For many scientists who study it, religion should be placed into one of two camps: 1) religion is an aberration, a mental virus; or 2) religion is an adaptation–that religion enhanced the survival of Believers. A well-written article by Robin Marantz Henig explores this issue in the New York Times. The title is “HeavenBound: a Scientific Exploration of How We Have Come to Believe in God.” [1] Henig sums up the alternatives by reference to blood. A trait might be “adaptive,” like the ability of blood cells to transport oxygen. On the other hand, a trait might be simply a byproduct, such as the “redness” of blood.
Is blood prominent because it’s red or because it actually carries oxygen?
Several notable scientists and philosophers lead the charge from the first camp (that religion is a byproduct). One of them is Richard Dawkins, who argues that “religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident.” Others falling into this camp include Sam Harris, Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer and Daniel Dennett. These believers in religion as a “byproduct” would also include Stephen Jay Gould, who proposed the use of the term “spandrel” to describe traits that have no adaptive value of their own.
If religion is a byproduct or a “spandrel,” of what is it a byproduct or “spandrel” of? Psychologists have looked carefully at several candidates: agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.
We see agents everywhere, it turns out, even in inanimate objects. The byproduct argument is that seeing agency is more adaptive as a general rule. “If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you’re still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.”
The second candidate is causal reasoning, which we also see everywhere, even when the phenomenon is random. We have a hard time dealing with the possibility that things just happen, including claims of supernatural events. “Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.”
A third candidate is “theory of mind.” Synonyms for this mental module include “intentional stance” and “social cognition.” Another synonym is “folk psychology.” Whatever it is called, this mental module “allows us to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at the heart of everything from marriage to office politics to poker.” The theory of mind is so pervasive because it is so important to our social functioning. It allows us to intuit the existence of minds that we cannot see or feel. This opens the door to the belief in minds that are unconnected to bodies. It opens the door to beliefs in souls and gods.
These three mental module candidates set us up to believe in what Pascal Boyer found: ubiquitous examples of “minimally counterintuitive” believes. Religious folks don’t believe in just anything at all. If it gets too bizarre, it will be rejected by religious believers. On the other hand, if it’s just a bit of a stretch, our mental modules kick in and adopt it. Therefore, we believe in an invisible gods and gods who know everything. On the other hand, we don’t have religions that believe in ice cream cones that can dance. That’s just too much
Henig reviews literature showing that the fear of death is at the heart of almost every religion. Death is a grim certainty, and religion is there to offer hope and solace. We are susceptible to such beliefs, because of something Henig describes well:
A large part of any relationship takes place in our minds . . . so it’s natural for it to continue much as before and after the other person’s death. It is easy to forget that your sister is dead when you reach for the phone to call her, since your relationship was based in so much on memory and imagined conversations even when she was alive.
The second major way scientist think of religion is that it is not so much an aberration as an adaptation, an activity that increases the likelihood of survival. Prominent among these adaptationist thinkers is David Sloan Wilson:
My purpose is to see if human groups in general, and religious groups in particular, qualify as organismic . . . religion offered an opportunity to show that group selection was right after all.
How would “group selection” work? Religious sentiments,
some adaptationists say, made the faithful better at finding and storing food, for instance and helped them attract better mates because of their reputations for morality, obedience and sober living. The advantage might have worked at the group level too, with religious groups outlasting others because they were more cohesive, more likely to contain individuals willing to make sacrifices for the group and more adept at sharing resources and preparing for warfare.
Richard Sosis argues that “rituals are a way of signaling a sincere commitment to the religion’s core beliefs, thereby earning loyalty from others in the group.” Indeed, experiments have shown that religious communes are more cooperative than secular communes.
Then again, the best success might belong to those groups that are actually mixtures of people who are secular and people who are religious believers. Henig quotes Wilson on this point:
What seems to be an adversarial relationship between theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor that keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel.
This article was originally published in March, 2007. It is detailed and carefully substantiated with references to scientists who fall into each of the major camps. I highly recommend it if this issue of the interplay between religion and evolution is of interest to you.
After you finish reading Henig’s article, consider where you stand on this issue. Is religion an aberration or an adaptation?
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