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?