03.25.07

Religion is NOT adaptive

Posted in Evolution at 8:27 pm by nemo

Is Religion Adaptive?.

I find Darwinian biologists puzzling. Are they tone-deaf, isolated in technical specialties, half-educated know-nothings, or just plain brazen ideologists?

The idea that religion is an adaptation simply won’t work. I would be the last to say that some primordial behavior in man or monkey could not have morphed into something related to what much later is connected with religion.
But the cliche schema of adaptation, to enforce the dogma of natural selection, used to explain religion is so naive we can only conclude that these biologists simply refuse to study the subject.
The public at least is entitled to disregard the dogmatic assertions hyped up here. I speak as a critic of religion, in fact. The strange thing is that Darwinists are triggered a public rejection of science. What else can the public do?

We can see from the data of the Axial Age that the real source of religious evolution is something entirely complex, and religionists themselves don’t understand it.

In any case, Darwinists need a reality check. Check out the history of Buddhism, say, and ask yourself if you are serious, in which case you’re problem is severe, or just pulling someone’s leg.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar addresses, in historical perspective, controversies about the cultural, philosophical, and scientific implications of evolutionary biology. Discussions focus upon questions about gods, free will, foundations for ethics, meaning in life, and life after death. Readings range from Charles Darwin to the present (see reading list, below).

In 1871, Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man that “…a belief in all-pervading spiritual entities seems to be universal.” A century later, Donald Brown, in his encyclopedic analysis of human universals, noted the same thing: that the capacity for religion is a universal trait, found in all human cultures. However, there is considerable individual variation in this capacity, ranging from people whose entire lives revolve around their religious beliefs to those who entirely lack them.

To an evolutionary biologist, such pan-specificity combined with continuous variation strongly suggests that one is dealing with an evolutionary adaptation. And indeed, in the past few years the publication of hypotheses for the evolution of the capacity for religion has become an explosive growth industry and a hot topic of debate. In this seminar course, we will take up this debate by considering three alternative hypotheses: that the capacity for religion is (1) an evolutionary adaptation, (2) a side-effect of an evolutionary adaptation, or (3) a “mind virus” with no direct evolutionary implications. We will read from some of the leading authors on the subject, including Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Andrew Newberg, and David Sloan Wilson. Our intent will be to sort out the various issues at play, and to come to clarity on how those issues can be integrated into the perspective of the natural sciences as a whole.

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