God's Quad

March 6, 2007 by Sanjay.

For those interested in understanding God from an academic/intellectual perspective: If this undeniably long article from last week’s NYT Magazine is to be believed, Science is finally beginning to develop plausible theories of religious belief.

Summarizing brutally, the article presents the two current evolutionary theories for why religion and God figure so uniformly in the human experience. The more linear “adaptionist” school posits that belief in God was historically good for survival:

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As some adaptationists see it, this could have worked on two levels, individual and group. Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves. As William James put it, religion filled people with “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life . . . an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.”

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The “byproductists” advance the idea that other adaptive human traits have created a teleological human impulse by happenstance:

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Atran ascribes the persistence [of theistic belief] to evolutionary misdirection, which, he says, happens all the time: “Evolution always produces something that works for what it works for, and then there’s no control for however else it’s used.” On a sunny weekday morning, over breakfast at a French cafe on upper Broadway, he tried to think of an analogy and grinned when he came up with an old standby: women’s breasts. Because they are associated with female hormones, he explained, full breasts indicate a woman is fertile, and the evolution of the male brain’s preference for them was a clever mating strategy. But breasts are now used for purposes unrelated to reproduction, to sell anything from deodorant to beer. “A Martian anthropologist might look at this and say, ‘Oh, yes, so these breasts must have somehow evolved to sell hygienic stuff or food to human beings,’ ” Atran said. But the Martian would, of course, be wrong. Equally wrong would be to make the same mistake about religion, thinking it must have evolved to make people behave a certain way or feel a certain allegiance.

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To learn what these God-friendly adaptive traits are, check out the article by a Robin Henig (a writer that I have not noticed before now). It is rich and deep enough to have been printed in a first-tier monthly.

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