R P McMurphy

Hello everyone,

Wow, I am impressed with the thinkers on this list!

You folks (with a few exceptions) are definitely philosophers, and that is fairly rare, at least in ar-kan-saw. People here are generally good natured but definitely NOT philosophical. (how 'bout them hawgs?!!)

Anyway, here's one that I've been musing on for sometime - no great conclusions yet, but chew on this for a while . . .

As far as I know, every society, at every time in history, (possibly excepting the Soviets and related political systems - but they are/were an "artificial" society in my opinion) has had religion.

So here's the thing, if religion is bogus, a big pile of ka-ka, a giant load of fertilizer, horsefeathers, BS, a fairy tale, a lie, a myth, total fantasy, a fabrication, a falsehood, and several other colorful metaphors that escape me at the moment, then what is the use of it, and why, oh why, do ALL the cultures have it?

Now first of all, someone may wish to counter that there are cultures without a *western* form of religion - that is to write - without a belief in a supernatural deity. From this argument one may point to the Buddhist system or the Taoists, or the Confucians.

Actually I might agree that the Confucians (as little as I know about them) aren't "religious" believers - however the Buddhists definitely believe (without evidence) in the existence of the "soul" and that makes them a religion in my estimation. Don't know about the Taoists. The Zen Buddhists I do know about and they are definitely *not* a religion - no God, no soul, no afterlife, etc., only the experience of satori has any importance to them. And that seems definitely to be a real experience.

Anyway, the point is that in ancient times every society had a religion. There are no ancient athesist cultures that I know of. Someone correct me (with evidence hopefully) if I am wrong here. And merely not having a belief in a god will not do - any "faith" in a non-material existence (dualism) is a religion, at least for my purposes here.

Any human trait that is ancient and universal is likely to have survival value or else it doesn't survive.

So the questions are simply, in view of the above,

1. Why is religion so universal?

2. Is religious faith an advantage? That is, does it have survival value? Did the ancient athesists all die out because they lacked a religion?

So what do you heavy thinkers have to write about this?

Thanks,
R. P. McMurphy

Godless Wonder

Just look at the threads that pop up around here from time to time, "My Christian gf broke up with me because I'm not.", etc. Are there any Christians having a hard time finding a mate because of their religion? Generally, no, not in the U.S., there aren't (at least not if their religion is fairly mainstream.)

Then there are guys like Mel Gibson's father, He has 11 children, 48 grandchildren, and 15 great grandchildren. So many likely because of religion. That seems evolutionarily significant to me.
(see http://houstonpress.com/issues/2003-...l/1/index.html)

Also, (I've read that) athiests tend to be more educated in general than theists. (I'm not making a judgement, or assigning causality, just observing a correlation.) There is also a correlation between a person's education and how many kids they are likely to have. The more education, the less likely they are to have a lot of kids. At least this appears to be true nowadays. So it would seem that atheists are in generally less likely to have, say 11 children than at least some of their theist counterparts, whose god(s) "tell" them to have lots of kids, or not to use contraceptives, or whatever.

I think the question is less, "does religion constitute an evolutionararily significant pressure" and more "How intense is this evolutionary pressure."

Now, maybe you are asking the quesiton, "if being religious is an evolutionary advantage, how did it come to be this way?"

The same way the peacock got its tail, is one answer.

Pyrrho

You may as well ask why every culture has also had numerous devotees of superstitious nonsense of all types. The short answer is, when people say things like, "Man is a rational animal", it is mostly wishful thinking. People are not, as a rule, very logical or rational. So, naturally, they are going to believe all sorts of silly things. Of course, people have more potential to be rational than what generally occurs, but this is because they are raised to believe silliness and to reject reason as a method for determining beliefs.

Also, when something is common, that does not mean that it has survival value. People have appendixes, but it confers no advantage, and is, in fact, a disadvantage, as it kills people from time to time. If humans were exactly as they are, except without appendixes, they would be better off. Religion is analogous.



When you live in a society, it is an advantage to your survival to believe, or pretend to believe, things that keep others from killing you. Religion, whenever it has the power to do so, is almost inevitably repressive and intolerant of other opinions. When the Inquisition stopped killing people, it was not because the Church wanted to stop, but because secular governments were finally strong enough to be able to stop it. This fact is something many religious people would prefer to forget, but it is secular authorities that have prevented such things in recent times, when it is prevented.

What we can guess about the past is more or less this: Whenever repressive religious organizations have been in charge, the irreligious tend to pretend to believe, or hide their non-belief, in order to survive. So there is the impression that everyone believes, though there are often hints in various writings that suggest that not everyone bought into the religious orthodoxy.

The Helmetmaker

Hello R.P.,


It seems to be a fairly common misconception that religion must have some survival value. You said, " Any human trait that is ancient and universal is likely to have survival value or else it doesn't survive." First, that's not necessarily true. Freckles have no survival value. Neither do wrinkles, or myopia, or the whorls of a fingerprint. Second, religion is not ancient in evolutionary terms. It has only been around a few thousand years, or more to the point, a few hundred generations. Considering that it developed concurrently with civilization, which eased survival pressures, those generations don't count for as much as they might otherwise.

The third and most telling point is that religion, or the religious feeling, is not really a trait. It is more like a side-effect of a trait. We have a trait to be curious, and to be problem-solvers. Religion is only an outgrowth of those traits, just like masturbation is an outgrowth of the trait of sexual drive. Not everything has to have survival value. As long as a behavior, a characterisic, or a trait has little or no "extinctive" value, there is nothing to mitigate against it. So I don't think religion has any real survival value.


The Helmetmaker

spacer1

I found this with a google search on the topic, by Richard Dawkins:
I think religion does confer a survival advantage. Perhaps in comparison to the sciences, religion seems a lesser belief system in terms of the answers and explanations it provides, but how closely related is the amount of "true" information at one's disposal to one's survival? At the very least, religion offers some sort of explanation which, to borrow Wittgenstein's terminology, allows one to "go on".

I think the issue of faith is also important, in that faith in oneself is important to aide in staying alive - to trust in one's bodily sensations and states, including perceptions of the world, is important when one's survival is at stake. However, at the extreme level we find fundamentalism and an unshakeable system of belief, however wrong it might be. But, if such a belief system confers a greater survival advantage, it doesn't seem to make much difference how "right" those beliefs may be.

Or perhaps a belief system which is found to confer a greater survival advantage soon becomes "the truth"?

Quantum Ninja

Nice reply, Helmetmaker. I agree with pretty much everything you say. However, I would like to make a comment in regards to this statement:

While I do agree that religious belief provides no "natural" survival benefits, I do believe it created "artificial" ones. It was only a few centuries ago that heretics were burned alive for harboring alternative ideologies. If you did not adhere to religious belief system X, you were less likely to survive and pass your less popular memes on to your children (or others, for that matter). In turn, the less popular memes become even less popular.

Thus, at least at a previous time in history, religious beliefs did have "survival benefits," even if they were artificial. Any time you have a meme that makes its hosts militant against hosts of competing memes, that meme provides a slight survival benefit to the host.

acronos

Count me in the "if religion did not have strong evolutionary advantages, it would have died out long ago," camp. I speculate that the advantages are culturally advantageous rather than individually advantageous. By this I mean, I think the society as a whole gains more than the individual does. Or, worded differently, that the individual gains through the success of the society. [Evidence that societies evolve is provided by our own cells, which carry many attributes that benefit the whole person rather then the individual cell. If societies didn't evolve, we wouldn't exist.]

Religious advantages:
1) It provides a quick and dirty framework for explaining the universe. Children do not have to reason out complex concepts that took religion generations to evolve, they can just be told that God said it and that's how it is. Morals that benefit society as a whole are an important example of this. Religion provides a framework for easy propagation and the society as a whole can evolve or die as its morals/ideas compete with other societies.
2) Kings and leaders often draw authority from religion. Religion augments structures that allow larger societies than tribal families where everyone knows everyone.
3) Larger groups typically have many survival advantages over smaller groups. Smaller groups are typically easier to kill. Larger groups that use a division of labor can allocate resources more effectively such or farming or weapon makers. Religion was a big part of most early agricultural societies, I believe, because it provided a foundation for the move to agriculture in kings and religious authorities.
3) A simple way to recognize the "us" in the "us" vs. "them" and to motivate the "us." Again, the most obvious advantage of this is in war or the battle of cultures, which has everything to do with evolution and the survival of the fittest. Worded another way, it is a glue that cements families and cultures together.

The main religious disadvantage is that, while is provides a quick and dirty framework for understanding the universe, it requires the entire society/religion to evolve to include new concepts which usually takes a generation or two. Science today is moving far faster than religions can assimilate and that rate is only increasing. This increase will probably overpower the advantages listed above as science becomes more and more important to a cultures survival. The more technologically and culturally advanced a society is, the less benefit slow moving religions will offer it. I doubt there has ever been a time where a larger percentage of the human population was atheist and non-religious. I believe the above to be the primary cause behind this effect.

SiliconWolf

I don't have the full evidence at hand, but I remember hearing something about the survival value of certain religious laws. Take the kosher laws of Judaism, for example, which prohibit, among other things, eating pork. Pork can be dengerous if not cooked properly. This isn't much of a problem now, but a few thousand years ago, when the sanitation wasn't as good, eating pork probably wasn't a great idea. So maybe the Jews were healthier than their peers at the time.

On the other hand, the Catholic church for centuries (during the dark ages) forbade anyone from perfoming autopsies. That restriction of medicine would seem to have a negative effect on the health of the people. Maybe religion had enough of a critical mass at the time that they didn't need to keep people alive for very long.

Gawdawful

Survival value? I think some very clever apes figured out how to make a living without actually working for it. Being very clever, they were able to convince the other slightly less clever and slightly less lazy apes that there would be divine retribution in an ill-defined afterlife if they didn't believe or fantastic rewards if they did believe in the all knowing all powerful divine entity of their creation; an entity that also required them to give the clever apes 10% of everything they have. Good plan. Still working to this day.

Credit must go to The Boomer Bible, the foundations of my belief system. Praise be to Harry.

Warren in Oklahoma

Pyrrho

Welcome Helmetmaker! Your first post here is first rate. I hope you will post more in the future.