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+---
+title: Harari’s Sapiens on Religion
+description: >-
+    In which I discuss why I think Harari’s characterisation of religion
+    is inadequate because it’s too materialistic.
+pubDate:
+    year: 2024
+    month: 01
+    day: 14
+---
+
+I’ve been slowly re-reading Yuval Noah Harari’s 2014 classic,
+<a href="https://www.ynharari.com/book/sapiens-2">Sapiens</a>,
+which apart from being ridiculously over-scoped and hilariously
+under-evidenced, is proving delightfully entertaining.
+
+I’ve just finished chapter 12, covering the world history of all
+religion in thirty pages. Of course, at that level of brevity,
+there will be many deficiencies. But here’s some thoughts - not
+terribly well organised - which stand out to me.
+
+Hurari generally assumes a materialist metaphysic (a problem which
+blights the book more generally). Nothing exists except physical stuff.
+This gives him severe tunnel vision. As a consequence of this
+restricting metaphysic, he is forced to adopt limiting accounts of what
+the role of religion is in world history, and therefore what religion is.
+
+> The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman
+> legitimacy to [all social orders and hierarchies].
+> Religion can thus be defined as <em>a system of human norms and
+> values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order</em>.
+> <footer>p. 234</footer>
+
+It might seem a little unfair to criticise Harari for giving a
+materialist account of religion. <i>Sapiens</i> is, after all, a
+materialist world history.
+
+But this account is just one extreme example of how that project, to
+give a materialist account of world history, will inevitably lack the
+metaphysical resources to really understand the human story.
+
+On Harari’s view, any human enterprise which attempts to understand
+that which transcends direct human experience is at best an effort in
+imaginative story-telling. All scientific theory, theology, ethics and
+metaphysics either contorted out of all recognition into a pragmatic
+fiction or is cast to the flames.
+
+In particular, it’s a view which is incapable of taking seriously some
+of the most important questions human beings have grappled with in the
+course of their history. Those who know me won’t be surprised at which
+ones I’m going to pick out: who was the being which made their covenant
+with Abraham? How is that promise being fulfilled? And who the heck was
+Jesus of Nazareth?
+
+If Harari’s characterisation of religion is adequate - and the Abrahamic
+faiths come under that banner - then those questions are reduced to
+nothing more profound than Doctor Who fans arguing over ‘canon’. The
+question of who God is becomes a mere tool for the organisation of
+society, rather than a substantial and important question on a matter
+of fact.
+
+This is a shortcoming for its own sake: a materialist account of
+religion cannot adequately account for the phenomenon of religion
+itself.
+
+But it is also a shortcoming even by its own lights. Without giving
+serious consideration to the substantial matter of what Harari calls
+‘religion’ (which, to his mind, includes the Abrahamic faiths,
+Hinduism, paganism, animism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucianism,
+capitalism, communism and Nazism), even the material facts are
+inexplicable. Why would, as Harari is keen to point out, out, people
+fight and die over and over again for a fiction?
+
+The material facts themselves prove that ‘religion’ as he construes it
+is not window dressing to the real story of history. It cannot merely
+serve as a mechanism in the churning of material history. It is itself
+the centre of the story.