For Further Reading
6
Evolutionary Explanations of Religion
Michael J. Murray
Over the last decade a small number of scientists working largely in obscurity began to ask themselves this question: is there any evidence that religion is hard-wired into the human mind? It is not hard to see why someone might ask this question. No matter where you travel around the globe, every human community, culture, tribe and nation has religion. Every human group, settled or nomadic, has religious leaders: priests, imams, monks, shamans, witch doctors and so on. And every human group that stays largely in one place has religious structures: churches, temples, pyramids, totems, shrines and the like. In light of the fact that religion is so pervasive—across both times and cultures—it is natural to think that there is something about the human mind that makes religion natural for us.
Applying the methods of their fields these scientists began to propose and test answers to this question, with some striking results. Psychologists and neuroscientists have now begun to amass some powerful evidence that human minds are in fact, if not exactly hard-wired, at least strongly predisposed to religious belief and behavior. And isn’t that just what we would expect to find, given the widespread nature of religion?
As a philosopher who does research on issues at the intersection of science and religion I have been paying close attention to this scientific research and found the results to be both fascinating and energizing. Perhaps these scientists are discovering the God-shaped vacuum that Augustine and Pascal saw in the human heart. Or perhaps they are giving empirical support for the “sense of the divine” that, Calvin argued, wells up within each of us. In any case, it seems that the evidence is lining up in favor of the claim that we have a mental gravitational attraction toward God.
As a result I was surprised—indeed shocked—to crack open the works of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to find them arguing that scientific accounts of the origin of religious belief show us that religious belief is false, unjustified or in some other way intellectually disreputable. How could showing that we have a natural disposition toward such beliefs show that?
That is the question I would like to get to by the time we reach the end of this essay. I will begin by providing some background concerning attempts by scientists to explain the origins of beliefs more generally and religious beliefs in particular. That sort of thing seems initially puzzling to some because we typically think of beliefs as explained by reasons rather than as generated by causes. So what is it that scientists engaged in this task are trying to do anyway? Second, I will describe the different types of explanations that are currently on offer when it comes to scientific accounts of religious belief. Some of these accounts argue that religion is something that evolved—that is, evolved through Darwinian process. But other scientific accounts don’t have much to say about evolution at all. It will be important to clarify this, since Christians and other theists who are resistant to evolution might be tempted to throw all of these scientific accounts of religion into the drink because of the Darwinian affiliation, and that would be a mistake. We will then turn to the central question of the essay: if one or more of these accounts is correct, what does that mean for religious belief?
Background
Since genuinely scientific psychology is a relatively new intellectual enterprise, one might be tempted to think that scientific accounts of belief are a fairly new business. That would be a mistake. In one sense, scientific accounts of the origin of beliefs go back at least as far as the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. And scientific accounts of the origin of religious belief extend back at least as far as the works of the first-century B.C. Roman philosopher Cicero. In what is arguably his most famous philosophical treatise, On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero writes as follows:
As infinite kinds of almost identical images arise continually from the innumerable atoms and flow out to us from the gods, so we should take the keenest pleasure in turning and bending our mind and reason to grasp these images, in order to understand the nature of these blessed and eternal beings.[1]
Here Cicero (parroting the thought of the even older third-century B.C. philosopher Epicurus) argued that belief in the gods was caused by a sort of divine atomic bombardment. While Cicero saw this process as arising from the activity of the gods themselves, he nonetheless conceived of the formation of religious belief as a natural process involving detectable causal pathways.
Scientific accounts of the origin of belief were a source of continuing discussion through the medieval period and into the era of the rise of modern science. Scientists gave what now appear to us to be fairly crude accounts of the workings of perception, memory, imagination, theoretical reasoning and other cognitive operations. Although they had the tools of modern experimental science at their disposal, these scientists’ explanations were often little more sophisticated than accounts offered in the premodern period. However, during this period one issue was of central importance, and it left a legacy that is crucial for understanding what is happening in contemporary psychological theorizing about the origin of religion and religious belief.
In the seventeenth century all of the major “scientists of the minds” were engaged by the question of whether any of our beliefs are hard-wired into our minds. Well, almost. The phrase “hard-wired” connotes something that arises out of the physical structures of the brain; most of these scientists still conceived of the mind as at least one aspect of an immaterial soul possessed by each human being. As a result, they cast the debate not in terms of hard-wiring but rather in terms of whether beliefs are sometimes innate or instead entirely learned by way of experience. Roughly, the English-speaking world favored the notion that all ideas were learned via experience, while those on the continent of Europe were more inclined to think that some ideas are innate.
When psychology was beginning to emerge as a genuine scientific discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the debate about innate ideas was largely regarded as settled. In part because of the work and influence of Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, scientists concluded that the evidence was squarely against the claim that we are born with any innate cognitive structures or content. However, in the last forty years or so psychologists have amassed a body of data that thoroughly refutes Piaget. Research shows that, from birth, infants possess an amazing array of both ideas and dispositions to form ideas that far outstrip the evidence available to them. These innate beliefs and dispositions make up what psychologists now call “folk beliefs,” and it appears that we have many of them—in the domains of mathematics (that one and one equal exactly two, for example), physics (that objects move continuously through space), biology (that organisms give birth to organisms of the same species), psychology (that human beings have minds) and so on. Indeed developmental psychology is an area of active scientific research in part because those working in this area are actively plumbing the extent of our native cognitive endowments.
Where do these native cognitive endowments come from? Some psychologists and evolutionary theorists think that they can explain the origin of these innate structures by appeal to the evolutionary forces of natural selection. On this view, if some of our human ancestors were born “hard-wired” with certain cognitive contents, and those contents helped them get to the place of having true and useful beliefs before others (who were forced to learn them from scratch), this may have provided an adaptive advantage which explains why these innate beliefs were selected for.
But not all scientists endorse evolutionary explanations of this sort. Many of them think that evolutionary explanations in this vein amount to unscientific, armchair speculations about our ancestral past that can never be properly tested. Critics of this sort are happy to continue to look for innate cognitive structures, but they don’t think we can say much of interest about exactly how human beings came to have those capacities.
As we will see, something similar is true when it comes to contemporary attempts to explain the origin of religious belief. Some theorists are interested in showing only that there are certain cognitive dispositions and neural structures built into us that make believing in God easy and natural for us. They take no stance on the question of whether, or how, evolutionary forces might have shaped our minds in this way. Others want to go further and argue that these dispositions and structures arose because they provided (or are connected with traits that provide) our ancestors with certain competitive advantages.
Before we go further, let me explain the parenthetical remark in the last sentence. Evolutionary scientists are interested in explaining how the forces of natural selection work on varying traits of organisms in order to explain why organisms are the way they are (and why they were the way they were). You might be tempted to think that these scientists would then reason as follows: every widespread trait in some species of organism exists and can be explained because it provided some advantage to its ancestors. That advantage was selected for, and now lots of organisms have it.
If you are tempted to think that, you should resist the temptation. Evolutionary theorists are insistent that widespread traits can have a few different sorts of causes. Some traits are explained just as described—they are widespread because they increase fitness (i.e., the ability to survive and reproduce). These traits are called “adaptations.” However, other traits might be mere byproducts of adaptations; such traits would exist even if they have no fitness benefits at all.
For example, the ability to dance is found in just about everyone (every human, that is). But even if you accept Darwinism in its entirety, no one would claim that our ability to dance evolved because it increased our fitness. It exists simply because it is adaptive for us to be able to walk gingerly on two legs, and any organism that can do that can also dance. The ability to dance is an inevitable byproduct of having the adaptive trait of gingerly two-legged walking. In evolutionary biology, such byproduct traits are called “spandrels.”
As byproducts, spandrels are not explained in terms of their fitness advantages. Some spandrels might start out as simply neutral—neither helping nor harming our fitness—but later come to have some valuable purpose (perhaps dancing evolves into a complex ritual that makes it easier to find mating partners); such traits are called “exaptations.” Some spandrels might start out as neutral and stay that way (perhaps armpit hair is an example of that). And other spandrels might actually be harmful to our fitness. If evolution is right, the fact that we eat, drink and breathe through the same hole in our heads is an evolutionary accident—but it is not ideal. If you have ever had the Heimlich maneuver performed on you, you know what I mean. That trait is a spandrel, but not an especially helpful one. Still, it is not so bad that those who have it have been weeded out of the population. So it persists.
In light of these distinctions it will not be surprising to learn that scientific accounts of religion fall into different categories. Some explanations claim that religion arises from natural cognitive dispositions, while remaining silent on the evolutionary significance of religion itself. Others argue that religion exists because it is an adaptation, that is, because engaging in religious belief and behavior increases the likelihood that one will survive and reproduce. Finally, others argue that religion is a spandrel, a byproduct of other adaptive traits. The latter camp divides into those who think that religion started out as a mere byproduct and then came to have a useful function later (an exaptation), those who think it is entirely neutral, and those who think that it is downright harmful. Readers will not be surprised to learn that Richard Dawkins and most of the New Atheists fall into the last category.
Scientific Accounts of Religion
There are, roughly speaking, five major scientific accounts of the origin of religion currently being defended. Three of those are adaptationist accounts; two are spandrel accounts.
One of the spandrel accounts, the cognitive model, is by far the most widely known and discussed. In fact, in popular treatments of scientific accounts of religion like those we find in the work of the likes of Dawkins and Dennett, it is the only one discussed. This could be because the New Atheists find spandrel accounts most plausible, but the more likely reason is that they have not done their homework in the field. Indeed, adaptationist accounts are rapidly gaining ascendancy among the specialists.
Before we turn to that most widely discussed account, I will provide a summary of the alternatives. Let’s first consider adaptationist accounts: supernatural punishment theories, costly signaling theories and group selection theories.
Adaptationist theories of religion tend to focus on one aspect that (a) they take to be characteristic of religion generally and (b) can be shown to have particular fitness benefits. In particular, all such explanations of religion—supernatural punishment theories (Johnson and Bering), costly signaling theories (Bulbulia) and group selection theories (Wilson)—argue that the adaptive character of religion arises because of its capacity to sustain cooperation among groups of individuals in the face of forces that threaten their unity.
It is uncontroversial that living in cooperative groups brings significant adaptive benefits both to the individuals in the group as well as to the group as a whole. Social organization allows groups of organisms to interact with their local environment in ways that allow them to extract greater benefits from it, and to do so with greater efficiency. Cooperating groups can work together to harvest more resources from their environments, groups of hunters can bring down more and larger game, and groups of farmers can divide their labor in order to make efficient agriculture production possible. Large cooperating groups can ward off predators and other threats. Furthermore, groups permit members to develop technical and intellectual specializations that allow specific individuals to develop unique adaptive talents that address narrow needs of the group, while leaving other needs to be handled by other members of the group. The result is that groups can have doctors, soldiers, scientists and so on, each bringing specialized and valuable assets to the group that would not be possible without the contributions of others.
However, while the potential benefits of group life are substantial, these benefits are hard to get and sustain in the face of threats of defection. For example, you and I both benefit if I agree to protect your property in return for your growing my food. But if I can get away with having you grow my food without having to spend my time protecting you, so much the better for me. The prospect of defection without loss of reward provides powerful incentives for members of the group to free-ride on the efforts of others, and this prospect constitutes the central problem of group life: it must be solved if groups of organisms are going to enjoy the adaptive power of their numbers.
So how can we sustain cooperation and scare off potential cheaters? One answer is: threaten to punish the cheaters. We set up police forces, courts, prisons and so on expressly for the purpose of providing disincentives for those who contemplate breaking the law. Of course, all of those things are very expensive, so if there were a cheaper way of sustaining group cooperation, natural selection would, in general, tend to select for it. An ideal system of punishment would be one which costs nothing, was not liable to corruption and could not be evaded.
Supernatural punishment theories argue that religions tend to give us exactly this. Gods and ancestors are able to monitor our every move (and sometimes our every thought), holding us accountable when we deviate from the demands of morality or cooperation by threats of punishment in this life or the next. As a result, on these views, religion is an adaptation which tends to “keep us in line.”
Costly signaling theories focus on the fact that religions tend to exact substantial costs on their members. Religions require people to forego not just pleasures but evolutionary necessities (through fasting, abstaining from potential sources of nutrition—cows for Hindus, pork for Jews—avoiding sex and so on), while also requiring substantial expenditures of resources (for building temples, churches and shrines, giving tithes and offerings, sacrificing children, abstaining from work on certain holy days, devoting long stretches of time to religious ritual or learning, etc.). What could be the point?
Costly signaling theorists argue that these evolutionary sacrifices are meant to serve as signs to others that individuals are indeed fully committed to the group, and thus to cooperation with its members. These costly displays thus allow those who are genuinely likely to cooperate to find one another and to affiliate. Those who are tempted to cheat would not be truly committed to the group and would thus be unwilling to put up these costly down payments. As a result, religions are adaptations that sustain cooperation by getting groups of cooperators together.
Finally, group selection theories focus on the tendency of religious groups to promote altruistic acts by group members. From an evolutionary standpoint, sacrificing my well-being for the sake of others makes no sense. The Darwinian motto is “survival of the fittest,” and that means looking out for number one. So how can religions, which promote looking out for others, survive, never mind prosper?
Group selection theories argue that we should think about groups of individuals in the same way we think about groups of cells that make up an organism. In our bodies we have certain immune cells that sacrifice themselves in order to promote the survival of the organism as a whole. Without their “willing sacrifice” we wouldn’t last long. What is true for cells and organisms, group selectionists argue, is true for organisms and groups. While the soldier who loses his life on the front line will not survive and reproduce, his sacrifice might, like that of the immune cell, advance the fortunes of his society. As a result, if societies are set up or programmed to have a certain subgroup that routinely sacrifices its interests for the larger group, this might be adaptive at a higher level of organization—the group level.
Each of these theories faces formidable difficulties, none of which I have the space to discuss here.[2] Instead, we will turn our attention to the more popular nonadaptationist explanations. For the most part these theories fall into one of two categories: cognitive theories and meme theories. Cognitive theories are predominant; meme theories of religion are vastly underdeveloped. Indeed, it would be fair to say that no one has really laid out a full blown memetic theory. What would it look like if they did?
Something like this. “Memes,” a term coined by Richard Dawkins, are “units of cultural information.” These can be songs, recipes, stories, moral platitudes, technological innovations and so on. Very crudely, memes are ideas that can be transmitted from mind to mind. Like genes, memes are susceptible to variation as they pass from mind to mind, and like genes they can be more or less successful in passing themselves on. Some recipes, songs, poems and the like “catch on” and others don’t. Those that do, spread, and those that don’t, don’t.
Once we see this we can also see that memes, like genes, can evolve and be selected for. Recipes, architectural designs, clothing fashion, sitcoms and so on vary in ways aimed at making them “catch on” even more than their predecessors. And those that are successful become the Betty Crockers, Frank Lloyd Wrights, Ralph Laurens and Seinfelds of culture. Meme theorists argue that religions exist and spread because they are good at exploiting belief-acquisition tendencies that we naturally have. Richard Dawkins, for example, argues that one mode of meme transmission involves “parental instruction”; that is, children have an innate tendency to believe what parents tell them and to do what their parents say. (This theory, of course, makes you wonder if Dawkins has children; the answer is yes, a daughter by his second marriage.) So on this view, religion exists and spreads because religions instruct parents to pass along religious teachings to children, who internalize them and pass them along to their children.
Meme theories suffer from numerous problems, many of which are immediately obvious, but none of which we can touch here.[3] Instead we will move on to consider the most widely held view, one that some have taken to calling the “standard model” of the origin of religion. The cognitive model contends that human beings have specific and identifiable mental tools that make religious belief easy and natural.[4] For example, we have a mental tool that makes us think there are agents around when we detect certain seemingly unnatural sounds (rustling in the bushes), motions (clothes blowing on the line at dusk) or configurations (crop circles) in nature.
This “hypersensitive agency detection device” (or HADD, as it is known in the field) leads us to hypothesize agents that, for example, control the forces of nature. In addition, our minds are naturally disposed to remember and transmit ideas that violate certain innate expectations we have about the workings of the world. Earlier I noted that psychologists are discovering all sorts of folk beliefs that we have hard-wired into us. For example, we are born (they claim) thinking that agents are physical things. When we (via HADD) are led to hypothesize agents causing the lightning or the wind, we are led to think that there are invisible agents. But invisible agents are counterintuitive and strange. As a result, we easily remember them and talk about them, thus making such concepts (including religious concepts) spread rapidly.
In addition, there is very strong evidence that we are naturally disposed, from an early age, to see goal-directedness in everything, including the natural world. This tendency has come to be called “intuitive theism” by developmental psychologists, since it is a tendency to see purposiveness throughout our world.[5] This naturally disposes us to believe in an invisible, counterintuitive, purpose-giving force in the universe: gods or a God.
I have not done much (or really anything) in the way of providing evidence for these views. Doing that would require more space than I have. But let’s be clear: there is a good deal of evidence in favor of them (some more than others). Given the evidence we have, it seems reasonable to think that, in fact, human minds, for whatever reason, have some strong natural affinities for religion.
What Are the Implications if Such Accounts Are True?
What does all of this evidence show us? Does it show, for example, that religion is just a trick that our minds play on us? Some scientists and philosophers have answered with a resounding yes. Michael Persinger, professor of behavioral neuroscience at Laurentian University, argues that this work shows us that “God is an artifact of the brain.”[6] Dawkins concludes that “the irrationality of religion is a by-product of the built in irrationality mechanism in the brain.”[7] Matthew Alper, author of The God Part of the Brain, argues as follows:
If belief in God is produced by a genetically inherited trait, if the human species is “hardwired” to believe in a spirit world, this could suggest that God doesn’t exist as something “out there,” beyond and independent of us, but rather as the product of an inherited perception, the manifestation of an evolutionary adaptation that exists exclusively within the human brain. If true, this would imply that there is no actual spiritual reality, no God or gods, no soul, or afterlife. Consequently, humankind can no longer be viewed as a product of God but rather God must be viewed as a product of human cognition.[8]
Even less subtle is Jesse Bering who is quoted as saying that with such research, “we’ve got God by the throat and I’m not going to stop until one of us is dead.” For Bering, the deliverances of the psychology of religion are “not going to remain in the privileged chapels of scientists and other scholars. It is going to dry up even the most verdant suburban landscapes, and leave spiritual leaders with their tongues out, dying for a drop of faith.”[9]
What makes these scientists think that scientific accounts of the origin of religion make religious belief disreputable? I could suggest that we now turn to the arguments these critics offer on behalf of this conclusion. Unfortunately, they don’t offer any. They take it to be fairly obvious that these accounts have such consequences, but this is not obvious at all. To see why, just consider the fact that developmental psychologists have tried to explain why human beings believe (from birth), among other things, that one and one equal two, that animals give birth to offspring of the same species and that certain unnatural events are caused by agents. No one thinks those beliefs are disreputable simply because they immediately spring to mind through our innate cognitive dispositions.
In fact, in some cases, the only thing that commends a belief to us is that it spontaneously arises through the natural workings of our minds. Beliefs of this sort, which philosophers call “basic beliefs,” are those bedrock beliefs which act as evidence for all of our other beliefs, even though they themselves do not rest on any evidence. For example, the belief that other human beings have minds (that is, that they have centers of consciousness with beliefs and desires and such) is a basic belief that we all have, despite having no evidence for it. Of course we have evidence that people behave as if they had minds—the issue here is whether those behaviors that we think are caused by minds really are. We have no evidence one way or the other on that question, and yet we all spontaneously assume, and firmly believe, that others do in fact have minds.
So the mere fact (if it is a fact) that we are naturally disposed to form, for example, belief in God is no evidence that such belief is disreputable. But if that is not the problem, what do these scientists think the problem is?
At this point we need to engage in a little reverse engineering of our own, trying to reconstruct what it is that might have or could motivate such a conclusion. Here is another line of reasoning that might be at work. In some cases when we form beliefs, the cause of that belief is the target of the belief itself. I believe, for example, there is a computer in front of me because there really is, or I believe my feet are propped up on the desk because they really are. What these accounts of religion show us, then, is that we have no good reason to think that our belief in God is due to the fact that God is really there. Instead, the God belief seems to be caused by purely natural mechanisms that don’t involve God at all. As a result, God beliefs come about in a very different way than our beliefs in more ordinary things come about. It is this difference which explains why, if these scientific accounts are right, religious beliefs are disreputable.
The problem with this line of argument is that it is, well, just plain mistaken. I believe there is a deer in the neighborhood because I can see its tracks in the mud in my yard. I don’t see it directly, but I see things that are causal consequences of the deer’s presence, and this triggers in me a belief that it is around. What this line of argument does not see or even acknowledge is the possibility that the mechanisms that lead us toward belief in God might be, like the deer tracks, causal consequences of God’s activity. If that is right, then it would not be true that God is not at all involved in the origin of religious belief. God would be the (remote) cause of them.[10] Thus, in order for this line of reasoning to work, the defender would have to claim that human beings would exist and have minds that form God beliefs whether or not there were a God. If our minds were insensitive to reality in this way (and we knew it) then we should at least be agnostic about whether or not there is a God.
Here an example might prove helpful. I am holding my hand in front of my face and have the belief “there is a hand in front of my face.” What if, however, someone were to tell me that a scientist is pointing a special ray gun at my head right now which makes people (a) go blind and (b) believe that their hand is in front of their face? If that were to happen I would be left to think that, if the gun really exists, I would believe my hand was in front of my face whether or not it really was. In such a case, until I can be sure that there really is a hand there, I should be agnostic about the matter.
But notice that the God case and the hand case are not analogous at all. I do not know that I would have the religious beliefs I do whether or not there really is a God. And the reason for that is simple: I think that there would be no universe, no earth, no life, no humans, no minds, no beliefs and no religion unless there were a God who created those things. The atheist might disagree. And then we would have something that we could intelligently discuss. But the question we would be discussing is not one that is settled by considering scientific accounts of the origin of religion, as we have seen. Thinking about scientific accounts of religion might lead us to think about this question—but they won’t answer it. They can’t.
Is that the end of the matter? Not exactly. There are other issues that are raised by scientific accounts of religion that are worth discussing. And perhaps “Newer Atheists” will come up with better (or even some) arguments that show that religious belief is disreputable in light of these accounts. But so far they haven’t done so. Thus, for the moment, it seems perfectly acceptable for the Christian to hold that God created the world, human beings and human minds in such a way that when they are functioning properly, they form beliefs in the existence of rocks, rainbows, human minds and . . . God. For now, what we should conclude is that contemporary psychology has shown us the rather unsurprising fact that, in the words of Oxford psychologist Justin Barrett, “belief in gods and God particularly arises through the natural, ordinary operation of human minds in natural ordinary environments.”[11] This discovery echoes the claim made four hundred plus years earlier by John Calvin that “there is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity.”[12]
For Further Reading
Barrett, J. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2004.
Schloss, Jeffrey, and Michael J. Murray, eds. The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.