“You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.”

In an appalling act of bias, Judge Cherie Blair suspended the sentence of a man convicted of assaulting another and breaking his jaw because the assailant was a “religious man”. Apparently just being a member of a particular cult is sufficient to get your criminal penalties reduced by a few years in her court; the scales of justice aren’t quite fairly balanced for the godless.

At least we have AC Grayling on the case, who sharply points out the ethical bankruptcy of Blair’s position, and then turns around and also slaps around the people who defended Blair. I wouldn’t want to be Hugo Rifkind, who tried to make the tired argument that we need an objective source of morality, i.e. that vicious thug God, and gets dismissed with an excellent lesson in history and philosophy.

This is an awful advertisement for wherever Mr Rifkind studied philosophy. Either that or he was not paying attention in ‘week one’ when it appears (from what he says) his ethics course took place. And he certainly seems to have stopped thinking since then. Let me direct his attention to Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, Hume, Kant, and a few dozen others among the thinkers he ought to have come across in his studies, whose ethics are not premised on divine command or the existence of supernatural agencies, but proceed from consideration of what human beings, in this life in this world, owe each other in the way of respect, concern, trust, fairness and honesty. The rich deep tradition of humanistic ethics stemming from classical antiquity has a tendency to make much of what passes for morality in religion (‘give away all your possessions’, ‘take no thought for the morrow’, ‘women must cover their heads in church’) look merely silly or trivial – at least in regard to what is distinctive to the religion, and not part of wider ethics whether religious or non-religious. Indeed Mr Rifkind is somewhat overexposed in philosophical ignorance here, for he ought to know that what is of practical value in Christian ethics is an import from the late Hellenic and Roman schools, mainly Stoicism, in the fourth century CE and later, to supply the want of a livable ethics in a religion that, to begin with, imminently expected the end of the world and had no use for money, marriage, and other aspects of ordinary life. So as the centuries passed it had to look about for something more sensible, and of course found it in the classical pre-Christian tradition. And to put matters in summary terms: the Roman Stoic conception of good character knocks Mrs. Blair’s (and Mr Rifkind’s) into a cocked hat, where they belong.

Religion: adaptation or by-product?

For years, whenever someone asks me about the evolution of religion, I explain that there are two broad categories of explanation: that religion has conferred a selective advantage to people who possessed it, or that it was a byproduct of other cognitive processes that were advantageous. I’m a proponent of the byproduct explanation, myself; I tend to go a little further, too, and suggest that religion is a deleterious virus that is piggy-backing on some very useful elements of our minds.

Now look at this: there is a wonderful paper by Pyysläinen and Hauser, The origins of religion : evolved adaptation or by-product?, that summarizes that very same dichotomy (without my extension, however). Here’s the abstract:

Considerable debate has surrounded the question of the origins and evolution of religion. One proposal views religion as an adaptation for cooperation, whereas an alternative proposal views religion as a by-product of evolved, non-religious, cognitive functions. We critically evaluate each approach, explore the link between religion and morality in particular, and argue that recent empirical work in moral psychology provides stronger support for the by-product approach. Specifically, despite differences in religious background, individuals show no difference in the pattern of their moral judgments for unfamiliar moral scenarios. These findings suggest that religion evolved from pre-existing cognitive functions, but that it may then have been subject to selection, creating an adaptively designed system for solving the problem of cooperation.

The general argument for religion as an adaptive property is a kind of just-so story. Because humans are dependent on cooperation for survival, religion could have provided an internal bias to promote social cohesion, to promote feelings of guilt and fear about defecting from the group, and also to act as costly signals — you knew you could trust an individual to be a loyal member of your group if they were willing to invest so much effort in playing the weird religion game, just to get along. Strangers will not try to free-ride on your gang if membership involves snipping off the end of your penis, for instance. Also consider the chronic Christian condition of believing themselves to be an oppressed minority—that’s emphasized because if membership is perceived to be costly, even if it actually isn’t, it still can act as an inhibitor of free-riding.

The by-product model recognizes that there are advantages to cooperative group membership, but does not require the evolution of specifically religious properties; these are incidental features of more general cognitive capacities. In this case, we’d argue that such advantageous abilities as a theory of mind (the ability to perceive others as having thought processes like ours), empathy, and a need for social interaction are the actual products of selection, and that religion is simply a kind of spandrel that emerges from those useful abilities.

I favor the by-product theory because it is simpler — it requires fewer specific features be hardwired into the brain — and because it is readily apparent that many of us can discard all religious belief yet still function as cooperating members of a community, with no sense of loss. That suggests to me that religion is actually a superfluous hijacker of potentials we all share.

If you’re familiar with Hauser’s work, you know that he adds another datum: people moral judgments on the basis of a kind of emotional intuition. This intuition is independent of rationalizations and more complex institutional mandates, and is therefore far more deeply imbedded in our brains. We make choices based on feelings first, and the Ten Commandments are invoked later. Religion may work to reinforce some of those feelings, however, so it could act as a kind of cultural amplifier of more intrinsic biases.

To the extent that explicit religiosity cannot penetrate moral intuitions underlying the ability to cooperate, religion cannot be the ultimate source of intra-group cooperation. Cooperation is made possible by a suite of mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion. Moral judgments depend on these mechanisms and appear to operate independently of one’s religious background. However, although religion did not originally emerge as a biological adaptation, it can play a role in both facilitating and stabilizing cooperation within groups, and as such, could be the target of cultural selection. Religious groups seem to last longer than non-religious groups, for example.

In the future, more experimental research is needed to probe the actual relationship between folk moral intuitions and intuitive beliefs about afterlife, gods and ancestors. It seems that in many cultures religious concepts and beliefs have become the standard way of conceptualizing moral intuitions. Although, as we have discussed, this link is not a necessary one, many people have become so accustomed to using it, that criticism targeted at religion is experienced as a fundamental threat to our moral existence.

The idea that religion did not give us an evolutionary advantage, but has been shaped by cultural evolution to better fit and support our productive behaviors, is an interesting one. Of course, it doesn’t make religion right or good; what it suggests is that the strength of free-thinking communities could take advantage of some of the cognitive contrivances of religion, without the extraneous baggage of god-belief. We could just add a few costly signals to atheism, for instance.

So I’m going to have to ask you all to get genital piercings if you want to be a New Atheist.

(Don’t worry, just kidding!)

(via björn.brembs.blog)

Things to do when you’re godless

Bored and godless? Want something fun to do?

  • Visit the Phillipines! The Filipino Freethinkers are having a film festival on 27 February. It’ll be a whole day of classic atheist documentaries and comedy films.

  • Quick, catch a plane to Australia: the Adelaide Atheists are having a youtube party. This is a cool idea: show up at a bar with a laptop and a video projector, and browse through a series of youtube clips on atheism.

See? Lots to do!

Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be

People keep asking me for books on evolution for their kids, and I have to keep telling them that there is a major gap in the library. We have lots of great books for adults, but most of the books for the younger set reduce evolution to stamp collecting: catalogs of dinosaurs, for instance. I just got a copy of a book that is one small step in filling that gap, titled Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Daniel Loxton. It’s beautifully illustrated, and the organization of the book focuses on concepts (and misconceptions!) of evolution, explaining them in manageable bits of a page or two. The first half covers the basics of evolutionary theory — a little history of Darwin, the evidence for selection and speciation, short summaries of how selection works, that sort of thing. The second half covers common questions, such as how something as complex as an eye could have evolved, or where the transitional fossils are. The book is aimed at 8-13 year olds, and it’s kind of cute to see that most creationists could learn something from a book for 8 year olds.

I recommend it highly, but with one tiny reservation. The author couldn’t resist the common temptation to toss in something about religion at the end, and he gives the wrong answer: it’s the standard pablum, and he claims that “Science as a whole has nothing to say about religion.” Of course it can. We can confidently say that nearly all religions are definitely wrong, if for no other reason than that they contradict each other. We also have a multitude of religions that make claims about the world that are contradicted by the evidence. It’s only two paragraphs, and I sympathize with the sad fact that speaking the truth on this matter — that science says your religion is false — is likely to get the book excluded from school libraries everywhere, but it would have been better to leave it out than to perpetuate this silly myth.

Don’t worry about it, though — take the kids aside and explain to them that that bit of the book is wrong, which is also a good lesson to teach, that you should examine everything critically, even good pro-science books.

Say, did you know that Darwin Day is coming up soon? Maybe you should order a copy fast for the kids in your life!

List of science blogs, with an asterisk

The Times Online has posted a list of science blogs of various sorts, which I was inclined to endorse since they did include me, and also some blogs I hadn’t seen before — I am enchanted by 2d goggles, and want to spend the rest of the day reading the archives — but then I got to the end of the list and … Anthony Watts? Crank weatherman and climate change denialist? That’s an anti-science blog, sorry. Now I’m a little embarrassed to be on it.

I note that the commenters on that site are similarly dismayed at the lack of discrimination in their final choice.