MercatorNet: Can evolution explain religion?

Here's my MercatorNet column (10 December 2009),

Can evolution explain religion?

Evolutionary psychologists offer two contradictory explanations for the existence of religion. They can't both be right, but they can both be wrong.

In a recent issue of the leading journal Science , Elizabeth Culotta offers a variety of speculations in an article titled "On the Origin of Religion." Explaining religion without God is quite the growth industry these days among evolutionary psychologists. Some argue that religion exists because it increases evolutionary fitness (survival of the fittest). Others argue that it makes no difference to fitness. It is merely a glitch in our thinking that doesn't kill us off.

They can't both be right, but they could both be wrong. Let's see.

For the rest, go here.

Neuroscience: We know nothing of brain evolution

Well, that's according to Harvard's Richard Lewontin, in an article posted by James Randerson of the Guardian (February 19, 2008)

We know nothing about brain evolution

Scientists are still completely in the dark about why the human brain evolved to be so big, according to Richard Lewontin

[ ... ]


All in all, despite thousands of scientific papers and countless National Geographic front covers, we have not made much progress in understanding how our most complicated and mysterious organ came about.

"We are in very serious difficulties in trying to reconstruct the evolution of cognition," said Lewontin. "I'm not even sure what we mean by the problem."

The main thing to see - from a layperson's perspective, is that countless National Geographic front covers do not add up to an ounce more certainty.

My own view is that the subject is not very important anyway. The important question for today is how to make the best of what we have. We may discover how we have it - or maybe not. But if we don't make the best of it, we are just plain losers, and that's all.

Mind: We still have no explanation for why humans have minds - or thoughts

In James Randerson's "We know nothing about brain evolution" (Guardian UK, February 19, 2008) we learn that Harvard's Richrd Lewontin has pointed out the obvious:

"Why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition". He systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line.

The main problem is the poor fossil record. Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so, we can't be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us. Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches.

Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret. "I don't have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means," Lewontin confessed. What does a particular brain size tell us about the capabilities of the animal attached to it?

Of course Lewontin is right! First, cranial capacity is not the best measure of intelligence, as brain absent humans show. While we are here, a number of studies show that some birds (notably crows) are smart - even though they do not have the brain parts we humans associate with smartness. At the time, I said,

I've long been skeptical of claims that intelligence evolved as an aid to survival. The vast majority of life forms that have survived for millions or even hundreds of millions of years did not require - or acquire - intelligence. The newer notion that intelligence is spurred by the need for complex social interactions seems a bit closer to the mark, though not entirely satisfactory. After all, many insects have achieved complex social interactions without anything like what we humans regard as intelligence.

There is no "survival of the fittest" reason why humans should be conscious! None whatever. Bacteria are way more fit than humans, but do they have thoughts? Nada. And they are probably better off without them.

So we are stuck being human and having minds, and we really can't claim that our minds give us a survival advantage. Its more the opposite. We give our minds a survival advantage.

Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

Religion: Why "evolutionary" explanations don't really work

Once again recently, I found myself explaining to a friend why I do not have much use for the attempt to explain religion according to the alleged evolutionary psychology that we have inherited from our Pleistocene ancestors through our genes and replicate robot-style in our neurons. Rather, I wrote,

I take the view that the origin of religion is bound up with the origin of consciousness. Religion attempts to answer the obvious questions that occur to a conscious being – for example:

How did the world come to be the way it is?

Why do I do things I shouldn’t do, and don’t even really want to? Will anyone punish me for this?

What happened to my father when he died?

It is not, in my view, necessary to look for an explanation for why people have these questions - as if the explanation were some sort of mechanism.

The questions are a function of conscious awareness of our environment. We may benefit from thinking about these things - or may not. But we think about them because we have minds.
So my lack of esteem for evolutionary psychologists' explanations of religion arises from two sources:

(1) They look for mechanisms, benefits, or byproducts that don’t necessarily exist and certainly don’t need to exist.

(2) They often neglect inconvenient facts that we DO know – for example, that human consciousness appears to have arisen swiftly. If the cave paintings are any guide, assigning a strictly pragmatic value to human activities becomes very risky after that.

Also the answers proposed by religions take people in very different directions: Procreating a large tribe, celibacy, and acquiring a necklace of shrunken heads are very different answers to the question "How should I live?"

That is an unpromising beginning to a search for a general mechanism or byproduct.

Another example is this: The conviction that our minds/souls somehow survive bodily death is probably as old as humanity. Both extinct Neanderthal man and our own family, homo sapiens commonly buried the dead in ways that implied that they would live again.

Were early humans more "fit for survival" because they believed that? There is no way to know because the belief itself changed what fitness for survival meant to them. Fitness often came to mean devotion to one's ancestors as well as one's children, and dying to protect one's ancestors' graves would be rewarded by favours from beyond.

A further problem with trying to understand religion in an "evolutionary" way is that every type of religious conviction imaginable is probably still present today somewhere. That is because, unlike life forms, extinct religions can simply be reinvented (e.g. the spread of Wicca).

Ethical monotheism is gaining ground worldwide against local cults that offer no systematic teachings. But that seems more the result of a trend toward education and mass communications than an evolution based on fitness. Education teaches logical reasoning, and monotheism is more logically satisfying than polytheism. I predict that if this trend reverses itself, local cults will become more important again.

Philosopher: Why you can't be both an evolutionist and a materialist

In "Evolution vs. Naturalism: Why they are like oil and water", philosopher Alvin Plantinga comments (Books & Culture, July/August 2008),

As everyone knows, there has been a recent spate of books attacking Christian belief and religion in general. Some of these books are little more than screeds, long on vituperation but short on reasoning, long on name-calling but short on competence, long on righteous indignation but short on good sense; for the most part they are driven by hatred rather than logic.

Plantinga cites with approval some more intellectually respectable atheist works.

But in general, many people have noticed the trend he points to. Hatred can drive good writing, but not usually good reasoning. Indeed, most of the recent "new atheist" books remind me of anti-immigration tracts . They attribute all the world's ills to religion in the same way that some attribute all the country's ills to new immigrants - and with about the same amount of justification too.

Plantinga goes on to say,

Nearly all of these books have been written by philosophical naturalists. I
believe it's extremely important to see that naturalism itself, despite the smug
and arrogant tone of the so-called New Atheists, is in very serious
philosophical hot water: one can't sensibly believe it.

Why?

Naturalists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of science, as if science in some way supports, endorses, underwrites, implies, or anyway is unusually friendly to naturalism. In particular, they often appeal to the modern theory of evolution as a reason for embracing naturalism; indeed, the subtitle of Dawkins' Watchmaker is Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. Many seem to think that evolution is one of the pillars in the temple of naturalism (and "temple" is the right word: contemporary naturalism has certainly taken on a religious cast, with a secular priesthood as zealous to stamp out opposing views as any mullah). I propose to argue that naturalism and evolution are in conflict with each other.

Because?

The first thing to see is that naturalists are also always or almost always materialists: they think human beings are material objects, with no immaterial or spiritual soul, or self. We just are our bodies, or perhaps some part of our bodies, such as our nervous systems, or brains, or perhaps part of our brains (the right or left hemisphere, for example), or perhaps some still smaller part. So let's think of naturalism as including materialism. And now let's think about beliefs from a materialist perspective. According to materialists, beliefs, along with the rest of mental life, are caused or determined by neurophysiology, by what goes on in the brain and nervous system. Neurophysiology, furthermore, also causes behavior. According to the usual story, electrical signals proceed via afferent nerves from the sense organs to the brain; there some processing goes on; then electrical impulses go via efferent nerves from the brain to other organs including muscles; in response to these signals, certain muscles contract, thus causing movement and behavior. ...

Your beliefs may all be false, ridiculously false; if your behavior is adaptive, you will survive and reproduce.

In short, if you are a materialist, you can never hope to know that materialism is true because there is no direct relationship between your beliefs and evidence; your beliefs are merely the output of irrational forces. Read the rest here.

One can have philosophy without God, but not without a mind that is real, rather than an illusion. No wonder the new atheists (who differ from the old atheists precisely in that they do not think that the mind is real) sound like a host of "anti-" zealots. It really is the best they can do.

Theories of brain evolution: Evolving brain or revolving door?

At the end of a long discussion of useless theorizing about how the brain might have evolved, Creation-Evolution Headlines kindly says of The Spiritual Brain:

Given the standoff in evolutionary explanations, how about a radical alternative? It’s not really radical; in fact, it is time-tested, logically coherent and self-evident. It enjoyed epistemic priority throughout the classical, medieval and Enlightenment periods. It is the non-reductionist position that the mind is non-material; the brain is an instrument of a spiritual reality that, while constrained by matter, cannot be reduced to its material components. A new book has dusted off this long-accepted truism and explored it within the findings of modern neurobiology. Written by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and journalist Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain is getting lively and enthusiastic reviews on Amazon.com.

Obviously, the brain evolved. We have brains. Stromatolites didn't. But I suspect that many people who are currently enquiring into brain evolution are looking for something that isn't actually there: How intelligence arose without any order, meaning, or purpose in the universe. They will not get real answers because they put all their energy into protecting their kludges.