In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

"This is more aspirational, as I said. I think that there’s a whole lot of really interesting work that’s been done in the last twenty-five years on cognitive science and cognitive anthropology of religion. People are really interested in working out why certain kinds of religious beliefs, including, in particular, beliefs in gods and supernatural agents are so widespread; and how has it come about that we have these beliefs? Atran’s book is representative, but there are other people like Pascal Boyer and Stewart Guthrie who have written books in this similar tradition. There are various live lines of argument and live theories being developed by different people trying to explain why certain bits about religion seem to be more or less universal. There’s a sense in which religion just seems very natural to human beings; you find it in all cultures. So, these people look at what it is about our minds and the way that we’re related to the universe that make it so natural for us to form these beliefs. I think Atran’s book is a really good example of this kind of work. Some people think that maybe it is part of their evolutionary inheritance, that we have certain cognitive mechanisms that give us this propensity to religious belief that we are selected for. So, they hold there are evolutionary advantages in believing in supernatural agencies. There are other people who think that’s not right and that, really, we have cognitive mechanisms that evolve for other reasons. It’s a kind of by-product; it’s not directly selected for. Here’s the standard example that’s been quite widely discussed: it’s evolutionary advantageous to have a kind of tripwire mechanism for detecting other agents. It’s not so bad if you think there are other agents around when there aren’t any, but it’s really bad if there are other agents around and you don’t realise that they are. So, we have a propensity to over-ascribe agency. One part of what leads to widespread belief in gods is looking around for agents — when you think there are agents around but you can’t find any. That’s one part of it. Another part of it is that when you look at the beliefs about the supernatural that people have, it turns out that the kinds of things that are believed in are a lot like us but they just differ from us in one or two rather spectacular ways. They might be invisible or they might be immensely powerful or something like that. That makes the stories about them really memorable. You would imagine that over time people came up with all kinds of things when their agency detection was activated but they couldn’t find any agents around that were responsible for the shivers up their spine or the feeling they were being watched or whatever it was. But some of those turned out to be particularly memorable, and they’re the ones that religions got formed around. So, you can think of the gods as being much like us but narrowly different from us in certain kinds of ways — and those beliefs were the ones that got culturally transmitted. So, that’s the kind of story that you might get out of cognitive anthropology which I think is really quite interesting. “The kind of theory that you’re going to have about religion is going to be complicated and will appeal to a lot of different factors that include evolutionary heritage over time, but also factors about the environment as well. That’s why Atran’s book is interesting.” It’s not necessarily a story that can only be accepted by atheists. You might think that there’s a story about selection, that we’re actually selected to have beliefs in God, that is ultimately directed by God. You can find theists arguing that kind of line. But the idea is that there’s got to be some way that we can explain the commonalities across time and place, of these cross-cultural similarities in the responses that we have towards the world. There is probably more to this story than I’ve just given, because so far I’ve only been talking about us, but there are also factors about our environment. I say that because if you look across cultures, you find lots of stories about cosmic eggs, sky fathers, and earth mothers. Why would that be? Well, one thought is that, when it rains, things grow. There’s a kind of natural analogy between insemination and the rain falling. That’s why that kind of myth arises independently in a whole lot of different cultures. That’s not something that’s inherent to our brains, but is more to do with the fact that the environment is similar; it rains everywhere that we flourish. It’s not going to be that there’s a really simple one-line story to tell here. The kind of theory that you’re going to have about religion is going to be complicated and will appeal to a lot of different factors that include evolutionary heritage over time, but also factors about the environment as well. That’s why Atran’s book is interesting. It’s in that kind of genre. One thing is that it might be that religious belief makes in-group/out-group markers. Back when we lived in very small groups, being strongly identified with your group may have given the group some evolutionary advantage. That would be one kind of suggestion. This is quite compatible with the idea that as we’ve become city-dwellers, and as we’ve ceased to live so tightly in unified tribes, that religion becomes a problem. But when it arose and became deeply entrenched, it may have actually helped with the survival of the groups that had religion. That’s the kind of idea that you might have. Just because something was evolutionarily advantageous when we lived on the savannah, or whatever, doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing now. There’s a lot of smart people working away on arguments for the existence of God. And you can expect that there’s going to be lots of new arguments that will require lots of work to figure out what to say in response to them. I don’t think that that’s going to stop anytime soon. I expect that there’s going to be a part of philosophy of religion that goes on for a long time as a sort of battleground between theists and atheists trying to mount arguments that will somehow force the other side to convert. I think there’s very little prospect in succeeding in an enterprise like that, and that it’s perhaps not the most profitable way of spending your time. But, nonetheless, that’s a part of philosophy of religion; it’s been a big part of it recently and it will go on being a big part of it. One thing I would like to see is much more emphasis on other parts of philosophy of religion, partly trying to come to grips with what the cognitive anthropologists and other scientists interested in this study of the origins, development, and spread of religion have got to say. But also, I think, having a much more careful look at all of the religions of the world, so that we aren’t obsessively focussed on the Abrahamic religions and, in particular, on Christianity. I think that we will learn all kinds of interesting things if we go and study Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Daoism, and all the other major religions. Many of these have very long and rich philosophical traditions as well, but, at least in the West, we just ignore them largely ."