This is an excellent talk by Andy Thomson on the biological and psychological origins of religion.
It’s also precisely my position on the matter. There are many people who argue that religion provides a direct evolutionary advantage — I find them unconvincing. Thomson is explaining how religion’s origin is indirect, as a byproduct of properties of the brain that we find useful in modeling our world and social interactions…and religion is a parasite that hijacks these traits to promote a caricature of these properties.
(via Richard Dawkins)
Oh Im so settling down to watching this with a beer or two, thanks!
From reading PZs description though, it sounds like this is exactly what Dennetts talks have been about too? It is always good to hear the same things said in different ways though. Here goes….
Uhhh, if you do watch it, can you summarize it afterward? I can’t fit in a 54-minute lecture right now.
Me neither.
Didn’t watch yet either, but yeah, that sounds pretty much like Dan Dennett’s view in “Breaking the Spell”.
I haven’t watched it yet, but from PZ’s description it sounds like this video is about the byproduct theory of religion, which is different from Dennett’s. Dennett draws on the “meme” idea from Dawkins (which I find to be rather dubious and highly speculative at best) and tries to argue that religion is adaptive for its own good, but not necessarily for its host’s good.
The byproduct theory is different. According to byproduct theory, our brains are adapted to specialize in certain types of cognitive processes (such as reasoning about agents and social situations) and religious beliefs are just a spandrel of the evolution of these cognitive processes.
Others have tried to explain religion as resulting from group selection or as a type of costly signaling (like bright spots in guppies which signal health to mates). These theories aren’t necessarily incompatible with the byproduct theory, because the byproduct theory seeks to explain the beliefs, while group selection theories seek to explain the social value systems, and costly signaling theories seek to explain the costly rituals and such. It’s not necessarily that all these aspects of religion–the beliefs, the social values, the rituals–have the same evolutionary origin. In fact, they could have originated due to separate evolutionary forces, and we just group them together under the heading “religion” because they happen to be very frequently associated with each other.
Of course, if your religious commitments include celibacy (as they sometimes do), I can see how that might have a real negative effect on a guy’s natural fitness.
What an apt description!
Richard Dawkins has stated that the religious indoctrination of children is tantamount to child abuse, a statement I thought excessively strong at the time. I now understand better the origin of that statement, and agree with it completely. Religion hijacks the inborn survival mechanism of the child that requires him to believe what the elders tell him. No wonder so many go through such turmoil when they seek to deprogram themselves from the poison, especially when it might mean going against one’s entire family, and indeed, many do not, because giving up attachments are too costly a price to pay for the freedom to disbelieve.
As a byproduct of characteristics recurrent in a population, we caricature. Amplifying perception of serious dangers is very much the effect. As a result of that effect, there are byproduct effects to the byproduct effects.
The memes among unbelievers are quickly evolving analogous byproducts. In the very authentic mark of objective, observable translatable grow observable familiar parasites.
Lee #8,
I had the same experience with Dawkins’s characterization of religious indoctrination as child abuse. When I first read that assertion in The God Delusion, I thought it was irresponsible hyperbole. Now, I think it’s a fair point.
Lee said:
“Giving up attachments [is] too costly a price to pay for the freedom to disbelieve.”
Yes, a critical point.
This speech was much better than his first one about a year ago. He’s getting his game on.
This is also pretty much Pascal Boyer’s position, which he argue persuasively in Religion Explained.
I’ve often thought about the PTSD ramifications involved with exposing a young child to crucifixion scenes and then saying, “Oh, and by the way, there is nothing you could do about it. He had to be tortured, whipped and nailed just for your benefit.”
Talk about guilty nightmares.
I can’t wait to find out what the hell Humphrey Bogart has to do with this theory of religion!
A nice talk but my problem with this guy is that he just lists a bunch of talking points, he doesn’t expound any of them. You need to know what any of those terms mean or otherwise you will not be convinced by this talk.
I was a bit unsatisfied with Thomson’s response to the question of which designated system in the brain finally causes disbelief in spite of the other systems. Education definitely has an effect, but I think it’s fair to say that for most deconverts, it was the lie detection faculties in the brain that led them to their conclusions.
Pretty much every deconversion story I’ve heard starts with the notice of inconsistencies and contradictions in religious teachings, such as the problem of evil or inconsistencies in the holy books. It’s not hard to see how this would be an extension of our capacity to detect lies, which itself is an important factor in the evolution of social systems.
It’s certainly true that religion looks very much like an amalgamation of spurious ideas produced by particular quirks of otherwise-useful brain processes. But the widespread fervor with which religious ideas are held also demands investigation of the possibility that the mere appearance of such ideas in our evolutionary past was not the end of the story. Once they exist, religious ideas are fair game for being co-opted for other purposes. For instance, devotion to religious rituals and obligations could come to be a vital advertisement of devotion to the group itself.
Celibacy does not explain the branlette, no more than life explains death. They can say ” All that is away deserves memory? ”
Le célibat n’explique pas la branlette, pas plus que la vie n’explique la mort.
Peut on dire “Tout ce qui est absent ne mérite mémoire ?”
They hate it when I, a “witch doctor”, point out that nooo… the “witch doctor” doesn’t believe that tossing a virgin in a volcano will make it rain, rather knows that tossing a virgin in the volcano keeps him secure in his cushy “witch doctor” gig while affording the additional perc of several quality end of life hours with the virgin.
I would gleefully toss a virgin in a volcano, if I could find one.
This is brilliant and devastating. It seemed well crafted for a general audience.
Unfortunately I agree with the questioner towards the end. The religotards will simply say
This is more proof for gawd. Our brains are this way because he made them this way. Gawddidit!
Thanks for posting this, it’s very worth while.
Timothy said:
I’m sorry…what??
Endemic #17
What lie detection system? People have consistantly not scored any better than chance in controlled studies.
Endemic #17
Here is another thought, inconsistencies only pushed me to very mild theist, bordering agnosticm. To go one step beyond, I needed science which is obtained by scientific methods. Judging by the human history, the scientific method is highly unintuitive and like reading/writing is a by-product of our intelligence. So in other words, I find his answer at least correct for myself: a combination of evolutionary by-products and environmental factors (i.e., scientific books) opened the door of atheism for me.
tl;dw. Lessee, 2hrs to download while all my other surfing slows to a crawl, another hour to watch. Someone is going to have to tell me how it all comes out.
BS
Very interesting. I wish he would have used another word like “adapted” where he so often used “designed”, as in this or that structure or function was “designed” by evolution.
Catballou said:
Maybe “Timothy” has been haning out here. at the Postmodernism Generator.
“The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator.”
And after a bit of perusing at the P.M. Generator, I’ve finally found (In the sidebar.) this “Time Cube” place I’ve read about here so often.
Holy Hasenpfeffer Batman!
That is some whacky shit.
I haven’t seen it (I prefer reading transcripts of these sorts of things) but I can figure out the key points: our brains evolved help us by developing the instinctive skills to 1) see patterns in nature and behavior, 2) follow causality, that a following b might mean b caused a, and 3) learn that human-like beings can be a cause through a willful decision.
combine them and it’s easy to assume, or accept someone else’s explanation as being “obvious” or even “logical”, that there must be an ultimate cause that (in his/our image) must have human-like traits like Will.
I don’t necessarily agree with his response there either.
I didn’t buy the God story as a kid. I was made to go to church and did buy the idea that Jesus was a different type of Rabbi, who was put to death, even though I denied his divinity. So, it wasn’t education that made me an atheist, It was reality. As a kid, I had friends who had imaginary friends, and I felt that these kids had something wrong with them.
I now not only deny Jesus’ divinity, I deny his existence. Christianity likely existed as messianic mixmash of Judaism, Hellenistic, Roman and Egyptian mythologies that predates the time frame where Saul of Tarsis created and placed the Jesus character, after stealing most of his attributes from other deities of the day.
Where does Thomson research/teach?
The basic summary of Dr. Thomson’s talk goes thusly; Humans are programed to notice pattern and agency so as to avoid danger and recognize potential help, and supernatural concepts, such as attributing agency to inanimate objects (animistic spirits, for instance), are a result of this. Similarly, humans are hard-wired to recognize emotion, trust kin, and strive for harmony with kin, again, ways to avoid or mitigate danger, and religions make blatant use of this through familial metaphor. Corollary to this is our capacity for empathy, which causes those areas of our minds which process pain to become active when we see others injured. He points out that, through images and stories emphasizing the suffering and sacrifices made by religious figures and co-coreligionists, religions use empathy to create a sense of guilt and obligation to them, and then claim that only obedience can fulfill this debt. He also points out that supernatural beliefs are produced in specific parts of the brain which are involved in these mental processes, proving the contention that supernatural concepts are a by-product of these cognitive self-defense mechanisms.
He concludes by pointing out that, as more evidence compiles showing the efficacy of this cognitive neuroscience of religion, the necessity to teach it to professionals will grow, and that eventually this will lead to its discussion at the public school level, which will lead to direct conflict with religion, as the promulgation of a complete, non-supernatural explanation of religion threatens the very roots of religious systems, and that a proper understanding of the basic neuroscience involved will be necessary to defend against this attack.
Newfie: I would think that Dr. Thomson would be one of the first people to agree that human minds operate within a wide range of cognitive capacity or expression. I think his response on this question, emphasizing education, was in regards to a fictional general human operating somewhere near the middle in regards to these capacities for assuming agency and trusting authority figures.
It is also important, and I think Dr. Thomson would agree, not to forget early environment and socialization in regards to childhood religiosity. Negative experiences with authority figures or peers could act to color an individual’s analysis of their opinions and conclusions. Similarly, a positive early environment, if it favors skepticism, scholarship, and prudence, could produce a jaundiced view of religious beliefs, even if widely held by a child’s kin-group.
Religion isn´t any more “true” if it has an evolutionary advantage.
There are all SORTS of religious groups, beliefs, practices and experiences, some of which (like not having children) are clearly not adaptive. There was one group of hebrews, for instance, who all had to take a crap in the same place. They were soon killed by parasites, who had a short and easy trip from host to host.
As I see it, religion is a byproduct of consciousness. The illusion that religion is adaptive is merely from the fact that societies with adaptive religions survive, and those with nonadaptive religions don´t. And we don´t hear very much about the nonadaptive religion, because they likely were small and never developed to a note worthy size.
I don´t know if you can say that religion, as some sort of clearly defined entity, even exists, much less determine its impact.
Dr. Thomson, how did you choose “Julian” as your Pharyngula pseudonym?
Seriously, excellent summary Julian.
Well, it was only Anglican church. ;)
That was a fascinating lecture. I really enjoyed how he pulled several fields and concepts together to describe religious thoughts and feelings.
yes, # 32, that was a great summary and I didn’t think he made any new points and it didn’t seem very scientific- better than what I could do (obviously) but it didn’t seem very good to me –
Wow, pretty impressive. Here’s another theory, albeit a little less complex: God actually exists.
#32 could correct the calendar date for the apologists some 345 years bc from about 2ad at the time of genesis 5428bc Chaldean-egyptian to the julian calendar in 45 BC with additional lunar days not being superfluous to the additional 23rd commentaries to any anticipatory repudiation.
“There are no stupid questions, but there are a LOT of inquisitive idiots.”
www. despair.com
which one?
Fundie trolling:
A two-word ‘theory’ that explains nothing. Less than unimpressive.
@Fundie, #39
Your God “theory” only seems less complex because it doesn’t actually say anything.
Unless you can, in a few paragraphs of comparable length, explain in mechanistic detail how God does, well, anything, I’m afraid he’s going to more complex theory.
To say “religion provides a direct evolutionary advantage” is to misapply the term ‘religion’. That does seem unlikely (though we must be honest with ourselves, it is not a hypothesis which has been falsified.)
But I think the need that religion fills, if you will, not only has direct evolutionary advantage but is the direct evolutionary advantage. What makes us better than apes, what gives us advanced tools and civilization and language itself.
We tell ourselves stories. The narratives which we create in our minds, the urge to not only think things which could not possibly be true but to use these fictions to define our reality. We all do it; it is something our brains do automatically once they’re well formed enough. Eventually we learn to call it thinking, and recognize that if it is well harnessed, it is a marvelously productive activity. Within a few thousand years, we’d conquered the planet and devastated the biosphere, all before we even realized what we were doing.
So, yes, without a doubt, the urge to have a narrative to ‘explain’ your ‘purpose’ in existing is quite strong, and ever-present, no less so in the most devoted antitheist. Happily, we just happen to have the only Actual True Story, or at least the one that fits all the facts the best, so far. Since our ‘religion’ binds us to continuing this tradition, that isn’t going to change when we find new facts, although the story will.
I think if we explain our story properly (“altruism and compassion evolved, and we invented God to explain why, before we knew about evolution”) but also gave in to the naturalistic fallacy and insisted it “means”, in a metaphysical kind of way, that we “must” be good, most of the religionists would give up their side of the argument, even if they still thought our souls would be going to hell when we died.
But anyone who is willing to contemplate actual morality and ethics? They will be attacked as viciously as possible. They believe in God so that they can avoid all that horrible and flawed human reasoning about what is right and what is wrong.
If we schooled every child successfully in secular humanism, and waited for all the religionists to die off quietly, we would still have religionists. All it takes is a little bit of woo and a smooth sales pitch, and you too can start a cult. So in that regard, it is ‘genetic’; the propensity to it is part of the human psyche, and the potential is inherent in social behavior.
But the same thing that drives religion in that regard also drives science, and since our answers will always (at least from now on, we hope) be better than theirs, we win. It just might take a few more centuries for our language to improve enough to where it makes sense to almost everybody. And by then I think we will learn to cherish and preserve the others, on the presumption there may possibly be some social advantage. And then holy wars will break out over whether group selection does or does not exist. ;-)
Is there a link to a transcript? Please?
The talk was interesting but not so impressive. A lot of it is conjectural. I am not saying the points are wrong, just that the talk was not convincing enough.
Dang, I’ll be in the field for a week (knee deep in moo poo on frigid wet days with winds of 30+ knots – great fun). I’ll have to remember to watch that video when I return to civilization.
I’m reading Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and his suggestions that todays aliens and alien abductions may be a previous era’s witches and demons is interesting.
That’s probably common, but not how it worked with me. After all, one word – ineffable – is enough to make all these inconsistencies and contradictions poof away; they may look silly, sure, but that’s not enough for disproof. (Of course, I never was a Biblical literalist; that’s not fashionable where I come from.) What happened instead is that I gradually found out there’s no evidence, that all religion just hangs in the air without any support, that it all follows logically from premises that are not testable (anything claimed to be ineffable is automatically untestable) and completely lack evidence.
I’m simply not capable of believing without evidence. I was certainly made aware of that by learning how science works, but I’m sure I’ve always had that feature.
Great Video! Thanks
Here’s another theory, albeit a little less complex: God actually exists.
you mean simplistic, not less complex, and your idea doesn’t fit the data.
fail.
I think you humanity had to subscribe to religion to survive – mostly because in many places the religious would (and in some places, still do) kill you and your children if you didn’t agree with the tenets of their religion, thereby ending your contribution to the big gene party.
A hypothetical: people in time of theocracy don’t believe in the local ooga-booga. But they know they and their kids will be killed if the truth came out. So, they lie to their kids and become faithful church-goers. The kids either grow up to be faithful and teach their kids to be faithful – or they learn the same lesson their parents did and lie about it to protect them.
Heck, if I had kids and someone had a sword at their throats then I’d jump at the chance to lie my ass off to protect them, even if it meant believing in something as profoundly dumbass as the Christian god.
Yah, Wow, a current incarnation is called “Taliban”.
Wowbagger, OM writes:
I think you humanity had to subscribe to religion to survive – mostly because in many places the religious would (and in some places, still do) kill you and your children if you didn’t agree with the tenets of their religion, thereby ending your contribution to the big gene party.
Yup. It’s social control, and I think that religion’s excessive concern with reproduction is part and parcel of it. It’s not as if we’re the only social animals that hand out asswhuppings for people who mate contrary to the alpha’s plan. It strikes me that the divine right of kings (and the sexual privileges it conveys) allies nicely with the priesthoods’ control of sexuality — religion and power have always coexisted by splitting the pie down the (approximate) middle. The enlightenment unbalanced that game for a short while. It just seems to me to be omitting a whole lot of obvious if we ignore the effects of religion on mating habits.
Wow, pretty impressive. Here’s another
theorybaseless assertion, albeit a little lesscompleximpressive: God actually exists.If God exists, he has a serious case of multiple personality disorder.
Wowbagger and Marcus Ranum co-op FTW.
Yeah, once those fuckers all got into bed with each other life became even more of a struggle for the powerless. The whole idea of ‘no, no – don’t fight against injustice and oppression in this life because you will be rewarded in the next; our god has made the king powerful here on earth but you will all be kings alongside Jesus in heaven’ infuriates me.
Geez, do you all have unlimited bandwidth or what??? HughesNet’s “Fair Access Policy” insures I can’t download or even watch anything this long.
I saw the video. My only question is what is the deal with the guy wearing the surgical mask? Was this before or after the swine flu pandemic?
Two things.
1 Most people talk to themselves and this can seem like someone else putting words in your brain; QUICK, tin foil helmet required. The very susceptible due to fasting, sleep deprivation, etc. could be convinced a power was giving them important messages. Gabriel to Mohammed, for example. Son of Sam and so on.
2 Also, certain drugs give an out of body experience similar to what “mystics” describe.
Long ago I had a vision and I have never forgotten the sense of wonder and happiness. It kept me religious for a long time, but not forever.
But it was nice and I am smiling in remembrance.
The problem I have with this theory is,that religions,as in ” one particular theology/faith system” with holy book and stories and traditions etc,are conscious efforts and inventions of real humans,who werent deliberately trying to create a mind parasite.
The theory might hold for superstitions,mythological beliefs,deism etc,but for concrete man-made-up religions,Im not sure how it can apply.
Recovering Catholic @#58 – I am on a Hughes satellite and I have a window (1AM to 5AM Mountain Time in my case) for unlimited downloading – you probably have something similar.
Staying up late listening to the video while pottering about. Good talk, but I think I have to correct Thomson on one point: Prof Simon Baron-Cohen is comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen’s first cousin, not his brother. (Yeah, I’m sure that he thought he was joking….)
Saw it yesterday. No doubt the religious folks will co-opt this information. I could imagine that happening as I was listening to it.
The crux of the argument is tht there is an inborn human biological bent toward God creation. At one point the author mentions that even extremely young children will invent God without the help of adults. The speaker explains how the various social adaptations necessary for us to survive as social creatures overlaps nicely with religious hooey.
One conclusion he makes is that disbelief in God is extremely more difficult as an intellectual enterprise than belief because of the nature of these biological (neurological) operations.
Enjoy.
This was at the American Atheist Convention a few weeks ago in Atlanta. I was there. I think this was the best talk of the day! He does a great job explaining it all.
Abraham
Saul of Tarsus
Muhammed
Joseph Smith
L. Ron Hubbard
Bandwidth issues still making it difficult for some people to watch a freaking Youtube video in 2009?!!?
What is this, 1995? On a satellite hookup??? What did Hughes do….re-purpose the electronic package on Sputnik and resell it as an Internet service to people in the ‘outback’?
Enjoy.
Wowbagger, OM writes:
Yeah, once those fuckers all got into bed with each other life became even more of a struggle for the powerless.
For my part, my ideas are nearly completely derived from a brilliant one-paragraph aside Bernard Lewis wrote in “The Middle East.” I’d blockquote it except the book in question is on my other bookshelf 10 miles away so I’m going to have to paraphrase it from memory. He observes that the crown and the temple have always divided power based on mutual interest. The crown likes having the temple, because it helps keep the people in line and offers a good excuse when one is needed for wars of aggrandizement. The temple likes the crown because it protects the temple and can do the violent work of enforcing its edicts – gods with land-based armies are quickly shown to be powerless, but the sheltering sword-arm of the state has always protected religion.
When I read that, my head exploded and everything became clear. In that context, you can see things like the destruction of the templars, the creation of the anglican church, catholic support for Hitler, etc, etc, etc — all become clear. The fuckers are in cahoots to stick it to the ordinary joes.
I’ve been an atheist all my life and flirted with anarchism as a teen-ager. It wasn’t until a decade or so ago that I realized that the “fix is in” between temple and state and if we’re going to repudiate the temporal power of the temple we owe it to ourselves to examine the legitimacy of the state, as well. It won’t surprise you that the legitimacy of the state is awfully wobbly if you really look at it closely. (I recommend Paul Wolff’s “In defense of Anarchism” to those interested in exploring this further) Recognizing the temple and the state as interconnected parts of a massive exercise in social control is an awakening you’ll never recover from. The control of sexuality aspect is interesting – if you consider that historically temporal power was inherited (“divine right of kings!”) it’s possible that celibate priesthoods were the only way to keep the temple from falling apart in dynastic quarrels the way the state occasionally does. But the bastards’ interests very nicely interlock to prevent the teeming masses from throwing off both yokes simultaneously.
Unfortunately, I have no suggestions for Plan B. :( But crushing the power of the temple and reducing the power of the state cannot have any effect but to help the majority of humans. We can all be thankful that the division of temple and state worked out the way it has; at least (in general) the temple hasn’t got the nuclear weapons.
The Tim Channel writes:
Bandwidth issues still making it difficult for some people to watch a freaking Youtube video in 2009?!!
Some of us live in rural communities that are served by various telco monopolies. Out here in Verizon country in North Central Pennsylvania, some of us are still on dial-up.
I had satellite for a while and it sucked so badly I “upgraded” back to dial-up. With a 3/4 mile long driveway to the road, I get 28.8k. The only good news is that spyware and trojan horses give themselves away really fast because they suck up the available bandwidth and die. :D
‘Caricature’ is the right word, but I see it better applied to the God of the Bible: isn’t he obviously a caricature in the first place?
Is the hypothesis that religion offers a direct advantage in a biological sense? I think it’s clear that many religions have developed in a manner that give them survival advantages in a cultural sense, as factors in human society.
Most religions, after all encourage
a) breeding
b) financial support
c) dogmatic adherence to the creed
and dare I say
d) violent opposition to opposing religions or, more generally, any philosophies or ways of thinking that threaten the religion’s dominant position in the psychology of its followers.
It is no accident that the Shaker religion, which forbade childbirth, is dead while the Mormon religion, which encourages large families and tithing, has thrived.
@59
“I saw the video. My only question is what is the deal with the guy wearing the surgical mask?”
Was he Japanese? They wear masks during allergy season, or when they have runny noses, because a runny nose is considered disgusting in Japan.
@61
The problem I have with this theory is,that religions,as in ” one particular theology/faith system” with holy book and stories and traditions etc,are conscious efforts and inventions of real humans,who werent deliberately trying to create a mind parasite.
Who cares if they were “deliberately” doing this or not? I certainly agree that at least _some_ of the founders of various religions (Hubbard leaps do mind) were doing so pretty much explicitly as a path to monetary power. I suspect a good number of religious leaders are honest with themselves about their pursuit of human manipulation, while others are simply delusional about their own “mission in life”. But who really cares? Do we care about what bumblebees are thinking when they do waggle dances? Or is it sufficient to observe how this behavior influences other bees?
OMG! Technological torture! I hope you aren’t on a Windows PC like I used to be when I was at that bandwidth. Simply keeping up with all the security and software patches, as well as the daily virus updates, required hours of connectivity time.
Not for low bandwidth users here, but I wanted to promote this video I saw over at Andrew Sullivan simply because the guy uses the term ‘hetero-normative nomenclature’ in a way I find amusing.
Enjoy.
I have not watched all of the video, yet, but much of what I saw is reminiscent of Dawkins and Dennett (as has been noted by others). The difficulty I have here, which I also had with The God Delusion, is the emphasis on religion is from the modern perspective on religion (e.g., the whole Abrahamic catastrophe). I’ve made this point previously on another thread: While I would agree, in part, to the psychological issues discussed here and by Dawkins, I also think that there are aspects of religious belief which might have had relevant adaptive value. The examples that I gave before were 1) Native American ceremonies, such as the Navajo Enemyway ceremony, include elements of (the Navajo have been well-studied by David McAllester and others) prescribed social interaction fostering pair-bonding for, essentially, reproductive purposes, as well as elements that foster economical forces through the promotion of goods exchange as well as more general social interaction and even placebo effects (this ceremony is largely a healing ceremony). 2) early burial practices had the effect of removing certain, sometimes valuable, goods from circulation, again, thereby promoting economic activity. (Of course these practices were/are also indicative of certain psychological needs of those still alive.)
I am not trying to say that, a) we still need such things, or b)that religion wasn’t essentially based on a “lie”, but I think that it can be argued that there have been beneficial elements to religious belief that provided an adaptive advantage, at least in the past.
In other words, I buy the idea that the concept of supernatural is a by-product of various psychological processes, but I think that religious belief has had useful function for people in the past, useful in an adaptive way.
I don’t think that Dawkins or Thompson have really addressed these other elements adequately. In fact, I think that have been generally ignored and until they are dealt with there is a significant weakness to the religion as brain-candy perspective. ( Unless one is making a distinction between the belief in the supernatural and more organized belief – Ironically, I can’t help but think of Dawkins’ discussion of “extended phenotypes.”)
Related to this, I though Thompson’s comment about music was equally problematic. Music, like religion, is know in EVERY culture and both have been known parts of human behavior for a very long time. (I have spent a fair amount of time studying music in historical, cultural and psychological contexts) Various studies have failed to connect rhythm with heart-rate. Oddly enough, what is known as “preferred tempo” is better correlated with walking speed (see work by Neil Todd). Early rhythmic activity might also have had something to do with repetitive activities like, say, stone tool making.
@Wowbagger:
“Heck, if I had kids and someone had a sword at their throats then I’d jump at the chance to lie my ass off to protect them, even if it meant believing in something as profoundly dumbass as the Christian god.”
Unfortunately, even being a firm believer wouldn’t help you. Just read about what happened during the crusades and later the witch hunts through europe. The only protection is to eliminate the whackos who would inflict such misery on people. So in the case of someone holding swords to your kids’ throats, maybe you can save the kids that time, but you’d better kill the bastards quick before they come back.
NO there is no god, you are full of shit. Wishing a fairy is true doesn’t make it so, there is no god. Grow up.
It is interesting that Thompson uses agency language when speeking of religion hijacking this or that. Religion may have arisen as a byproduct of the evolution of cognitive functions but I bet it probably left its mark on human evolution, perhaps selecting conformity and belief and the punishing of noncoformity. Religion is the only social organization exploiting kin psychology and attachment, personality cults, nationalism, communism, movements, trekkies, unions, anarchists, also do so. Comrades, brothers, father figures, heroes, etc. Vegetarianism and environmentalist demonize nonbelievers. Exploitation of human vulnerabilities extends far beyond religions. Perhaps one of the evolutionary benefits of religion is that it isn’t one of these others. At the other extreme feeling existential dread isn’t exactly a productive or socially uniting, or reproductive effort.
“…religion’s origin is indirect, as a byproduct of properties of the brain that we find useful in modeling our world and social interactions…and religion is a parasite that hijacks these traits to promote a caricature…”
My atheist credentials are in good order, but this dismisses one of the dominant phenomena of human culture as a parasitic caricature of our higher cognitive abilities. It sounds a little as though a bit of raw prejudice leaked out of the bag to obscure further discussion. Er, inhibiting discussion is a
Christian virture. Is there something we ought to know?
Can anybody name another human behavioral phenomenon of similar magnitude with similar continuity through time and across cultures that does not have direct (OK, maybe not a straight line all the time) evolutionary advantage?
(Great blog! Thanks for all the hard work.)
@ Gavin McBride, Norm Olson, et al: This is a lot like Scott Atran, even more, and in much more detail, than Dennett.
Atran EXTENSIVELY covers this territory from an evolutionary perspective in his book “In Gods We Trust,” five-starred by me over at Amazon.
Here’s the book and here’s my review.
One thing I found very interesting was parallels between certain religiously-related brain states and PTSD.
Oh, and Atran takes a good, and deliberate, whack at memes, too.
(Fourteen of the 16 reviews are four- or five-starred, and one of the two one-stars is from an obvious conservative monotheist.)
Sorry; fail. Only if you count anything that exploits kin psychology and attachment (whatever that is) as ‘religion’. Gangs, civil organizations, even government “exploits” kin psychology.
@MePrimate @ 78: “Government” likely goes back almost as far as the first cities of more than 12,000 years ago. And, as ancient shards of cuneiform, religious texts, etc., attest, religion and government were closely intertwined millennia ago. Priests served as kings, for example.
As for how far back religion goes? People who want to attribute something like the Lascaux paintings as due to religion I think are on very thin ground, overreading what’s just not there empirically. So, let’s not backdate the religious impulse quite as far as some would.
Thomson and Dawkins are asking whether religious tendency is an adaptation. It’s not the same as pointing to isolated examples of religious behaviors which may increase fitness.
@ Ryan @ 59 and @ Rick @ 71: Without having watched the video, but knowing its subject, no, I can tell you with good confidence, he’s a Jain. Does he look Indian? (Not American Indian, Indian?)
@ Newfie @ 30: I’d say the existence, or nonexistence, of a Yeshua bar Yusuf is an open question, at least.
And, that should be me in post 80, too…
This talk may explain how religion originates, but it certaintly doesn’t explain how it spreads and codifies. I still think that you need to fall back on a direct evolutionary advantage for that.
Let’s say two tribes enter the same valley, and are competing for the same resources. Our tribe identifies itself as “The People Who Worship the Frog Totem.” The other group don’t have any particular identification. Surely, simply the fact of group identification will give us frog worshippers a definite advantage. We’ll be able to coordinate efforts amongst ourselves better, both in war and to exploit the resources — we know we should listen to the chief, because he’s the one who carries the sacred frog mask. We’ll fight more bravely because we know we’ll go to the big sacred pond after we die in battle. Also, if the sacred frog wants us to help the weaker amongst our group (altruism) then we’ll probably have a higher survival and reproductive rate, and perhaps the weaker people from the opposite tribe will wish to join us.
Direct evolutionary benefit seems to have at least as much evidence as what’s presented here.
Do you really suppose that it’s realistic that a tribe would have no “particular identification” at all? Unless they are complete morons, they can differentiate between “my tribe” and others. Seems to work for chimps without totem-worship.
If you meant that identifying with a symbol would give a definite advantage over identifying with other people of your tribe, that’s simply an assertion. A lot of tribes just identify themselves as “The People”.
Followup to Windy @84 and Bruce @83 … along these lines, who says the tribal identification has to be religious? Or have an identification that’s based on a totemic symbol?
It could be “The People Who Eat Human Brains.” Or many other things. (And, given the protein and fat value of human
Within Puebloan societies, many of them have two moeities; the identities don’t matter, and they’re not primarily religious. They primarily serve to combat intermarriage, and without any purely religious strictures to that end.
@85: Good points. Or, just take a bunch of people and divide them in two sports teams, and you get group identification in no time. This need is probably much older than religion.
It’s possible that religious identification provided an advantage later, when people started living in larger groups. But that might have been more of a cultural than a genetic adaptation.
It gets even scarier when you mix the two; IIRC, supporters of Glasgow teams Celtic and Rangers delineate along religious lines – Catholic and Protestant respectively. So they’ve made a rivalry in a sport prone to outbursts of violence even more troublesome.
@ 71 & 82
If you go to the 40 minute mark he is in the background when the camera pans to the right (I think he was wearing a red shirt). Way too far away to make any sort of identifications. I wouldn’t have even noticed if I hadn’t been watching the news the day before.
Me, too, Marcus. Just four miles from an interstate highway I’ve got no cable and no satellite, just fucking Bell South that won’t let me have DSL for any price.
Not to mention no electricity anytime the wind blows a tree down over the lines.
#20 I would gleefully toss a virgin in a volcano, if I could find one.
Virgin or vulcano?
Thanks for compliments on the summary guys; having a brain that understands the world through simplification has its benefits :)
I can’t get the video feed though I have a fast broadband connection. Anybody else have the same problem?
I like the bit about “If you understand the psychology of the Big Mac, you understand the psychology of religion.”
Big Macs make me nauseous too.
Now we know why some people call Big Macs “the food of the gods.”
Militant Agnostic–
Yes, I have the same deal with HughesNet. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get my computer to download stuff while I’m asleep. Really–I should at least be able to do this even if I’m not a geek! (And I use that term with the greatest respect and admiration.)
Religion path of least resistance is really a polite formulation of the realities that religion is the least intellectually taxing way to understand ourselves and our surroundings, and religion gives the easy, immediate answers to anything complex. These intellectually lazy answers may later be refined in stories which make the foundations for myths, – myths like the bible story, or the more fun ones like the ones of the Germanic/Norse gods, or the Australian Aborigine’s alluring flights of fantasy.
When Thompson talks about [Children] Spontaneous invent the concept of god without adult intervention, it sounds like he is trying to placate the religious. ‘The concept of god’ is such a broad possibility with quite narrow interprtations, so that it sounds like he has something like the abrahamic god in mind. Thompson was skating very quickly over this, as if on thin ice.
Think I am more with Larry Moran http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2009/04/not-me.html#links on this one (not that anyone gives a shit, but I really am :^).
shonney: I had a problem with that too, if only because, by using the word god, he is implying something he isn’t saying. What he’s trying to say is that children spontaneously apply agency to inanimate object without parental supervision, or to put it in religion-speak, that children are born animists. By saying children spontaneously invent god, he’s implying that the monotheistic, paternal, all-powerful ego of the abrahamic faiths, a concept that literally took tens of thousands of years of intellectual development dedicated to spiritual imagination to invent and was precursored by such religions as Zoroastrianism and the sky-dwelling god-king cults of Ra, Brahma, and the Mongolian sky-father traditions.
The point he’s trying to make is that, left to their own devices, many children will imagine “spirits” into the objects they interact with as both an act of hyper-active paranoia(humanity’s most successful self-defensive mechanism), and as a way to interact with the world around them.
nice
Oops, I ended one of those sentences before I meant to, that should read;
“…By saying children spontaneously invent god, he’s implying that the monotheistic, paternal, all-powerful ego of the abrahamic faiths, a concept that literally took tens of thousands of years of intellectual development dedicated to spiritual imagination to invent and was precursored by such religions as Zoroastrianism and the sky-dwelling god-king cults of Ra, Brahma, and the Mongolian sky-father traditions, springs fully formed from the minds of children, which is not what he’s trying to say at all.”
Also, to be more accurate, he not only claims that children are born animists, but that they are also born ancestor worshipers. To be honest, what’s innovative about Dr. Thomson’s talk is not so much the assertions as the evidence for them; most of these theories of religion are already present, in a much more conjectural and deductive form, in Freud’s Totem and Taboo of 1913.
Which you should all read, by the way.
#98 RBDC, that could be broadened to ‘Big Business,’ where oftentimes the psychology and the mind-set behind the drive for profit (as in ‘greed’) is very nauseating, even more so than a Big Mac. And that is very sickening indeed.
Finally finished.
Dr. Thomson’s talk was a fun exercise, but the issue with this type of research is it can never (so far as I can see) be more than conjecture as, contrary to what I sometimes think, there aren’t a lot of neanderthal brains hanging around to give us a picture of how social mechanisms and thought processes developed. Archaeologic psychology, without a time machine, just hasn’t got much to back it up.
I mean, his proposed mechanisms make intuitive sense, but believing the picture he draws is not much different than believing a religious theory. Everything, as our Aussie questioner rightly pointed out, lends itself to chicken-egg type arguments.
Nevertheless, as a model for current human behaviour, it’s a more complete explanation for the drives of the id than Freud ever offered.
@Red Rabbit/101. C’mon, now. Tooby and Cosmides would give you a day-by-day account of the evolution of religious belief from these few scraps.
Red Rabbit: I disagree. The brain mechanisms that Thomas lists are well-known and don’t need to be proved by Archaeology or Evolution.
From conception on, a child is totally dependent on nurturing parents. It learns to rely on relatives and friends, and one can easily extend its beliefs via a Santa Claus story to a supernatural parent figure who “knows when you are sleeping, who knows when you’re awake, who knows if you’ve been bad or good”.
In America, a whole Santa Claus industry has grown up to profit annually from this paradigm, and religions have grown up with suitable rituals to garner profits in some way.
I mean Andy Thomson, of course. I had notes about Red Rabbit being a doubting Thomas …
Couple of things:
First LOTS of cultural phenomena only make sense as “side-effects” or as something made possible by some cognitive development that was not selected for at the time of the development . . . it’s kind of stupid to use this idea to then condemn religion as a “parasite.” We might as well call literature or music a “parasite.”
Does religion convey an advantage? I think the first thing to do when trying to figure this out is to throw out EP’s moronic obsession with the Pleistocene and try to figure out what advantages it may have provided at any time in our development–one period that springs to mind is when group size began to expand beyond close kin–so that most people in the group were at best distantly related and roles in the group started to become more differentiated, etc. etc.
I have little doubt that some of the cognitive tendencies developed for other purposes–finding agency, for instance–may well have combined to produce a “religious predisposition.” I wouldn’t doubt that that predisposition exists in apes as well.
(We might imagine that the religious predisposition is similar to their linguistic predisposition–apes in the proper context can show remarkable linguistic abilities, but it isn’t something they produce in their natural context, as far as we know. So with religion–they may have the predisposition and the ability, but the context doesn’t lend itself to an obvious expression of them. Rituals surrounding death would seem to be an obvious place to look for them.)
BUT the really interesting thing isn’t that we have evolved a predisposition toward or ability for supernatural belief–that seems pretty obvious–but how that predisposition developed into the developed forms we see today. Which probably have a lot to do with the problems surrounding larger, more highly differentiated social organizations.
Believing contrafact is probably of at best modest advantage to the individual in a small kin group, but what if that individual is part of a much larger group, one growing toward agriculture & towns, in competition with other such groups? How might religion have played into that situation? In a very competitive environment, a belief system that justified and “rewarded” great personal sacrifice unto death, gave absolute assurance of righteousness and strong connections with non-kin co-believers would have some advantages over a group of skeptics each looking to free-ride the system to his/her personal advantage.
@Oran Kelley/105: Theories of this nature were much more common a century ago, in James Frazier’s “The Golden Bough,” etc., where magic and science were treated as having been two sides of the same coin at one time, with both grounded in religion.
It’s true, I think, that religion could promote group cohesion, but so can other things, such as anti-Semitism (see Germany, Nazi).
So, why did religion become this group cohesion driving force so often?
My guess is that, as a spandrel, the adaptive mental skills upon which it piggy-backed were stronger than others. Or, if you want to go back to the “parasite” idea, some parasites have fitter hosts.
To the degree early religion did attempt explanatory ventures as to how/why certain things in the world were the way they were
The most basic aspect of mind that gives us religion is simply modeling the way the world works according to how our own actions work. Animism, IOW, which continues to be the basis of “more sophisticated” religions.
It’s about all that ID is, really. But even better minds conflate their purposes for the universe with some greater mind, which “must have been responsible” for setting up the conditions for life, or some such nonsense.
There are, certainly, many other cognitive and psychological aspects to religion arising. Yet “spiritual feelings” and the like don’t give a “basis” to religion. Only conflating our purposes with the “universe’s purposes” allows one to suppose that “god exists” or some related idea.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
The problem with the talk, so far as I followed it, was that proving there is a psychological basis for turning fantasy, asssumption of agency etc into religion doesn’t explain why every individual in early society doesn’t have his or her own religion. I might be a frog worshipper, someone else would worship the bear totem, each one as our own psychology prompted us.
I know that some would say that in these societies, a particular power group of priests and kings tend to take charge, then bully everyone else to follow their beliefs. Fine, but again, those cultures are in competition with other societies that don’t have such bullies. If the group beliefs don’t confer an advantage to the society that has them, they’ll die out.
Red Rabbit, I’ve heard the point a lot about how paleontological psychology or meme theory isn’t science because of the lack of evidence. It’s true that competing cultures don’t leave fossils like organisms do. However, isn’t much of biology based on similar speculation? Let’s say that species X went extinct shortly after species Y moved into its territory, and species Y had a quicker reproduction rate. We could argue that species Y caused species X’s extinction, but can we prove that? How is that different from saying culture A brought about the downfall of culture B because culture A had superior tool-manufacturing skills?
You’re right and I don’t express it very well. It’s more that there’s an ability to properly model some things and not others. Yes, there’s evidence but it’s of a different sort. Theories re: the evolution of religion, or indeed of many social constructs are very different from theories as to how one population outgrew another. Who’s to say the superior tool-building didn’t contribute to the better reproductive capacity etc?
Of course the neural mechanisms are present, but attributing a purpose that isn’t demonstrable in other forms remains guesswork. So, dependence on parents and social behaviour is one thing; inferring innate tendencies to religiosity from the behaviours of (even very young) children raised in a religious society is a bit of a stretch. We all anthropomorphise in our society (my car has a name, even): is it really a surprise that our kids catch it young?
My understanding is admittedly incomplete- I’m certainly no psychiatrist. And, as I said, I like the theory, I just tend to take my skeptical views wherever I go.
I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that religion is primarily a propositional system–that is that it is all about explaining unknowns.
While this may be part of what religion does, I think it is a sidelight. Most people simply don’t care how things work–how many people can tell you how their cars work or how the computer works, or how the Internet works? Most people don’t know, they know they don’t know and they don’t much care that they don’t know. I would seem to me that if religion were dependent on our curiosity it wouldn’t be the big business it is.
That religion seems largely immune to scientific challenge seems to me to argue that it has other, probably more important, engines.
Oran #110: that was very well put. Don’t know why I never heard that proposed before. I guess the meme is that religion *is* associated with explaining unknowns (the god of wine, the goddess of love etc.), therefore that’s what gets the most attention.
Oran @ 110, I’d disagree. Although the myth and ritual school of religion, and its attendants, like the religion as magic idea, lost favor about a century ago, there’s still a degree of truth to it.
Why does it thunder and lightning? The gods are angry. We must confess, and propitiate them, to make the lightning go away.
Why didn’t it rain this summer? We were impure when we did the rain dance. We must find the uncleanness, confess, and do the dance again.
And, that’s not just primitives of 3,000 years ago, or the Hopi Indians of today.
Why is there death? Because of this thing called “original sin.” Where did it come from? From this guy named Adam.
People less looney that Robertson and Falwell seek to “explain” what happens to “Chrstian America,” too.
I also think you need to split truly investigative curiosity away from what Dennett might call “folk psychology curiosity.” I think people have plenty of the latter, and religion still scratches that itch. But it does so at a glib, facile, folk psychology level.
Religion may reinforce wisdom and improve decision making. Imagining what ones parents or mentors would have done in such a situation, may lead to more detached and considered decisions. Raising respect for anscesters to the level of worship may just reinforce this respect for their accumulated wisdom, which you have internalized, and perhaps the honoring of the family values that they transmitted. A more abstract font of wisdom and order such as a “god”, may be the focus of accumulated historical experience and lessons and the principles distilled from that experience. While the principles and rules for living together in the major religions may not be ideal, they might be better than a society in which there is lack of general agreement on how to resolve disputes, resulting in disorder.
This explanation really provides little in the way of comfort–it seems more like monotheism’s attempt to explain why the God who is supposed to love us and look after us should allow us to experience loss. That is, it is part of a tangled web of religious explanations that are prone to challenge from experience and obvious contradictions.
I’d say they are a) an attempt by religion to impose a sort of moral order on the whole of experience, a moral order over which their priests have influence; and b) a distraction from what really drives the religious impulse. This kind of explanation isn’t driven by our fear of thunder–it really isn’t all that scary (in itself) for most people–it’s driven by organized religion’s imperialistic claims on the one hand and by the desire of some to figure religion as failed science.
Wow! I’m glad I watched that.
One reason for being a nonbeliever would be the practicality of the wished for afterlife.
When the major religions were made up there was no knowledge that there was a physical thing doing this thinking. They had no idea that there was a physical brain made of neurons organized into structures communicating. Thinking was pure-fucking-magic. So why not believe it could be a spirit or soul that justed moved around?
I would like to see some speculation on how much information is going to be necessary for a worthwhile afterlife. What parts of the mind gets uploaded or downloaded as the case may be.
Will a human soul/spirit be able to learn? I would hate to face eternity with no chance of gaining a bit of insight.
Are you only your memories? After a few thousand years will they fade? In a nonphysical space / time what would make a new memory?
During the brain death which parts can be discarded?
None of the motor neurons or their memories need be saved. Not going to need to ride a bicycle again.
None of the mapping knowledge is needed. It would be best if that was gone. For a male, a phantom hand reaching for a phantom dick is going to be a shock.
No need of any of the visual stuff. Would a soul/spirit have any interaction with the electromagnetic spectrum?
No need for anything to do with sound or balance. No up or down. Would a soul/spirit have any interaction with gravity?
Keeping a thought to yourself would seem impossible. So the free-will bit will have to go. A fond remembrance of a set of hooters and out the door you go.
So what bits of human minds make it to afterlife? Why would you want to be there?
If my dogs don’t go, then I don’t want to go.
too lazy to watch that clip and read all the comments above (so mine is the only important one anyway, right?). God was proposed as a first attempt at explaining the world humans occupied. So it was 50,000 or more years ago and they did not have a lot of facts. As hypotheses go this one as been pretty sturdy. Easy for some of us now to see it is wrong.
@ Oran/114 – Original sin provides ZERO comfort for me; that’s why I’m an antitheist.
But, we’re talking about religious people, not me, and I will guess not you.
Don’t forget, after original sin comes this explanation of “sacrifice,” etc. All these explainers come as a group.
(Which is why “liberal “Christianity,” as a religion, rather than just a moral philosophy, actually makes much less sense than fundamentalism. PZ, try that at your next church visit.)
And, I think you sell the psychological power of ancient religion short — way short — if you limit it to moral explanation. Ancient peoples believed that their religious structures actually did explain why the rains came, crops grew, etc.
Do you think ancient Aztecs would have been at all comfortable at offering still-beating hearts to their gods if it was just for “moral explanations”?
Rather, the apparently scientific explanations demanded action and reaction, cause and effect, within religious structures.
We know today, of course, those were pseudoexplanations, and pseudoscientific reasonings, but they seemed the real deal back then, of that I have no doubt.
On another subject entirely,
Do NOT eat Smithfield Foods pork products!
Apparently a Smithfield CAFO-type farm in Vera Cruz, Mexico is the likely source for the swine flu outbreak.
A few things to remember:
Fundamentalism is a modern movement. It isn’t the ur-religion modern or liberal society has strayed from. It “makes sense” that we might want to chose our enemies positions for them, but we can’t, and we can’t just dismiss liberal streams of religiosity because they are inconveniently non-threatening. Liberal religion is religion, too, and makes just as much sense as fundamentalism as far as I can see. More, actually.
We know less about what ancient peoples really believed and why than we’d like to think . . . and what we do know from people who wrote doesn’t make it look to be simple. For people who didn’t write . . . well we don’t have a lot of first-hand evidence.
We really are only just beginning to get a sense of what religious belief means in the contemporary world. People who say that every word of the bible is absolutely true have a strange way of hedging when all the Levitican strictures are rolled out–in short, they say every word of the bible is true, but they really pick and choose what’s important to them.
Also even if we assume an ancient Greek shepherd believed the Olympic myths quite literally, that still doesn’t mean the explanatory myths (this is why Spring comes, etc.) are *why* he is religious, any more than a contemporary Christian is religious out of a deep feeling of agape.
When I speak of religion giving “moral explanations” what I mean is that the explanations of natural phenomena all tend to be moral ones. We get stories of what we owe the gods, how we may pay, and what they’ll do if shortchanged, etc. etc. In other words, natural phenomena get dragged into a moral economy over which the priests oversee. These stories may reflect not the crying need for explanations among the flock, but rather a significant opportunity to expand the power of the priests.
How does eating Smithfield pork products pose a risk, exactly?
Oran, follow the link. It’s clear that Smithfield’s one Mexican CAFO hog farm is the likely cause. Until Smithfield either guarantees no Mexican hogs are imported here pre-slaughter (or even post-slaughter pork, depending on preservation conditions and other things) I ain’t eating any of their food. Are you?
For that matter, we don’t even know if any of their CAFOs in the U.S. are cleaner than Mexican operations.