Religion: a survival mechanism?

In Message 42, Schrafinator reacted to Faith's claim that unreliable eye-witness accounts are caused by a decline in moral standards.Here's part of the exchange: Schrafinator mentioned the survival value of "human biases and thought errors and communal reinforcements". If I am not mistaken, she uses the quoted phrase in the previous sentence as a description of how she views religion. And, again if I am not mistaken, religion was indeed Faith's point of departure when making that statement about declining moral standards.Coincidentally, just before I saw Schrafinator's comments, I read an article in Guardian Unlimited which describes just that view - that "religion may be a survival mechanism". The article discusses how scientists are trying to explain the phenomenon of religion and gives some interesting details - and differing opinions - from diverse lines of research.A few extracts:

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Faith has long been a puzzle for science, and it's no surprise why. By definition, faith demands belief without a need for supporting evidence, a concept that could not be more opposed to the principles of scientific inquiry. In the eyes of the scientist, an absence of evidence reduces belief to a hunch.

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As well as providing succour for those troubled by the existential dilemma, religion, or at least a primitive spirituality, would have played another important role as human societies developed. By providing contexts for a moral code, religious beliefs encouraged bonding within groups, which in turn bolstered the group's chances of survival, says Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist turned psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

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"Will science be the death of religion? As neuroscience, it's interesting to see how brains can create very strange states of consciousness, but in terms of threatening religion, I think it'll have absolutely no effect."

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The article also describes at some length the neurological research into religious experiences, effectively presenting the view that they can be seen as (part of) a neurological condition.I find the "survival mechanism" view of religion very interesting, if not compelling, as a possible explanation for it as a phenomenon, although I have not made up my mind about which of the various possibilities would be closest to the truth. Personally, I would add the concept of religion as a meme-complex into the mix. (That would still involve a survival mechanism, but of a different entity.)Probably, as is usually the case, things are not quite as simple as we would like them to be, and a combination of all three (survival mechanism, neurological condition, meme-complex), perhaps spiced up with even more unthought-of possibilities, may be what we're looking at.But in this thread, I would like to hear your opinions about the "survival mechanism" theory.{Note for the admins: Although one could argue for "Biological Evolution" as the proper forum, I think this would be better placed in "Faith and Belief".}This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 02 March 2005 13:30 AM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Tusko,Thank you for your reply.You focus on mental health and physical well-being and the direct implications of these for evolutionary fitness on the level of the individual.But as you can read from the article, the "survival mechanism" approach targets the effects of religion on a group of individuals.Here's the quintessential passage:

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By providing contexts for a moral code, religious beliefs encouraged bonding within groups, which in turn bolstered the group's chances of survival [...]

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If the effect of religion on a group is to endow it with some sort of moral system, then that may give the group as a whole an evolutionary advantage. It may bind the group members and motivate them to help the needy individuals in their group. These may then in turn be able to survive and even procreate, where they might not have been without this chain of religion giving rise to morals, giving rise to compassion, giving rise to actual care. You would be surprised by what memeplexes are capable of withstanding. After all, some people still refuse to acknowledge the fact of evolution, in spite of an overwhelming amount of evidence, simply because a religious memeplex forbids them to.How ironic it is then to contemplate the idea that religion, one way or another, may itself be a factor in, and a product of, evolution.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Hi Brad,You have posted a lot of material on this thread, but since I don't have much time right now, I could only have a quick look at it. I will get back to you, but I would ask you to have some patience, because it will take some time.I am glad that you have taken the trouble to post in a considerably improved style. Now, if you could just start to add a comma in the right spot every once in a while, you'd make me quite happy. (Don't take that last remark too seriously.)See you.

Although I have yet to find out what way of thinking of mine would surprise Brad, before I can even gauche my relevancy to his post, perhaps I should tell you now, 'Dom', that Brad forshortened my moniker.

I still don't see where you want to go with this, I think you are over-analyzing things. That's all I can say about it, because of what I'm going to say next.Although I think your style has improved slightly, DominionSeraph is probably right: you start writing when you are already halfway a long train of thought. You seem to assume all of us have read Kant, Russel, Carnap, Jammer and others to such an extent that your merely mentioning them in passing explains everything you don't say. Well, "I know nothing, I'm from Barcelona." Let that be your starting point with me. This is how I would have said that: I know you can write plain sentences, Brad. Indulge me, and the discussion would become much less one-sided for you.

I wonder why no one has latched on to the idea of the brain evolving in such a way as to be "wired" for believing, the way it is suggested in the article. That way, the development of religion in man would have a solid, biological foundation, with the group-connected advantages as the selective element:

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One factor in the development of religious belief was the rapid expansion of our brains as we emerged as a species, says Todd Murphy, a behavioural neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada. As the frontal and temporal lobes grew larger, our ability to extrapolate into the future and form memories developed. "When this happened, we acquired some very new and dramatic cognitive skills. For example, we could see a dead body and see ourselves in that position one day. We could think 'That's going to be me,'" he says. That awareness of impending death prompted questions: why are we here? What happens when we die? Answers were needed.

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Some believe that religion was so successful in improving group survival that a tendency to believe was positively selected for in our evolutionary history.

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This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 04 March 2005 20:50 AM

The point is that, to be wired as a child, we necessarily have a brain that is capable of believing things. To be able to be conditioned to believe certain things, we need to have the hardware first. Well, the questions must lead to something, and it might just have happened to have been religion. Besides, stories may be very magical to a mind that has barely risen out of the swamp of animal instinctiveness, especially so if the stories are about what happens after death. We're not talking about people who are sophisticated, calling themselves Jews and everything, I'm thinking rather of people who have just overcome the grunting stage. I can imagine that, once a mind grasps the idea of its own existence, it's very hard for it to contemplate it's eventual non-existence.{edited to change "maybe" into "may be"}This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 07 March 2005 10:59 AM

Hi Robin,It’s good to see you’re back. Maybe I shouldn’t have said wired to believe things. It sounds too much as if we are wired to believe some specific things. I think now that I should have phrased it more carefully, something like wired to be able to entertain beliefs of any kind.And perhaps the same kind of wiring would also allow us to find out if our beliefs are justified. After all, a belief is nothing but a speculation about something. Why then don’t we take this one step further and speculate about the truth of our belief? Not only do we have the mental capacity to have a belief about something, we also have the capacity to question that belief.Thus, if we entertain a delusion in spite of the fact that there is no justification for it, we could, in the end, be rightfully blamed for not using our capacity to the full. The feeling of incorporeality may have been a most magical thought for primitive people, akin to the incorporeal world where stories seem to reside. The combination of the two might be irresistible for a mind that has just climbed out of the abyss of non-consciousness.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 07 March 2005 11:49 AM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

How is this likely? Isn’t it also plausible that a creature that has only just begun to have thoughts at all, let alone second thoughts, would find it difficult to grasp the idea of death, especially its own death?You didn’t address what I think is Purpledawn’s main point, which is

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Is that {what the primitive people in her example are doing, P.} believing or just accepting what seems reasonable given the evidence in front of them?
So are we wired to believe or reason?
Or are we wired to reason and conditioned to believe?

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So, are we wired to believe or reason? Meaning, I think, are we wired to believe, or are we wired to reason? My take on this is: a bit of both. I think the wiring for believing and the wiring for reasoning aren’t that far apart, or perhaps even the same. Believing things requires a certain amount of reasoning, and vice versa. Believing and reasoning are two sides of the same coin.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Isn’t one of the consequences of the fall of Man from paradise, that he has lost his immortality? The people who handed down this parable must have had thoughts about the end of their lives, or they wouldn’t have come up with this idea.A thinking mind is capable of ‘producing’ future. I think it is inevitable for a thinking mind to hit upon the idea of its own death. I imagine it must be a horrendous moment for a mind that has become used to producing plausible short-time futures, when it suddenly realises it hasn’t the first idea of what that ultimate future, death, is going to be like.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

I didn’t bring it up, Purpledawn did:

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I don't think ancient man had a problem with death. Even the OT doesn't touch on a need for eternal life.

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I was talking about ancient man in general, as in ‘cave people’. That’s a bold statement. Could you please explain?

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Is there a real difference? A difference that matters?I said: [They] must have had thoughts about the end of their lives, and I was deliberate in describing it in such general terms. Whether they were thinking about the end of their lives, or about the how and why of their lifespan, in the end, it comes down to their contemplating the transition of life to what comes after life. A certain preoccupation with death is what lies behind it all, I think. It comes with the territory.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 07 March 2005 18:21 AM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins