religion doesn't evolve

Marine biologist and former White House science adviser Jeff Schweitzer is not much impressed by speculations about a god gene and the evolution of religion. Nothing here about Higgs-Boson, though. (He's responding in part to Nicholas Wade's new book on the subject.) Thanks for the link, Dean. And oh, btw: the Hitchens response to the Googlers at 33'10" when he's asked about people who feel a need for the communal and other benefits of church membership but don't really believe any of the doctrine, and who seek out "the least obnoxious" faith and take it half-heartedly: "This used to be called the Church of England, or the Unitarians-- of whom Bertrand Russell remarked  that they believe in one god MAXIMUM." Hitch also mentions the late novelist Peter DeVries, who said the movement from poly- to mono-theism is progress, next step being non- or a- or anti-theism altogether. That presumably would be the apotheosis of religious evolution! (And is Hitch's response to Robert Wright.)

First, religion did not evolve through the mechanisms of natural selection. The idea of god perpetuates itself through cultural transmission. Second, atheists as a rule do not claim that religion is "useless" at all, fully recognizing that an appeal to an unseen force had benefits to early human societies unschooled in the sciences. Third, even if the absurd claim were true that religion evolved through natural selection, that would in no way challenge the tenet that god is nothing but a silly myth. The "evolution" of religion would simply mean that perpetuating a ridiculous myth had a selective advantage, nothing more, and would certainly not lend credence to the myth itself...

Religion was born not from some god gene, but of fear of the unknown, of the drive to control the uncontrollable, of the need to have mastery over one's fate in the face of an uncertain world. The first ideas of religion arose not from any awe of nature's wonder and order that would imply an invisible intelligent designer, but rather from concerns for the events of everyday life and how the vast unknown of nature affected daily existence. To allay fears of disease, death, starvation, cold, injury and pain, people fervently hoped that they could solicit the aid of greater powers, hoped deeply that they could somehow control their fate, and trusted that the ugly reality of death did not mean the end. Hope and fear combine powerfully in a frightening world of unknowns to stimulate comforting fantasies and myths about nature's plans.

The human brain is extraordinarily adept at posing questions, but simply abhors the concept of leaving any unanswered. We are unable to accept "I don't know," because we cannot turn off our instinct to see patterns and to discern effect from cause. We demand that there be a pattern, that there be cause and effect, even when none exist. So we make up answers when we don't know. We develop elaborate creation myths, sun gods, rain gods, war gods and gods of the ocean. We believe we can communicate with our gods and influence their behavior, because by doing so we gain some control, impose some order, on the chaotic mysteries of the world. By making up answers to dull the sting of ignorance, we fool ourselves into thinking we explain the world. Religion was our first attempt at physics and astronomy...

Wright vs. Hitchens

Robert Wright (Evolution of God) and Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great) disagree about the future of the God concept, in this netcam debate from Wright's "bloggingheads" site. Neither is at his best, but it will be of interest to some of us in the A&S class.

And speaking of evolution and religion... "According to Nicholas Wade (How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures) religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. They bind us into groups. Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behavior, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related. We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources.

Wade holds that natural selection can operate on groups, not just on individuals, a contentious position among evolutionary thinkers. He does not see religion as what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called a spandrel — a happy side effect of evolution (or, if you’re a dyspeptic atheist, an unhappy one). He does not agree with the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that religion is a byproduct of our overactive brains and their need to attribute meaning and intention to a random world. He doesn’t perceive religious ideas as memes — that is to say, the objects of a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He thinks we have a God gene..."

What does he mean, "we"? And what's so great about being bound into a group, when your group is small and exclusive? But that's Robert Wright's point: our groups are expanding, "evolving," becoming more inclusive. But "we" are still killing one another over our different religious commitments. That's Christopher Hitchens' point. They're all correct. So who's right? And who's really dyspeptic?

"God" evolves?

Okay, I know I said in Intro class today that I'd like to discourage further work this semester on God... but I take it back, in case anyone wants to try and shed some light on the "God gene" issue (which Dan Dennett tackled in Breaking the Spell*). Is this good news or not?

...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.

It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.

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. Nicholas Wade, "The Evolution of the God Gene"

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