Re: Are Atheists as Happy as Theists? Your Secrets of Happiness?

The Sophist wrote: 
Steve Kelley wrote:

Something that is missing in this thread is the importance of biology and evolution in the forming of religious belief. I believe it was an important element of our early development to provide a basis for community. In order to survive we needed to band together in groups and having a common belief set helped us do that. As we have learned more about how the universe actually works the need for religion for survival has become less but we still have the wiring in our brains and a predisposition toward some sort of religious or spiritual belief. Without this biological component it would be very hard to explain why virtually every culture known to us has had some kind of religion with all of its symbols and rituals.


Surprisingly, the fact that you provide an adaptationist argument undermines your claim that religion must be biologically determined (this is something evolutionary psychologists also generally seem to miss, so don't feel too bad). Humans undergo a considerable amount of Lamarckian evolution (a number of the mechanisms by which acquired characteristics are passed on to future generations are collectively referred to as "education"). Thus, if some characteristic is genuinely beneficial (as you speculate a tendency towards religion is), and can be passed on by education, you would expect it to become widespread in just the same way as traits in the genes do, only much more quickly. Religion does seem to be capable of being passed on by education, so there is no apparent reason to jump at a genetic explanation.

Of course, if the tendency toward religion is not beneficial, then no evolutionary story, Darwinian or Lamarckian, can tell us why we have it. So, either way, the theory that we have religion for Darwinian reasons looks highly problematic.

I do not claim that religion is strictly evolutionary. However, I do claim that there is an evolutionary component. It is not an all or nothing proposition. Certainly, religion is learned and can be unlearned but just as evolution alone can not explain religious belief, all of the complexities of the apparent need to have a religion by most people can not be explained by teaching alone.

I guess I did not make it clear in my previous post that it is not religion itself that is biological. It is the predisposition toward religion. The predisposition is in how the brain is wired. Without religious doctorination that wiring would lead a person to seek answers to life's questions through other forms of superstition.

I think that the tendancy toward religion did help early forms of humans to band together. You know, "families that pray together stay together."

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