God and evolution

This is an extended response to Louise’s question here

Is what you are looking at why religions are ‘adaptive’ despite being counter-factual in so many ways?

Well, differing religions are counter-factual in different ways. Classic Calvinism is beautiful, because it turns the horror of the world into something dramatically and aesthetically pleasing. It seems to me intellectually entirely consistent, emotionally true in lots of ways, and unbelievable only on the balance of probabilities, which is no disproof at all.

I started off asking why different religions grow in different places. I found a mire of interesting complications. “Adaptive” is not an absolute quality any more than “heritability” is. Some quality is adaptive to some entity in a particular situation. Having a soul may be adaptive for individuals relative to other individuals; but shared belief and rituals – religions, if you like – have to be adaptive for groups relative to other groups if there is to be any kind of Darwinian explanation for their success.

There may not be such an expllanation. There certainly won’t always be one. Peter Geyl, I think, has an interesting essay on all the people who argued that Calvinism represented the Dutch national character, and Catholicism the Belgian. He concluded that the real factor was that the Spanish armies couldn’t make any headway in what is now Holland in the 17th century. No doubt this had something to do with the dykes and all that; but more with the fact that they made the country defensible than with the social solidarity they promoted. But I still think the social solidarity helped Calvinism endure there for a long time.

[Louise] I would say that Calvinism does a really good job of describing and shaping a certain sort of inner landscape which is very adaptive in extreme circumstances, but as well as making for tight knit groups, it also makes for individuals who are able to go against the grain because they have an inner source of certainty and consolation.

This I think is very true and an improvement on what I was originally saying. But the corollary of your observation is that these individuals, formed by Calvinism, will tend not merely to leave it, but to weaken the structure they leave, by turning the strengths of Calvinist character against a Calvinist society. The Scottish Enlightenment in the end produced Hume.

Where I think it really scores is not in its description of the external but in its description of internal processes – which has some very interesting parallels to modern counselling.

Ah. Sinners in the hands of an angry Self.

I think we’re probably saying similar things but due to the constraints of e-mail we’re probably talking past each other a bit!

Quite.
I am trying to think myself into a really rather complicated argument, and still at the stage where you take the old machine apart, and the whole workshop is a mess of bits and scruff. What I want to do is to separate all the different layers of things that we’re talking about when describing “religion” and its relation to biology.

Layer 1

There are certain cognitive mechanisms, operating on an individual level, which tend to make supernatural beings credible and natural. That’s the Pascal Boyer argument, which I entirely buy. These mechanisms, he says, are not selected for. They are spandrels: by-products of immediately useful ways of apprehending the world. To take the crudest possible example, we all “understand” pacman when we see the game for the first time. Something is chasing; something is eating;; something is being chased. Without those categories, the game would make no sense. They are part of the mental furniture of any normally functioning human being, and anyone who didn’t have then would probably be handicapped in some way. So it’s safe to say they have been selected for, but obviously ridiculous to argue we’ve been selected to play pacman. Similarly, you can’t argue, from the universal character of supernatural belief, that it has been placed there by any designer.

At this point, an argument occurs to me that proves that universal supernatural belief must have been placed there by an object of supernatural apprehension, in the sense that if we can’t help apprehending the world supernaturally, and the world has designed us in this way, then we have to understand our position with supernatural or theological overtones, and might as well get good at it. “We are surrounded by Gods, and might as well get good at it” — a slogan that could do with some work, I feel.

Layer 2

Supernaturalism may be natural to humans, but we clearly vary a great deal in our skill at it, as with other areas of temperament. Very few people are either the Prophet Muhammed or Edward Gibbon. Like other innate human tendencies, the expression of it varies greatly across societies. Similarly, so does a moral capacity, or what is known as the internalisation of norms.

All human societies have moral codes. All of them, I think, express these codes in terms of superhuman and possibly supernatural entities. This is an aspect of the way in which we feel instinctively that a moral prohibition has to have absolute force, and to be absolutely binding on everyone, or else it’s not proper morality. Either that, or the people on whom it is not binding are not proper humans. It is possible, with an effort of reflection, to rise above, or at least to refine these intuitions about morality. But we can’t get too far away from them.

The link between different moral codes and the supernatural beliefs associated with them is not, I think, strong enough to call a full-fledged “religion”. The link is there. But we are still at the stage where supernatural entities dramatise moral intuitions and commands and make them easier to understand and follow. To the extent that they do so, and to the extent that the capacity to function as part of a moral community is adaptive, then we can see that supernaturalism begins to be more than a spandrel. It begins to be something whose absence might handicap your chances of leaving descendants. It begins to be something preserved by natural selection. It begins to have a purpose.

Differing codes and patterns of behaviour are obviously something that can be selected for, and that affect the differential survival of groups. So we have two kinds of things being selected for here: one the individual capacity to be impressed with the norms of a group, and to make them part of her own drives; secondly, a contest at a group level between differing moral codes or strategies.

You may call these belief systems religions but they don’t compete in the way that later monotheisms do. To make this point clear, consider the Roman conquest of Greece. If you want to explain why this happened, you end up asking which features of Roman social organisation, and of Roman moral codes, made Rome more militarily effective than the Greek city states. This is much more illuminating than asking whether Roman or Greek religion was “truer” or “more adaptive” because both religious frameworks were syncretic, and eventually more or less indistinguishable.

Level 3

Then we have the great Christian/Jewish invention of conversion (though the Jews had it beaten out of them in 70AD). Conversion allows you to change the group you belong to. Conversion with scriptures and prophets allows the new group to have explicit moral codes – and corresponding supernatural understandings of the world. We still call this religion, but it seems to me quite distinct from the religions in level 2, and to require different supplementary explanations. They were the sort of things I was groping towards in my remarks on Calvinism. And now it’s nine in the evening and I will stop.