Evolution doesn't explain religion

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Contents

Claim

Evolution doesn't explain religion.

Source

Responses

  1. There have been many explanations for religion within an evolutionary framework, mostly focussing on group cohesion. Social structuring and cooperation provided the frameworks for religion. By creating religions, groups could find ways to better enforce social mores, form group identity and pass on traditions that benefited the group, such as cooking specific herbs to make remedies (as evidenced by "medicine men" in Native Americans and other cultures). Therefore, the organisms with religion in their group would be better able to pass on their genes for that behaviour.
  2. Humans have evolved to make false positives rather than false negatives. That is, we are more likely to see agents where there are none than we are to miss agents when they are there (for example, we are more likely to interpret a shadow as a human or animal, and it is not likely we will attribute a human shadow to a complex arrangement of tree branches). This confers an advantage to the person, because it is better to be scared for nothing than to overlook potential danger. However, it also results in situations where agents are imagined to explain mysterious situations where no natural cause is obvious - such as gremlins to explain lost items, demons to explain mental disorders and nature gods to explain complex harvest seasons. Humans have also evolved the capacity to try to manipulate each other and other agents, so folk religions may have originated to gain control over these phenomena, with shamans and priests offering communication with these agents in return for material possessions or status. Humans threaten other peoples’ survival. In traditional societies people also depend on each other. People need family and friends to share food when they are short of it, to defend them from dangerous animals, human enemies and other threats etc. Overlooking a kindness and not returning a favour can be life threatening. The person who was overlooked is less likely to help you or your relatives in future. Religious people tend to believe that god, the gods, the spirits are behind good things as well as bad things that happen. Showing gratitude for good things is an important part of many or most religions as is asking for mercy when bad things happen.
  3. Evolution does explain religion. As stated above, religion came about as a result of social structuring and early, primitive man's psychology; for example, the need to explain the unexplainable, such as, "Who am I?", and "Why am I here?", along with why things happen without an obvious cause (drought, famine, disease, natural disasters). Also, once established, religion provided a hierarchy in the society, which in turn gave power to those who provided these answers. Once begun, it was left to expand and grow unfettered by modern skepticism. As with the early Christian church, religion ruled early society.
  4. Natural selection has been applied conjecturally to the world of ideas -- the result being known as memetics. Clearly, any religion which instructed its followers not to proselytize and not to have children will die out, as in the case of the Shakers. Many of the most successful religions (Catholicism; Mormonism in the American West) encourage followers to have children and raise them in the church; others (Evangelical Protestantism) encourage proselytization and missionary work. Religious belief has been analogized to a cultural gene or virus, as by Richard Dawkins and Gary Cziko.
  5. Because religions are social institutions, there is no legitimate reason for evolutionists to have an imperative to explain Religion. Demanding that Evolution's legitimacy rests on explaining social institutions is nonsense.
  6. Recent work involving altruism and Third Party Punishment reveals a link between identification of in-group versus out-group members and enforcement of norms constructive to reciprocal altruism. Additionally, studies into the limitations of the inferred limit of people one is able to cognitively track social relationships with (Dunbar's Number) have implied a maximum limitation for adaptive altruistic behavior for humans. Religion, assumed to be the combination of perception of chaotic processes in nature and the sociocultural creations of humans, includes symbology, a degree of demonstrable sacrifice to participate, and a set of behavioral norms. After a fashion, religion may be adaptive in the form of expanding the numbers of a reciprocal, altruistic group beyond the limitations of the cognitive faculties of the human brain.
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Fallacies contained in this claim

  • Appeal to Ignorance (I don't understand this, it can't have happened)
  • Red Herring (religion has nothing to do with biological evolution)
  • Equivocation ("evolution" is used to refer to non-biological evolution, which is outside the paradigm of the creationist objection to Darwinism)

External Links

Further Reading

  1. Boyer, Pascal, Religion Explained.
  2. Konner, Melvin, 2002. The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, New York: Henry Holt and Co.
  3. Burkert, Walker, 1996. Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [It concentrates on early cultural aspects of religion but still has some relevance to religion's origin.]
  4. Dunbar, Robin, 2003 (14 June). Evolution: Five big questions: 5. What's God got to do with it? New Scientist 178(2399): 38-39.

Related claims

See Also

Acknowledgments

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