I know I’m late getting to this article on “Darwin’s God” that was published last weekend…but I’ve been busy, OK? And to be honest, when I took a look at at, the first couple of paragraphs turned me off. These are silly rationalizations for god-belief.
Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as Atran does, Âbelief in hope beyond reason  whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. ÂWhy do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us? asked Atran when we spoke at his Upper West Side pied-à -terre in January. Atran, who is 55, is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, with joint appointments at the University of Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. ÂIf you have negative sentiments toward religion, he tells them, Âthe box will destroy whatever you put inside it. Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driverÂs license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.
If they donÂt believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?
Errm, but I don’t cross my fingers during turbulence. I don’t pray, either. My heart rate might go up, but otherwise I regard it with helpless equanimity, and I don’t find solace in rituals or magical incantations. So I’m already predisposed to be disagreeable with his premises.
As for the “magic box”, isn’t there an obvious explanation that doesn’t involve god-belief? A strange man with a strange device asks you to do something that he says has an element of risk; you don’t have to believe that there is anything supernatural involved in order to hesitate before committing anything valuable to the test. That hesitation says nothing about belief in religion or the supernatural; if we’re afraid of anything, it’s trusting the crazy bearded guy who claims to have a magic box.
The rest of the article is a longish but not very deep discussion of two competing explanations for religion: the spandrel explanation, that it is a side effect of some other property of the brain that is useful, and the adaptations explanation, that religion confers a direct benefit on an individual or group. You can put me solidly in the spandrel camp, since I don’t find the adaptationist rationalizations at all persuasive. They rely on the valid observation that these kinds of non-productive activities impose a cost on the individual, coupled to the erroneous assumption that selection would purge any less-than-optimal solution from the population, therefore there must be an advantage that maintains it.
There are costs to any individual of being religious: the time and resources spent on rituals, the psychic energy devoted to following certain injunctions, the pain of some initiation rites. But in terms of intergroup struggle, according to Wilson, the costs can be outweighed by the benefits of being in a cohesive group that out-competes the others.
Many people assign a high personal value to religious belief, so they find the idea that it is an accidental by-product objectionable, and embrace the idea that it has some specific purpose (“purposelessness” is a kind of dirty word to a lot of people, for some reason). So let’s strip that loaded term “religion” out of the equation, and put in something equivalent that won’t have quite the resonance to most of us.
Say, “Civil War reenactments“.
It’s pretty much the same phenomenon as religion. Groups get together and follow repeated behavioral scripts; they argue in great detail and with great heat over fine points; many have much of their identity tied up in the philosophical underpinnings of the practice; people invest significant amounts of money and time in the practice; and to outsiders, the whole thing looks rather ridiculous, even when we can appreciate the fervor and the spectacle.
And yet, I haven’t seen anyone try to argue that Civil War re-enactors must have had a historical selective advantage, or that there must be a Civil War reenactment gene, or that something so costly must have a hard-wired biological basis. We’re reasonably comfortable with saying it has a cultural source, that there’s a biological substrate that drives people to be social and associate in community activities, but that the specific patterns in which this drive expresses itself, whether it is in parading in wheatfields with old rifles loaded with blanks, or in standing up and sitting down in pews while someone hectors you about hellfire, are not derivable from your genes. Well, actually, some people do try to argue that the latter pattern of religious custom is built into your biology—I find them about as credible as I would someone who claims the Confederate battle flag is etched onto their cortex.
The kinds of arguments made in this article are the same kind of privileging of the idea of religion—acting as if it were something special, that it has biological attributes that make it unique and, as one of the people consulted suggests, could even be a mark of a god’s design. We see the same astonishing commitment to the irrational in sports fans, or Dungeons and Dragons nerds, or stamp collectors, though; I’m hoping some evolutionary psychologist somewhere will give me a wonderful story about how those manias are the product of millennia of selection.
Greg Laden makes another interesting point about the article: it’s a subtle smear against atheists. It sets up a false conflict between the noisy “neo-atheists” and these other people carrying on a “quiet and illuminating debate” within science. It also tries to set up atheists as the weird people who are fighting their natural impulses.
What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism.
Again, Atran is generalizing his own peculiarities to the whole of humanity. I have none of these conflicts he describes at all; I’m not tempted by magical thinking, I don’t have superstitious warding rituals, I’ve faced the death of family members and not felt even a twinge of religious wishful thinking. Now you could argue, I suppose, that I am some unusual mutant with a defective god gene (I’m an X-Man, with the power of Godlessness!), but I find it much more plausible that I, and many others like me, have simply escaped the cultural indoctrination that still afflicts Atran. It’s no less real for being the product of ubiquitous repetition, but neither is it inescapable. We are not predetermined to believe in the nonsensical claims of religion—we have to have them dunned into us.
I’ve also avoided the urge to recreate the battle of Antietam in my backyard. That’s another allele I seem to have avoided, although I suppose if I’d been brought up to obsess over the War of Northern Aggression I might feel an occasional itch.
If you repeat the experiment using a box were made out of a clear plastic, instead of being opaque, you might be able to get around those concerns. In particular, if you can clearly see that there isn’t a hidden blade or something, the only reason to be afraid would be a fear of the supernatural.
I have an answer for people who try to suggest that, since we may have a biological predisposition to believe in some kind of supernatural deity(ies), that…well, it’s obvious, you should accept Christianity! (or whatever the person’s religion happens to be)
If, as you say, it’s good for us to follow a religion, since it has certain practical benefits, why not make the most of the opportunity, and create our OWN religion? One that suits our needs, our tastes, the best? One that unambiguously promotes peace, cooperation, etc. to give our species the best chance of survival–rather than, say, Christianity or Islam, which promote peace and harmony at some times and urge us to kill one another at other times?
It’s the same issue, really, as the point that, if evolution is wrong, that doesn’t make creationism/ID right.
It was a disturbing article on many levels. I was turned off not only by the gratingly-cheerful-simplicity style of the writing but also by the things you mentioned- The easy generalization of one person’s perspectives to all humanity. The really scary thing was the reverence with which the scientists in the article were quoted. Not just Atran, but Wilson and the rest of them. Where was some healthy skepticism, of any point of view?
I try telling myself that it is a newspaper article, it is journalism, not science journalism and therefore can just be consigned to the pit of annoying opinion pieces. Oh well.
There’s a third explanation which we should place beside the “spandrel” and “adaptationist” models. Call it the “selfish meme” hypothesis: the entities which are replicating and mutating are not people, but ideas, beliefs, viruses of the mind.
What’s more, these explanations do not necessarily forbid one another. As Jason Rosenhouse points out,
A general predisposition to see human faces in the clouds and understand natural phenomena in human terms may be a spandrel. It’s the accidental consequence of evolving in a particular environment to cope with particular hazards. In the wild, a false negative can kill you: that shape lurking in the shadows was a leopard after all. Optimize to avoid false negatives, and you breed yourself the potential to suffer from false positives. If these don’t kill you as often, or if you move into a new environment where the standards your ancestors evolved don’t apply so well anymore, then you’ve set yourself up for perceptual distortions.
Perhaps a tendency to animism is a by-product, a spandrel, while the things which give our madness method — doctrines, statements about which gods to worship and how — are the memes which exploit our vulnerabilities.
Regarding a possible “historical selective advantage of religion”, you may want to have a look at Julian Jaynes’ Origin of Consciousness, if you haven’t already.
Be warned though: scary, scary book!
I’ve seen enough illusionists on TV to be worried a bit even with a clear plastic box. Some of these guys are really good at what they do.
To me, the guy seems to be trying to rationalize his own personal superstitions. He’s not as rational and atheistic as he knows he should be, so he’s trying to come up with a biological excuse to explain why he still crosses his fingers.
Not that I’m disagreeing with you, PZ, but how do you know that the Civil War reenactments aren’t a spandrel from the adaptatious development of religion?
Why?
“Errm, but I don’t cross my fingers during turbulence.”
Wow, PZ, you’re so awesomely logical. We all should be more like you.
Anyone else see the box scene from dune here?
“Put your hand in the box.”
“What’s in the box?”
“Pain.”
“How about my car keys instead?”
I was also put off by the “even atheists cross their fingers” crap. I know I don’t. I don’t even say bless you when someone sneezes. As a matter of fact, when I dropped all pretenses of magical thinking in my early twenties, I felt an immense relief. I thought, “Hey, I don’t have to worry about some diety reading my dirty thoughts. Cool!” I don’t feel any struggle to overcome a god-gene. Just the opposite — I thought life was more stressful when I had a minor belief in the supernatural.
In other words, Atran is full of it.
It also tries to set up atheists as the weird people who are fighting their natural impulses.
This seems like an odd objection. If there were some level of heritable tendency (selected or incidental), it would be a case of naturalistic fallacy to then say that god-belief/religiosity is therefore necessarily a good thing.
I think it is likely there is some genetic basis (but not simply a “gene for”) god-belief. But that no more compels me to belief then does a tendency to desire multiple mates compel me to infidelity.
Dungeons and Dragons nerds…the product of millennia of selection.
HEY, when the dragons come swooping out of the sky, all breathing fire and tossing Charm Person spells around, where will you be? I’ll have my Delayed Blast Fireball primed and ready! Also, I typically roll natural 20s when really needed.
Civil War reenactments
Nice example.
Do other countries also reenact their own civil wars? Do Englishmen run about the countryside with pikes and wheel-locks? Do Spaniards build replica Messerschmitts? Do Bangladeshis drive around in restored T-55s?
‘muricans are weird.
You can sum up the problems of the article, it seems, thusly: Sample Size of One.
Living in the NY metro gives me access to the premier public radio station WNYC. Sadly they replaced a secular Saturday morning program “Sound & Spirit” [Music and Ideas that Celebrate the Human Experience –a somewhat historical themed look at the music based on religion & cultures] with the deist “Sepaking of Faith”. Makes me want to sleep in. Needless to say I won’t pledge support to a ‘religious’ radio station….The point is the topic for this Saturday [1st of 3 parts] is “Einstein’s God”. While the guest may have valid credentials I’m sure the host Krista Tippett will still manage to twist all into something truly nauseating. As much as I loathe the program I dont think I can avoid listening in.. note WNYC lets one listen online for those furious enough but outside this metro, and not receiving this schmaltz from their own public radio sation.
I cannot stand Scott Atran. I last saw him appearing in the wonderful Beyond Belief 2006 conference, and his smug arguments about why religion wasn’t harmful were very frustrating. He spoke it wish such authority and confidence that he almost had me for a second. Luckily Sam Harris roundly demolished him soon after that. If I recall correctly Scott also made up some facts about Palestine over the course of the conversation.
Brum: I don’t know that they do recreations necessarily, but there is a Richard III Society that takes an interesting contrarian view on the Wars of the Roses.
TheBrummell–
Allow me to suggest Otiluke’s Freezing Sphere instead of a fireball spell against a fire-breathing dragon.
Thanks for the (as usual) great analysis, PZ. Maybe it was the “glass half full” phenomenon, but I didn’t hate the article as much as the rest of y’all. After all, this is the New York Times Magazine we’re talking about–the same clowns who helped launch the country into Atkins diet mania a few years back. Plus, I still haven’t had a chance to crack open Atran’s book–it’s still sitting on top of the Pile of Guilt–so it seemed a decent prologue to his work.
I agree Atran lacked a bit of rigor when he generalized his superstitious behavior to the population, but he may have felt this was an easy way to communicate his findings. And, as you might know, it’s not always easy communicating findings to the press. Also, when you’re dealing with human psychology, sometimes you come up with quite neat research questions that way: “I’m knocking on wood–I wonder why people do that?”
Finally, personally, I avoid walking under ladders, but I think it’s mostly for fear of being klonked on the noggin with a paint bucket!
In other words, Atran is full of it.
I’m afraid you might be right about that. I have no idea what point he was trying to make with the hand in the box experiment. The only thing I can figure is maybe he thought he really had a god in there. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense.
Be warned though: scary, scary book!
Uber : Why?
Hard to tell really. (I didn’t mean scary in a derogatory way, BTW) Probably because we regard consciousness as such a defining quality of being human. I found Jaynes, at a first reading at least, utterly convincing, especially in his descriptions of societies whose members were devoid of this quality. His descriptions of the “hallucinatory reality” of Summer and the early Hebrews tribes definitly created a few goosebumps.
(Plus: I am a big fan of the Illiad!)
I have heard several times since that his thesis had been more or less refuted. But to tell the truth I have never really found out what exactly this refutation was.
Still, a book I’d recommend to anybody looking for an explanation for the religious phenomenon.
Oh my FSM! He discovered the radical and shocking theory that many people feel pressure to act and believe the way everyone around them is acting and believing!
What can we call this new and unexpected phenomenon… how about “peer pressure”.
(Are atheists, as a group, more resistant to peer pressure than the general population? The vast majority of us resisted it at least once, after all, and frequently many, many more times than that… Honestly I would expect no more than a weak correlation at most – humans are pretty complex – but then, I haven’t looked.)
Anyway, the statement “Humans are instinctively predisposed to believe X”, even if correct, is not evidence that X is true. Many people seem strongly predisposed to believe that the person they love must also love them in spite of evidence to the contrary, but if you pursue *that* belief too far you can be jailed for stalking. Feelings are a very, very poor guide to what is actually true in the real world, and there’s no reason to believe that principle wouldn’t generalize to the supernatural world (if there is one) as well.
Again, Atran is generalizing his own peculiarities to the whole of humanity.
better known as projection. universally found as a primary MO in creationists, interestingly enough.
bottom line, Atran is no better in his application here than Collins is with his “Moral Law” argument in his latest book.
Heh. The gist I got from those excerpts was
“humans tend to exhibit behaviors which betray their belief in god/religion”
I’d take away from that rather, the converse
“humans tend to reflexively exhibit behavior which explains the existence of religion.”
just like all the other ugres we fight, the need to believe is buried away in there like the need to eat, sleep, and procreate. there’s also the urge to lounge around, steal, kill, chew with your mouth open, etc.
depending on your resolve you may recognize and conquer these urges, or, in most cases, you may just convince yourself that you have conquered them.
if anthing, the excerpt shows how very little the writer understands about human nature. w00t.
If you have negative sentiments toward religion, he tells them, the box will destroy whatever you put inside it
why not just ask them if they are still beating their wives?
Excellent analysis.
I’d just like to add: If the actions rhetoric of various religious groups (what they do to children, what they profess regarding other groups, etc.) were described without attributing any group to a particular religion (not providing labels such as “christian” or “fundamentalist” etc.) and then ranked by a panel of average citizens as to weirdness, freakiness, potential danger to society, etc., you would get one ranking. But if you added back the labels, the groups that call themselves “christian” no matter how strange and dangerous they are, would not be ranked on this scale where they should be.
In other words, just as atheists who fail to remain quite, but instead deign to make a point or two, are automatically labeled as extremist radicals trying to destroy civilization, christians can do nearly anything and not be identified as fringe.
Or at least that’s been the case since the late Roman Empire. (Ah, for the good ol’ days…)
Another important but often overlooked fact is that it’s also not evidence that believing in X is a good thing. The Atran types like to slide from the assertion that there is a built-in biological tendency to believe in the supernatural to the assertion, or at least insinuation, that people really ought to believe. If anybody thinks that’s a valid argument (regardless of the truth or falsity of the premise), Mr. Hume would like to have a word with them.
Yes, since you ask. They also frequently reenact the Battle of Hastings. The Dutch are big reenactors as well. Why on earth would anyone assume that reenacting battles is a specifically American pastime?
If they dont believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?
the guy holding the box, obviously. I know I would hesitate to even converse with someone who proffered an idiotic superstitious premise to a box. at best, i would suspect a trick.
what a stupid article. evolutionary psychology and sociology is plagued with panadaptationists and just positing some contrived dualist opposite spandrelism doesn’t explain anything either.
there is a class conflict explanation that is a far better answer to why religions persist. the root cause of religious beliefs is a black box until we can actually run the experiments where children are raised without teleological metaphysics (english is full of this bullshit) and without references to god-beasts. until then, it belongs in the new york times.
“humans tend to reflexively exhibit behavior which explains the existence of religion.”
dead on, will.
“If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.”
Yeah, I’m sure everybody believes him when he says that. /sarcasm.
Anyway, how can he possibly know that there is only one god? There is just no way of knowing that. Obviously the man has gone completely over the edge.
Only one god?
Even a cursory reading of the bible, with the premise that whenever “god” is mentioned a real god is being referred to, immediately indicates that there are several.
The comparison of religion to Civil War reenactment is incredibly unpersuasive.
I’d love for that guy to tell me that if I have a negative sentiment toward religion, his magic box will destroy whatever I put inside it. I’d totally teabag that box, while decribing several uses for crucifixes, communion wafers, and baby Jesus that might not have previously been obvious to him.
“silence”, there’s a line in “Guys and Dolls” which explains why a skeptic would be reticent to put something valuable in any sort of box, clear or otherwise:
“One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.”
I think PZ here is implicitly falling for that popular version of the Naturalist Fallacy which says that if something is “natural,” then that means it’s good for us, the right way for us to behave. The tendency towards violence and waging war may also be deeply structured into human nature, but we don’t automatically assume that someone who tries to fight against their “natural impulses” and be peaceful and nonviolent has some sort of problem. On the contrary. Even the religious respect such a person more, not less.
As for me, I fight against some of my superstituous tendencies, and give in to others, usually as a self-conscious form of whimsy. The ability to recognize the powerful draw of wanting to seeing significant patterns in random events — or anthropomorphizing inert objects — helps me to understand how the other side can be wrong, but not “crazy.” In a different culture, and with a different background, there goes me.
I read the article — and several others on the subject — and don’t see that much difference between Atran, Boyer, Bloom, Dennett, and Dawkins (at least, not when compared to their detractors.) They’re all more or less looking for natural explanations which answer the question “why are religions or other forms of supernaturalism universal across cultures?” And I agree with Jason Rosenhouse and Blake Stacey: I suspect the actual answer is going to be complex, and lie in both byproduct and adaptionist theories, because the grab-bag we label “religion” is so complex.
By the way, not all adaptionist interpretations of religion favor the idea that religion is Good for Us. One of the most popular is the view that communities tied together through a belief in an afterlife and a special relationship and knowledge of a Spirit World would be absolute powerhouses in war, with a nasty tendency to kill their victims rather than enslave them, and kill their children rather than have them marry outside the tribe. Thus, the genes which favor religious-ways-of-thinking spread. Whether it’s plausible or not, it’s hardly “religion-friendly.”
I am genetically predisposed not to belive in Scott Atran, even when I cross my fingers. After reading your posting, and the comments, however, I think I am now humanistically and mystically predisposed to put him in front of several Civil War cannons at the Battle of Gettysburg. But he has his hope without reason, so it should come out okay for him!
PZ,
Would you prefer the statement that “humans are not hard-wired to be rational” to the “humans have a hard-wired acceptance of god” statement?
It explains a lot to say that we’re not hard wired to be rational…
Anyone else see the box scene from dune here?
Instantly. Which actually brings up some interesting philosophical underpinnings of the Bene Gesserit and their Missionaria Protectiva.
Or, even better, from National Lampoon’s Doon…
“I hold at your neck the deadly Kareem Abdul Jabar – the High Handed One, the Sky Hook…”
They’re all more or less looking for natural explanations which answer the question “why are religions or other forms of supernaturalism universal across cultures?”
there’s desire, and then there’s method.
do you really think, sastra, that Atran’s box experiment is an accurate method of determining the answer to the question he set out to explore?
if you do, as someone above mentioned, I have a deck of cards I wanna show you.
to see no difference in the methods between Atran and Dawkins, to pull two examples from your list, reflects rather poorly on your ability to differentiate method from desire.
Crossing your fingers in turbulence, or prayer in the face of fear, and possibly religion itself, are expressions of an attempt to exert influence over events that are beyond our control. Humans will seek any advantage, no matter small or hopeless, in a situation where they have no control. The immediate rationalization is something like “Well, it might not help, but it can’t hurt.” We find that, in the aggregate, this kind of thinking can hurt humanity (see Dawkins Root of All Evil), but on the personal level, it makes a kind of silly sense.
The example about the mysterious African box is laughably insipid in its attributed “ingenius” nature. I don’t get all religious if I walk up to a guy on the street with the 3 bowl-shuffle routine, hand him my watch, and then drop to my knees in earnest prayer while he’s shuffling, hoping my wallet doesn’t disappear.
I think that example sets the tone for this article. But notice the writer is playing the most-oft abused hand in religion: fear. Using just the destroying box as an example, he is drawing a clear connection between religion and fear. He says the people putting their hands into the box obviously hesitate strongly at first, no doubt out of some sort of natural apprehensive impulse. Even a dog will sniff a hand before shoving its nose into it affectionately, or halt when hunting in the woods to detect possible danger.
So now that the writer and the destructo-box guy have laid the layer of fear for unwitting subjects, the only antidote must be incorporation of a god?
That example is poor on a comedic level.
JakeB@17:
Dragons – Color Coded for your convenience!
“Anyone else see the box scene from dune here?”
That and the Wood Beast in Flash Gordon.
“Do other countries also reenact their own civil wars? Do Englishmen run about the countryside with pikes and wheel-locks? Do Spaniards build replica Messerschmitts? Do Bangladeshis drive around in restored T-55s?”
I know there are reenactors for the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. I know some Civil War reenactors, including a guy who managed to get a bayonet through his arm at Gettysburg (while filming the TNT film, no less!), and they’re not all cooks who romanticize the Confederacy. But then he’s from Michigan and plays a Midwestern character almost exclusively. Apparently, there are sometimes issues with the Confederate reenactors. Completely aside the problem of having six or seven Robert Lee’s show up, sometimes they simply refuse to lose the battle. My source also informed me that these are the kinds of guys who go out of their way to live up to the more unfortunate stereotypes about Southerners and the war in question.
I have yet to read much of Atran’s stuff, but for anybody who HAS spent time going into his arguments in detail, is this really representative of the level of argument he presents?
if so, seems one can safely save some time.
PZ, the hate you spew is just an example of one of the reasons why the human race is in trouble.
And eventually the hate and desire for revenge will spill over to own destruction.
Come to your senses. Stop the hate. Set a higher standard.
Win, but do it with honor.
It’s fine to deconstruct Atran’s box “experiment” as if it were really being presented as a research method rather than the (still criticizable) classroom illustration that it is. How about the actual psychological research cited in the article that at least suggests an innate propensity for god-belief/supernatural-belief? I think the article’s author actually did a reasonable job of identifying the controversial nature of the issue.
I’ll reiterate my view that it seems strange that a material basis for god-belief would is so objectionable on its face. If it exists, it really says nothing either way as to whether god-belief or even religion is something that one ought to embrace or reject.
PZ:
Sastra:
Reading PZ’s post again, I think a better description would say that the New York Times article implicitly falls for the Naturalistic Fallacy. To which I say, religion may be natural, but so is deadly nightshade.
(Tip o’ the Pope hat to Alan Alda.)
386sx “what point he was trying to make with the hand in the box experiment. …”
He imagines that finding pervasive hesitance is evidence of actual belief in god or god-like supernatural in spite of a declared skepticism, what he believes and is trying to ‘prove’.
Surely there are other explanations, but my response is will my head fit in the box?
#48It’s fine to deconstruct Atran’s box “experiment” as if it were really being presented as a research method rather than the (still criticizable) classroom illustration that it is. How about the actual psychological research cited in the article that at least suggests an innate propensity for god-belief/supernatural-belief? I think the article’s author actually did a reasonable job of identifying the controversial nature of the issue.
it doesn’t matter if it was being represented as a method of research (his statements imply that in his mind, at least, it is), but that he represents the results as supportive of his argument, which they clearly are not.
get it?
there are indeed a couple of recent studies looking at heritability of “extreme religious behavior”, like this one:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15745438&dopt=Abstract
surely you can see the difference between desire and method, just like I was getting at with Sastra’s post?
Thanks Francis! Really helpful.
Wait who is PZ hating?
The concern is nauseating.
“I’m an X-Man, with the power of Godlessness!”
I absolutely love that statement. Just PERFECT.
I’ll reiterate my view that it seems strange that a material basis for god-belief would is so objectionable on its face. If it exists, it really says nothing either way as to whether god-belief or even religion is something that one ought to embrace or reject.
I think part of it is the fear that the premise “Human beings have an innate tendency to believe in supernatural agency” will be used to support the conclusion “Religion will always be with us. It’s built into our genes. So don’t bother challenging or fighting it. You’re wasting your time.”
If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe.
That few atheists “have to work hard at being atheists” is evidence that the evolutionary view of religion is false — a point that construction of the above conditional is biased against.
I was once selected by a stage magician for his guillotine act. I hesitated putting my head into the device, despite being fairly certain , intellectually, that it was harmless. Does this demonstrate that I’m infected by a religion gene? Or does it suggest that Atran and Henig are infected by a stupidity gene? Perhaps, just perhaps, there are other explanations.
“Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?”
The journalist’s “we” is one of the most annoying habits in all of journalism. If I could have one rule drilled into every student or trainee journalist, it would be to never, ever assume that “we” all feel or do the same things. It’s doubly obnoxious in this instance, where he compounds the initial offence by saying “the most atheistic of us” when he clearly isn’t an atheist. What if I were to say something like: “Nobody endures serious racism anymore, even the blackest of us”? It’s incredibly offensive in its presumption.
Huh? They haven’t “learned” that. They’ve been told it in Church and by their parents and told that if they don’t believe it they’ll burn in hell. Have children “learned” that the tooth fairy will give them money for their teeth?
Brandon: “I don’t even say bless you when someone sneezes.”
One acquaintance of mine says, “Damn you!” whenever I sneeze. (I don’t know if he says that to other people–I imagine so, I just don’t remember anyone else sneezing in his presence.) The first time he did, I didn’t get the joke for a moment …
“(I’m an X-Man, with the power of Godlessness!), ”
How many hit points is that worth?
So many bozos on this bus:
I’ll reiterate my view that it seems strange that a material basis for god-belief would is so objectionable on its face.
It’s not objectionable on its face. What is objectionable is fallacious reasoning and misrepresentation.
I think PZ here is implicitly falling for that popular version of the Naturalist Fallacy which says that if something is “natural,” then that means it’s good for us, the right way for us to behave.
Uh, no, PZ is reporting on the argument made in the article — he did quote the article in support of his statement.
I don’t cross my fingers during turbulence either. I’ve never even heard of that superstition. What’s it supposed to do, suspend the plane in mid-air? Break the cycle of bad luck?
I actually don’t even get all that bothered by turbulence, which I know is odd. I just don’t believe that I’ll crash because plane crashes don’t happen all that often. And I’ve also flown a lot. That’s probably why the superstition wouldn’t ever do much for me even if I had heard of it.
The only superstition to get to me is stepping on a crack. As a kid the saying, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back” really did a number on me. I used to imagine my mom dying as a result. I still hesitate when I notice I’m about to step on a crack even knowing how silly it is.
truth machine:
I’m not so sure. I was raised without religion and never acquired one, but my brain is still predisposed to see faces in clouds. Whatever spandrels emerged from the accidents of human evolution, they’re in my head too. Without the memes, though, my neurological quirks don’t become the foundation for a belief system.
Speaking of which, buy the t-shirt!
“Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?”
The journalist’s “we” is one of the most annoying habits in all of journalism. If I could have one rule drilled into every student or trainee journalist, it would be to never, ever assume that “we” all feel or do the same things.
I doubt that even the “journalist” has ever crossed her fingers during turbulence, or ever seen anyone do so — certainly no atheist. It’s simply a lie fabricated to support a conclusion. The reality, that people mostly grab their armrests, and that people who grab their crucifixes are the sort of people who wear crucifixes, obviously doesn’t fit into her just-so story.
Dune was the first “book” (I.E. not doctor seuss) that I read as a child. (i was eight at the time) It has always been one of my favorites and it might be it’s treating of religion that set me on the doubters path. After all it treats religion as a tool and not a truth. The bene gesserit use it as a manipulative force all over and Paul is in a constant fight to not let it come to it’s ultimate conclusion. (the righteous war against the unrighteous)
Kinda seemed to say that all religions are a path toward that outcome, and so far i agree.
Also Doctor Kynes the senior is a wonderful portrait of a biologist.
TheBrummell (#12). Yes, there are reenactors of almost any interesting period. My father is a an avid Sherlockian, and their cannon discussions are just as vehement as a Civil War buff. And let’s not forget folk dancers, White Rat Morris being my favorite (yeah, the bells are stitched onto their arms; best shirt at the fair: “Yes, it hurts”).
And if there’s not a historic period that appeals, just make it up: see furries & real life roleplay.
“We see the same astonishing commitment to the irrational in sports fans, or Dungeons and Dragons nerds, or stamp collectors…”
Exactly (I’ve used the stamp collector analogy a few times myself); which prompts the question: why the heck the whole thing about separation of Church and State? A hobby, however indoctrinated, is a hobby; there is no reason to give preferential treatment to one over others. Therefore, as far as I am concerned, the only secular State is such that does not have any mention of religion in its laws.
Ichthyic wrote:
The way the experiment was set up, the students were told that the box was an “African relic” which magically worked to destroy anything put in it, but only if the owner “had negative sentiments about religion.” Clearly a religious sort of relic. Technically speaking, if you had no belief in the supernatural at all it should be easy to put your pen, your driver’s license, or your hand in the box. Yet even atheists seemed hesitant. That is a bit unexpected.
Saying the experiment was poorly designed because it would be reasonable for the students to think there was a trick involved — and the guy with the box was a loony — is a fair point. The test could be redesigned to meet that objection.
But I suspect the class knew, in advance, that Dr. Atran did not believe in the box, and they didn’t believe in the box either. In the circumstances, it was unlikely to be a trick (an anthropology classroom, and not Las Vegas.) But it was a lot harder for them to put their hand in, than their pen. And it felt “wrong” to wear a used but clean sweater when told it had belonged to a criminal, but not if it had belonged to an unknown stranger.
Something interesting is going on. Some sort of instinctive taboo seems to be working. I think his point — and it’s been made by both Dawkins and Dennett — is that religion is not just about belief in God. That’s a detail which may or may not be taught in the environment, where details are learned. It goes deeper than that, and deals with superstition and instinct and intuition and folk-physics and propensities in childhood.
By broadening his scope, Atran is actually getting further and further away from the simplistic “God puts knowledge of Himself in Every Heart” tripe the general public thinks of when it thinks of an innate tendency to be religious. They may try to spin it, but Atran’s point of view should not be reassuring to any Believer.
Yes to the first example, at least. I’ve seen an ECW re-enactment group in England. There are also very active re-enactment groups covering the whole span all the way back to the Roman era (complete with fully functional onagers and such…).
Regarding PZ’s original comment about muskets loaded with blanks, I’ve seen one re-enactment involving a muzzle loader in which the owner forgot to remove the ram-rod before firing it at one of his friends. Owwwwww. Not quite a “blank”.
Everything. The void. The fact that there is no higher ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’. What is, just is. I’m going to die and that’s it. I shall have been a speck of dust in time and space. Nothingness is rushing up to meet me and I can do nothing about it. And there isn’t anything Out There that gives a fuck about my terror.
Atheists spend their entire lives facing those fears without the props religions (claim to) provide.
Oh, almost forgot. No, I don’t cross my f***ing fingers in turbulence either.
I have my own ritual in such cases, which involves pouring any wine currently in my glass back into the little bottle and screwing the cap on. Much more practical, I think you’ll agree…
As nm pointed out, the English do in fact have their own civil war reenactment group(s?). But, as I recall, they run around with matchlocks–at least the infantry would. Any wheel locks would most likely be carried by the cavalry.
And actually, there’s more reenactment groups out there than you’d probably expect. There’s a group worldwide, for instance, that’s all about recreation of the Middle Ages (the good parts–color, pageantry, chivalry, etc., not the cruelty, disease, and religious oppression): http://www.sca.org.
I think part of it is the fear that the premise “Human beings have an innate tendency to believe in supernatural agency” will be used to support the conclusion “Religion will always be with us. It’s built into our genes. So don’t bother challenging or fighting it. You’re wasting your time.”
I think you’re right, jason, but you didn’t quite go far enough.
the second part of that is to patiently explain why a genetic predisposition is not equivalent to saying “genetically determined”.
hence, 90% of the kerfuffle that occured when EO Wilson released “Sociobiology” was based on the incorrect inference of the equivalence of the two terms, and most of the rest was based on the reasonable assumption that politicians themselves would end up using the confusion to further anti-humanistic agendas (especially coming right after the civil rights movement).
In short, there is no substantive basis for the fear you correctly surmise exists among some, and any avoidance on the part of scientists to discuss the issue is likely based on the hindsight of the mess caused by the release of works like that of Wilson, which in large part was unjustified to begin with. That still leaves the fear that politicians would abuse the confusion, which historically has some support.
Another level of “fear” is primarily based on avoiding having to deal with the issue at all, as many scientists think it would take away from the time spent on reasearch and teaching, and they’re right. It’s just so complicated to explain to the general public, who have apparently such a poor understanding of genetics to begin with.
In that sense, it’s exactly the same “fear” scientists share of having to waste time dealing with creationist claptrap.
You mean blogging, right? I know of one blogger who has crafted an online dungeon, with detailed descriptions of its troll-inmates. :)
Technically speaking, if you had no belief in the supernatural at all it should be easy to put your pen, your driver’s license, or your hand in the box. Yet even atheists seemed hesitant. That is a bit unexpected.
not that it already hasn’t been stated, twice, but are you sure you couldn’t come up with an alternative explanation that far better explains the observed behavior?
did Atran himself ever state that the results could be interpreted in a more parsimonious fashion than he himself was pushing?
Saying the experiment was poorly designed because it would be reasonable for the students to think there was a trick involved — and the guy with the box was a loony — is a fair point. The test could be redesigned to meet that objection.
yes, I see you’re following, but not yet quite grasping the implication.
Try this; you say the test could be redesigned to eliminate the other explanations.
How, exactly, would you do that?
Something interesting is going on. Some sort of instinctive taboo seems to be working.
again, how could you determine that based on the design of the experiment?
how can you even conclude something intrinsic is happening?
how could you eliminate the possibility that the behavior observed is entirely learned, either directly, or indirectly?
TheBrummel, JakeB, you guys have fun. I’m going to hide inside my rope trick and hope it lasts long enough.
I have my own ritual in such cases, which involves pouring any wine currently in my glass back into the little bottle and screwing the cap on. Much more practical, I think you’ll agree…
yeah, but is that an innate behavior, or learned?
;)
In other words, Atran is full of it.
I’ll say. Did it ever occur to him that maybe what people really were afraid of was that he had placed a contraption in the box, like a buzzer or Chinese fingercuffs, and used the “magic” story to hint at his joke? That’s what occurred to me.
I wouldn’t go that far. It doesn’t bother me at all that one day I will simply cease to exist: not that I’ll go from here to somewhere else–that it will all just end. What’s to worry about there? There’s no pain or suffering in nothingness. So I will cease to exist one day–so what? The only real fear is how it might happen: a plane crash, a mugger’s bullet, a fellow motorist, cancer, old age…
Not that I’m looking forward to death; I’m just not afraid of it. There are nice things in life I enjoy and will be sad to think I won’t have any more, and I don’t like the thought that my loved ones will miss me. But for me at least, nothingness itself isn’t anyhing to fear.
If you want a metaphor for religion in evolutionary terms I would suggest the genus Sacculina…
Millimeter Wave said:
You pour your drink back in the bottle? That’s the opposite of my turbulence ritual! ;)
Millimeter Wave said:
You pour your drink back in the bottle? That’s the opposite of my turbulence ritual! ;)
Ichtyhic wrote:
In one experiment? You couldn’t. But Atran is, like all anthropologists, pulling from a lot of experiments, and a lot of cultures. One of the problems which has to be explained is why, if religion is always learned behavior, it appears to have been taught and learned by ALL societies.
The first to fight against the “all peoples have always believed in God” are anthropologists like Atran. “God” is a very narrow belief, and most peoples have NOT believed in “God” at all. Belief varies enormously — but there are some similarities. I think the African relic box experiment is looking for clues.
As for the religious, they will spin it to their advantage either way. If atheism came easily and naturally, if it took work and effort and massive input from the environment to believe in God, does anyone think they would hold this against faith? Heck, no. It would be “atheists are like children” or “when you mature and can reason, you find God.”
But no, for most people it seems to be the other way around. Science is not common sense. Magic is common sense. Personal experience is common sense. Going with your gut is common sense. And it misleads.
One of the weirdest arguments I sometimes hear for the existence of God goes like “Across the world, small children, even those in non-religious societies, will say ‘someone made the moon.’ See, they know there is a God, by instinct.”
Huh? But that would support the opposite. The circumstances happen to be true — there really have been studies where young children in all sorts of cultures spontaneously report to researchers that the moon must have been “made by someone.” But that goes AGAINST religion being true. That’s how children think. Young children. They grow out of it. Except for anything their social structure labels religious. Then, it’s deep wisdom.
I think Atran’s basic conclusion that human beings have an innate tendency to believe in supernatural agency is supported by so much evidence from the universality of such belief that the attempts to punch holes in it here are entirely unconvincing. It’s not just the pervasive nature of theism and traditional religion, but of superstition and magical thinking more broadly. I don’t think this can plausibly be explained as a consequence of socialization or other environmental factors alone. Sastra’s post #36 expresses my views pretty well.
In one experiment? You couldn’t.
bing.
then, niether you nor Atran can construe the results of the box experiment as something significant.
simple as that.
One of the problems which has to be explained is why, if religion is always learned behavior, it appears to have been taught and learned by ALL societies.
i’ll leave it to others to explain to you why that is NOT a logical argument, as I can clearly see too much circular reasoning here for me to feel like continuing.
In fact, I’m quite certain that your EXACT supposition has already been dealt with in detail, and likely someone will jump to provide references.
tendency to believe in supernatural agency is supported by so much evidence from the universality of such belief that the attempts to punch holes in it here are entirely unconvincing.
just like sastra, your reasoning is circular.
There are built-in propensities for language in human beings. Nevertheless, all languages are taught and environmentally acquired.
If you don’t understand how those two sentences are compatible, you shouldn’t be posting here.
i’ll leave it to others to explain to you why that is NOT a logical argument
It seems perfectly logical to me. Any anthropological trait that is found in all known human cultures (the so-called “Human Universals”) is likely to have a genetic basis. Furthermore, scientists have developed plausible evolutionary explanations of the trait as an adaptation or byproduct of other adaptations.
I can think of two parallels to religion, where there are good and bad feelings which have no basis in reality:
1. Bipolar disorder
2. Use of hard drugs — heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, meth, ecstasy, etc.
Should we encourage and subsidize these with tax dollars?
Reading these comments, I have to wonder if you folks have a category for people you disagree with but don’t feel a need to vilify.
I have very specific objections to Atran’s ideas, for example, I think that his definition of religion* is too narrow. It focuses the superstitious side of religion, rather than the aspects that don’t involve truth claims at all or are primarily affective or aesthetic. I think Atran projects some of the characteristic obsessions of the historical religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.)backwards and thus tends to treat historically contingent facts about specific human institutions as if they reflected an unchanging human nature. So I disagree with Atran; and yet, for some unknown reason, I don’t feel moved to yell, “Die heretic!” The circumstance that I’ve actually read Atran’s books may have something to do with taking him seriously. I’m not looking around for some fresh atheistical rhetoric; I want to understand human religiosity. So does Atran, that evil bugger!
*”Religion is a community’s costly and hard-to-fake commitment to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents who master people’s existential anxietes, such as death and deception.” –In Gods We Trust, p. 4.
So in other words, by analogy, there are built-in propensities for religion, but all religions are taught and environmentally acquired?
Isn’t that what the article was trying to say (albeit somewhat clumsily, and with clunky generalizations)?
Jim Harrison, I have one nitpick with your definition of religion. I would say that the commitment is very easy to fake: certain politicians, televangelists, and other frauds*, for instance–not to mention the thousands of folk who really aren’t into it but go along with a church or religion because it’s expected of them.
Of course, if your definition was referring to a commitment on the part of a society, not of individuals in it, then I have no issues with it.
* Note: I’m not suggesting that politicians and televangelists are all insincere; I used them as examples because they have a reputation for wearing their faith on their sleeve but behaving in ways that suggest it’s mostly an act.
Atran studies religion professionally, so the comments that accuse him of having a “sample size of one” are misguided. In fact that criticism is much more applicable to people like PZ, who use their own introspection (or lack thereof) to prove points — religion means nothing to me, therefore it shouldn’t mean anything to anyone.
It’s a simple fact that supernatural beliefs are very widespread, essentially universal on a cultural level, although individuals may be immune. This is something that demands explanation and is likely to have an interesting one. The urge to re-enact the Civil War is not similarly universal.
Leon,
It’s not Jim Harrison’s definition, it’s Atran’s definition, which Jim claims is “too narrow.” I think it’s a pretty good definition myself.
The urge to reenact the US Civil War isn’t universal, certainly, but neither is belief in Christianity or speaking English. Civil War reenactment is a subset of reenactment in general, which is probably a subset of nostalgia and interest in the past, which are widespread among humanity, if not indeed universal.
The trait of belief in the supernatural/religion is universal in human cultures. Specific religions are particular expressions or elaborations of that universal trait and are contingent on the particular environment and history of the culture in which they arise.
Well, yes, and if you consider civil war re-enactment a variety of drama or narration then it starts to look like something more universal.
But then it starts to have a similar status as religion. It’s universal, it looks like it may be adaptive or it may just be accidental byproduct of something else. Certainly learning about the past and having the ability to recall and retell past events so you can learn from other people’s mistakes sounds pretty adaptive. So PZ’s use of it as a counter-analogy falls apart. He was the one chuckling about how ridiculous it would be to have the Confederate Flag etched on your cortex, but as you suggest, it’s not that ridiculous to have a narrative tendency etched there.
I’ve conversed with (and in a few cases, actually met) people who believed that their religion really was built into their genes: not religiousness, but their actual religion.
What should be done with such people?
mtraven: you aren’t getting it. The civil war reenactor comparison is not a counter-analogy — it is an example of a phenomenon just like religion where you can trace causes back to perhaps generalities about social cohesion and so forth, but in the case of reenactments, we do not invent elaborate genetic correlates to the behavior, or treat it with as much privilege as we do religion.
Yes, ” learning about the past and having the ability to recall and retell past events” are universals. We might reasonably assume that they are exactly the kind of universals underlying religious behavior. But religion qua religion is not a particularly interesting or necessary phenomenon, and I would make the argument that it is actually a pathological derivative of some good and useful properties of the human mind.
The Sealed Knot is what you’re looking for.
As for religion, what’s the problem – or are atheists just lacking in imagination?.
We’re a social species and religion is a very powerful force for social cohesion. Just like Star Trek or Star Wars or sports fandom, it provides a set of shared beliefs, rituals, comradeship and a sense of purpose. In fact, where ST and SW are concerned, it’s noticeable you have the emergence of a quasi-religious movements in the followings for the logical Vulcans or the Jedi knights. I can well remember feeling the tremendous appeal of Mr Spock as role model for a while. It isn’t hard to imagine that, in earlier centuries and stripped of trappings of science fiction, such a character might well have spawned a religious cult.
What religion does, however, is provide hope in the face of utter hopelessness. How many of us here have tried to imagine what is probably unimagineable, the total nothing which – if, as agnostics and atheists, we are right – follows our death. And I’m not talking about the words or philosophical concepts here but the appalling prospect that after our death it will be as if nothing has ever existed – not us, not our family or friends, not our world, not the entire universe. It will be – except that it won’t even have that level of existence – as if everyone that we have ever cared about, everything that we have ever striven for or simply known had never existed – there had never been anything other than nothing.
I suspect most people simply ignore such a possibility until they are forced to confront it but when they do, they come to realise that however philosophically impeccable atheism or agnosticism may be, they offer little comfort in the face of the bleak reality of total personal oblivion.
There’s no question that the the powerful and uncompromising advocacy of the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and our own Myers and Moran have raised the profile of atheism and elbowed their way into the public debate about religion. Hopefully this will lead to atheism being treated with greater respect, especially in the US, but anyone who thinks this will significantly diminish the appeal of religion simply doesn’t understand what that appeal really is.
We’re a social species and religion is a very powerful force for social cohesion.
and you just stated exactly what the evidence really indicates:
religion is a manifestation of a predispostion towards social cohesion. there is also evidence of it as a natural extension of a predispostion towards heirarchical social structures in group dynamics as well.
which, I hope, will help illustrate to Jason and sastra why i say that the pervasiveness of religion does not, by itself, mean that religion is the innate predisposition.
Superstition is undoubtedly innate, although it’s probably best understood as a failure rather than a thing in itself.
Combine tribalism, superstition, and a need to create meme markers for ideological immune systems, and you produce religion.
Arnaud:
1 of the criticisms is that the Gilgamesh epic actually shows introspection, which throws the dating off. The other, as Dennet points out, is that it doesn’t explain hallucinations adequately. There’s probably more.
I found Jaynes to be rather intuitive in most respects. Then again, I used to hear voices myself (voice-free since 2003). Nothing outre: no instructions, glossolalia, anything that wild by far. Mostly harmless.;)
It’s hard to back up the theory evidentially, as there’s no actual physiological proof.
Learned. Definitely learned. ;)
Specifically from a particularly bad turbulence incident in which I really, really wished that the guy sitting in the seat behind me had thought of it. :(
I guess the pilot learned a new ritual too: before you start yelling and cussing at ATC for not warning you about that really bad patch of turbulence, double check that your microphone isn’t switched to “cabin PA”… ;)
IF you’re in the universe of DUNE by Frank Herbert, THEN DO NOT put your hand into a mysterious box held by a strangely dressed old woman, OR it will hurt like hell, AND if you pull your hand out, she will jab you with a poisoned needle AND you will die.
Frank Herbert, by the way, was giving a radical critique of charismatic relgious leaders. Even IF they correctly prophecize and have uncanny powers, following them will plunge the galaxy into Jihad (he uses that term).
Since “Star Trek or Star Wars” was mentioned, this reference hits the trifecta.
My conclusion: Atran fails to understand either the Bible or Science Fiction.
PZ said:
I would make the argument that [religion] is actually a pathological derivative of some good and useful properties of the human mind.
I agree, and now you seem to agree with the article’s spandrel descriptions – though you’re not so restrained in your value judgments.
I don’t think the civil war reenactment comparison is apt. It seems that many of the researchers are curious about concepts of magical thinking and projected personification, not just questions of irrational popularity of a social meme. Their experiments seem aimed at the question of whether such magical thinking, etc. is acquired or innate. Frankly, I’m not surprised to find evidence supporting it as an innate characteristic. It calls to mind Skinner’s superstitious pigeons. Certainly, a “natural” tendancy toward magical thinking illuminates the popularity of religion, and adaptive mechanisms for seeking cause and effect relationships illuminate the origins of magical thinking.
Only two things bothered me about the article. First, the group selection example was flat out wrong. In the example, genes which make an individual prone to sentry behavior in the individual would be outcompeted by genes which discourage sentry behavior, even if that decreases “group fitness”. It’s really an example of the fallacy of group selection. The only way for the sentry gene to flourish would be if the sentry aids the survival of kin disproportionately to non-kin, or also influences a more beneficial trait (eg. multiple phenotype influences, heterozygous advantage, or a linked trait), or causes the individual to receive reciprocal altruism. That last one is interesting, and a case could be made that religious behavior causes priests/shamans to receive tremendous altruism. Of course, that doesn’t make predictions of genetic vs. memetic inheritance.
My other complaint is that like too many science articles, this one ends with the standard milquetoast shrug “hey, maybe there’s something to it, or maybe those nice folks over there were right all along, or maybe we’ll never know and you can keep believing whatever you want…so don’t worry.” It’s this, diet fads, and weather reports that cause so many people to deny the utility of science.
Ichthyic,
religion is a manifestation of a predispostion towards social cohesion
How is religion a manifestation of that? Why would a predisposition towards social cohesion manifest itself as a belief in supernatural agents and other religious ideas rather than just as loyalty or friendship? Religion is costly. All those temples and pyramids and cathedrals consume a lot of resources, as does the time put into worship and prayer and other religious rituals and behaviors. As Steven Pinker puts it:
Ahhhh. non believers are proven wrong because they don’t believe the crazy bearded guy with a magic box?
Isn’t not believing wholeheardetly in bearded guys’ claims what skepticism is all about?
Theism is about blind trust. Skepticism is about not being quite sure about stuff.
-I cross my fingers-I wish people good luck and fortune-
It’s as much cultural upbringing and old habit as actual belief.
Who shakes hands with people they meet to make sure the other guy isn’t going to shiv you?
Religion is costly.
relative to what?
costly to whom?
I say bless you because it’s polite. I leave out the god, it’s me who’s giving the blessing.
When turbulence gets bad I say, “Wheeeee!!!” If we’re going down there’s nothing I can do about it, and this is a pretty cool roller coaster.
relative to what?
To its absence.
costly to whom?
To the people who practise it.
I rather liked the article. I’ve been an atheist for over two years, but I STILL find myself automatically beginning to pray during stressful or frightening situations. And then I immediately stop, reminding myself that no invisible friend in the sky is listening.
Not everyone is capable of being quite so consistently rational and logical as PZ, even though we do try. I think a lot of people here, PZ included, would do well to remember that, and not (seem to) be so scornful and judgmental.
As for Jason’s response to Ichthyic (comment #107), I think Dennett pointed out in Breaking the Spell that religion provides justification for soldiers to sacrifice their lives for the good of their community, since there’s an award of eternal life afterwards. At the least, religion is a more powerful incentive than non-supernatural ones to adhere to community rules and values, since the punishment for disobedience is perceived as both terrible and eternal.
it’s trusting the crazy bearded guy who claims to have a magic box.
In most places, that guy has a name. His name is usually “System Administrator”, but sometimes goes by “Network Admin”, “IT Coordinator”, or BOFH.
I wonder if religion started out as a sexual selection issue. People who were deeply into magical thinking could probably be pretty persuasive to the rest of their community that they had all the answers (how compelling must the story of giants rolling boulders or gods throwing lightning bolts be when it’s a freezing night and you’ve got half a burning log to keep warm). I suspect most ancient holy folk were as messed up about sex as their more modern day counterparts, so they were probably pretty successful in the fit department. I would think that their memes were more successful as well.
I certainly think religion is a sexual selection issue in historic times. Or, perhaps, the idea of being outspokenly NON-religous was selected against in many parts of the world.
I’m not as sure what the effects would be nowadays. All I know is that, in dating, I’ve had far less positive responses by mentioning I’m areligious than by mentioning I’m a roleplaying geek.
(Forget fighting the dragon. Let the warrior with all the hitpoints and the dragon-slaying arrow deal with it. I’ll go rescue the princess/vast hoard of treasure.)
(I once saw on the show Brainiac–an entertaining if not terribly useful in learning how science works sorta show–that there is apparently an American Civil War re-enactment group in Britian. Which I thought was fascinating.)
Oops. That should have been “ancient holy folk wereN’T as messed up about sex” Bah.
Understood that not every atheist is quite that way, but I didn’t read PZ’s comment as being “scornful and judgmental”. Rather, I read his comment:
To be a direct reaction to this:
Which sort of pissed me off too; it’s awfully presumptuous to assert that latent superstition is inherent in “even the most atheistic among us” and rather mild criticism to announce that one is, as a result of the blanket assertion about atheists, “predisposed to be disagreeable with his premises”.
PZ: OK, maybe I’m not getting your point, since you seem to be in violent agreement with me and Atran. You said:
I agree, it’s like religion (I don’t know about “just” like). But you are misleadingly comparing a specific thing (civil war reenactment) to a generality (religion). The proper comparision would be either “narrative behavior” and religion, or civil war reenactments and, say, Mormonism. We don’t have any specific genes for either of the latter, but there very well might be genetic underpinnings to both narrative in general and religion in general (in fact, they are probably closely related). As for privilege, I don’t think anyone here is making the argument that religion deserves privelge, but it is an interesting sociological fact that it does in fact enjoy a certan privelged status. Atran is a sociologist, not an evangelist.
Well, it’s obviously interesting or we wouldn’t spend so much time discussing it. You have to admit that atheists like Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and yourself have a deep interest in the subject. It’s obviously not necessary in the sense that breathing is, but who said it was? It’s a deeply ingrained tendency, no more or less.
As far as I can tell, you and Atran both take the spandrel view of what religion is, and you only differ in your personal reaction to the facts of the matter. Atran wants to study religion and maybe coexist uneasily with it; you’d prefer to stamp it out.
mtraven,
I oppose religion and would like to see an end to it because its factual claims are never justified and are often demonstrably false, and its morality is harmful. I support the study of religion because it is an important social phenomenon, but studying something does not imply approving of it.
me: That few atheists “have to work hard at being atheists” is evidence that the evolutionary view of religion is false — a point that construction of the above conditional is biased against.
Blake: I’m not so sure.
I didn’t say anything about being sure, did I? My point was only about the biased construction of the argument.
Reading these comments, I have to wonder if you folks have a category for people you disagree with but don’t feel a need to vilify.
Apparently you felt a need to vilify “you folks”. Perhaps it’s a human universal.
One thing that no one mentions about this whole “hard-wired for god!” thing is that it basically contradicts all of what we call religious “faith,” the faith of Christianity in particular.
In Christianity, or at least the tenants I was brought up with, belief in god was both an act of love for god and a “leap of faith” to placing trust in god. Belief was a choice and the very act of choosing to believe is what made Christian beliefs the “faith” that they are. If an individual doesn’t have a choice in the matter, then faith in god is essentially meaningless. Christian theology continually harps on this point.
But if 90 plus percent of the believers out there had no choice due to brain chemistry, than this god that they worship gave them no choice.
So god wants us to choose faith, but then “designs” us in such a way that compels it? Hookay…
Just one of the many things about religion that make no sense, if all this “hardwired for god!” stuff is true.
(“purposelessness” is a kind of dirty word to a lot of people, for some reason
This is the crux of the matter and is actually widely ignored in the discussion. It is my experience that people definitely have an innate tendency to look for purpose in observed phenomena. This is as clearly apparent in problems with the concept of stochasticity as it is with superstition and religious belief.
I personally think the best way to combat religion is to teach stochasticity agressively. Get out that deck of cards and make some experiments in primary school. Teach people early that somes things are just random. Teach people to see how Journalists often deliberately ignore the null hypothesis in their articles.
Of course this search for purpose, is biologically useful, most phenomena are not random. Finding reasons for things is definitely a step up from blind instinct.
We may disagree with Atran, but we need a positive alternative agenda. After all, he is basically on the same side as we are, he is not a friend of the fundies.
usagi said : And if there’s not a historic period that appeals, just make it up: see furries & real life roleplay.
Hey ! Larpers are generally a nice bunch, and mostly harmless even if a bit obsessed… I think they would resent the comparison with religion.
How many of us here have tried to imagine what is probably unimagineable, the total nothing which – if, as agnostics and atheists, we are right – follows our death.
Why should that be any more horrible than our nonexistence *before* our lives started?
And I’m not talking about the words or philosophical concepts here but the appalling prospect that after our death it will be as if nothing has ever existed – not us, not our family or friends, not our world, not the entire universe.
No, it will be as if the universe is still there, but we will not be there to experience it. But we won’t experience any “appalling nothingness” either. Are you confusing death with that episode of Futurama where the universe got destroyed?
The article covers a lot of ground for all its faults. But the subject of giving a biological explanation for complex social behavior seems to be all about unsupported theories and some vague correlations. It doesn’t look like it would be promising in the near term.
And where is the connection to neuroscience research in basic characteristics, or animal research on related behavior as grieving for the dead? As Henig is a neurobiologist one would think he would find the ties to basic biology and evolution an essential part of the picture.
Nice to have this spelled out, since the definitions and arguments between byproduct and adaptationist camps seems to be taken for granted by other posters. Perhaps it would be fitting for a Basics post by PZ or Wilkins.
The more I read on evolutionary psychology and adaptationism, the less they seem to rise above the level of “just so stories”. The above may explain why they seem to lack empirical support. On the face of it, it seems easier (but not that easy) to tease out which basic characteristics are domain-general or domain-specific first, and take it from there.
I don’t think anyone thinks religion doesn’t have basic appeals of different kinds. What for example Dawkins wants to do is to show why we can’t always follow basic urges.
For example, it is appealing to some to watch television and stuff their faces with junk food. That doesn’t make it healthy. For others it is appealing to act out on their aggressions and hit people when frustrated. That doesn’t make it moral.
The strategy in all these cases is to show what is wrong and to make it less attractive. It may be harder to prevent people from getting needlessly and dangerously fat than to make them refrain from using superstition. But that won’t stop us from trying since overweight hurts people and costs society. Much as superstition, btw.
The article covers a lot of ground for all its faults. But the subject of giving a biological explanation for complex social behavior seems to be all about unsupported theories and some vague correlations. It doesn’t look like it would be promising in the near term.
And where is the connection to neuroscience research in basic characteristics, or animal research on related behavior as grieving for the dead? As Henig is a neurobiologist one would think he would find the ties to basic biology and evolution an essential part of the picture.
Nice to have this spelled out, since the definitions and arguments between byproduct and adaptationist camps seems to be taken for granted by other posters. Perhaps it would be fitting for a Basics post by PZ or Wilkins.
The more I read on evolutionary psychology and adaptationism, the less they seem to rise above the level of “just so stories”. The above may explain why they seem to lack empirical support. On the face of it, it seems easier (but not that easy) to tease out which basic characteristics are domain-general or domain-specific first, and take it from there.
I don’t think anyone thinks religion doesn’t have basic appeals of different kinds. What for example Dawkins wants to do is to show why we can’t always follow basic urges.
For example, it is appealing to some to watch television and stuff their faces with junk food. That doesn’t make it healthy. For others it is appealing to act out on their aggressions and hit people when frustrated. That doesn’t make it moral.
The strategy in all these cases is to show what is wrong and to make it less attractive. It may be harder to prevent people from getting needlessly and dangerously fat than to make them refrain from using superstition. But that won’t stop us from trying since overweight hurts people and costs society. Much as superstition, btw.
Yes, as mentioned above, we have the Sealed Knot (as we’ve already had “Dune”, Star Wars and Star Trek, I may as well mention that Cpl Nobbs is a member of the Ankh-Morpork Civil War re-enactors, the Peeled Nuts, in “Men at Arms”).
We also have Second World War re-enactors. They worry me intensely.
As has been pointed out, there are plenty of ECW (English Civil War) enthusiasts. I suspect that TheBrummel is also aware that the Spanish licence-built Me109s for several decades after WW2 for their air force, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the Bangladesh army also uses licence-built T-55s. So I imagine TheBrummel is being ironic or something in referring to USians as being weird when it’s clear that it’s human beings in general who suffer that affliction.
My Atheist take on religion is this. When we gained speech we were as intelligent as we are today but we had no data base to explain our surrondings. An entity was invented to explain where rain,wind the sun etc came from. It was our first science. Theorising and mythical stories are one and the same. We made up the stories to make sense of it all. The amounts of Gods has lessened in most cases as commonsense then Science helped explain away the mysteries of the Universe. And like the Civil War guys, Religion now gives those people who think they need a sense of belonging, and help them to make sense of the world and perhaps a difference in the world. And the promise of an eternal after life. Which is almost right we exist as long as Earth exists just in a non threatening form.
We may disagree with Atran, but we need a positive alternative agenda.
My agenda is the heat death of the universe, and so is Atran’s. In the meantime, it’s nice to try to get the facts right.
After all, he is basically on the same side as we are, he is not a friend of the fundies.
The fundies are basically on the same side as we are; they’re not the friend of the attackers from Mars.
Most people are very shallow thinkers; it isn’t limited to the religious.
That whole article is a bit weird. First they quote Dawkins, a mean atheist, saying that religion may be an “unfortunate byproduct” of evolution. Then they contrast this with the view of the more moderate scientists studying the evolution of religion. They think it’s -surprise!- a byproduct of evolution. So how is this supposed to contradict Dawkins? He is wrong because he uses mean words?
And:
“Giggling seaweed meets the requirement of being minimally counterintuitive, Atran wrote.”
I’ll take whatever Atran is smoking…
evolutionary psychology and sociology is plagued with panadaptationists and just positing some contrived dualist opposite spandrelism doesn’t explain anything either.
there is a class conflict explanation that is a far better answer to why religions persist. the root cause of religious beliefs is a black box until we can actually run the experiments where children are raised without teleological metaphysics (english is full of this bullshit) and without references to god-beasts. until then, it belongs in the new york times.
I don’t necessarily buy the neo-Marxist class-conflict part.
But this about about says everything I intended to say on this topic. Evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, which may one day turn out to be something useful and genuinely scientific continues to undermine any limited credibility it has with delightfully romantic “Just So” explanations like this. Religion may well be rooted on some of these basic mental modules described in the article (assuming they exist) and it may be rooted in entirely different ones that we know nothing about as yet. It may be a combination of adaptation, exaptation, culture and excessively ferocious toilet-training. It’s an interesting question. But we have nothing close to an answer. This is speculative philosophy, not science. It is misleading to call this stuff science and give the public the impression that something has actually been discovered, tested and verified or falsified. Shame on the NYT, as usual!!
I find this whole thing pretty silly. The argument for religion being innate is that it’s universal. Except that’s not true anymore; most of the developed world is not religious. We see a clear correlation between education and lack of religious belief. It’s like saying illiteracy is innate. So Atran et al have to come up with ways of showing that people who don’t practice religion are still secretly religious. The whole thing is circular and ridiculous.
What’s really inane about these types of discussions is that there’s a whole level of explanation that’s passed over so we can chitchat about our Grand Unified Theories of Religion. We [i]know[/i] why Evangelical Christianity has been spreading in the US and Africa. In the US it’s a concerted effort by a few to change laws and force the cultural climate to be more hospitable to their ideas. In Africa it’s coldly methodical missionary work. Neither is anything anyone in their right mind would support; so they tell themselves it’s really due to some innate need for religion.
Wherever people have their needs sufficiently met and attain a decent level of education and there is no concerted effort by reactionaries to undermine the legal and cultural framework of the society to be more hospitable to religion, religion is either dying or dead. The fact that religion whithers so rapidly when it encounters education and modernity is probably a clue to what fuels it.
PZ: “…find it much more plausible that I, and many others like me, have simply escaped the cultural indoctrination that still afflicts Atran”
Maybe, but this still begs the question of *how* you escaped, when others of similar background succumbed. In that spirit, I am reminded of a typically trenchant bit from Dawkins:
“Any suggestion that the child’s mathematical ineptitude might have a genetic origin is likely to be greeted with something approaching despair: if it is in the genes “it is written”, it is “determined” and nothing can be done about it; you might as well give up attempting to teach the child mathematics. This is pernicious rubbish on an almost astrological scale. Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principle no different from each other. Some influences of both types may be hard to reverse, others may be easy.”
So, your sense of liberation may yet owe something, if not everything, to your inheritance. Speaking of which, on the occasion of your birth, may nature and nurture combine to grant you many more!
Warmly…SH
All this reminds me of the (apocryphal?) story that Niels Bohr kept a horseshoe nailed to his office wall. Asked if he thought that it brought him luck, he replied: “Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you luck whether you believe in it or not.”
If not true, it should be.
i have heard human beings referred to as ‘meaning-making’ machines. i think this is pretty apt. i do find myself fighting the connections my brain seems naturally to want to make between events in the world that can only be related coincidentally.
research has even shown that pidgeons can be superstitious, developing a ritualized behavior pattern when faced with the riddle of how to get a pellet to pop into their bin, when, in fact, the timing of the pellet delivery is completely random.
we’re not so different from those pidgeons. good things happen. bad things happen. we seek out the causality and we do our ritual dance to ward off the bad things and encourage the good.
reserach with split brain patients has vividly demonstrated this faculty in action, and even isolated its location in the brain. we generate meanings (causality) automatically and effortlessly, and the evolutionary justifications for the existence of such a faculty are close to obvious. but, understanding that this is what’s going on when i am tempted to wear my lucky shirt to watch the red sox gives me some power over how i receive my brain’s automatic causality messages in my day to day life.
Urges?
I have no urge to kill (note that that’s different from the urge to kick assholes in the belly), or to chew with my mouth open (gives me a sore throat). I also have no urge to cross my fingers (which I have never been taught to do) or pray (which I have been taught to do).
On the origin of religion, I consider the God of the Gaps argument in comment 128 to be pretty much obvious.
Surely it’s not just me and PZ?
Urges?
I have no urge to kill (note that that’s different from the urge to kick assholes in the belly), or to chew with my mouth open (gives me a sore throat). I also have no urge to cross my fingers (which I have never been taught to do) or pray (which I have been taught to do).
On the origin of religion, I consider the God of the Gaps argument in comment 128 to be pretty much obvious.
Surely it’s not just me and PZ?
I wrote:
Actually that’s more an explanation for the former universality of religion. On the origin, try Skinner’s pigeons.
I wrote:
Actually that’s more an explanation for the former universality of religion. On the origin, try Skinner’s pigeons.
I haven’t seen anyone try to argue that Civil War re-enactors must have had a historical selective advantage, or that there must be a Civil War reenactment gene, or that something so costly must have a hard-wired biological basis
I think there is. As others point out upthread, there are re-enactment communities all over the world, either doing their own history (our Civil War, the English doing their Civil War) or romanticized versions of someone else’s history (our medieval re-enactment groups; I hear cowboy & Indian re-enactments are HUGE in England).
There is also a big overlap between re-enactors and science fiction fans, who display many of the same behavorial actions – obsessive research, dressing up, gathering in groups to discuss/create/share in the culture du jour. It’s the exact same thing, only with fiction plugged into the place of history. (Excepting the Sherlock Holmes fans, who are doing both simultaneously.)
The general “re-enactment behavior” is too widespread and the communal actions are so similar that I can’t help but think that there is a re-enactor/fandom gene that simply activates on different triggers. It’s just that some are considered more culturally normal than others – arguably sports fans are also doing many of the same things as well, but it’s somehow considered more acceptable to be seen in public wearing a football uniform with your face painted in team colors than it is to run around in a civil war or Star Trek uniform.
Why is it always the Civil War? Wouldn’t it be interesting if people got together to re-enact this one instead?
#132 said
That’s pretty dumb. Do you really think American religiosity can be explained by some conspiracy theory? Evangelical leaders are powerful because they have many followers whose votes they can control, and religion is the reason they have that control, not the consequence! I can’t tell if your opinion of the American public is higher or lower than mine — you apparently think they are smart enough to not be religious if they weren’t being influenced by pernicious outside influences, but you also believe they are dumb enough to be influenced by those forces.
In any case, the question of religion still remains to be explained. If it’s some nefarious plot, why does it take the form of a religion rather than something else? As PZ points out, there are other group manias like war reenactment, sports teams, Amway, celebrity worship…but none of those have the power, reach, and influence of religion.
The anti-evolution people keep on asking for the evidence for natural selection. “Where are all the transitional fossils?” Blah, blah, blah. For them, what they don’t know doesn’t exist. And they’re unlikely to learn much since they really aren’t interested in the science. They want to bolster their religion, not understand nature. Many of the critics of Atran and other writers on the sociology and psychology of religion demonstrate a similar willful ignorance. They assume that, like themselves, the people who study religion seriously are just throwing around some ideas. They are merely ignorant of vast mass of effort that has already been expended on the subject. Just as Creationists don’t have any real awareness of the sheer scale of work in biology and geology, village atheists are pretty obviously innocent about the ethnography, history, and sociology of religion, which is why their polemics are so impoverished and repetitive. “What about the Crusades! What about the Inquisition!” Blah, blah, blah.
Torjborn,
The more I read on evolutionary psychology and adaptationism, the less they seem to rise above the level of “just so stories”.
Then I have to wonder what you’re reading. Perhaps you should take a look at the EP research described at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UCSB. Most of the criticism I have seen of evolutionary psychology is political and ideological in nature, and the few attempts at serious scientific criticism of the field I have seen (e.g. David Buller’s Adapting Minds) are not remotely persuasive.
My basic problem with what I’ve heard about Jaynes is that he’s talking about universal bicameralism 3000 years ago, followed by breakdown under the pressure from complex societies in the Middle East. Which implies that Native Americans and Australian aborigines, among others, should still have been bicameral when encountered. I’ve never heard that he talks about how bicameralism went from being universal 3000 years ago to being restricted globally to a few schizophrenics today.
I think you are all much too sweet when it comes to explanations for religion. My take: We have an inborn sense of right and wrong; with it comes guilt, sadness, despair. Religion allows forgiveness! There was an example of this fairly recently on PK’s site, where a Christian apologist admitted that he had cheated on his wife and Jesus had forgiven him. He seemed pretty smug about this as well. He misbehaved and managed to avoid any penalty by invoking his “get out of Hell free” card. Yeah, Religion makes us less moral. We sin, God wipes our sins clean. In my humble opinion. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the benefit of this.
An editorial note: Without religion, we are all responsible for our own actions; no God swooping in from the sidelines to save the day. YRMV
Also, I believe the author, Atran, is wrong with his statement that all primitive peoples have religion. There are hunter-gatherers that are not religious–at least I was taught so by my Prof. who had done fieldwork in the Kalahari.
As has been pointed out, there are plenty of ECW (English Civil War) enthusiasts. I suspect that TheBrummel is also aware that the Spanish licence-built Me109s for several decades after WW2 for their air force, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the Bangladesh army also uses licence-built T-55s. So I imagine TheBrummel is being ironic or something in referring to USians as being weird when it’s clear that it’s human beings in general who suffer that affliction.
…and other similar comments.
Yes, I was being ironic. I did not realize there was such a healthy historical-warfare reenactment culture in the UK, but I’m not particularly surprised. I also did know about the SCA and similar groups, but they’re rather tangential to my question – I was asking specifically about civilians reenacting civil wars. The English wars-of-the-Roses reenactments sound right, but other examples (Napoleonic, WWII, etc.) are not civil wars, which I assume to be on average more traumatic to a culture or society than a war with a foreign army. The whole brother-vs.-brother thing, in my mind.
My examples of Spain and Bangladesh were deliberately chosen as examples of civil wars that occurred before the majority of living citizens were born, but where there are still some people (old people) around who have first-hand experience of the conflict. The US civil war (it’s annoying to the rest of the world, if I may speak for a few billion people, to drop the nation-specificity during discussion) occurred before anyone alive today was born – but not by much, perhaps only two or three generations separate the oldest US citizens from their ancestors who fought alongside Lee or Sherman.
The phenomenon of civil-war reenactment, specifically, to me seemed pecular to the USA, but I stand corrected. My question about replica or restored military hardware stands, though. The T-55 tank is probably a bad example, since it’s still in active use in many nations’ armies – I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I could buy one for myself if I only had the money.
I think that it would be interesting to look at invented religions like New Age and neo-paganism, as well as non-Abrahamic religions in general — I get annoyed when I see discussions of religion that turn out to be dominated by Abrahamic stereotypes.
Especially invented religions that do not seem like they have some socio-political agenda and that do not seem very lucrative for their leaders — if they have well-defined leaders at all.
I think that it’s also important to look at the Communist experience. Despite their attempts to suppress religion as the moral equivalent of drug addiction, Communists have done lots of quasi-religious things, like their personality cults of their leaders. Consider Stalin’s personality cult:
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/cult.html
O great Stalin, O leader of the peoples,
Thou who broughtest man to birth.
Thou who fructifies the earth,
Thou who restorest to centuries,
Thou who makest bloom the spring,
Thou who makest vibrate the musical chords…
Thou, splendour of my spring, O thou,
Sun reflected by millions of hearts.
— A.O. Avdienko
That seems almost religious, doesn’t it?
mtraven, How is that a conspiracy theory? There’s a concerted effort by a few to have laws changed, ensure politicians give appropriate lip service to religious issues, ensure the media kowtows to Christian ideas of morality, etc. America has a vocal minority of highly motivated and persistent Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians. They operate in the open; it’s hardly a conspiracy. They have followers mostly in areas of the US that suffer from relative economic inequality of a kind that isn’t found in the rest of the developed world.
Why does it take the form of religion? The Christian worldview preceded modernity; anyone who feels threatened by modernity will fall back on whatever preceded it. Obviously the nature of Christian beliefs, like all beliefs, have some basis in our psychology; but there doesn’t seem to be any reason to postulate specific psychology to explain just religious beliefs. Aristotle was part of the favoured worldview of the West for hundreds of years; are we innately predisposed to Aristotlism? Confucianism dominated China for hundreds of years; is that evidence for an innate disposition?
There’s no evidence at all that people even have difficulty in giving up religiosity. Modern science has been with us for little over 300 years, during which time organised religion has seen an almost complete collapse in Europe. That’s lightning fast on a cultural scale. You couldn’t ask for better evidence that people can do without religion. I think it’s wrong to point to exploitative movements like Evangelicalism in the US and impoverished Africa or the growth of Muslim nations as evidence that religion “won’t go away.” In countries with the sort of social and political climate sane people wish on others, religion is dead.
I also did know about the SCA and similar groups, but they’re rather tangential to my question – I was asking specifically about civilians reenacting civil wars.
I’ve never heard of Finnish civil war reenactments. Probably the lack of proper uniforms and the general brutality and confusion during the 1918 war make it off-putting. And properly redoing the most famous battles would require something like this:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30412?issue=4227&special=1996
I would like to see a reenactment of the Cudgel War of 1596, though…
I understand the sentiment, but I’m not sure it’s that big a deal to leave off the country identifier. When someone from the UK talks about “the civil war”, I assume they mean the English one–likewise someone from Spain, or wherever.
OTOH, you may have some reason to bristle a little at it. Canada never had a civil war of its own, did it? I think that reflects well on you as a people, that you’ve been better at working out your differences without resorting to force. But I can also see how there would be no “US vs. Canadian civil war” distinction, and considering people in the US often lack respect for Canadians, I can see how it would be annoying.
Personally, I’m just glad your country has a real name. I hate calling my people “Americans” or trying to work my way around having to use the term.
poke, you are implying that the reason for American religiosity is some kind of top-down imposition. I think that’s ridiculous. Nobody forces the masses to go to the megachurches. America is market-driven, and the pastors are adept at giving people what they want while extracting their tithes.
As for religion being linked to poverty and ignorance, you may have a point, but it’s really Western Europe that is the outlier, not the US. And while they may enjoy high levels of secularization, it’s also linked to a way-below-replacement birth rate, so who knows how long that’s going to last.
That’s pretty dumb. Do you really think American religiosity can be explained by some conspiracy theory? Evangelical leaders are powerful because they have many followers whose votes they can control, and religion is the reason they have that control, not the consequence!
No, actually, your comment very dumb. Religious leaders have been very active in the creation of their flocks, through indoctrination of children, the creation of megachurches, the promotion of religion through radio, cable, and editorials, “think tanks” and institutes like DI, electing school boards, legislators, and executives who support them through changes in the law and funneling tax money their way. The spread of religiosity is a huge conspiracy, and has been for millenia.
They operate in the open; it’s hardly a conspiracy
Conspiracies don’t have to be secrets, and that wasn’t an element of mtraven’s objection.
I think that’s ridiculous. Nobody forces the masses to go to the megachurches.
So you believe in libertarian free will? Talk about ridiculous.
As for religion being linked to poverty and ignorance, you may have a point, but it’s really Western Europe that is the outlier, not the US.
No, the U.S. is the outlier, because its relatively high level of religiosity is uncharacteristic of first world nations.
And while they may enjoy high levels of secularization, it’s also linked to a way-below-replacement birth rate, so who knows how long that’s going to last.
Note sure I understand the argument. Are you suggesting that a low birth rate promotes religiosity? How? There does seem to be a causal link between religiosity and fertility rate, but it’s the opposite of what you seem to be implying.
“Personally, I’m just glad your country has a real name. I hate calling my people “Americans” or trying to work my way around having to use the term.”
You know who has real nerve? Ecuador. Imagine, claiming the equator that passes through 12 other countries.
As for religion being linked to poverty and ignorance, you may have a point, but it’s really Western Europe that is the outlier, not the US. And while they may enjoy high levels of secularization, it’s also linked to a way-below-replacement birth rate, so who knows how long that’s going to last.
The lowest birth rates are in Spain and Italy, not the least religious countries.
One can with equal justification link religiosity with way-beyond-sustainable birth rates…
Don’t be silly. “Libertarian free will” is merely the recognition that individuals make choices, weighing the pros and cons of the options they’re aware of. They don’t necessarily do so rationally, but they still do so – while everything is subject to causation, it’s often useful on an everyday, human level to talk about entities making decisions.
No, I’m saying that secularization and low birth rates are linked (not necessarily causally), which suggests that secular culture may not be sustainable over the long term, and they will end up being out-bred by the “be fruitful and multiply” crowd.
mtraven,
There is a link. In general, secularism is associated with lower fertility, and religiosity is associated with higher fertility. But that does not support the prediction that the religious members of a culture will come to outnumber the secular members over time by “outbreeding” them. Children do not reliably inherit the religiosity of their parents. There are broader cultural forces that determine the level of secularism/religiosity of a society and those forces swamp the effects of parental influence on children. If they didn’t, high religiosity would be a permanent feature of all cultures and Europe could never have become so secular in the first place.
Hmm. Yet, the “be fruitful and multiply” crowd have to contend with plagues they insist don’t happen and are not caused by things like HIV, environmental disasters they cause, then insist can’t be their fault, since God wouldn’t let it happen. Basically, what you are saying is humanity is fracked, since first the nuts will out bread the sane people, then the nuts will die off in some massive natural (or man made) disaster. Real fun thought there mtraven.. lol
windy wrote:
It’s only more horrible in the sense that we now have some glimmering of an idea of what we have escaped briefly but are condemned to return to whether we like it or not.
We assume it will still be there – much like Christians assume there is a God in heaven – but we will never know. I find it terribly depressing that I will never know what the world will be like a hundred or thousand or million years from now. The only meagre comfort is that we will not exist to worry about it.
1. I think people are a little too hard on this article (great closing line: religion as the “tragedy of human cognition”).
2. And, more importantly, how about the splashy photo in that article immediately following–the Harvard sex magazine editor adorned by a big fat copy of Campbell-Reece “Biology”…and Darwin too!!!
3. Finally, Happy Birthday PZ–you are doing a magnificent job and I hope you keep it up for another fifty years.
Don’t be silly.
Don’t be appallingly ignorant.
They don’t necessarily do so rationally, but they still do so – while everything is subject to causation, it’s often useful on an everyday, human level to talk about entities making decisions.
It’s also useful to recognize that, in context, the comment “Nobody forces the masses to go to the megachurches” only makes sense under the assumption that people can make causally independent choices, as the “force” here is the “top down” causal manipulation of human beings. The question at hand is why the levels of religiosity in the U.S. are so high, and the answer is to be found in causal relationships among physical entities, and church leaders and members are such physical entities.
It’s only more horrible in the sense that we now have some glimmering of an idea of what we have escaped briefly but are condemned to return to whether we like it or not.
I have never before heard of anyone expressing a fear of death in terms of having escaped from the non-existence that preceded their existence, or expressing that non-existence as something undesirable that it was good to escape. Are you really upset that you were only born recently? I doubt it. The whole idea expressed here is incoherent — “we” did not escape anything because “we” didn’t exist at that point — there is no state that we were in, such that we could have escaped it into a different state. And we will not return to any state — we will simply cease to exist, thereby having no state.
Don’t be appallingly ignorant.
How about getting off your high horse, actually reading what Caledonian wrote, and going a little easy on the ad hominem there, kiddo?
Neither he nor I believe in absolute free will any more than we believe that there are only four dimensions. Science and mathematics have pretty well debunked both assumptions. However, in the “real world” in which we live and work, we are in that familiar analogic sense “wired” to operate as if there are only four dimensions, and as if we have control over our decision-making powers.
I leave room for the possibility that you really didn’t understand at all what he was getting at, and that you just crapped out some conversational diarrhea to make yourself feel better because the word “libertarian” disagreed with your digestion.
Ian Spedding, I think we should have a much more positive attitude towards the Universe and the human situation. The “attitude of gratitude” is important for our psychological health. If your basic stance is “how dare reality not provide me with the shiny new Lexus I was hoping for, and eternal life too”, then you’re not really going to be happy. The Universe does not know how to provide us with eternal life, and we should forgive it for that, even though it has done nothing wrong. Our lives are not invalidated just because we will die someday; even the earth and the sun are temporary, but their majesty doesn’t depend on how long they will be here. We should be deeply grateful for the chance to know that the Universe is a real and incredibly dynamic place. Reality will probably always exist in some form or another, but if it all blinks out of existence some day, it would be a catastrophe merely from our perspective; nature is “relaxed” and accepting of all things.
If the earth is currently in an interglacial period, I imagine myself smiling in my grave when the ice comes down from Canada and transforms northern Illinois, where I lived. A mountain of ice will cover Chicago and Lake Michigan for 80,000 years or so, but then it will melt, and leave behind fertile soil for meadows, trees, flowers, and birds, all covered by a brilliant blue sky. My body will provide material for some of that splendor. And I’m supposed to be unhappy about this?
mtraven, People forced the states to change the zoning and tax laws that allow the megachurches to be built. The lack of alternative forms of entertainment (given that there’s no exceptions made for stadiums, malls and entertainment complexes that aren’t religiously-themed) is, I suspect, the reason so many people attend them.
Europe really isn’t the outlier here. The majority of developed countries show the same pattern. Within Europe, Ireland and Spain have recently shown a similar correlation between development and secularism. Developed parts of Asia show the same pattern. (Japan polls extremely high numbers of atheists. As a Japanese friend told me, “We’re Buddhist one day of the year, Shintoists one day of the year, and atheists the rest of the year.”) Australia is secular. Canada is secular.
Jason: I would point out that the secularization of Europe almost certainly has something to do with the many wars that Europeans have experienced in the last 500 years.
Many of those wars were religious, including the last big one. (What were the Nazis, if not a religious cult?) This has left a very bad taste for religion in European populations.
Less obviously, family units have been destroyed on a grand scale multiple times in recent European history. Marvin Harris has a nice discussion of this in his book ‘Cannibals and Kings’, when he points out that during the Napoleonic Wars there was something like a de facto infanticide of illegitimate offspring. Church records show that millions of foundlings were left in the cathedrals of Paris alone during this period, and as you might expect, there was a high mortality rate.
There were, similarly, millions of refugees after both World Wars, most of them children. I would think that these repeated upheavals, so daming to families, would tend to seriously undermine the ability of religions to perpetuate their memes.
SH
Re: post #168: ‘daming’
Sorry, folks, I *think* I meant ‘damaging’. But, since I’m currently on Vicodin, I could be wrong….:)
It’s true, religion is not invariably transmitted along biological lines. The relation of culture and biology is complex.
Human brains and culture coevolved with religion for many millenia. Religion was central to the development of civilization. Whether it can be cast off now that we’ve evolved beyond it remains open to question. The human propensity for religion-like movements remains (look at Nazism and communism and other mass movements). If societies can all be like present day western europe, prosperous and secular, that would be pretty great, but even europe is having problems staying that way (low birth rate and a growing unintegrated muslim underclass). So, we’ll see.
I agree with PZ on about all points except for one. Civil War reenactment is not the same as religion – religion is special. I pontificate at length on my blog:
http://www.biotunes.org/bioblog/2007/03/atheism-next-evolutionary-step.html
Thanks for the reference.
Perhaps.
I read a little bit of Pinker, and that text had IIRC far too many assumptions to seem reliable.
Now, as a layman I obviously don’t know much about evolutionary psychology. The reason I now speak up is because Moran on his blog comments. “Because there are too many just-so stories in evolutionary psychology, the entire discipline is flawed. In order to qualify as real science the discipline has to clean up its act and start distinguishing between facts and wishful thinking. It would help if all evolutionary psychologists took a course on evolution because it’s clear that most of them don’t understand it.” ( http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/just-so-stories.html#comment-2644907546163296311 )
And he makes an analysis of a commenters model, that is very suggestive to me of the type of analysis that should give results. “And how, exactly, would this allele have arisen in humans? Do you imagine a time when men did not want to make out with anything in skirts? Do you postulate that a mutation arose making men more promiscuous and this allele then became fixed in the human population? If so, what was the selective advantage?” ( http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/just-so-stories.html#comment-3100257788774726918 )
I hope that this pointer will be enough to get me primed for when I encounter these types of ideas. I need to get a grasp of basic evolutionary theory, to understand the plausible mechanisms.
Thanks for the reference.
Perhaps.
I read a little bit of Pinker, and that text had IIRC far too many assumptions to seem reliable.
Now, as a layman I obviously don’t know much about evolutionary psychology. The reason I now speak up is because Moran on his blog comments. “Because there are too many just-so stories in evolutionary psychology, the entire discipline is flawed. In order to qualify as real science the discipline has to clean up its act and start distinguishing between facts and wishful thinking. It would help if all evolutionary psychologists took a course on evolution because it’s clear that most of them don’t understand it.” ( http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/just-so-stories.html#comment-2644907546163296311 )
And he makes an analysis of a commenters model, that is very suggestive to me of the type of analysis that should give results. “And how, exactly, would this allele have arisen in humans? Do you imagine a time when men did not want to make out with anything in skirts? Do you postulate that a mutation arose making men more promiscuous and this allele then became fixed in the human population? If so, what was the selective advantage?” ( http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/just-so-stories.html#comment-3100257788774726918 )
I hope that this pointer will be enough to get me primed for when I encounter these types of ideas. I need to get a grasp of basic evolutionary theory, to understand the plausible mechanisms.
Don’t be appallingly ignorant.
How about getting off your high horse, actually reading what Caledonian wrote, and going a little easy on the ad hominem there, kiddo?
How about not being a fucking hypocritical asshole? Was Caledonian’s “don’t be silly” less an ad hominem?
I leave room for the possibility that you really didn’t understand at all what he was getting at, and that you just crapped out some conversational diarrhea to make yourself feel better because the word “libertarian” disagreed with your digestion.
That’s really funny, asshole, since it was I who used the word “libertarian” (in a technical, not political, sense) and Caledonian who had the diarrhea fit when he saw it.
Neither he nor I believe in absolute free will any more than we believe that there are only four dimensions.
Speedwell, you are profoundly stupid. I never said anything about Caledonian believing in “absolute” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) free will, I asked mtraven if he/she believed in libertarian free will, and in #163 explained to that dolt Caledonian why I had asked the question. And as for his “‘Libertarian free will’ is merely the recognition that individuals make choices, weighing the pros and cons of the options they’re aware of” — he’s simply wrong, that is not what libertarian free will is — libertarian free will is the denial of the very thing that you say that science has debunked; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_free_will:
But apparently, being (political) libertarian dickheads, you and Caldeonian thought that I was talking about political, rather than metaphysical, libertarianism, and got all dickheady, as (political) libertarians are wont to do.
truth machine:
I have to confess I don’t know which I enjoy more, you mixing it up with these guys or the adjective ‘dickheady’.
truth machine wrote
In a way, I am. I try to imagine the vast spans of time and space implied by the numbers scientists use to describe the Universe and it brings homejust how little of it I will ever know or experience. I’m also aware of the fact that the little that I have experienced will soon dissipate into nothingness along with the rest of me. You could say that’s a bit of a downer.
I agree that the idea is incoherent and irrational but what we are talking about here is the prospect of inevitable personal annihilation which faces us all sooner or later. I suspect most people prefer not to think about it too much until they find there’s no choice. But when that time arrives, that’s when the appeal of religion really begins to kick in.
Sure, most people have some sort of faith long before that, most probably because that’s what they were brought up to believe. They accept it as part of reality as much as they accept the fact that if they jump off the top of a tall building they will fall to their deaths.
What keeps religions going, though, are their offers of an escape from personal oblivion into personal salvation and eternal life. Atheism and agnosticism might be perfectly respectable and coherent philosophical positions but they can’t offer frightened or grief-stricken individuals anything to compete with that and that’s why it is foolish to think that religion will somehow be erased from human culture any time soon, however desirable such an end might be.
JJ Anderson wrote:
Don’t misunderstand me. I entirely agree with what you say. Since we apparently have just this one opportunity to live in this amazing Universe we should savour and revel in the experience as much as we possibly can. Anything else woould be such a waste.
Not at all, and intellectually I can take the same detached pleasure at the thought that the matter and energy of which I am presently made will go on to form other parts of this world. The tragedy is that, although we can imagine such a future, we will not be there to observe or experience it. And, personally, I would love to know what happens in that unknown ‘afterwards’.
Torbjorn,
I generally admire Larry Moran, but he really should learn to shut up about things he clearly doesn’t know anything about. The theory he’s mocking in the comments you link to, parental investment theory, is supported by abundant evidence from anthropology, sociology, zoology, genetics and other fields. The scientist who devised the theory, Robert Trivers, was just awarded the 2007 Crafoord Prize (the eqivalent of the Nobel Prize for the biological sciences) for his work on parental investment and related theories.
As you will see if you investigate the CEP website, the field of evolutionary psychology has a large primary research literature describing evolutionary theories of many aspects of human and animal psychology. As far as I know, prestigious scientific journals such as Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are not in the habit of publishing work that consists of “just-so stories.”
TL: Jason touches a nerve, and he touches it well.
Some context: Trivers’ graduate supervisor, E.O. Wilson, also won the Crafoord Prize, but not before some overzealous activists memorably dumped some water on his head—an event prompted, at least in part, by the public condemnation of Wilson’s ideas on human sociobiology by the left-wing Science for the People study group, of which Gould was a member. Wilson’s commentary on these events and the general tenor of that time is fascinating, and can be read here:
Wilson, E.O. “Science and Ideology” 1995.
URL: http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/wilson01.html
Now, Gould publicly repudiated some of the tactics used by his Marxist cohorts, but there was no undoing the damage that the emerging discipline of sociobiology experienced. Overnight, it became ‘controversial’ and many of those interested in exploring its implications (chief amongst them Trivers) went ‘underground’, meeting informally for several years. Eventually, the interests of these scientists coalesced along sharper lines and the field has reemerged as ‘evolutionary psychology.’
Now, it seems that the Gouldian critique of the adaptationist programme in biology still has passionate defenders, among them Professor Moran. It’s still difficult, at this stage of the game, to give Gould and his advocates a fair hearing due to the nasty way the ‘sociobiology controversy’ played out.
I tend to see things as Jason does. I regard evolutionary psychology as a useful and productive research programme within evolutionary biology. It would irritate me greatly to see Cosmides and Tooby’s work, for example, described as ‘just-so-stories.’
Still, it occurs to me that cautionary examples like ‘spandrels’ and the general emphasis on contingency advocated by Gouldians serve a useful purpose: they are brakes on runaway speculation, which is to say the sort of pop human evolution that seems reemerge, Phoenix-like, every generation, after the mode of Robert Ardrey or Desmond Morris. In a way, all they are demanding of evolutionists is what we should demand of scientists in general: testable hypotheses…..
Jason:
I agree with you on Larry Moran’s ignorance of parental investment theory, and I believe that WD Hamilton and Trivers are among the most important evolutionary theorists since Darwin (along with Fisher, Goldschmidt, and some others).
I don’t know the precise basis of Dr. Moran’s views on the topic, but there is a lot of contempt for the evolutionary ecology (‘sociobiology’) program that is enabled by several biases: caricaturing it as hyperadaptationist and Panglossian, the view that it is somehow politically reactionary, the belief that proximate causation explanations are more amenable to testing and hence more scientific, favoring approaches historically linked to Goethe’s process structuralism (constraints, bodyplan, self-organization) over neo-Darwinian selectionism-adaptationism (as if these approaches were actually in opposition).
Having said that, with all due respect for the field of evolutionary psychology, I have to note my disagreement with some theoretical views often associated with EP; to name a couple, the rigid EEA view and overly specific modules. However, a good deal of the work in the field is exemplary; see Daly & Wilson and James Chisholm. And there is certainly theoretical plurality within evolutionary psychology.
Furthermore, outside of the field the term ‘evolutionary psychology’ is broadly – and incorrectly – applied not only to evolutionary psychology proper but also to various distinct approaches that practitioners refer to as ‘Darwinian anthropology’ (human behavioral ecology) and ‘dual inheritance’ as well as other schools of thought.
As I understand it Moran’s basic stance goes back to discussion about adaptationism, the value of group selection, population dynamics et cetera. I don’t know enough to follow him or anyone else there, at least for now. But I did appreciate his arguments for pointing out the weaknesses in these types of models.
Thanks. I have heard that some of these ideas were controversial, but not about the forms the controversy took.
In any case, it is nice to know not only where the ant hills are situated, but what moves the ants. To avoid the stings, of course.
Not being a biologist, I would say that a parsimony of mechanisms (relying on already found mechanisms) would be an advantage, all else equal.
As I understand it Moran’s basic stance goes back to discussion about adaptationism, the value of group selection, population dynamics et cetera. I don’t know enough to follow him or anyone else there, at least for now. But I did appreciate his arguments for pointing out the weaknesses in these types of models.
Thanks. I have heard that some of these ideas were controversial, but not about the forms the controversy took.
In any case, it is nice to know not only where the ant hills are situated, but what moves the ants. To avoid the stings, of course.
Not being a biologist, I would say that a parsimony of mechanisms (relying on already found mechanisms) would be an advantage, all else equal.
A couple more links of interest:
George Williams
http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/h-Ch.1.html
More on proximate vs ultimate causes: Tinbergen’s Four Questions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinbergen's_four_questions