Last Week, Nicholas Wade, author of The Faith Instinct, wrote an article for the New York Times arguing that religion came into existence because it allowed people to get along, thus allowing early civilizations to form. According to Wade, this means religion is now a fundamental human behavior via evolution, and that atheists won't like hearing this:
. . . Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.A few days ago, Sam Harris chimed in on the issue with a letter to the editor:
For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.
In his recent article about the evolutionary origins of religion, Nicholas Wade claimed that atheists would be reluctant to accept that religion might have conferred some adaptive advantages upon our ancestors. As one of the atheists whom Mr. Wade may have had in mind, I disagree.As usual, I'm with Harris.
If religious belief helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, perhaps because it increased group altruism in the face of territorial violence, this would not even slightly suggest that it is currently useful, much less true.
There are, needless to say, many traits that may have helped our ancestors propagate their genes that we would be wise to outgrow. Rape is also a universal feature of human life, and may have been selected for, but who would conclude on this basis that rape is morally defensible?
The tension between atheism and biology suggested in the article does not exist. In fact, there is no logical space in which it could exist. The reasons to doubt the evolutionary origins of religion have nothing to do with atheism; they relate entirely to the controversies over group selection to which Mr. Wade alluded.
2 comments:
Why would atheists be upset about this? All it shows is that religion isn't true but had a purpose in the past. Hell, Daniel Dennett wrote an entire book on this very subject!
This is exactly what I've been saying in terms of religion and its need to survive in a modern society.
It was indeed useful at one point. It can even be argued that without it, societies would have taken longer to form. But now that we have gone past the need for a supernatural reason to stay united against a common enemy, religion has outlived its usefulness (also considering that all/almost all of its benefits can be gained through other sources).
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