Of all this reading, Alper liked evolutionary biology best. The meat of his book is a loopy riff on that discipline's standard explanation of religion: "Our species' awareness of inevitable death placed such a strong pressure on our cognitive evolution that over the course of millions of years -- during the emergence of the hominids -- nature selected those members who had developed a physical consciousness, a built-in perception that there exists an alternate, transcendental reality that supersedes the limitations of the finite physical realm, one that can only offer us pain, anxiety, and inevitable death." So, he concluded that "spiritual consciousness represents nature's white lie, an inherited misperception selected into our species, for the purpose of alleviating us of some of the anxiety caused by our awareness of death."

Alper's evolutionary argument requires him to describe religion in universal terms, but his ideas about religion are strictly Western, monotheistic and personal; and his representation of religious worldviews is exclusively dualistic. "Since the dawn of our species, every culture has maintained a dualistic interpretation of reality. In other words, every culture -- no matter how isolated -- has perceived reality as consisting of two distinct substances or realms: the physical and the spiritual." This argument is a clay pigeon, and could be blown away from any number of angles. The word "Asia" should suffice.

This one-dimensional definition of religion exemplifies the intellectual complacency of Alper's earnest project -- a hubristic, closed-minded certainty that the world can be fully understood in empirical terms. But this intellectual orientation is not the sole province of cranks. It's shared by many legitimate scientists, including E.O. Wilson, though he pads his dismissal of religion ("self-deception" that gives our species an "adaptive edge") with disingenuous humility: "And yes -- lest I forget -- I may be wrong". (Incidentally, Wilson's blurb for "The God Part of the Brain" reads, in full: "Excellent.")

The trouble with empiricist criticisms of religion such as Wilson's and Alper's is that they are not criticisms of religion per se. Their actual targets are Christian ideologues (usually church leaders, the current pope being the supreme example) who believe that right doctrine is the essence of true religion, and who defend that position in an idiom that properly belongs to science. Religious doctrine cannot be empirically proven, nor can it be defended on empirical grounds, by invoking the transcendent God. A fundamentalist's claim that he reads the "literal" truth of Scripture is shot through with test-tube envy. It's his need to compete with the authority of modern science, not his attention to Christian tradition, that makes the religious ideologue claim to possess clear knowledge of the transcendent God's will.

Most Christians, most of the time, experience religion's power to explain the world in more modest and more glancing terms than those of a papal bull. For most of us, neither Maria nor God are problems to be solved. Faith may involve thought, but for most of us faith isn't fundamentally an intellectual posture. It is something that we do, involving all of our faculties, all of our bodies. Faith is living in relationship to God, a relationship that manifests itself in love of the world.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"