It is both the glory and the tragedy of humanity that it never forgets anything. Like the layers of geological strata that go deep down into the earth beneath our feet, the beliefs and superstitions accumulated by humanity from its earliest infancy remain buried in all our minds, just like those geological layers. And because everyone’s biography from childhood onwards is a kind of reprise of mankind’s history, those early layers are vivid in childhood, and by their vividness leave a shadow on the mind thereafter. This is the source and explanation of superstition, including its organised form as religion.
The single most significant of those early geological layers of the mind is the belief that everything is animate – that is, is in some sense an agent, an actor: the rock that trips your foot, the tree that sways in the forest, are somehow conscious things with purposes or intentions that we instinctively feel might be malevolent. More so are the ghosts and demons that come out at night. This is the direct result of early man’s effort to understand the world around him. He was conscious of his own agency; he picked up a stone and threw it, and was therefore the motive force behind the stone’s flight. He projected from his own felt capacity as an agent to everything moving, growing, happening around him in the world, for – he thought – everything that happens must have a motive force behind it, a will or an intention, just like his own, even if he could not see the agency responsible for it.
He therefore explained the thunder as an invisible and mightier version of himself walking on the clouds. Lightning was a spear hurled by that being, in threat or punishment. The sound of the wind in the trees was whispering, the trees themselves observed him as he crept through the forest, and he might knock on their trunks to propitiate the spirits within. (We still knock on wood to avert bad luck.)
Every superstition has its origin in ancient tales and beliefs about the myriads of agencies swarming throughout nature, many of them antipathetic to humans and therefore in need of being placated by little rituals or invocations. We do not now see these superstitions as our earliest science and technology (science: explanation; technology: prayer, ritual) because the organised religions have swept up the powers of nature and removed them – first to the mountain tops, then outside space and time altogether, as education increased and better understandings of nature supervened.
One of the pleasantest feelings is getting rid of one’s superstitions, by boldly ignoring them – go on: walk under that ladder, don’t throw a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder, step on the pavement’s cracks. The resulting sense of liberation, of maturity, is a refreshment.
Are direct arguments against superstitions and – more importantly – religious beliefs likely to dissuade their votaries? The anecdotal evidence seems to suggest otherwise; robust full-frontal attacks by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it is said, only annoy the faithful and make them dig in further.
I am not so sure about this. In my personal experience waverers and Sunday-only observers can find forthright challenges to religious pretensions a relief and a liberation; it gives them the reason, sometimes the courage, to abandon those shreds of early-acquired religious habit that cling around their ankles and trip them up.
Still, Charles Darwin had a point in thinking that ‘direct arguments against [religion] produce hardly any effect on the public, and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science’.