Since the 19th cen­tu­ry, thinkers like Lud­wig Feuer­bach, Friedrich Niet­zsche, and Sig­mund Freud have the­o­rized reli­gion as a strict­ly psy­cho­log­i­cal and anthro­po­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non born of the ten­den­cy of the human mind to project its con­tents out into the heav­ens. The Dar­win­ian rev­o­lu­tion pro­vid­ed anoth­er framework—one ground­ed in exper­i­men­tal science—to explain reli­gion. Social sci­en­tists like Pas­cal Boy­er have inte­grat­ed these par­a­digms in com­pre­hen­sive accounts of the ori­gins of reli­gious belief, and in the­o­ries like E.O. Wilson’s Socio­bi­ol­o­gy, evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy pro­vides an expla­na­tion for all social phe­nom­e­na, of which reli­gion is but one among many human adap­ta­tions. Advances in neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy have fur­thered sci­en­tists’ under­stand­ing of reli­gion as a prod­uct not only of human con­scious­ness, but also of the phys­i­cal struc­ture of the brain. In exper­i­ments like the “God hel­met,” for exam­ple, sci­en­tists can induce reli­gious expe­ri­ences by prod­ding cer­tain areas of sub­jects’ brains.

It is in this con­text of psy­chol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, and evo­lu­tion­ary and neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy that we need to sit­u­ate the lec­ture above from Stan­ford pro­fes­sor Robert Sapol­sky. Where many crit­ics of reli­gion explic­it­ly reject reli­gious author­i­ty and belief, Sapol­sky, though him­self “stri­dent­ly athe­is­tic,” has no such agen­da. As an arti­cle in the Col­orado Springs Inde­pen­dent puts it, “he’s no Christo­pher Hitchens.” Sapol­sky freely admits, as do many scientists—religious and non—that reli­gion has many ben­e­fits: “It makes you feel bet­ter. It tends to decrease anx­i­ety, and it gets you a com­mu­ni­ty.” How­ev­er, he claims, these pos­i­tives are the result of evo­lu­tion­ary adap­ta­tions, not proofs of any super­nat­ur­al realm. In fact, reli­gios­i­ty, Pro­fes­sor Sapol­sky argues above, is bio­log­i­cal­ly based and relat­ed to seem­ing­ly much less adap­tive traits like obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der, schiz­o­phre­nia, and epilep­sy.

Part of a lec­ture course on “Human Behav­ioral Biol­o­gy” at Stan­ford, the reli­gion lec­ture is one Sapol­sky admits he is “most ner­vous for, sim­ply because this one peo­ple wind up hav­ing strong opin­ions about.” As he moves ahead, he presents his case (with occa­sion­al inter­rup­tions from his stu­dents) for reli­gios­i­ty as a result of nat­ur­al selec­tion, con­nect­ing belief to the selec­tion of genes for dis­eases like Tay-Sachs, the exis­tence of which can help to explain dispir­it­ing his­tor­i­cal cas­es like the Euro­pean Pogroms against the Jews in the Mid­dle Ages. Through­out his lec­ture, Sapol­sky makes con­nec­tions between reli­gios­i­ty and biol­o­gy, the­o­riz­ing, for exam­ple, that St. Paul had tem­po­ral-lobe epilep­sy.

At the end of his lec­ture, around the 1:19:30 mark, Sapol­sky issues a dis­claimer about what he’s “not say­ing”: “I’m not say­ing ‘you got­ta be crazy to be reli­gious.’ That would be non­sense. Nor am I say­ing, even, that most peo­ple who are, are psy­chi­atri­cal­ly sus­pect.” What he is say­ing, he con­tin­ues, is that “the same exact traits which in a sec­u­lar con­text are life-destroy­ing” and “sep­a­rate you from the com­mu­ni­ty” are, “at the core of what is pro­tect­ed, what is sanc­tioned, what is reward­ed, what is val­ued in reli­gious set­tings.” What fas­ci­nates Sapol­sky is the “under­ly­ing biol­o­gy” of these traits. Sapol­sky even con­fess­es that he “most regrets” his own break with the Ortho­dox reli­gion of his upbring­ing, but that his athe­ism is some­thing he “appears to be unable to change.” The ques­tions Sapol­sky asks broad­ly cov­er the phys­i­cal deter­min­ism of gain­ing faith, and of los­ing it, which he says, is “just as bio­log­i­cal.” What we are to make of all this is a ques­tion he leaves open.

You can watch Sapolsky’s full series of lec­tures on Behav­ioral Biol­o­gy here, and for a ful­ly anno­tat­ed sum­ma­ry of his reli­gios­i­ty lec­ture above, see this site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion

Biol­o­gy That Makes Us Tick: Free Stan­ford Course by Robert Sapol­sky

Do Your­self a Favor and Watch Stress: Por­trait of a Killer (with Stan­ford Biol­o­gist Robert Sapol­sky)

Dopamine Jack­pot! Robert Sapol­sky on the Sci­ence of Plea­sure

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness