Harari's Sapiens and religion

Yuval Noah Harari's bestseller Sapiens has shaped how millions of readers think about religion. In his telling, once farming led to cities and empires, people “invented stories about great gods” to bind strangers together. He also presents belief in one God as something that grew out of belief in many gods, and says biology leaves only a blind evolutionary process with no Creator and no purpose.

This paper agrees that religion can strengthen shared morals, identity and cooperation. Its objection is that Harari moves too quickly between three different kinds of claim. Saying what religion does in a society is one claim. Saying how religion began is a second, which needs historical evidence. Saying whether God exists is a third, which needs philosophical argument. Evidence for the first does not settle the second, and neither settles the third.

The authors draw on anthropology to make the point. Franz Boas and E. E. Evans-Pritchard warned against grand stories of how religion “must have” started, and Clifford Geertz showed that religion is a whole way of seeing reality, not a tool someone built for a purpose. Language and family structures help people cooperate too, but nobody thinks they were consciously invented for that. On monotheism, the authors argue that a few historical cases do not make a universal law. On science, they distinguish studying the world without reference to God, which is how science works, from concluding that there is no God, which science cannot show.

Their conclusion is that Sapiens offers a provocative way of looking at religion, not a settled finding of history, anthropology or philosophy.