Field of Science

Drat, religion evolved

Nicholas Wade promotes his book in the NYT (fair game):
For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.
Really? Why not? For me it makes a lot of sense. It's one among several workable hypotheses.
For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.
As an atheist, that's how I would put it, but I doubt this is going to sway many believers.
But the evolutionary perspective on religion does not necessarily threaten the central position of either side. That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned. [Emphasis added.]
Yeah, for believers who aren't literalists. But what of the Baptists and the Evangelicals, etc.?

Wade describes one hypothesis of the function of religion way back when, and I'll add that the best model to fit this hypothesis is one where humans evolved and then started to make up religion all on their own, with no help from the supernatural.
The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community. Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal.
Humans before God, so to speak.
Could the evolutionary perspective on religion become the basis for some kind of detente between religion and science? Biologists and many atheists have a lot of respect for evolution and its workings, and if they regarded religious behavior as an evolved instinct they might see religion more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles. Religion is often blamed for its spectacular excesses, whether in promoting persecution or warfare, but gets less credit for its staple function of patching up the moral fabric of society. But perhaps it doesn’t deserve either blame or credit. If religion is seen as a means of generating social cohesion, it is a society and its leaders that put that cohesion to good or bad ends.
The problem, of course, is not that religion had a function useful in forming human societies, but that that function is no longer needed, and that religion now largely serves to oppress people and causes all sorts of calamities. The spectacular excesses of religion are, either way, completely unnecessary - they don't promote social cohesion much, do they?

6 comments:

  1. But religion does promote social cohesion...within small sub-societies. To the detriment of society as a whole, of course, but I think that the members of those sub-societies would see that as a feature, not a bug, since it means that they get to feel special. The idea is to persuade society as a whole to join them in their brand of special, which makes the tendancy to religiously-based conflict completely beside the point.

    Or, if there are no Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, your-choice-of-denominations, there won't be any you-name-its. It's not for them to make the changes, it's for the rest of the world to change...at which point, religion becomes a wonderful source of social cohesion!

    (This may not be as coherent or as relevant as I think. It's Monday. Sorry.)

    cicely

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  2. Or, shorter, religion is a source of social cohesion, but it's not the source we're looking for.

    cicely

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  3. I recently finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, and he pitches a similar early purpose for organized religion... namely, to justify kleptocracy. :D Which maybe turned out to be a good thing in the long run, because it might have allowed larger and more complex states to develop. Meh, anyway, yeah, that religion might have been useful tens of thousands of years ago is an interesting question for historians, but not for setting public policy.

    I had a major problem with the following statement by Wade, and I think you failed to catch the most objectionable part of it:

    "Biologists and many atheists have a lot of respect for evolution and its workings, and if they regarded religious behavior as an evolved instinct they might see religion more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles."

    Ugh. This stupid idea that something having an evolutionary basis somehow makes it okay is downright offensive. What if, as many suspect, racism has its roots in evolved instincts? Should we then see racism more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles?

    Or what if, as some scientists more controversially have proposed, rape is an evolved instinct? Should we then see rape more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles?

    Please. That something evolved is not a justification for it. At all. Ever.

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  4. Ugh. This stupid idea that something having an evolutionary basis somehow makes it okay is downright offensive.

    Okay, agreed.

    And Cicely, it's true that religion still promotes social cohesion on some scale, but as you suggest, I think it's pretty obvious that it's not working very well for the global society.

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  5. Seeing the silver lining... I was flipping through the print version of the Sunday NYT this morning (it's a luxury my wife insists on, and the only print newspaper we get) and I saw the real version of Wade's article, complete with a giant pull quote about how "the idea that religion is an evolved trait is upsetting to both believers and atheists".

    Although Wade's arguments are lukewarm, and his characterization of the implications plain stupid, it warmed my heart anyway to see that. Here is a 2/3 page opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times, and they feel the need to make sure the pull quote directly addresses the atheistic position. And we're seeing stuff like this more and more. Atheists may still be the least trusted group in America, but we're part of the national conversation now. That's a tremendous step forward.

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  6. I too think it's nice and most likely beneficial in the long run that atheism is discussed in any shape or form in the media. Even if the sentence in question is plainly stupid like that one.

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