---
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.
