Is Religion Adaptive

Something I've heard from both religious people and atheists is that religious belief is necessary and inevitable.

For me, this is not really relevent to whether religion is true. Except in extreme cases, I don't think there is any utiity to having false beliefs. Having false beliefs makes it harder to reason about everything else because your priors are all fucked up, and that means you can't even evaluate whether you're better off with said false beliefs.

That said, if it truly is the case that religion occupies a neccesary and beneficial role in society, or that it is inevitable, then that does have significant implications for the atheist.

Should they lie in a bid to encourage religious belief? Should they focus on taming religion so we can get the best from it rather than eradicating it?

There are a few different ways that people make this claim. But I will be focused on one in particular:

"The reason that religion is so historically widespread is because it is evolutionarily advantageous"

I have written a related article for a friends blog at https://blog.alexisdumas.org/2021/09/11/memes.html.

I highly recommend reading her other articles. They're well written and very interesting. I don't always agree with them but they make me think which is a good thing.

In that article I explored an alternative way that things like religions can become widespread, without being good for us. In my most recent article, I addressed evolutionary misconceptions and outlined some of the concepts used by evolutionary biologists. I think that these concepts can also address the arguments for the adaptive value of religion.

Defining Religion

There are people who define religion to incorporate things like watching sporting events and going to science museums. I think those people should stop doing that, because it's disingenous. There's a clear difference between someone that watches a game at a football stadium and someone that has beliefs regarding what happens after death, and tries to please an entity that supposedly makes the afterlife fun and makes the rain come.

Here's a working definition that I'll be using for the rest of the article:

• Belief in supernatural entities that interact with the world
• Practices intended to make these interactions favourable
• A high prioritisation for those beliefs and practises
• Some sort of formal creed or scripture or implicitly codified set of these beliefs shared by others

This is a rough definition intended to encompass most religions throughout history whilst discarding entities that we don't think of as religions.

My Position

I'm not going to argue that religion is not adaptive. I think that it should be investigated scientifically. I have yet to see a good case for why it is. I happen to think that it's unlikely, I can't see why it would be adaptive, and non-religious people, myself included, seem to be doing fine. Non-religious societies also seem to be doing fine. Religiousity has been declining, but most societal indicators show progress (I'm not saying they're causally related).

It seems highly implausible to me. Proponents of this argument can't be talking about the contents of a specific religion (e.g Christianity), because modern religions have not been around for most of history. Instead, proponents are claiming that a readiness to believe whatever is good for society or you or whatever.

Instead, in this article, I will challenge some of the reasons that people provide for why religion might be adaptive.

Who For?

When people argue that religion is adaptive, they rarely specify exactly who it's good for. They often vaguely mention us and veer dangerously close to group selection (Jonathon Haidt does exactly this). But this is a crucial question. Evolutionary theory does not deal with "good for society" or "good for the species", the way that conservative functionalists would like it to. In my other articles I go through some problems with group selection.

You have to ask, how is religion good for the religious person. Or, rather, how is religious behaviour good for the religious gene. What mechanism leads to increased evolutionary fitness? If someone is more religious do they live longer? Reproduce more?

It's not clear at all. It seems to me that if you introduce a religious person to a group of non-religious people, they wouldn't do well. And vice versa. It's not clear what advantage to being religious there is that would cause it to profligate.

But where does religion come from?

One thing to bear in mind regarding religions is that by the time someone becomes an adult, they're unlikely to change religious views. Most believers are raised that way. Why is that? What is different about childhood that makes this the case. If there is a religion gene, then presumably this is when it is acting. It's not clear if there is a religion gene. There are people who become irreligious later in life. There are societies that are more or less religious than each other. It seems to be largely cultural rather than genetic. How religious someone is seems to be more a function of the community they are born into then the genetic parentage they have.

That said, I think there are a few genetic traits that could account for why many people are religious, at least indirectly.

For example, when people are very young - babies, they put everything in their mouths. But once they reach a certain age, they become very picky. And parents teach them what to eat. Then, once they reach a certain stage of development, they won't eat what they weren't taught to eat. This is what accounts for cultural differences in taste.

The "reason" for this is that infants don't know what is or isn't healthy. Some of that is innate, but a lot of it is taught. One of the side effects of that is that things taught from adults during that developmental stage stick. One of the predictions that you would make from this is that if many people were raised into a religion, most would keep it. This would make it more widespread than it otherwise would be. If things people were taught during that developmental stage did not stick as much, fewer people would be religious. And that has nothing to do with religion being adaptive.

That still doesn't tell the whole story, though. Why are so many children taught religion?

Anthropological evidence indicates that early religions were not quite as elaborate as modern religions. That was something that developed over time. It's not that children were taught the religions of today, those religions have developed culturally. The early religions could hardly be called religions. They were often animist in nature, dealing with spirits. When asking about why religion would start, this is the kind of religion that we should ask about.

Why would people make up this sort of thing?

Well, consider what humans do. We understand things in terms of certain mental constructs. For example, if you see a ball being thrown you understand that with your intuitive physics. This is the sort of thing you might do when building tools. Cause and effect is another mental construct we have. We see certain things as likely to be followed by other things, and other things as likely to be preceded by certain events. This relates to explanation. Explanation is something we like because it helps with prediction and communication.

One other mental construct we have is intentional agents. It pays for an animal to distinguish between the mechanical motion of a rock and the intentional motion of other animals intending to eat you or avoid getting eaten by you. It's especially important in the context of a social species.

We also have the intuitive notion of essences. We don't react like we're meeting a completely new person if we see someone from an angle we haven't seen before, or if they're missing a hand. Because of exponential growth of microbes, we regard contact with something dirty as transferring some sort of impure essence.

Now what happens if you put all of this together, but you make it imperfect?

If you see intention where there isn't? If you see essences and causation where there isn't? If you make it up to your children to get them to do what you want without being overwhelmed with questions you can't answer? It seems unsurprising that you would feel like a dead person is like a living person but missing their essence.

This to me seems like a perfectly reasonable account of religious beliefs that does not require that they are true or that religious beliefs are directly good for us.

This undercuts the "necessary" case, at least if no further argument is made.

But what about inevitable. If religion is a likely consequence of our cognitive faculties being imperfect, then isn't it here to stay?

I don't think so. For one, modern science has removed a lot of room that religion previously had. Religion is no longer used to explain lightning, earthquakes, or diseases. Even though most people can't describe how lightning works scientifically, it just seems like the sort of thing that works by scientific means now.

This is unlikely to swing in the favour of religion.

What next

The proponent of this argument needs to do the following things:

• Explicility specify who is beneffiting - show how it helps the gene
• Describe the mechanism by which religion is adaptive, with mathematical models and evidence
• Explain why religion being adaptive is the best explanation we have

Until then, as Hitchens says, "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". As society progresses, we get rid of old bullshit such as high infant morality rates, illiteracy, astrology, and religion. There has always been a first time we got rid of harmful nonsense, and afterwards we always wish we did it sooner and can't believe it took us so long to get rid of it. We shouldn't be making excuses in a bid to preserve religion. If it smells like bullshit and there is no evidence that is actually useful, then what are we waiting for?