Once upon a time, there was a village that lived on the side of a large mountain. Just above them was a cloud cover that never moved, obscuring what lay above. Below them were dotted many other villages all the way down to the bottom of the valley.
The villagers did not know where they came from. Well, that is not quite right, for there were two opposing schools of thought, both of whom said they knew. One group, the Ascenders, said they came from the villages below, or trekked past them from the valley, where there were many other groups, some quite similar in their languages, dress and cultures.
The other group, the Descenders, said that they came from an ideal village high atop the peak of a very high mountain above the clouds. They said that they were better than all the lower villages, despite their many hardships, because they were nearer to the ideal village than all the others. None of their village had ever been down below, and it was just a moral failure to think they had been.
The leader of the Ascenders once debated the leader of the Descenders. He laid out his argument: the similarities of language, styles of dress, ritual practices, and so on. All this evidence, he said, led to the conclusion they had risen in the world, not descended. There was no evidence they had descended from above.
The Descenders, on the other hand, had no evidence. Therefore they should believe their ancestors were lower-dwellers. The leader of the Descenders rose in indignation. Of course they came from Above - and there was irrefutable evidence. Voices from the cloud bank told them so. Nothing else made sense but to believe these voices.
"But nobody has ever heard these voices but the late Grand Master of the Descenders," replied the Ascender leader. "Why would he lie?" replied the Descender master. "Therefore it is true".
The debate became so acrimonious that the Descenders, who were in the majority and controlled the warriors, fell upon the Ascenders and killed or exiled all of them, until social harmony was restored. And on the belief that the Ideal Villagers would come to take them to a better place, they stopped trading for food from the lower villages, and eventually, they all starved.
The debate over evolution versus creation is very like this little parable. Those who defend the creation stories of their favoured religion have no time for conservation of the biological diversity around us. Jesus will come before we are in trouble, and anyway, trouble is a sign that the Second Coming, or the Mahdi, or the Mashiach, or whatever, is about to happen, so why worry?
Despite Ed Wilson's attempt to get Evangelicals onside about biodiversity conservation (which he unfortunately still seems to think is a matter of species taxa diversity), they would still, in the main (honourable exceptions aside) still rather focus on the dictates of the Bible than of evidence.
There are a rash of books lately on the evolution, by which is meant a natural history, of religion. I will be reviewing a couple of them later, but it seems to me that one of the basic problems here is that no religious person actually wants there to be a naturalistic story for religion. It is time that we developed this into a serious disciplinary study, involving ethology, psychology, phylogenetics, and cultural evolution.
There seems to be a few basic approaches to this. One is to say that religion is a byproduct of our cognitive capacities. That is, it is due to our knowing about inevitable death, transcendent experiences due to neurological processes, and a desire to conform to authority. Another is to say that it is itself a matter of cultural (that is, as in Dennett's book, memetic) evolution. A third is that it is itself a biologically adaptive phenomenon, which raises the fitness of groups that are inclined to religion.
I invite commenters to add or discuss these suggestions while I get up to speed on the following books:
- "In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition Series)" (Scott Atran)
- "Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion" (Barbara J. King)
- "The Sacred Depths of Nature" (Ursula Goodenough)
- "Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society" (David Sloan Wilson)
- "Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life" (Alister McGrath)
- "The Origin and Evolution of Religion" (Albert Churchward)
- "Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion" (Lee A. Kirkpatrick)
- "The Evolution of Morality and Religion" (Donald M. Broom)
- "The God Delusion" (Richard Dawkins)
- "God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist" (Victor J Stenger)
- "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" (Daniel C. Dennett)
- "Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought" (Pascal Boyer)
Let me know if there's anything else I should look at...
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Well, I've read the Dawkins, Dennett and Wilson books and will read Stenger and King soon. I'll stop there and write my review of those all together. I am looking forward to your more comprehensive review in the future.
I've read Dawkins, Stenger and I'm reading Dennett now. I've skimmed through Wilson. Atran I know from other work, so I'll read him next. At the end, I'll have to actually take notes, dammit...
Do I need to read Harris?
Turning theology into a real subject is a good idea but one likely to be met with much resistance.
Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer?
Oh, I don't propose to do that. I propose that we treat religion as a phenomenon of human societies, psychologies and biologies, and seek explanations for why they occur, and how they evolved, both socially and biologically.
Ah, yes! Boyer. I had read but forgot him.
I quit Harris and will not finish him or include him in the review - a waste of time.
Seems familiar...
[flute music]
Listen children to a story
That was written long ago
Bout a people on a mountain
And the valley folk below...
The ancient Greeks liked to suppose that the Twelve Olympians resided atop Mount Olympus in their crystal mansions.
Somebody was the first to scale the mountain and discover no mansions, and no gods. Others followed, always with the same negative findings.
Some of the religious modified their imaginings to explain the discrepancies, but others happily kept their imaginings intact, not caring about the evidence.
You've noticed religious people find reality not to their liking. They prefer made up stuff to found out stuff. I would call that a cultural phenomenon.
I finished the Dawkins the day before I had dinner with him, but I still haven't decided what I think about it. I hated his treatment of agnosticism, but I'm still trying to digest the rest.
You have to include Pascal Boyer.
The Goodenough book, while a nice personal testament of the "religious naturalist" worldview, doesn't really have much to say about the evolution or function of religion.
Dennett points to a wealth of other relevant literature. Rodney Stark's large body of work looks pretty relevant.
Have you seen 'The Martyrdom of Man' written by Winwood Reade in 1872? I read it decades ago but as I recall it was an attempt to do something similar to what you are considering. No doubt there is plenty of additional evidence but the ideas might be useful.
Reade says basically that gods are absent kings, a view with which I (and apparently Wilson) agree, but the rest of that chapter is pretty credulous. My own view is that religion in general is the outworking of our social dominance biology, which we share in large part with apes. The main difference between us and the apes is that we live in sedentary agrarian societies of large scale. If chimps lived in the same scale, and had symbolic language, it's my view that they would also have a social religion based on absent alpha males and females (like us, they have a dual hierarchy with females having dominance as well as males, unlike a herd animal).
Part of the difficulty here is that folk specify "religion" based on whatever is the local prototype. Dawkins, for instance, treats fundamentalist religion as the prototype, but it is very far from being the historical or anthropological model of religion. William James, in his magnificent Varieties of religious experience treats pietism and mysticism as the model form of religion, which is also not the case more broadly. I tend to take a more sociological approach, myself.
The parable confused me: I could see where it was going, but the directions seemed wrong. Wouldn't the supporters of the Naturalistic approach have had a theory based on The Descent of Man?
Bob
Descent is a term used to imply that we came from more noble ancestors than today. The evolutionary account indicates we came from what one might once have called "meaner" ancestors. This is indicated by Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man series.
Besides, phylogenetic trees always go from bottom to top...
Do I need to read Harris?
No (and if my wife and I ever get our nascent blog off the ground, I'll post my personal fisking of The End Of Faith).
Summary: he's long on polemics, short on actual argument (Dawkins makes many of the same points, but presents evidence rather than mere ranting), goes haring off after current political issues, and (as I'm sure you've heard by now) special-pleads for his own form of mysterianism. I don't recall him saying much if anything about the origins of religion.
(BTW: In case you were wondering who the new blabby commenter is: I'm Steve Watson's new 'nym for the aforementioned blog-we-never-get-around-to-choosing-a-theme-and-writing-the-first-bloody-posts).
Why, oh why didn't the villagers just admit, at least to themselves, that they just didn't know, where they came from? Why didn't so many of them think that way, that both the Descenders and the Ascenders became less fundamentalist? I hope that the reason why they did not was not that the Ascenders were correct, that Decendism was part and parcel of their ascent. For then it just seems natural that they should die out, to be replaced by other pointless patterns of chemicals.
no religious person actually wants there to be a naturalistic story for religion
Oh, please don't be like all the other guys and forget about Buddhism, one of the major religions of the world. There are plenty of Buddhist teachers here in America and I'm sure in the UK and Oz who would be quite happy to see and even contribute to a naturalistic story of religion.
Who can forget about Theravada or Zen Buddhism? But here's my point: if you could show that all apparent states of enlightenment were just a matter of reaching the relevant cycling in the brain, would a Buddhist of that kind still think Buddhism was the way to enlightenment, or that they had better start treating meditation as a way to attain alpha cycles?
For my money, aspects of the lesser Buddhist tradition are the most reasonable of all religions, but those aspects I would not call religious.
Re your defence of "no religious person actually wants there to be a naturalistic story for religion" (#0) via "if you could show that all apparent states of enlightenment were just a matter of reaching the relevant cycling in the brain" (#19), John; either (i) there is no problem for the Buddhist because there could be an infinite gap between the physical manifestations (the appearance) of a state of enlightenment and the direct (empirical but personal) experience of enlightenment, or else (ii) you meant the states themselves, not just their physical manifestations, but then surely there could never be such a demonstration as you hypothesise (in #19)?
no religious person actually wants there to be a naturalistic story for religion
Hmm. How about Justin Barrett, Calvinist cognitive scientist and author of 'Why Would Anyone Believe in God?' (which is not a book of apologetics, despite the title [1]). I hear it covers much the same territory as Atran, though I've yet to read it.
There's also a fairly enthusiastic (if a little dated, by now -- Boyer gets a mention, I'm not sure if Atran does) review of the field in Frasier Watt's 'Theology and Psychology', but the book in general focuses more on, well, psychology and Christianity than the evolutionary history of religion. There's an interesting, if overly brief, discussion of the neurological and cognitive mechanisms behind religious experiences as well, though. (He doesn't like Persinger, thinks d'Aquili and Newberg are on to something and suggests a model of his own that is beyond my competence to judge, though it sounds plausible.)
While a lot of religious people can be hostile to this sort of thing (eg. James Crossley's application of sociological data regarding the nature of religious conversions to the rise of Christianity got a pretty negative reaction from some Evangelical quarters [2] in the field of Biblical Studies), it might be premature to write us all off just yet...
[1] This has lead to some mildly confused reader reviews on Amazon.com.
[2] He's not sure why, judging by what he's posted on his blog; neither are some of his more receptive Evangelical colleagues, for that matter...
The recent comments about how Buddhism would be more excepting of a naturalistic story for religion, reminds me of an interview I saw with the Dali Lama where he was asked the question:
"What if science could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that re-incarnation did not exist?"
The Dali-Lama answered:
"Then Tibetan Buddhism would have to change."
He then added that, "That would be a very difficult thing to prove, though."