A group of Darwinian theorists discuss religion in Edinburgh, Scotland, the
below article was taken from the latest issue of Scientific American .
Is religion adaptive ? It is complicated: By Jessee Bering
Last weekend I traveled to Edinburgh to attend a small workshop on religion.
The group consisted of a multidisciplinary group of scholars—psychologists,
biologists, political scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists—each of
whom were studying the natural (that is, Darwinian) foundations of religious
belief and behavior. The meeting took place at a marvelously opulent hotel near
Waverly Station on Princes Street, with distant glimpses of the castle and the
Old Town district. Each morning, about ten of us, still bloated with wine and
food from the evening before, sat around an enormous lion-pawed walnut table in
a Victorian suite while the bitterly cold Scottish winds rattled the
windowpanes and rushed down the flue of the chimney, where a coal fire quietly
warmed us. Here, we hatched out a variety of ideas related to the evolutionary
puzzle of religion.
Now, since all of this probably reads to you like a bunch of spoiled academics
being paid to engage in idle theorizing on some wealthy grant agency’s dime, I
hasten to add that this was an atypical experience, as far as conferences go.
Usually on these types of trips I stay at the equivalent of a Best Western
that’s adjacent to a freeway or convenience store, not at a 5-star hotel. And
I’m usually chewing on a Tabasco flavored Slim-Jim rather than indulging in
filet mignon and crème brûlée.
Given the world’s political climate, it is hardly necessary to point out why
having a better scientific understanding of religious behavior is worthwhile.
In fact, while we were meeting in this overly decadent tearoom, a large group
protesting Israel’s recent Gaza strikes against Hamas was marching outside the
hotel, demonstrating against yet another conflict at least partially fueled by
head-scratching religious ideologies. Fortunately, the past decade has seen
tremendous and quite rapid developments in the naturalistic study of religion.
Topics such as God, souls and sin are no longer being treated as “outside
science” but rather as biologically based emanations of the evolved human mind,
subject to psychological scrutiny like any other aspect of human nature. And I
can only hope that soon these scientific discoveries will translate to real
world intervention strategies in the reconciliation of spiritually based social
conflicts.
Here is the fly-on-the-wall’s view of just a few of the topics discussed last
weekend:
As the resident psychologist, I reiterated my empirically based argument that
belief in the afterlife is more or less an inevitable byproduct of human
consciousness. Since we cannot conceptualize the absence of consciousness, even
non-believers are susceptible to visions of the hereafter.
Political scientist and evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson from the
University of Edinburgh presented his argument that the idea of omniscient
supernatural agents served an adaptive social policing function in the
ancestral past. Johnson reasons that this would have encouraged individuals in
groups to conform to group sanctions out of the fear of divine punishment, thus
lessening the chances of social fission. This phenomenon would have been
biologically adaptive since larger groups meant better chances of survival and
reproductive success for individual members. It’s a bit like Santa Claus
knowing whether we’re bad or good (but Santa doesn’t cause you to suffer renal
failure, kill your crops, or sentence you to everlasting torment).
Anthropologist Richard Sosis summarized his “costly signaling” hypothesis of
religious behavior. The gist of Sosis’s clever theory is that people engage in
all sorts of costly religious behaviors—wasting time on rituals, wearing
uncomfortable clothes, spending their hard-earned money—because, in doing so,
they are advertising their commitment to the religious in-group. In other
words, if you’re willing to do things such as cut off your child’s foreskin,
pay a regular alms tax of 2.5 percent of your net worth or sit twiddling your
thumbs for two hours every Sunday morning on a hard church pew, then your
fellow believers will assume that you’re really one of them and can therefore
be trusted.
Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers from Rutgers University, meanwhile,
discussed the possible role of psychological self-deception in the realm of
religion and reviewed the impossible to ignore evidence that religiosity
positively effects human health. And Westmont College biologist Jeff Schloss,
who has worked extensively on the theological implications of Darwinism, gently
compelled us to consider what these scientific developments in the study of
religion will ultimately mean philosophically.
Schloss’s point is the one that gets most people thinking. “That’s all fine and
dandy about the scientific research, but what does it all tell us about the
existence of God?” What if, as I suggested in my answer to this year’s “Annual
Question” at Edge, the data suggest that God is actually just a psychological
blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? Would you still
believe if you knew God were a byproduct of your evolved mental architecture?
This research committee in Edinburgh is one of three I’m currently serving on
to investigate the evolutionary bases of religion. Another is the “Explaining
Religion” project (EXREL) with its hub at Oxford University led by
anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse. And there’s even a new sub-discipline in
evolutionary biology called “Evolutionary Religious Studies” being spearheaded
by David Sloan Wilson at SUNY-Binghamton. All of these projects promise to
infuse new life into the tired old religion versus science debate by injecting
actual data into the discussions.
At the very least, I hope that this type of research helps people get past the
simplistic pigeonholing that all too often occurs when discussing science and
religion—that religious people are “airheads and stubborn to science” and
scientists are “cold materialists without a spiritual side.” I, for one, am a
bit of both of these things.
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