Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
Common viewpoint among some scientists: all religions are
delusions that prevent people from embracing science,
secularism, and modernity. The attacks of 9/11 turned out to be
a stimulus to explicit discussion of this topic.
New Atheism:
• Sam Harris: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future
of Reason (2004)
• Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion (2006)
• Daniel Dennett: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural
Phenomenon (2006)
• Christopher Hitchens: God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything (2007)
Harris, Dawkins and Dennett “claimed to speak for science and to
exemplify the values of science—particularly its open-mindedness
and its insistence that claims be grounded in reason and empirical
evidence, not faith and emotion”.
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
Harris:
• “Throughout this book, I am criticizing faith in its ordinary,
scriptural sense – as belief in, and life orientation toward,
certain historical and metaphysical propositions”.
• “A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything
else in a person’s life”.
Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett all take religion to be a set of beliefs
about supernatural agents.
The New Atheist
model of religious
psychology
e.g., the belief that martyrs will be rewarded with 72 virgins in
heaven causes a man to undertake a suicide attack
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
The New Atheist
model of religious
psychology
The Durkheimian model of
religious psychology
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
The New Atheist
model of religious
psychology
“The New Atheist model is based on the Platonic rationalist view
of the mind … Reason is (or at least could be) the charioteer
guiding the passions (horses). So long as reason has the proper
factual beliefs (and has control of the unruly passions), the chariot
will go in the right direction … [but, Haidt asks] to understand the
psychology of religion, should we focus on the false beliefs and
faulty reasoning of individual believers? Or should we focus on the
automatic (intuitive) processes of people embedded in social
groups that are striving to create a moral community? That depends
on what we think religion is, and where we think it comes from”.
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
All known human groups have religion in some form. So from an
evolutionary view, how do we explain the existence of religion?
According to Haidt, either you grant that religiosity is beneficial OR
you “construct a complicated multistep explanation of how humans
in all known cultures came to swim against the tide of adaptation
and do so much self-destructive religious stuff. The New Atheists
choose the latter course”.
New Atheist View:
Step 1: Hypersensitive agency detection device (e.g., we see faces in
clouds, but never clouds in faces) – all mistakes in ‘false positive’
direction. Detector tuned to maximize survival, not accuracy. Add in
shared intentionality and story-telling and pretty soon we get the
birth of supernatural agents. Belief in gods is a by-product. ‘Gullible
learning’ module (Dawkins) = believe what your parents tell you. All
these modules in place 50,000 years ago. No natural selection in
response to pressures either for or against religiosity since then.
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
Step 2: Cultural evolution. Race is on. But race not by people or
genes, but by memes. Religions are ‘heritable’, they ‘mutate’, and
they are selected. Some memes are better than others at highjacking the human mind. (Dawkins religious memes ≈ virus, Dennett
memes ≈ parasite).
Religion as Adaptive View
Other scientists (e.g., Atran, Heinrich) think that religion may be
adaptive for individuals and/or groups. Like Durkheim, they believe
that religions are sets of cultural innovations that spread to the
extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative.
Driven largely by completion among groups. But this is pure cultural
evolution: religions evolve, not peoples or their genes.
As groups take up agriculture and grow larger, their gods become
far more moralistic. Gods of larger societies are usually quite
concerned about actions that foment conflict and division within
the group. They are used to promote cooperation within the group.
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
General function of Gods: to create a moral community.
If the gods evolve (culturally) to condemn selfish and divisive
behaviors, they can then be used to promote cooperation and
trust within the group.
People behave less ethically when
they think no one can see them.
But if the Gods are always watching…
When people think that God can see
them, and will punish them, they are
much less likely to cheat, steal,
commit adultery, etc.
Gods that administer collective punishment (on the group) are
much more effective at motivating group members to police
individuals (gossip etc.).
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
Haidt thinks this is (biological) group selection, Atran & Henrich think
it is pure cultural selection (moralistic gods are too recent, in last
10,000 years). They say religions evolve, not peoples or their genes.
• If Haidt is right, we have been becoming more religious!
• An adaptation that benefits individuals in the group context, e.g.,
by making the individual more cooperative, can be called a “group
adaptation” but that does NOT make it a group-selected
adaptation
• Likewise, genes for religiosity (or a related trait) could have
continued to evolve over the last 10-50,000 years but that process
is not automatically group selection because it benefits the group
• We invoke group selection only if the trait is genetically based
AND is costly to the individual so that group selection and gene
(individual) level selection are operating in opposite directions.
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
David Sloan Wilson
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
D. S. Wilson 2005: three four evolutionary hypotheses about religion
• “For example, a social behavior can evolve by either within-group
selection (increasing the fitness of the individual relative to others
in its same group) or by between-group selection (increasing the
fitness of the group relative to other groups in the total
population)”.
• “Perhaps it was adaptive in past environments but failed to keep
pace with environmental change”.
• “Perhaps it is a costly by-product of another trait that is a product
of natural selection”.
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
D. S. Wilson 2005
…a social behavior can evolve by either
within-group selection (increasing the
fitness of the individual relative to others
in its same group) or by between-group
selection (increasing the fitness of the
group relative to other groups in the total
population).
D. S. Wilson
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
Sosis & Bressler (2003) – compared religious and secular communes
Chapt 11. Religion is a Team Sport
Costly sacrifices best predictor of long-term success for religious communes,
not for secular communes. Need to sacrilize the costly sacrifices.