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Darwin, Pascal Boyer and the Evolutionary Theory of Religion

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Darwin, Pascal Boyer and the Evolutionary Theory of Religion ************* Darwin, Pascal Boyer and the Evolutionary Theory of Religion. Note: Along with the essay on anti-science in the last book and the essay on Chomsky’s linguistics, this essay deals mostly with science. It dissents from the theories of Boyer and Dennett, among others, and claims that religion is not an evolutionary development but merely one of cultural development, power and social control, and even then it is hardly necessary and can be done without quite easily and well. Is religion and adaptation and due to natural selection, or not?. I think not, and I will explain why. Much of religion derives from symbols imposed on nature or evoked by nature. This process of imposing artificial or cultural beliefs on the world goes way back, certainly, and appears to be motivated mostly by social needs. E.O Wilson thought religion was adaptationist because it involves “bonding”. But this tells us very little as bonding happens without religion, as anyone who has children knows. Religion is not necessary to bonding. Oxytocin is a hormone that helps a woman bond with their babies and does far more than religion could ever do. Indeed, the Virgin Mary images exploits just this kind of closeness that mothers can feel for their babies. Is an exploitation an adaptation? I think not. A few years ago I did a painting of a mother and child and women in general loved it. They responded just as I have seen women respond to portraits of the Virgin Mary and there was nothing at all religious in my work. So the Church is indeed exploiting an evolutionary response to children. To say that religion is evolutionary in this case is false. What is created by evolution is the human response to images of children. Church images of the Virgin are a lie into which is projected a real emotion and feeling that goes with parenting and being a mother or father. Painting of my Wife and Son, oil, 2011 by author Darwin thought religion is just an accident and not an adaptation. He writes that “It is… impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief [in religious entities or gods] is innate or instinctive in man”. Darwin rightly maintains that various parts of human culture have an evolutionary basis. He thought many changes occurred in inherited characters and only a few became real adaptations. Religion was one such method of scoial organization, but it was not an adaptation. Nature is full of possibilities and attempts and most are dead ends, or empty tries that did not work. One loves Mozart’s music because it has a beauty of heart and this comes from the man himself. It hardly makes his music less because it is a product of people whose genes underwent adaptation. One loves it because it expresses something lovely and profound in humans and our world, just as science does. The fact that Mozart himself fell for myths of various kinds is beside the point. The Masonic myths he used in The Magic Flute are not adaptations, even if music itself is. Culture supports the artificial symbolic constructions called religions as part of a social power system. While cooperative behavior does have adaptive value, religion is only one attenuated and extreme form of cooperative behavior and inessential. One could argue that it is not cooperative but more tribal, divisive and warlike. While the drive for power may be an adaptation, this hardly means that tyrannical governments or religious myths are. Mistaking verbal or visual symbols for things that are not real, is a common mistake in all religions. But is this mistake due to evolution or a misuse of language as a symbol making faculty? I doubt that this is an evolutionary step for humans. Indeed the contrary might be true. But let’s back up a few steps. Rather than use the word “counterintuitive”, as Dennett and Boyer do, I choose to describe religion by a simpler word: delusion. A delusion is defined as “a belief held with strong conviction despite strong evidence to the contrary”. One can believe that the moon is green cheese but that does not make it so. As I will show later, the existence of Muhammad and Jesus are probably delusions of a similar kind, and certainly their miracles and divinity are delusions. It has long been clear that religion is partly an effort to fool people into thinking death is not a fact and existence persist after death. This effort to lie to people is usually done for people’s benefit, it is believed. This lie is so ardently believed by some, I have heard people say that would wish to die if they did not believe there was life after death. Life after death is a fiction, as there is as yet not one shred of evidence anyone has ever come back, so this is a belief that is certainly delusional. Gods are delusions. Anti-science is delusional. Even the notion that religion is evolutionary or that it has good results are possibly but arguably delusional beliefs.. Beliefs against global warming or evolution as well as all sorts of magical thinking, superstitions, visions and other mental fabrications and fictions are delusional too, once one sees the evidence. There are many kinds of delusions, many of them discussed in this book. William James was wrong, religion is not true because it is useful, it is useful because it is a lie. Deluding people is useful to those who want power or who need a crutch. George Lakoff contends that narratives become brain structures, or patterns of thinking. If something is repeated enough it become worn paths in the brain. Repeated often enough, delusions seem to become facts. But this is dubious. Buddha was enlightened under the Bodhi tree and Queen Mary assumed into heaven. These are fictions that became “true” though being repeated over and over, even though such things never happened. This process of repetitive memorization is useful to those who need delusions for psychological reasons or who want power over others. For some, simple delusions are preferable to more nuanced or complex truths. There is a lot of evidence for this, as I will discuss throughout these three books. This book completes my investigation of the subject of religion and draws conclusions about it. There has been a reversal of my views from 25 years ago. These three books are the record of that reversal. I tried on the certainties of religion and discovered religion can only be approached with doubts, from a point of view that favors science and evolution. Daniel Dennett notes in his Breaking the Spell that “Only when we can frame a comprehensive view of the many aspects of religion can we formulate defensible policies for how to respond to religions in the future”. Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained, Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Richard Dawkin’s the God Delusion and other books, including this one1, begin comprehensive critique of religion based on science, 1 My book differs from the “four horsemen” in that there is more knowledge of the actualities of religions, since I practiced many of them myself. My book is weaker in that it is less focused on one way of looking at the subject and covers a very large range of subjects. This might confuse some people. But I but it still does not go far enough. William James tried to look at religion through science and failed miserably, as I will show. Dennett is certainly right that religion must be assessed form a Darwinian point of view, but exactly what this means is still an open question. The problem with Dennett is that unlike Darwin he shows no real understanding of animals and denies we can know much about them, so he cannot be taken very seriously as a Darwinist. 2 E.O. Wilson also suggested such a study earlier. A proposal is one thing and actually doing it is another. This is not a new idea and has been started in Anthropology and Sociology to a limited degree. There are people in evolutionary psychology who have started looking at religion via the Darwinian model and that is a good thing. I do not find the current attempts to do that very satisfying and I will say why. I will ponder some of these proposals throughout these three books, in this long series of texts. Some of these studies are so far disappointing, as they appear to tacitly endorse religion as a social construct, and even claim it is adaptationist, even while they appear to assess it from a non-religious Darwinian point of view. 3 Some of these researchers see religion as parasitic upon cognitive systems, a by-product, and that is probably accurate to some degree, though less than has been claimed, I think. Religious concepts and norms are not exactly a “by- product” of evolution, but more likely a maladaptive by-product, perhaps. mean to cast a wide net here. I did not approach religion as an academic and will not write about it just as an academic. I mean to appeal to ordinary seekers too as well as scholars of wide and eclectic learning. I have always been interested in philosophy, and this book is a philosophical text that is not based on academic study but on lived experience in the real world. It crosses the usual disciplinary boundaries and I do not apologize for that. 2 See his essay Animal Consciousness, what matters and why. 1995 http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/dennett_anim_csness.html 3 For an example of this see the example of this see this essay by Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich “The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions” On the other hand it appears that “group selection theory” which also tries to explain religion, will fail, as I will explore later.
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