy about the second coming of Jesus."
The group that Waldman is talking about is Democrats; the hard-core subgroup is African-American Democrats.
Finally, consider scientists. They are less likely than non-scientists to be religious—but not by a huge amount. A 1996 poll asked scientists whether they believed in God, and the pollsters set the bar high—no mealy-mouthed evasions such as "I believe in the totality of all that exists" or "in what is beautiful and unknown"; rather, they insisted on a real biblical God, one believers could pray to and actually get an answer from. About 40 percent of scientists said yes to a belief in this kind of God—about the same percentage found in a similar poll in 1916. Only when we look at the most elite scientists—members of the National Academy of Sciences—do we find a strong majority of atheists and agnostics.
These facts are an embarrassment for those who see supernatural beliefs as a cultural anachronism, soon to be eroded by scientific discoveries and the spread of cosmopolitan values. They require a new theory of why we are religious—one that draws on research in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, and developmental psychology.
One traditional approach to the origin of religious belief begins with the observation that it is difficult to be a person. There is evil all around; everyone we love will die; and soon we ourselves will die—either slowly and probably unpleasantly or quickly and probably unpleasantly. For all but a pampered and lucky few life really is nasty, brutish, and short. And if our lives have some greater meaning, it is hardly obvious.
So perhaps, as Marx suggested, we have adopted religion as an opiate, to soothe the pain of existence. As the philosopher Susanne K. Langer has put it, man "cannot deal with Chaos"; supernatural beliefs solve the problem of this chaos by providing meaning. We are not mere things; we are lovingly crafted by God, and serve his purposes. Religion tells us that this is a just world, in which the good will be rewarded and the evil punished. Most of all, it addresses our fear of death. Freud summed it all up by describing a "three-fold task" for religious beliefs: "they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them."
Religions can sometimes do all these things, and it would be unrealistic to deny that this partly explains their existence. Indeed, sometimes theologians use the foregoing arguments to make a case for why we should believe: if one wishes for purpose, meaning, and eternal life, there is nowhere to go but toward God.
One problem with this view is that, as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker reminds us, we don't typically get solace from propositions that we don't already believe to be true. Hungry people don't cheer themselves up by believing that they just had a large meal. Heaven is a reassuring notion only insofar as people believe such a place exists; it is this belief that an adequate theory of religion has to explain in the first place.
Also, the religion-as-opiate theory fits best with the monotheistic religions most familiar to us. But what about those people (many of the religious people in the world) who do not believe in an all-wise and just God? Every society believes in spiritual beings, but they are often stupid or malevolent. Many religions simply don't deal with metaphysical or teleological questions; gods and ancestor spirits are called upon only to help cope with such mundane problems as how to prepare food and what to do with a corpse—not to elucidate the Meaning of It All. As for the reassurance of heaven, justice, or salvation, again, it exists in some religions but by no means all. (In fact, even those religions we are most familiar with are not always reassuring. I know some older Christians who were made miserable as children by worries about eternal damnation; the prospect of oblivion would have been far preferable.) So the opiate theory is ultimately an unsatisfying explanation for the existence of religion.
The major alternative theory is social: religion brings people together, giving them an edge over those who lack this social glue. Sometimes this argument is presented in cultural terms, and sometimes it is seen from an evolutionary perspective: survival of the fittest working at the level not of the gene or the individual but of the social group. In either case the claim is that religion thrives because groups that have it outgrow and outlast those that do not.
In this conception religion is a fraternity, and the analogy runs deep. Just as fraternities used to paddle freshmen on the rear end to instill loyalty and commitment, religions have painful initiation rites—for example, snipping off part of the penis. Also, certain puzzling features of many religions, such as dietary restrictions and distinctive dress, make perfect sense once they are viewed as tools to ensure group solidarity.
The fraternity theory also explains why religions are so harsh toward those who do not share the faith, reserving particular ire for apostates. This is clear in the Old Testament, in which "a jealous God" issues commands such as:
"Should your brother, your mother's son, or your son or your daughter or the wife of your bosom or your companion who is like your own self incite you in secret, saying Let us go and worship other gods' ... you shall surely kill him. Your hand shall be against him first to put him to death and the hand of all the people last. And you shall stone him and he shall die, for he sought to thrust you away from the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slaves. —Deuteronomy 13, 7:11
This theory explains almost everything about religion—except the religious part. It is clear that rituals and sacrifices can bring people together, and it may well be that a group that does such things has an advantage over one that does not. But it is not clear why a religion has to be involved. Why are gods, souls, an afterlife, miracles, divine creation of the universe, and so on brought in? The theory doesn't explain what we are most interested in, which is belief in the supernatural.
Enthusiasm is building among scientists for a quite different view—that religion emerged not to serve a purpose but by accident.
This is not a value judgment. Many of the good things in life are, from an evolutionary perspective, accidents. People sometimes give money, time, and even blood to help unknown strangers in faraway countries whom they will never see. From the perspective of one's genes this is disastrous—the suicidal squandering of resources for no benefit. But its origin is not magical; long-distance altruism is most likely a by-product of other, more adaptive traits, such as empathy and abstract reasoning. Similarly, there is no reproductive advantage to the pleasure we get from paintings or movies. It just so happens that our eyes and brains, which evolved to react to three-dimensional objects in the real world, can respond to two-dimensional projections on a canvas or a screen.
Supernatural beliefs might be explained in a similar way. This is the religion-as-accident theory that emerges from my work and the work of cognitive scientists such as Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, Justin Barrett, and Deborah Kelemen. One version of this theory begins with the notion that a distinction between the physical and the psychological is fundamental to human thought. Purely physical things, such as rocks and trees, are subject to the pitiless laws of Newton. Throw a rock, and it will fly through space on a certain path; if you put a branch on the ground, it will not disappear, scamper away, or fly into space. Psychological things, such as people, possess minds, intentions, beliefs, goals, and desires. They move unexpectedly, according to volition and whim; they can chase or run away. There is a moral difference as well: a rock cannot be evil or kind; a person can.
Where does the distinction between the physical and the psychological come from? Is it something we learn through experience, or is it somehow pre-wired into our brains? One way to find out is to study babies. It is notoriously difficult to know what babies are thinking, given that they can't speak and have little control over their bodies. (They are harder to test than rats or pigeons, because they cannot run mazes or peck levers.) But recently investigators have used the technique of showing them different events and recording how long they look at them, exploiting the fact that babies, like the rest of us, tend to look longer at something they find unusual or bizarre.
This has led to a series of striking discoveries. Six-month-olds understand that physical objects obey gravity. If you put an object on a table and then remove the table, and the object just stays there (held by a hidden wire), babies are surprised; they expect the object to fall. They expect objects to be solid, and contrary to what is still being taught in some psychology classes, they understand that objects persist over time even if hidden. (Show a baby an object and then put it behind a screen. Wait a little while and then remove the screen. If the object is gone, the baby is surprised.) Five-month-olds can even do simple math, appreciating that if first one object and then another is placed behind a screen, when the screen drops there should be two objects, not one or three. Other experiments find the same numerical understanding in nonhuman primates, including macaques and tamarins, and in dogs.
Similarly precocious capacities show up in infants' understanding of the social world. Newborns prefer to look at faces over anything else, and the sounds they most like to hear are human voices—preferably their mothers'. They quickly come to recognize different emotions, such as anger, fear, and happiness, and respond appropriately to them. Before they are a year old they can determine the target of an adult's gaze, and can learn by attending to the emotions of others; if a baby is crawling toward an area that might be dangerous and an adult makes a horrified or disgusted face, the baby usually knows enough to stay away.
A skeptic might argue that these social capacities can be explained as a set of primitive responses, but there is some evidence that they reflect a deeper understanding. For instance, when twelve-month-olds see one object chasing another, they seem to understand that it really is chasing, with the goal of catching; they expect the chaser to continue its pursuit along the most direct path, and are surprised when it does otherwise. In some work I've done with the psychologists Valerie Kuhlmeier, of Queen's University, and Karen Wynn, of Yale, we found that when babies see one character in a movie help an individual and a different character hurt that individual, they later expect the individual to approach the character that helped it and to avoid the one that hurt it.
Understanding of the physical world and understanding of the social world can be seen as akin to two distinct computers in a baby's brain, running separate programs and performing separate tasks. The understandings develop at different rates: the social one emerges somewhat later than the physical one. They evolved at different points in our prehistory; our physical understanding is shared by many species, whereas our social understanding is a relatively recent adaptation, and in some regards might be uniquely human.
That these two systems are distinct is especially apparent in autism, a developmental disorder whose dominant feature is a lack of social understanding. Children with autism typically show impairments in communication (about a third do not speak at all), in imagination (they tend not to engage in imaginative play), and most of all in socialization. They do not seem to enjoy the company of others; they don't hug; they are hard to reach out to. In the most extreme cases children with autism see people as nothing more than objects—objects that move in unpredictable ways and make unexpected noises and are therefore frightening. Their understanding of other minds is impaired, though their understanding of material objects is fully intact.
At this point the religion-as-accident theory says nothing about supernatural beliefs. Babies have two systems that work in a cold-bloodedly rational way to help them anticipate and understand—and, when they get older, to manipulate—physical and social entities. In other words, both these systems are biological adaptations that give human beings a badly needed head start in dealing with objects and people. But these systems go awry in two important ways that are the foundations of religion. First, we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and an afterlife. Second, as we will see, our system of social understanding overshoots, inferring goals and desires where none exist. This makes us animists and creationists.
For those of us who are not autistic, the separateness of these two mechanisms, one for understanding the physical world and one for understanding the social world, gives rise to a duality of experience. We experience the world of material things as separate from the world of goals and desires. The biggest consequence has to do with the way we think of ourselves and others. We are dualists; it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity—a mind or soul—are genuinely distinct. We don't feel that we are our bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them.
This duality is immediately apparent in our imaginative life. Because we see people as separate from their bodies, we easily understand situations in which people's bodies are radically changed while their personhood stays intact. Kafka envisioned a man transformed into a gigantic insect; Homer described the plight of men transformed into pigs; in Shrek 2 an ogre is transformed into a human being, and a donkey into a steed; in Star Trek a scheming villain forcibly occupies Captain Kirk's body so as to take command of the Enterprise; in The Tale of the Body Thief, Anne Rice tells of a vampire and a human being who agree to trade bodies for a day; and in 13 Going on 30 a teenager wakes up as thirty-year-old Jennifer Garner. We don't think of these events as real, of course, but they are fully understandable; it makes intuitive sense to us that people can be separated from their bodies, and similar transformations show up in religions around the world.
This notion of an immaterial soul potentially separable from the body clashes starkly with the scientific view. For psychologists and neuroscientists, the brain is the source of mental life; our consciousness, emotions, and will are the products of neural processes. As the claim is sometimes put, The mind is what the brain does. I don't want to overstate the consensus here; there is no accepted theory as to precisely how this happens, and some scholars are skeptical that we will ever develop such a theory. But no scientist takes seriously Cartesian dualism, which posits that thinking need not involve the brain. There is just too much evidence against it.
Still, it feels right, even to those who have never had religious training, and even to young children. This became particularly clear to me one night when I was arguing with my six-year-old son, Max. I was telling him that he had to go to bed, and he said, "You can make me go to bed, but you can't make me go to sleep. It's my brain!" This piqued my interest, so I began to ask him questions about what the brain does and does not do. His answers showed an interesting split. He insisted that the brain was involved in perception—in seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling—and he was adamant that it was responsible for thinking. But, he said, the brain was not essential for dreaming, for feeling sad, or for loving his brother. "That's what I do," Max said, "though my brain might help me out."
Max is not unusual. Children in our culture are taught that the brain is involved in thinking, but they interpret this in a narrow sense, as referring to conscious problem solving, academic rumination. They do not see the brain as the source of conscious experience; they do not identify it with their selves. They appear to think of it as a cognitive prosthesis—there is Max the person, and then there is his brain, which he uses to solve problems just as he might use a computer. In this commonsense conception the brain is, as Steven Pinker puts it, "a pocket PC for the soul."
If bodies and souls are thought of as separate, there can be bodies without souls. A corpse is seen as a body that used to have a soul. Most things—chairs, cups, trees—never had souls; they never had will or consciousness. At least some nonhuman animals are seen in the same way, as what Descartes described as "beast-machines," or complex automata. Some artificial creatures, such as industrial robots, Haitian zombies, and Jewish golems, are also seen as soulless beings, lacking free will or moral feeling.
Then there are souls without bodies. Most people I know believe in a God who created the universe, performs miracles, and listens to prayers. He is omnipotent and omniscient, possessing infinite kindness, justice, and mercy. But he does not in any literal sense have a body. Some people also believe in lesser noncorporeal beings that can temporarily take physical form or occupy human beings or animals: examples include angels, ghosts, poltergeists, succubi, dybbuks, and the demons that Jesus so frequently expelled from people's bodies.
This belief system opens the possibility that we ourselves can survive the death of our bodies. Most people believe that when the body is destroyed, the soul lives on. It might ascend to heaven, descend to hell, go off into some sort of parallel world, or occupy some other body, human or animal. Indeed, the belief that the world teems with ancestor spirits—the souls of people who have been liberated from their bodies through death—is common across cultures. We can imagine our bodies being destroyed, our brains ceasing to function, our bones turning to dust, but it is harder—some would say impossible—to imagine the end of our very existence. The notion of a soul without a body makes sense to us.
Others have argued that rather than believing in an afterlife because we are dualists, we are dualists because we want to believe in an afterlife. This was Freud's position. He speculated that the "doctrine of the soul" emerged as a solution to the problem of death: if souls exist, then conscious experience need not come to an end. Or perhaps the motivation for belief in an afterlife is cultural: we believe it because religious authorities tell us that it is so, possibly because it serves the interests of powerful leaders to control the masses through the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell. But there is reason to favor the religion-as-accident theory.
In a significant study the psychologists Jesse Bering, of the University of Arkansas, and David Bjorklund, of Florida Atlantic University, told young children a story about an alligator and a mouse, complete with a series of pictures, that ended in tragedy: "Uh oh! Mr. Alligator sees Brown Mouse and is coming to get him!" [The children were shown a picture of the alligator eating the mouse.] "Well, it looks like Brown Mouse got eaten by Mr. Alligator. Brown Mouse is not alive anymore."
The experimenters asked the children a set of questions about the mouse's biological functioning—such as "Now that the mouse is no longer alive, will he ever need to go to the bathroom? Do his ears still work? Does his brain still work?"—and about the mouse's mental functioning, such as "Now that the mouse is no longer alive, is he still hungry? Is he thinking about the alligator? Does he still want to go home?"
As predicted, when asked about biological properties, the children appreciated the effects of death: no need for bathroom breaks; the ears don't work, and neither does the brain. The mouse's body is gone. But when asked about the psychological properties, more than half the children said that these would continue: the dead mouse can feel hunger, think thoughts, and have desires. The soul survives. And children believe this more than adults do, suggesting that although we have to learn which specific afterlife people in our culture believe in (heaven, reincarnation, a spirit world, and so on), the notion that life after death is possible is not learned at all. It is a by-product of how we naturally think about the world.
This is just half the story. Our dualism makes it possible for us to think of supernatural entities and events; it is why such things make sense. But there is another factor that makes the perception of them compelling, often irresistible. We have what the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has called a hypertrophy of social cognition. We see purpose, intention, design, even when it is not there.
In 1944 the social psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel made a simple movie in which geometric figures—circles, squares, triangles—moved in certain systematic ways, designed to tell a tale. When shown this movie, people instinctively describe the figures as if they were specific types of people (bullies, victims, heroes) with goals and desires, and repeat pretty much the same story that the psychologists intended to tell. Further research has found that bounded figures aren't even necessary—one can get much the same effect in movies where the "characters" are not single objects but moving groups, such as swarms of tiny squares.
Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University, was the first modern scholar to notice the importance of this tendency as an explanation for religious thought. In his book Faces in the Clouds, Guthrie presents anecdotes and experiments showing that people attribute human characteristics to a striking range of real-world entities, including bicycles, bottles, clouds, fire, leaves, rain, volcanoes, and wind. We are hypersensitive to signs of agency—so much so that we see intention where only artifice or accident exists. As Guthrie puts it, the clothes have no emperor.
Our quickness to over-read purpose into things extends to the perception of intentional design. People have a terrible eye for randomness. If you show them a string of heads and tails that was produced by a random-number generator, they tend to think it is rigged—it looks orderly to them, too orderly. After 9/11 people claimed to see Satan in the billowing smoke from the World Trade Center. Before that some people were stirred by the Nun Bun, a baked good that bore an eerie resemblance to Mother Teresa. In November of 2004 someone posted on eBay a ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich that looked remarkably like the Virgin Mary; it sold for $28,000. (In response pranksters posted a grilled cheese sandwich bearing images of the Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley.) There are those who listen to the static from radios and other electronic devices and hear messages from dead people—a phenomenon presented with great seriousness in the Michael Keaton movie White Noise. Older readers who lived their formative years before CDs and MPEGs might remember listening intently for the significant and sometimes scatological messages that were said to come from records played backward.
Sometimes there really are signs of nonrandom and functional design. We are not being unreasonable when we observe that the eye seems to be crafted for seeing, or that the leaf insect seems colored with the goal of looking very much like a leaf. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins begins The Blind Watchmaker by conceding this point: "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." Dawkins goes on to suggest that anyone before Darwin who did not believe in God was simply not paying attention.
Darwin changed everything. His great insight was that one could explain complex and adaptive design without positing a divine designer. Natural selection can be simulated on a computer; in fact, genetic algorithms, which mimic natural selection, are used to solve otherwise intractable computational problems. And we can see natural selection at work in case studies across the world, from the evolution of beak size in Galápagos finches to the arms race we engage in with many viruses, which have an unfortunate capacity to respond adaptively to vaccines.
Richard Dawkins may well be right when he describes the theory of natural selection as one of our species' finest accomplishments; it is an intellectually satisfying and empirically supported account of our own existence. But almost nobody believes it. One poll found that more than a third of college undergraduates believe that the Garden of Eden was where the first human beings appeared. And even among those who claim to endorse Darwinian evolution, many distort it in one way or another, often seeing it as a mysterious internal force driving species toward perfection. (Dawkins writes that it appears almost as if "the human brain is specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism.") And if you are tempted to see this as a red state—blue state issue, think again: although it's true that more Bush voters than Kerry voters are creationists, just about half of Kerry voters believe that God created human beings in their present form, and most of the rest believe that although we evolved from less-advanced life forms, God guided the process. Most Kerry voters want evolution to be taught either alongside creationism or not at all.
What's the problem with Darwin? His theory of evolution does clash with the religious beliefs that some people already hold. For Jews and Christians, God willed the world into being in six days, calling different things into existence. Other religions posit more physical processes on the part of the creator or creators, such as vomiting, procreation, masturbation, or the molding of clay. Not much room here for random variation and differential reproductive success.
But the real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum physics; we may intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right to us. When we see a complex structure, we see it as the product of beliefs and goals and desires. Our social mode of understanding leaves it difficult for us to make sense of it any other way. Our gut feeling is that design requires a designer—a fact that is understandably exploited by those who argue against Darwin.
It's not surprising, then, that nascent creationist views are found in young children. Four-year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions ("to go in the zoo") and clouds ("for raining"). When asked to explain why a bunch of rocks are pointy, adults prefer a physical explanation, while children choose a functional one, such as "so that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy." And when asked about the origin of animals and people, children tend to prefer explanations that involve an intentional creator, even if the adults raising them do not. Creationism—and belief in God—is bred in the bone.
Some might argue that the preceding analysis of religion, based as it is on supernatural beliefs, does not apply to certain non-Western faiths. In his recent book, The End of Faith, the neuroscientist Sam Harris mounts a fierce attack on religion, much of it directed at Christianity and Islam, which he criticizes for what he sees as ridiculous factual claims and grotesque moral views. But then he turns to Buddhism, and his tone shifts to admiration—it is "the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma." Surely this religion, if one wants to call it a religion, is not rooted in the dualist and creationist views that emerge in our childhood.
Fair enough. But while it may be true that "theologically correct" Buddhism explicitly rejects the notions of body-soul duality and immaterial entities with special powers, actual Buddhists believe in such things. (Harris himself recognizes this; at one point he complains about the millions of Buddhists who treat the Buddha as a Christ figure.) For that matter, although many Christian theologians are willing to endorse evolutionary biology—and it was legitimately front-page news when Pope John Paul II conceded that Darwin's theory of evolution might be correct—this should not distract us from the fact that many Christians think evolution is nonsense.
Or consider the notion that the soul escapes the body at death. There is little hint of such an idea in the Old Testament, although it enters into Judaism later on. The New Testament is notoriously unclear about the afterlife, and some Christian theologians have argued, on the basis of sources such as Paul's letters to the Corinthians, that the idea of a soul's rising to heaven conflicts with biblical authority. In 1999 the pope himself cautioned people to think of heaven not as an actual place but, rather, as a form of existence—that of being in relation to God.
Despite all this, most Jews and Christians, as noted, believe in an afterlife—in fact, even people who claim to have no religion at all tend to believe in one. Our afterlife beliefs are clearly expressed in popular books such as The Five People You Meet in Heaven and A Travel Guide to Heaven. As the Guide puts it,
"Heaven is dynamic. It's bursting with excitement and action. It's the ultimate playground, created purely for our enjoyment, by someone who knows what enjoyment means, because He invented it. It's Disney World, Hawaii, Paris, Rome, and New York all rolled up into one. And it's forever! Heaven truly is the vacation that never ends."
(This sounds a bit like hell to me, but it is apparently to some people's taste.)
Religious authorities and scholars are often motivated to explore and reach out to science, as when the pope embraced evolution and the Dalai Lama became involved with neuroscience. They do this in part to make their world view more palatable to others, and in part because they are legitimately concerned about any clash with scientific findings. No honest person wants to be in the position of defending a view that makes manifestly false claims, so religious authorities and scholars often make serious efforts toward reconciliation—for instance, trying to interpret the Bible in a way that is consistent with what we know about the age of the earth.
If people got their religious ideas from ecclesiastical authorities, these efforts might lead religion away from the supernatural. Scientific views would spread through religious communities. Supernatural beliefs would gradually disappear as the theologically correct version of a religion gradually became consistent with the secular world view. As Stephen Jay Gould hoped, religion would stop stepping on science's toes.
But this scenario assumes the wrong account of where supernatural ideas come from. Religious teachings certainly shape many of the specific beliefs we hold; nobody is born with the idea that the birthplace of humanity was the Garden of Eden, or that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception, or that martyrs will be rewarded with sexual access to scores of virgins. These ideas are learned. But the universal themes of religion are not learned. They emerge as accidental by-products of our mental systems. They are part of human nature.
* Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology and linguistics at Yale, is the author of Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human and How Children Learn the Meanings of Words.
Wired for Creationism?
By Jennie Rothenberg
Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, is an author and researcher who studies human belief in the supernatural. He is also the father of two small boys who have theories of their own. One evening, Bloom recalls, his six-year-old son Max burst out, "You can make me go to bed, but you can't make me go to sleep. It's my brain!" Intrigued, Bloom pressed his son to say more about his brain and how it worked. Max explained that his brain was responsible for thinking and perceiving but not for more intimate experiences such as dreaming, loving, or feeling sad. "That's what I do," Max informed his father, "though my brain might help me out."
Bloom takes note when his children, or any other children, wax philosophical about the body and the soul. As a rationalist and a self-declared atheist, he rejects all notions of spirits, deities, and the afterlife. As a researcher, however, he has discovered that children are predisposed to divide the world into two categories: the physical and the immaterial. Five-month-old babies show clear signs of understanding the basic properties of objects; for example, that they are solid, will fall if dropped, and do not spontaneously disappear. These infants also show signs of responding to and understanding the world of emotions and personal relations—recognizing familiar voices, for instance, and responding to happiness or fear. As Bloom puts it, these two sets of abilities "can be seen as akin to two distinct computers, running separate programs."
With this kind of dual psychological wiring, he argues, it is no wonder that the majority of humans believe in the concept of souls as separate from bodies, which in turn leads to spirituality and faith in the afterlife. To Bloom, all religions everywhere are essentially variations on the same theme. He draws no real distinction between East and West, or between First-World and Third-World nations. What interests him is the human tendency to "see intention where only artifice or accident exists." Unlike many of his fellow atheists, Bloom is not content to simply dismiss religious people as misguided. Instead, he questions why a belief in the divine dominates virtually every culture on earth.
In his December 2005 article in The Atlantic, provocatively titled "Is God an Accident?," Bloom concludes that "the universal themes of religion are not learned." Taking his cues from Darwin, Bloom posits that our spiritual tendencies emerged somewhere in the evolutionary process, most likely as "accidental by-products" of other traits. As a species, humans have an unprecedented knack for finding patterns and reading intentions. Unfortunately, to Bloom's mind, this tendency to read intelligence into everything sometimes gets out of hand:
People have a terrible eye for randomness. If you show them a string of heads and tails that was produced by a random-number generator, they tend to think it was rigged—it looks orderly to them, too orderly. After 9/11 people claimed to see Satan in the billowing smoke from the World Trade Center. Before that some people were stirred by the Nun Bun, a baked good that bore an eerie resemblance to Mother Teresa. In November of 2004 someone posted on eBay a five-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich that looked remarkably like the Virgin Mary; it sold for $28,000 ... Older readers who lived their formative years before CDs and MPEGs might remember listening for the significant and sometimes scatological messages that were said to come from records playing backwards.
Bloom sums up his own worldview by inverting the old Hans Christian Andersen tale to proclaim, "the clothes have no emperor." The "clothes," to Bloom's mind, are the physical objects that make up the world: oceans and landforms that took shape over slow millennia, creatures that evolved through natural selection, gray matter that generates all of our thoughts and behavior. That the majority of people on earth are inclined to perceive all of this as the externalization of something boundless and meaningful is, according to Bloom, an evolutionary fluke; not evidence for an all-powerful Being. Even so, his work with children has left Bloom convinced that all humans, even his own children, will inevitably see design and divinity in the world: "Creationism—and belief in God," he writes, "is bred in the bone."
Paul Bloom lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where he and his graduate students research such wide-ranging topics as bodies and souls, art and fiction, and moral reasoning. We spoke by telephone on October 10.
Why do you think it is that more philosophers and researchers haven't explored whether humans are "wired" from infancy to believe in God?
It's a good question. I think people on both sides of this aren't paying enough attention to how our natural way of seeing the world affects our religion and faith. Take someone like Richard Dawkins, whom I respect a lot. I agree with him on the facts. But when he talks about people who are creationists, he says they're either stupid, ignorant, or downright evil. His point of view is that there's an excellent case for Darwinian theory, so if you don't know about it, you're ignorant; if you can't understand it, you're stupid; and if you know about it and you can understand it, but you tell people that creationism is the way to go, then you're being evil.
The problem is, he's not taking into account emotional and psychological facts about people. Dawkins doesn't look enough at the role of human nature in why people hold these beliefs. If you want to effect change in how people think—which Dawkins definitely does, and I do, too—you have to have some understanding and sympathy for where they're coming from. People who are creationists aren't just morons.
But is the rejection of science really a part of human nature? According to your article, babies understand how the natural world operates.
I think you have to make a distinction. Babies have an extraordinary understanding of the world. But they have an understanding of the "middle-sized" world that we've evolved in. They understand material objects and gravity and space. And they understand people. Humans have what's sometimes called theory of mind, or mind-reading capacity. We know how other minds work, and we're extremely adroit at social reasoning. So you're right. People are very smart in this way, naturally smart. And this is the sort of smartness that evolves from natural selection.
But science deals with vast scales of time. Evolution is a process that unfolds over millions of years, a largely hidden process that has to be inferred through indirect evidence. For most of human history, people thought that the earth was flat. There's nothing in the wiring of your brain to tell you that it isn't flat. A large part of science is demolishing common sense.
You describe babies as natural dualists. But how can we be so sure that they separate the physical world from the world of feelings? Perhaps when an object falls from a table, they see it as wanting to go toward the ground.
There's a lot of debate about that. We know that if we show babies objects that move in an animate fashion they attribute to these objects intentions and goals and desires. What some people have suggested is that they overextend this social mode of interpretation. Jean Piaget said a lot of wrong things, but one thing he said that's probably right is that people are natural animists. We naturally see agency and goals in the natural world. So I wouldn't be surprised if babies, when they see something fall off the table, think it's alive.
The success of stuffed animals would seem to suggest that babies can attribute human qualities to non-living things. I've even seen Orthodox Jewish children cuddling with plush Torahs.
Yes, children imbue all sorts of inanimate things with emotional qualities, things like teddy bears and often blankets. Were you raised Orthodox?
No, I wasn't. But it sounds like you were. You begin your article with a story about your childhood rabbi who believed that the world was only a few thousand years old and that it would soon be coming to an end.
I was raised Conservative. But I grew up in a suburb of Montreal. There was just one synagogue in town, and it was Lubavitch [a Hasidic sect]. My parents dutifully brought us to that synagogue. The rabbi had a bumper sticker that said something like "We want the Messiah now." What's weird about this rabbi of mine—what struck me so much that I wanted to begin the article that way—is that he was no zealot. He was a smart guy. He just believed the world was going to end.
Right now, I live in this tiny academic enclave with people who think just like me. But when you look at polls, you'll see that the world is composed of a strong majority of believers. Most people are just like my rabbi.
You seem to take an "all or nothing" approach to religion. Is it possible to explore, through scientific research, whether human beings are predisposed to believe in one God or in multiple gods—for instance, whether Islam or Greek mythology is a more natural fit for the human mind?
The idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipotent God is not universal. Many religions don't have such things. Often the spiritual forces are stupid or malevolent. The way Jews and Christians worship God is, I think, a bit of an anomaly. It doesn't come naturally to people. I think that people are wired to be dualists and creationists. But I don't know that this brings them to monotheism in particular.
The modern idea of a God who is above human characteristics was not well represented in the past. If you read the Old Testament, God has very human qualities. He's quite quick to anger; he describes himself as a "jealous God." He battles with the Pharaoh to basically show people that he is the more powerful force. We tend naturally to make gods in our own image. So we understand the idea of a jealous God or a God who wants sacrifices.
Even within one religion, the tone and style of belief can change so much over time. When you look at the Hebrew Bible, there's a lot of emphasis on sacrifice and ritual. Now Judaism has become something more abstract, based on ideas and Talmudic discourse. How does this tie into your research on the way human beings perceive the divine?
You have, on the one hand, the theologically correct version of religion, and that is generally sophisticated. And then you have the stuff that people actually believe. People have studied this a lot in Buddhism, because Buddhism is supposed to be extremely advanced and linked up with modern science. But when you look at what actual Buddhists on the street believe, they believe in a lot of superstition, they believe in dualism, they believe in creationism. And they often treat the Buddha as a Christ figure. It's the same thing in the Catholic Church when the Vatican presents official doctrines like that hell is not a place, or that people should accept evolution as a possible fact. Few of the people on the street believe that.
So to answer your question, I think religions develop in all sorts of ways, in response to science and in response to other religions or social changes. But honestly, I think most people have a kind of Stone Age approach to religion. In their hearts, they believe in the same kind of religion people believed in thousands of years ago.
You mention a 1944 study in which two psychologists made a movie involving circles, squares, and triangles. The shapes moved in a certain way, and viewers interpreted the shapes as bullies, victims, or heroes. You cite this as an example of how people are predisposed to "see intention where only artifice or accident exists." But couldn't someone argue just the opposite—that humans are able to correctly identify intentions where they do exist? After all, the researchers did in fact create the movie with those motives in mind, and the audience picked right up on this story.
That's right. It was no surprise what the people saw. You see a very sophisticated version of that in Walt Disney movies— Fantasia, for instance. A good animator can make objects come to life and give them personalities in films. And people are extraordinarily adept at picking them up. We're natural conspiracy theorists, hypersensitive to signs of intelligence. So when it's there, we find it. Unfortunately, we tend to overshoot the mark. For instance, people historically attribute intentions to the weather.
Or to natural catastrophes, especially when they happen one after another.
Exactly. Social psychologists have studied that for a long time. When events happen, people try to find meaning in them, especially when it's something awful like the hurricane: "It was God's will." For everything, you could tell a story—for 9/11 and everything else. Social psychologists study what's called the "just world" hypothesis. This is the hypothesis that people seem to hold quite strongly, that when bad things happen, people had it coming to them. It shows up in why rape victims are often blamed for their own crime. Often the first response is, "They shouldn't have been walking there." There's a sense of justice that we have.
How does this issue of intentionality relate to animals? Would a dog, for instance, be able to watch that same animation and find the same motives in the movements of the triangles and squares?
There are a lot of ways to study that. I'm working with two colleagues—Karen Wynn and Laurie Santos—on a series of studies to explore this. We're doing some of the same experiments we've done with babies on monkeys and looking to see how monkeys do. We know that they can handle complex social interactions within their groups. What's not as clear is the extent to which they are motivated by actual social understanding. For instance, there's a lot of debate as to whether other animals besides humans can deceive each other—not through camouflage or anything like that, but by intentionally doing something to trick somebody else. The jury is still out. And that's another difference between social understanding and physical understanding. You asked before about how we can know that these are separate. One answer is that all of these physical-object studies have been replicated with non-humans, and we get the same results with monkeys or dogs. But the social stuff may be unique to humans. What might be special about humans is our incredibly advanced social ability.
The study with the animated shapes also reminds me of that famous scene in American Beauty where the character shows a video of a plastic bag floating in the wind. He says, "That's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things," and he remembers feeling an "incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever." Based on your research, how would you analyze this scene?
Not all conspiracy theories are depressing. You can look at something and see intelligence behind it and be gratified by it. If I believe that everything in my life has a meaning, it makes me feel reassured about myself and the people I love. If it's a cold random world, the reassurance goes away.
Where, if anywhere, can we draw the line between the movement of a plastic bag and the experience of hiking through the Rocky Mountains on a beautiful day? When people go into nature, they don't generally feel that the rocks and the water are just cold and lifeless. They more often feel that the landscape is radiating something genuine and personal.
I think we have these transcendent feelings about the natural world, and it makes no sense for someone like me to say it's right or wrong. We experience some things as beautiful and awe-inspiring, and I have no beef with that. My troubles are when someone sees the Grand Canyon and not only finds it aesthetically inspiring but says, "Somebody must have built this." Just as when you see a beautiful painting, you infer the intelligence of the painter, when you see beauty in nature, you infer some divine artist.
That may bring us back to your point that within any given religion there are different levels of intellectual reasoning. There are religious people who can look at the Grand Canyon and say, "Yes, it was created by these elaborate scientific processes, but that just proves all the more how brilliant the creator must be." Do you think it's possible for people to have such subtle thinking that they don't have to choose between science and divinity?
I think it's better than that. Someone who has a scientific worldview can actually get more appreciation from nature than someone with a religious worldview. I don't want to say this in an offensive way, but religious explanations are typically very boring. They're uninspired and they end very quickly. When you look at the actual facts of how the Grand Canyon was formed, and you look at the actual nuances of Darwinian evolution, it's far more interesting, far more beautiful, than what you find in the Old Testament and the New Testament. So when it comes to appreciating things, I think scientists have an edge over religious people.
I'm interested in the difference between blind religious faith and firsthand mystical experience. There's a kind of epiphany that you see popping up in different cultures throughout history, regardless of whether people are religious or not. I'm thinking of Eugene Ionesco, the postmodern playwright. In his memoir, he describes a flash of insight that he calls "a certainty of being." It hit him one day while he was walking through a little French village. His body felt weightless, but he writes, "Neither flight nor anything else could give me greater euphoria than that of becoming aware that I was, once and for all, and that this was an irreversible thing, an eternal miracle." When you're talking in terms of a direct experience like that, is it really so different from the experience of hot or cold, or hunger or thirst?
That touches upon what I'm most interested in: our feelings of what we ourselves are. There are some philosophers who believe that the result of science is that there's no such thing as consciousness or no such thing as free will. I'm not one of them. There is nothing more irrefutable than that we experience ourselves as conscious, experiencing, acting beings. That's just one of the facts that we as scientists have to come to terms with. I'm not interested in getting rid of that sense of selfhood. I'm just interested in where it comes from. And I think it comes from the physical brain.
One could speculate that the emergence of a coherent self is, in some ways, a developmental accomplishment. This idea sometimes gets overblown, but I think that the experience of selfhood that an adult has is different, in interesting ways, from that of a three-year-old—and the three-year-old's experience is different, in interesting ways, from that of a six-month-old. People with language and culture construct a sort of narrative self.
One argument for the eternity of the soul is that life in a body is even harder to explain than life outside of one. The quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote a long essay called "What Is Life?" in which he tried to understand how material objects can be alive and resist entropy. He concluded that the human being, the "I" or observer, must be something other than the body because the body goes through dramatic changes—childhood, puberty, the renewal of cells—while the identity inside the body is a continuum. Do you see this as a valid line of reasoning?
Schrödinger's observations are right on and the questions he's asking are the right ones. The hardest question in my field—maybe it's the hardest question ever—is how a mere physical object could give rise to an experience of selfhood. The mind-body problem, as it's called. Religious answers are deeply unsatisfactory. "It has a soul" is a common answer, but it doesn't go anywhere. But the problem is replacing it with something that makes sense to us.
Do you think science will succeed in that?
I think science is very far away from solving the fundamental problem of how physical objects give rise to experience and feeling and choice. On the other hand, I think we now know a hell of a lot about what's not the answer. So we know schizophrenia is not demonic possession. We know that memory is in the brain, not in the ether or spirit world. But we're very far from a solution to how a physical brain can give rise to mental life. Some people say we're never going to get there.
In your article, you tell a charming story about your six-year-old son, Max, who tells you, "You can make me go to bed but you can't make me go to sleep. It's my brain!" I can't help but wonder if he has given so much thought to his brain partly because he has you as a father—and maybe because he knows that talking about his brain is one sure way to lure you into letting him stay up later. How much do parents shape the very way that children, even infants, perceive the world of matter and the world of the mind?
Both of my kids are very interested in these issues and love to talk about them, probably in part because my wife and I love to talk about them, and they're kind of like me and they're kind of like my wife. So Max does get a lot from me. And if he was raised in an Orthodox Jewish community, or if he was raised Islamic or fundamentalist Christian, he would think differently. In that way, parents and culture do play a role.
On the other hand, there's one really interesting finding that comes up in all of this research on common sense dualism and creationism. And that's that children believe it more than their parents do. What goes on in society isn't a question of taking kids with no religious beliefs and pumping religious beliefs into them. Instead, kids start with a strong, powerful propensity to believe all of these things. And then what society does is focus it: "There is one God"—or, "There are five gods"—or, "Here's what happens to your soul. It goes to heaven." "It occupies another animal." "It resides in the spirit world." Society tells a story and focuses these beliefs, but kids start off with the foundations.
And then in some very interesting sub-societies, like my house, the parents don't believe in any of these things. I don't bully my kids into my way of thinking, but when we talk about it, they know my view. And they're free to make up their own minds. Actually if they're like most people, they'll probably end up a lot more religious than I am.
There does seem to be a certain age at which kids are very ready to just adore someone, whether it's Jesus or Krishna or the Lubavitcher Rebbe. They'll gaze at pictures of that person or deity, and when visitors come to the house, the kids will take them by the hand and try to get them to believe in it, too.
Kids who are raised in atheist houses often glom on to the religion of other kids. There are atheist parents who discover, to their horror, that their daughter has fallen in love with Jesus. And a lot of Jewish kids, at least for a phase, become a lot more religious than their parents.
Many sociologists are interested in why some religions do better than others. They often conclude that it's the orthodox religions that do very well, because they keep the kids locked up, metaphorically speaking. They have strong control over what the kids read and see and whom they meet. When a religion has porous boundaries, like Reform Judaism or most forms of Christianity, people often rebel and look for something stricter. They want something to satisfy their intuitive belief systems, and the sort of secularized versions of the religion often aren't enough for them.
In your article, you mention Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dalai Lama as examples of very appealing religious leaders because they emphasize morality and universal brotherhood rather than intolerance or eternal damnation. But a religious person might insist that Martin Luther King's faith in humanity was possible only because of his faith in God, or that the Dalai Lama's ethics are based on his belief that actions reverberate throughout the universe. Is it really possible to separate morality from some kind of belief in forces beyond the physical?
I think people have a strong moral sense that, to some extent, is built in. Children don't need to be taught that some things are fair and others are not. Of course it gets complicated, and of course there are some aspects that have to be learned. But if you're splitting up cookies between kids, a two year old will have a sense of what's right and what's wrong.
What a really good, contemplative person can do is take religious texts and use them to construct appealing virtues. But a lot of times, I think religious texts can corrupt our natural sense of morality. Most religions, for example, given the times they were created, have bizarre views about sex roles and the place of homosexuals in society.
In America, though, it does seem that the people who are most motivated to go out and work in soup kitchens or take care of flood victims are often members of a church group. It's difficult to inspire and mobilize people without something as magnetic as religion.
Here's a way to look at it. You're right that you find all things in religion. During the civil-rights movement, a lot of people were able to effect change by working through their churches. And that's certainly still true today. On the other hand, most of the world's current fanatical movements evolved from religions. So even though it's the religious people who are doing the most right now to help the victims of the hurricane, there are also religious people who are involved in abortion-clinic bombings.
The role of religion and morality is a complicated one. What religion often does is give people a language to express their moral views. But people pick and choose. So it can be a very useful tool—people who care about morality can get together under the rubric of religion and do good things. People can also go through the Bible and use it to justify all sorts of immoral things. A lot of people think gay marriage is terrible, but they won't say, "I think it's terrible because I hate gay people." What they'll say is, "I think it's terrible because it says so in the Bible." And they'll quote you chapter and verse. There are a lot of arguments against slavery in the Bible. There are a lot of arguments for slavery in the Bible. Religion provides a language, but the decision of what to say with it relies on other factors.
And then there's the argument that Sam Harris makes in his book The End of Faith, that religions are standing in the way of a more authentic form of spirituality. He advocates being spiritual outside the context of these set religions. How do you feel about that notion?
I tend to be rather crabby about this. When people tell me how spiritual they are, I roll my eyes.
Well, it's one of those words that's been overused to the point of self-parody.
People typically use it to tell you how wonderful they are. I would like to move away from such notions and towards more secular virtues such as intelligence and empathy and kindness and good sense. If it comes to someone deciding how to allocate money in society or how to treat animals or whether to allow gay marriage, I'd rather people give up both religion and spirituality and use their common sense and moral intuition. So I'm probably even more skeptical than Sam Harris.
You mention toward the end of your article that the Dalai Lama is becoming involved in neuroscience. I know that there's been a lot of research on Transcendental Meditation as well. The film director David Lynch is funding a study on TM at American University. Do you think there's any value in analyzing what happens to people's brains while they're having a certain inner experience?
I think it's extremely interesting. And there actually is good scientific work on meditation, suggesting that this has benefits for creating happiness. There's a very short list of things that people can do to make themselves happier. Making more money doesn't tend to make you happier unless you're living in poverty. But meditation does. That and getting married.
The Dalai Lama is quite an interesting case. He was invited to give a talk at a major neuroscience conference, and it's proven to be quite controversial. Part of the issue is that although he puts himself forth as a representative of science, he defends other views that are quite supernatural.
Do you think people are afraid that this might open the door to research on prayer and religious practices?
Meditative practices and how they work is a straightforward, interesting psychological question. People have been meditating for a very long time, and there's no reason that neuroscientists shouldn't study the effects of it. It could have real, practical benefits for making our lives better.
I know your graduate students are doing some intriguing research. Can you tell me about the topics they've been investigating?
Sure. I have a first-year graduate student named Izzat Jarudi who is asking the question, "Why do we find certain interventions, such as steroids, to be morally wrong?" The main idea here is that our moral intuition doesn't have to do with the bad consequences of this intervention; it has to do with its perceived unnaturalness. If I could tell you about some herbs that you could take that would make you much stronger, our prediction is that this would not be seen as being as bad as steroids. People used ginkgo biloba as an antidepressant for a while, before they found out it had very bad side effects. They did it because it was herbal, and so they saw it as intrinsically better than drugs like Prozac. So Izzat is interested in the idea that it's morally okay for people to use natural things and not okay to use unnatural products, independent of the effects.
I have another student named Deena Skolnick who is interested in young children and their views about fictional characters. The idea is that you believe that Batman and Robin are fictional, and so do young children. You believe that Spiderman and Mary Jane are fictional, and so do young children. But what do you think the relationship between Batman and Robin and Spiderman and Mary Jane is? As an adult, you think they're separate. She's asking whether children think they're separate also, and she's finding that they do. The youngest children understand that Batman can touch Robin, but he can't make contact with Harry Potter. Harry Potter is as far away from Batman as you are. So she's doing work on what she calls the cosmology of fictional worlds.
I've read that you and your students have also been researching art—trying to understand, for instance, what distinguishes an artwork from an ordinary object or from a forgery.
One argument that art critics have made for a long time is that what distinguishes art from non-art is the intention underlying it. This doesn't matter so much when you look at a Rembrandt. But it matters when you look at modern art, like the work of Marcel Duchamp, which gets to be art just by virtue of the intent of its creator. This sort of intuition seems to be shared by young children. You can show a two year old some paint on a canvas. In one case, paint was spilled on it. In another case, the two-year-old watches as somebody carefully works on it. The two paintings can look the same, but what matters is that only the second was created through an act of will. This is the one that two-year-olds will see as art.
So what sets apart a Monet or a Van Gogh from other lesser artists?
Now that's something I don't know much about. I'm just looking into what's art and what isn't. The difference between mediocre art and great art is a wonderful question. And I have nothing to say on it.
How Hollywood Saved God
It took five years, two screenwriters, and $180 million to turn a best-selling antireligious children’s book into a star-studded epic—just in time for Christmas.
By Hanna Rosin
The Atlantic, December 2007
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| GET ME REWRITE! A bear king on his throne in a scene from The Golden Compass |
This month, New Line Cinema will release The Golden Compass, based on the first book in a trilogy of edgy children’s novels written by the British author Philip Pullman. A trailer for the movie evokes The Lord of the Rings, and comparisons have been made to The Chronicles of Narnia. All three are epic adventures that unfold in a rich fantasy world, perfect for the big screen. But beyond that basic description, the comparisons fall apart. In the past, Pullman has expressed mainly contempt for the books on which the other movies were based. He once dismissed the Lord of the Rings trilogy as an “infantile work” primarily concerned with “maps and plans and languages and codes.” Narnia got it even worse: “Morally loathsome,” he called it. “One of the most ugly and poisonous things I’ve ever read.” He described his own series as Narnia’s moral opposite. “That’s the Christian one,” he told me. “And mine is the non-Christian.”
From the archives:
Dispatch: "Compass Without Direction"
(December 5, 2007)The movie version of Philip Pullman's Golden Compass creates a luminous fantasy world, but loses the book's magnetic force of meaning. By Hanna Rosin
Pullman’s books have sold 15 million copies worldwide, although it’s difficult to imagine adolescent novels any more openly subversive. The series, known collectively as His Dark Materials, centers on Lyra Belacqua, a preteen orphan who’s pursued by a murderous institution known as “the Magisterium.” Or to use the more familiar name, “the Holy Church.” In its quest to eradicate sin, the Church sanctions experiments involving the kidnap and torture of hundreds of children—experiments that separate body from soul and leave the children to stumble around zombie-like, and then die.
The series builds up to a cataclysmic war between Heaven and Earth, on the model of Paradise Lost (the source of the phrase his dark materials). But in Pullman’s version, God is revealed to be a charlatan more pitiable even than Oz. His death scene is memorable only for its lack of drama and dignity: The feeble, demented being, called “the ancient of days,” cowers and cries like a baby, dissolving in air. The final book climaxes, so to speak, in a love scene that could rattle the sensibilities of an American culture that tolerates even Girls Gone Wild, because in this case the girl is still a few years away from college. (More on this later.)
Four years ago, before anyone worried about marketing a movie, Pullman wondered why his books hadn’t attracted as much controversy as the Harry Potter series—another Hollywood favorite. As he told The Sydney Morning Herald, he was “saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God.”
In 2001, Pullman became the first author to win the prestigious Whitbread Award for a children’s book—The Amber Spyglass, the third book in the series. A six-hour London theater production of the books sold out its entire four-month run even before the reviews were published. Many of Pullman’s avid adult fans seek out his books because of his critique of religion. But they, like his adolescent readers, get drawn into his world by his fantastic imagination.
The series begins in a parallel Oxford, England, at “Jordan College,” where the familiar and the fantastic coexist. Lyra is the anti-Disney heroine: an unruly, unteachable orphan cared for by the university’s dons who spits and lies her way out of trouble. She cobbles together a family from other brave, reckless cast-offs like herself: a kitchen boy; a young, runaway murderer; gypsies and witches. For a time she finds a surrogate father in Iorek Byrnison, a deposed bear king decked out in metal armor who speeds her through one of several parallel worlds. (As with most fantasies, any attempt to summarize plot and character edges too close to Dungeons & Dragons. Trust me, in the novels it all hangs together.) Her most intimate relationship is with her “daemon,” a soul that lives outside the body in animal form. In Lyra’s world, a child’s daemon can change form—hers can shift rapidly from moth to ermine to rat, depending on her mood—until its companion hits puberty, at which point it settles as a fitting animal. The daemons of the Holy Church functionaries? They tend to be dogs.
To an industry intoxicated with sophisticated visual effects, Pullman’s creations were irresistible. In 2003, when describing what sold him on the movie, Toby Emmerich, New Line’s president of production, explained, “It was two words: Iorek Byrnison.” Iorek is an “insanely awesome character,” he added. “He can’t tell a lie,” Emmerich told me recently, “and [Lyra] is an expert liar.” And Hollywood had a precedent in the perfect chemistry between Narnia’s little Lucy and the special-effects lion Aslan. (Of course, Aslan is a stand-in for Jesus, while Iorek helps Lyra conquer the forces of God.)
New Line commissioned the first script in 2002. In the five years since—spanning two writers, two directors, and several scripts—the studio has spent enormous energy sorting out exactly how to characterize the villains in the movie.
You can probably guess how things turned out. Given enough time and effort, Hollywood can tweak and polish and recast even the darkest message until it would seem at home in a Fourth of July parade. In the end, the religious meaning of the book was obscured so thoroughly as to be essentially indecipherable. The studio settled on villains that, as Emmerich put it, “feel vaguely kind of like a fascistic, totalitarian dictatorship, Russian/KGB/SS” stew. The movie’s main theme became, in one producer’s summary, “One small child can save the world.” With $180 million at stake, the studio opted to kidnap the book’s body and leave behind its soul.
When director Ridley Scott was shooting Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick had a feverish, paranoid vision of the filming. He imagined himself seizing leading man Harrison Ford by the throat and “battering him against the wall,” he told The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1982. He imagined security guards netting him with a blanket and forcing Thorazine on him as he screamed, “You’ve destroyed my book!”
By that standard, Pullman has remained serene about the translation of his own book to film. In August, I met him in Oxford, where he used to live before too many fans came knocking at his door (he now lives a few miles outside of town). Despite his frequent combative essays in British papers, Pullman in person is an exceedingly amiable man. At 61, he preserves the air of the middle-school teacher he once was. He is tall, with tufts of gray hair and sly, amused eyes. When we met, he wore a rumpled oxford shirt and carried a beat-up leather satchel. It’s easy to imagine him meeting dull student questions with the liveliest of answers.
In the past, Pullman has defended the “good faith of the film-makers” and denied any “betrayal.” On the surface, his relationship with the studio has remained “cordial,” as he put it. The director, Chris Weitz, has made several pilgrimages to Oxford, and the two men exchange e-mails. Pullman got to review a video of the final 50 candidates for the part of Lyra, and he has made script suggestions. Still, the studio publicist seemed nervous when she heard I was going to visit him. All things being equal, Pullman told me, New Line would prefer he were, well, the late author of The Golden Compass. Dead? “Yes! Absolutely!” If something happened to him, there “would be expressions of the most heartfelt regrets, yet privately they would be saying, ‘Thank God.’”
When we met, Pullman had just been to a screening of the film, and he praised many specific scenes. He was thrilled with Dakota Blue Richards, the previously unknown English schoolgirl who plays Lyra. And with Nicole Kidman, whom he described as having the “exact quality of warm and cold, seductive and terrifying” to portray the tender and evil Marisa Coulter. In discussing the film, he chose his words carefully, acknowledging that his role now is to be “sensible” so that the next two films get made. Nonetheless, he was honest about what was missing: “They do know where to put the theology,” he said, “and that’s off the film.”
Long silence. Then, “I think if everything that is made explicit in the book or everything that is implied clearly in the book or everything that can be understood by a close reading of the book were present in the film, they’d have the biggest hit they’ve ever had in their lives. If they allowed the religious meaning of the book to be fully explicit, it would be a huge hit. Suddenly, they’d have letters of appreciation from people who felt this but never dared say it. They would be the heroes of liberal thought, of freedom of thought … And it would be the greatest pity if that didn’t happen.
“I didn’t put that very well. What I mean is that I want this film to succeed in every possible way. And what I don’t want to do, you see, is talk the other two films out of existence. So I’ll stop there.”
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| THE WITCH QUEEN Serafina Pekkala, played by Eva Green, flies above a land denuded of religious imagery. |
Pullman has expressed admiration for Richard Dawkins, a fellow British atheist. Like him, Pullman views the prevailing forms of religion as destructive and oppressive forces in history. “Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him,” he once said. But his views are not as coldly antiseptic as Dawkins’s. He grew up going to Sunday school and has only fond memories of serving as a choirboy in his grandfather’s rural Anglican parish. One of Pullman’s favorite subjects is the moral power of stories, and he can sound preacher-like when he addresses it. “‘Thou shalt not’ might reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart,” he once wrote. Pullman’s own books are full of the mysticism and grandeur often associated with religion, which is no doubt part of their appeal. “We need joy, we need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we need a connection with the universe, we need all the things the Kingdom of Heaven used to promise us but failed to deliver,” he said in a 2000 speech.
When pressed, Pullman grants that he’s not really trying to kill God, but rather the outdated idea of God as an old guy with a beard in the sky. In his novels, he replaces the idea of God with “Dust,” made up of invisible particles that begin to cluster around people when they hit puberty. The Church believes Dust to be the physical evidence of original sin and hopes to eradicate it. But over the course of the series, Pullman reveals it to be the opposite: evidence of human consciousness, a kind of godlike energy that surrounds everyone. People accumulate Dust by “thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on.” It starts to build up around puberty because, for Pullman, sexual awakening triggers the beginning of self-knowledge and intellectual curiosity. To him, the loss of sexual innocence is not a tragedy; it’s the springboard to a productive and virtuous adulthood.
The most curious aspect of Pullman’s theology is the primacy he places on teen sexuality; like the best heavy-metal songs, the whole series builds up to a celebration of losing your virginity, or at least getting to first base. In The Amber Spyglass, a former nun turned physicist guides Lyra to her destiny using clues from the I Ching. The physicist divines that she should tell Lyra the story of when she was 12 years old at a birthday party and a boy “took a bit of marzipan and he just gently put it in my mouth,” and she fell in love.
This simple story sets off salvation. When she hears it, Lyra “felt something strange happen to her body. She felt a stirring at the roots of her hair: she found herself breathing faster.” (At least that’s what she felt in the British edition; the American version leaves these lines out.) A few scenes later, Lyra, alone in the woods with her friend Will, lifts a little red fruit “gently to his mouth.” They bump together clumsily, and Will is soon described, in terms familiar to Playboy readers, “kissing her hot face over and over again, drinking in with adoration the scent of her body,” his nerves “ablaze.” What happens next is not entirely clear. The scene is intended as a rewriting of Genesis, with Lyra replaying the role of Eve, so presumably some nakedness is required. But she and Will are still several years shy of 18, which might make the scene’s fullest implication illegal in some states. When critics accused Pullman of sanctioning underage sex, he said: “Nowhere in the book do I talk about anything more than a kiss. And as a child, a kiss is enough. A kiss can change the world.” What the novel says is, “Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath.” When they return from the woods, after an ambiguous gap in the narrative, holding hands and “oblivious to everything else,” all is suddenly well with the world: “The Dust pouring down from the stars had found a living home again, and these children-no-longer-children, saturated with love, were the cause of it all.”
“This is exactly what happens in the Garden of Eden,” Pullman told me. “They become aware of sexuality, of the power the body has to attract attention from someone else. This is not only natural, but a wonderful thing! To be celebrated! Why the Christian Church has spent 2,000 years condemning this glorious moment, well, that’s a mystery. I want to confront that, I suppose, by telling a story that this so-called original sin is anything but. It’s the thing that makes us fully human.”
Pullman gets annoyed whenever he recalls a passage in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia: In the final book of the series, Lewis excludes Susan Pevensie, the oldest sister, from what is essentially Paradise because she is “interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Pullman, in an essay called “The Dark Side of Narnia,” cites this as evidence that Lewis disliked women and sexuality and was “frightened and appalled at the notion of wanting to grow up.”
The Narnia series, in his view, embraces a worldview that comes close to “life-hating ideology”—punishing, misogynistic, racist, and death-obsessed. By contrast, his own books are filled with a kind of warmth, an exuberance for finding utopia in this life. When he loses patience with his Christian critics, he lists the values he promotes in his own stories: tolerance, love, kindness, courage, duty, individual freedom over blind obedience. The series ends with Lyra realizing she has to return to her world and separate from Will. She is heartbroken, but accepts that this is the only way she can fulfill her ultimate destiny, which is to help build the “Republic of Heaven.” She understands this to be a paradise on Earth where she can learn to be “kind and curious and patient,” and where she can rely on her own knowledge and wisdom, not the mandates of God or the Magisterium. This reads as a moment of heroic idealism, one that not so subtly mocks the whole notion of a Kingdom of Heaven that rules and oppresses us while we live, and from which we are excluded until after we die.
In 2002, New Line commissioned the English playwright Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay for The Golden Compass. As a playwright, Stoppard is drawn to the dark and philosophical. His biggest success in Hollywood came from co-writing a comedy (Shakespeare in Love), which The Golden Compass is decidedly not. So New Line should not have been surprised by the outcome. In its choice of villains, Stoppard’s script stays relatively faithful to Pullman. The script introduces Father MacPhail, an odious clergyman with a lizard daemon, who in a later book tries to kill Lyra. In intermittent scenes, MacPhail and other clerics gather to discuss Dust and heresy. Stoppard told The New York Times that he turned in the script in 2003 and didn’t hear back from the studio for quite some time. Ultimately, New Line decided the script was “too intellectual,” and “not Lyra-centric enough.” Stoppard “was interested in the discussions between old men with beards,” Pullman told me, “and those discussions are only important in how they affect Lyra.”
In 2004, while it was sitting on Stoppard’s script, the studio received an unsolicited 40-page adaptation plan from the screenwriter and director Chris Weitz. Given his résumé, Weitz was an unlikely candidate. He was best known for directing, with his brother, Paul, the raunchy teenage comedy American Pie. He also co-directed and co-wrote About a Boy (based on the Nick Hornby novel), which was nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Although The Golden Compass was on an entirely different scale, Weitz made a convincing case for himself. He wrote that he, too, had attended an “Oxbridge College,” in his case, Trinity College, Cambridge, where he’d studied 17th-century literature and Milton’s Paradise Lost. A friend had given Pullman’s books to Weitz while he was filming About a Boy, and when he imagined them onscreen, they seemed to him “everything I loved about moviemaking.” He loved the combination of epic adventure and coming-of-age story; in the books, the drama comes as much from Lyra’s learning her true identity as it does from the battle scenes. He loved that the hero was a girl who was stubborn and defiant. And he loved that even the battles seemed beautiful and elegant, not “bunches of armies hacking at each other.” The studio reportedly called Stoppard and told him not to do any more work on the script.
Weitz got the job as writer and director, and immediately set out to prove to Pullman’s devoted fan base that he deserved it. In December 2004, before he’d started filming, Weitz did a Q&A with bridgetothestars.net, the main Pullman fan site. Weitz was intelligent, expansive, self-deprecating, and honest. The interview turned out to be a fiasco:
BRIDGETOTHESTARS.NET: Do you think any of the more controversial aspects of HDM (like the portrayal of religion) will be toned down or removed altogether?
CHRIS WEITZ: Here we are at the heart of the matter. This will certainly be the issue that will ignite the most controversy amongst fans and amongst the general public …
New Line is a company that makes films for economic returns. You would hardly expect them to be anything else. They have expressed worry about the possibility of HDM’s perceived antireligiosity making it an unviable project financially … Needless to say, all my best efforts will be directed towards keeping HDM as liberating and iconoclastic an experience as I can. But there may be some modification of terms. You will probably not hear of the “Church” but you will hear of the Magisterium. Those who will understand will understand. I have no desire to change the nature or intentions of the villains of the piece, but they may appear in more subtle guises.
“Economic returns.” “Unviable project financially.” This is not the kind of boardroom blather a fan committed to the darkest side of His Dark Materials wants to hear. The message boards quickly soured on Weitz. “Like it or lump it, Pullman’s atheism is an integral part of his novels,” one fan wrote. “I’m led to assume that Weitz isn’t currently pursuing a career in spin only because he’s crap at it,” sneered another. The Times of London ran a story headlined “God Is Cut From Film of Dark Materials.”
Weitz had believed that his (safe) take on Pullman’s theology—the Magisterium represents an oppressive theocracy or a totalitarian state, not religion in general—was widely shared. He hadn’t quite realized that the loudest part of Pullman’s fan base regarded that interpretation as a cop-out. These fans were committed to the broader interpretation of the villain’s identity as God himself. In their defense, Pullman does spell this out rather unambiguously, for those who missed the earlier hints, in the final book: “The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty—those were all names he gave himself.”
Weitz told me that after reading the Times story, he went into a cold sweat. “Why am I doing this?” he remembered thinking. “I’ll end up being hated by the fans and ripped into by the press. And this is a huge, huge endeavor. Maybe this isn’t for me.” All of a sudden, he felt overwhelmed by all of it: the visual effects, the cost and scope of the project. Only a short time after Weitz got his dream directing job, he backed out of it.
In 2005, the studio hired the British director Anand Tucker, best known for directing Shopgirl. In under a year, Tucker too was gone (“Creative differences,” the studio said). New Line persuaded Weitz, who’d stayed on as screenwriter, to become the director again. By then, he told me, “I’d started to care less about what people might think of me.” Besides, he added, “This thing about the books being antireligion is a bit of a canard. They are, in fact, very spiritual.”
Studios usually try to maintain good relations with authors, especially when an author has a large fan base. When Weitz came back to the project, he took comfort in an e-mail exchange he had with Pullman. He had asked him whether a “version that wasn’t superficially so much a critique of organized dogmatic religions would fly with him,” and Pullman, Weitz reported, “didn’t seem particularly bothered by that.”
Pullman has at times offered up a similar interpretation of his work, calling Soviet Russia, for example, a form of theocracy: “They start with a Holy Book that’s inerrant, in that case the writings of Marx,” he told me. “They have doctors of the ‘Church,’ and a priesthood that has privileges not afforded to common people. They have a teleological view of history moving inexorably to a certain point. They have demons, who are called traitors. So are there examples of the Magisterium in the secular world? Of course.” But when I asked whether he considered this a limited interpretation of his views and not the “heart of the matter,” he smiled mischievously and suggested I put down, “Pullman nodded enthusiastically.”
The heart of the matter is introduced at the end of the first book and is critical to the progression of the rest of the series. It was in the earliest versions of the movie script, but over time it has been slowly erased. In the book, Lord Asriel, an enigmatic explorer, lectures Lyra on the story of Adam and Eve. In Lyra and Asriel’s world, the story goes: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to reveal the true form of one’s daemon, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.”
According to Western religions, human history began with the Creation. But the cruel world as we know it began with the moment when Eve ate the fruit and then gave it to Adam. This is the Fall, which brought on sin and suffering. Adam and Eve were cursed by God and expelled from Eden. (The full consequences of their act are laid out in a photo display at the new creationist museum in Kentucky: viruses, death, war, concentration camps, and starvation in Sudan.) Asriel is unsettled by this interpretation of history. Over time, witches reveal that Lyra’s destiny is to replay the Eve story and undo original sin. Lyra fulfills this destiny in the third novel when she does whatever she does with Will. For the purpose of streamlining the plot, the reversed Eve story is perfect: simple, elegant, and accessible. And, as Pullman points out, it “comes at the point in the story when we most need that explanation.” But no $180 million movie is going to trash the first book of the Bible, so the movie will have to do without it.
The earlier scripts made passing reference to the Fall. In the Stoppard script, Asriel, in a rage about the Authority, mocks the “apple of desire” and the “fig-leaf of shame”; a few scenes later Coulter, the evil Nicole Kidman character, yells at Asriel, “You can’t conquer God!” Weitz told me he’d originally written an opening scene showing Lyra in a college chapel listening to a sermon about the alternative Genesis, “but that movie was not going to get made.” A Weitz script dated December 2004 makes no explicit reference to Genesis. Instead, the theology is mediated entirely through a discussion of Dust, which, according to your taste, is either more highbrow or just more muddled. Asriel tells Lyra that people believe Dust is sin and that it brings on misery. He says he will set out to destroy Dust and essentially reverse the consequences of original sin: “When I do—pain, sin, suffering—death itself will die.”
The final, shooting script includes no mention of sin or the end of death. As Emmerich told me, Dust is “akin to the Force” in Star Wars. Coulter tells Lyra that Dust is “evil and wicked” and makes people “sick.” Asriel sounds like Obi-Wan Kenobi: “They taught themselves to fear Dust, instead of master it,” he says. “They’ve ignored a tremendous source of power … That is what it all comes down to, Lyra. That is what Dust is. Power. Without it, we are like children before the might of the Magisterium.”
It may make sense if you’re in a dark room dazzled by special effects and not thinking too hard. Then again, maybe it won’t. What’s left of Pullman’s story is a string of disconnected proclamations that obscure not just his original point, but any point at all: “Master Dust!” “Freedom is at stake!” “We’re not alone. We’re never alone! We have each other.” They satisfy, but they don’t really explain. Or perhaps they offer explanations so familiar and straightforward that they don’t invite questions.
This is Hollywood at its most hazily indignant and self-congratulatory, recycling the generic theme of Victory, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dead Poets Society, and countless other films—a band of grubby, half-crazed heroes takes on the System and wins. When I talked to Weitz in August, he expected that he would still be tinkering with the opening voice-over until just before the release, but the general direction was already set. New Line’s publicity materials describe it this way: “One child stands between the end of free will and the beginning of a new age. Lyra Belacqua … is only 12, but even she knows that doing what you’re told versus doing what you feel is right can yield very different outcomes.” The message is nominally loyal to Pullman, but it also fetishizes the power of childlike innocence—which is one of his greatest complaints about religion.
Weitz told me he tried to keep in a line where Asriel says, “Dust is sin,” but “that didn’t make it. What can I say?” Hollywood “is just terrified that anything that brings up religion or anything controversial will be disastrous.” But after three years of working on the movie, he’d come up with a solid explanation for why he’s not selling out: In the ’80s and ’90s, Hollywood was “scornful in a very intellectually unsound way about religion. Any priest or nun was a dogmatic idiot. So I think there’s something valid in the way the Christian community has responded.”
There will be some religious imagery in the movie, Weitz said, but it will be blended so unobtrusively into the production design that it will take a “DVD player and working knowledge of Latin to decipher the symbols.” Outside the Magisterium buildings will be icons of Orthodox saints. Sprinkled around the movie will be Latin inscriptions from the Vulgate translation of the Bible, including one in Mrs. Coulter’s bedroom that refers to eating from the tree of good and evil. “Kind of a little joke between me and me,” Weitz told me.
Movies that deeply offend Christian sensibilities do get made from time to time: The Last Temptation of Christ, Dogma, and, last year, The Da Vinci Code, a major Sony release. The last one lends credence to Pullman’s idea that a faithful translation of his books could have been commercially viable. It’s possible that New Line’s executives once thought so too. New Line, after all, has a reputation for picking up edgy projects, like Boogie Nights and Se7en. When the studio bought the rights to The Golden Compass, in 2002, it was flush with the success of The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps its leadership imagined making something less anodyne. If so, a more nervous mood has since prevailed. Pullman’s books never had as large a following in the United States as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. And with shape-shifting daemons in most scenes and the armored bear in several, the movie’s production costs were enormous. New Line’s interim projects, meanwhile, met with mixed success. The studio reportedly has tense relations with its parent company, Time Warner, and may be in danger of losing its independence. That’s a lot of pressure, which would naturally lead you to call on the Force.
Despite all of New Line’s efforts, the movie may still be received as offensive in some communities, if only because of its association with the book. Catholic League, a watchdog group that monitors portrayals of the Catholic Church in the media, has printed thousands of copies of a 23-page booklet called “Golden Compass: Agenda Unmasked,” which it plans to distribute to reviewers and religious groups. “I don’t want Christians to be seduced by the idea that this is a great fairy-tale story to show your kids at Christmastime,” says Bill Donohue, the group’s president. “This is Hitchens taken to the kids,” he adds, referring to Christopher Hitchens, author of the best seller God Is Not Great. Donohue knows that the moviemakers decided on a “dumbed down” version of the villains, but he still plans to call for a boycott. “It’s a backdoor way of selling atheism,” he says. “Unsuspecting parents will take little Johnny to see the movie. Johnny likes the movie. Johnny gets the trilogy for Christmas.”
But these days Hollywood just doesn’t make for a satisfying enemy in the culture war. After the amazing success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, in 2004, studios have at times tried to win over what they initially saw as an untapped Christian market. They’ve arranged press junkets for Christian journalists and hired marketers to reach out to churches. (New Line made a bid with The Nativity Story in 2006, a prequel to The Passion. It bombed.) Right now, the love affair is in limbo. After a rocky start, the studios now seem to view the Christian market as it would a difficult girlfriend: elusive and hard to please; ultimately, you keep your distance but still take pains not to irritate her.
Marketing plans aside, New Line executives likely believe they were doing Pullman no great disservice by stripping out his theology and replacing it with some vague derivative of the Force. Values such as obedience, religious devotion, and chastity are so rare in Hollywood’s culture that they probably seem archaic and quaint—courtly rules that no one lives by anyway. Certainly not something to get exercised over.
At the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, in a press conference with cast members of The Golden Compass, a reporter asked if there was any pressure to tone down the anti-Christian elements of the story. It fell to the young Eva Green, the former Bond girl who plays the beautiful witch queen Serafina Pekkala, to answer.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t ans— I don’t know what it’s going to be like. But, um, religion is present; you can’t avoid it; it’s going to be there. People are going to be, ‘Oh, my God.’ You don’t know. It’s a very tricky subject. Chris [Weitz] can answer that. I don’t want to … say something bad.”
When pushed about the book’s “subversive elements,” she said: “It’s very metaphysical, philosophical, about God—but not in a bad way. You know people love ‘Oh, my God, it’s anti-Christian.’ It’s not at all; it’s highly spiritual.”
Pity poor Green. This may have been her mangled attempt to follow orders. At the festival, the studio had delivered a sheet of talking points to the hotel room of at least one cast member, Sam Elliott, who plays a Texas aeronaut in the film. According to Elliott, the talking points instructed that if the question of Pullman’s religious views came up, the actors should just “avoid it and play stupid.” The message they all agreed on was something along the lines of, “How can I possibly tell what Pullman had in mind?”
Still, Green’s reply, with its unintended flashes of id, rang with a certain Hollywood authenticity. This could be Paris Hilton reading her Bible in prison. Or Madonna preaching about Kabbalah. You can almost see Pullman cringing at the standard Tinseltown crypto-Buddhist babble. Be Spiritual. Praise the Divine. Offend No One. Then say, Ommmm.
Hollywood is in somewhat the same position as Las Vegas these days. It went from being the capital of sin to Disneyland, and now it’s landed somewhere in between. It tries to keep the sins hidden away and outwardly present itself as a defender of American virtues: justice, individual freedom, and the power of one innocent soul to save the world. The Golden Compass should not offend, or be controversial at all, Weitz swears. It will certainly not, heaven forbid, offer any critique of religion. “The movie’s first job is to beguile the audience for a couple of hours,” he says, and that much it can promise to do.
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