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The Darwinian explanation of mankind’s universal belief in the transcendent
In yesterday’s New York Post Jonah Goldberg discusses the New Age-style spirituality in James Cameron’s movie Avatar. As a side note, Goldberg tells about an interesting development in evolutionary science (or, depending on your point of view, an interesting development in rank Darwinian speculation):
Nicholas Wade’s new book, “The Faith Instinct,” lucidly compiles the scientific evidence that humans are hard-wired to believe in the transcendent. That transcendence can be divine or simply Kantian, a notion of something unknowable from mere experience. Either way, in the words of philosopher Will Herberg, “Man is homo religiosus, by ‘nature’ religious: as much as he needs food to eat or air to breathe, he needs a faith for living.”
Wade argues that the Darwinian evolution of man depended not only on individual natural selection but also on the natural selection of groups. And groups that subscribe to a religious worldview are more apt to survive—and hence pass on their genes. Religious rules impose moral norms that facilitate collective survival in the name of a “cause larger than yourself,” as we say today. No wonder everything from altruism to martyrdom are part of nearly every faith.
Does this Darwinian theory of religiousity make sense? As a way of approaching the question, let’s start with the fact that modern, material-reductionist scientists subscribe to the rule of parsimony, which says that the best explanation for a phenomenon is the simplest. Now I don’t like the rule of parsimony. I think the best explanation for a phenomenon is the one that best explains it, regardless of how simple or complex the explanation may be. If it’s a complex phenomenon, it may need a complex explanation. However, subscribers to modern positivistic science, including all Darwinists, rely religiously on the rule of parsimony, and it’s fair to hold them to it.
I therefore ask the Darwinians, which of the two following statements is the more parsimonious explanation for the universal human belief in a god or transcendent truth?
Is it that in a universe that lacks a God, mind, intelligence, and purpose, a universe consisting of nothing but particles and energy, evolution created, as its highest production, by means of a process of random genetic accidents that were selected because they survived better than other random genetic accidents, a creature who requires for its existence a belief in an imaginary transcendent deity?
Or, is the more parsimonious explanation for the universal human belief in a god or transcendent truth—that God exists?
Here is the column:
An unlikely ‘Avatar’ of spirituality
By JONAH GOLDBERG
December 30, 2009
James Cameron’s epic “Avatar” tells the tale of a disabled Marine, Jake Sully, who occupies the body of a 10-foot-tall alien so he can live among the mystical forest denizens of the moon world Pandora. Sully is sent in mufti to further the schemes of the evil corporate nature-rapists desperate to obtain the precious mineral “unobtainium.”
Jake inevitably goes native, embraces the eco-faith of Pandora’s Na’Vi inhabitants and their tree goddess, the “all mother,” and rallies the Pandoran aborigines against the evil forces of a thinly veiled 22nd-century combine of Blackwater and Halliburton.
The film has been subjected to an assault from the right, notably by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, as an “apologia for pantheism.” His criticisms hit the mark, but the most relevant point was raised in The Weekly Standard by John Podhoretz. Cameron wrote “Avatar,” says Podhoretz, “not to be controversial, but quite the opposite: He was making something he thought would be most pleasing to the greatest number of people.”
What would have been controversial is if—somehow—Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.
Of course, that sounds outlandish and absurd, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We live in an age in which it’s the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion. If the Na’Vi were Roman Catholics, there would be boycotts and protests. Make the oversized Smurfs Rousseauian noble savages and everyone nods along, save for a few cranky right-wingers.
But what I find interesting about the film is how what is “pleasing to the most people” is so unapologetically religious.
Nicholas Wade’s new book, “The Faith Instinct,” lucidly compiles the scientific evidence that humans are hard-wired to believe in the transcendent. That transcendence can be divine or simply Kantian, a notion of something unknowable from mere experience. Either way, in the words of philosopher Will Herberg, “Man is homo religiosus, by ‘nature’ religious: as much as he needs food to eat or air to breathe, he needs a faith for living.”
Wade argues that the Darwinian evolution of man depended not only on individual natural selection but also on the natural selection of groups. And groups that subscribe to a religious worldview are more apt to survive—and hence pass on their genes. Religious rules impose moral norms that facilitate collective survival in the name of a “cause larger than yourself,” as we say today. No wonder everything from altruism to martyrdom are part of nearly every faith.
The faith instinct may be baked into our genes, but it is also profoundly malleable. Robespierre, the French revolutionary who wanted to replace Christianity with a new “age of reason,” emphatically sought to exploit what he called the “religious instinct which imprints upon our souls the idea of a sanction given to moral precepts by a power that is higher than man.”
Many environmentalists are open about their desire to turn their cause into a religious imperative akin to the plight of the Na’Vi, hence Al Gore’s uncontroversial insistence that global warming is a “spiritual challenge to all of humanity.” The symbolism and rhetoric behind Barack Obama’s campaign was overtly religious at times, as when he proclaimed that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”—a line that could have come straight out of the mouths of Cameron’s Na’Vi.
What’s fascinating, and infuriating, is how the culture-war debate is routinely described by antagonists on both sides as a conflict between the religious and the unreligious. The faith instinct manifests itself across the ideological spectrum, even if it masquerades as something else.
On the right, many conservatives have been trying to fashion what might be called theological diversity amid moral unity. Culturally conservative Catholics, Protestants and—increasingly—Jews find common cause.
The left is undergoing a similar process, but the terms of the debate are far more inchoate and fluid. What isn’t happening is a similar effort between left and right, which is why the culture war, like the faith instinct, isn’t going away any time soon.
[end of Goldberg column]
- end of initial entry -
George R. writes:
I guess according to Wade the world was once populated by a race of Darwinists. Then a mutant race of creationists arose and wiped them out.
No wonder they’re afraid of the ID movement.
LA replies:
That’s brilliant.
January 1
LA writes:
When I said that Nicholas Wade’s argument that religion is the product of genetic mutations naturally selected by the survival of the fittest sounded like rank Darwinian speculation, all I knew about the book was Goldberg’s brief description. But Carolyn See in her review of the book in the Washington Post says the same thing (see the passage I’ve bolded):
“The Faith Instinct” is not what its title claims it to be, and the book doesn’t do what the jacket copy says it will do: “Nicholas Wade traces how religion grew to be so essential to early societies in their struggle for existence that an instinct for faith became hardwired into human nature.” If Wade had actually done that here, people of faith might be justifiably annoyed, but he didn’t, so they don’t have to be.
Instead, the book is devoted to quotations from anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians, psychologists, commentators and pundits. Quotations from geneticists are as scarce here as the proverbial hens’ teeth. Safely tucked away in a footnote comes this throw-away caveat: “Because most genetically based human behaviors are flexible, not deterministic, it is probably unrealistic to require that a behavior be exhibited by every known society in order to be accepted as having a genetic basis.”
Elsewhere, Wade suggests that evolutionary or genetic evidence of the religious instinct is hard to pin down precisely because it is ubiquitous—does the fish identify the water in which it swims? In other words, all this promised “new evidence” about religion being part and parcel of the evolutionary process and genetically hard-wired into our brains is something the author certainly wishes were true, and indeed may be true, but he cites no convincing data or proof; he just keeps repeating his opinions, perhaps in the hope that they may become true somewhere down the line. (I’m not against his premise; I’d just like to see more scientific proof!) [Emphasis added.]
What “The Faith Instinct” actually seems to be is a set of loosely constructed essays that maintain that religion is, indeed, ubiquitous or universal and, from the human point of view, timeless: “For the last 50,000 years, and probably for much longer, people have practiced religion. With dance and chants and sacred words, they have ritually marked the cycles of seasons and the passages of life, from birth to adolescence, to marriage and to death.”
This certainly seems to be true enough, but it isn’t exactly world-shaking news. Anthropologists have been pondering this since the first great ethnographers went intrepidly out to find what they called “savage” tribes and tried to figure out what those people were actually doing and believing.
[end of excerpt]
” … he just keeps repeating his opinions, perhaps in the hope that they may become true somewhere down the line.”
The same applies to the entire Darwinian claim that new life forms are the product of random genetic mutations naturally selected.
Ferg writes:
George R. writes:
I guess according to Wade the world was once populated by a race of Darwinists. Then a mutant race of creationists arose and wiped them out.
No wonder they’re afraid of the ID movement.
LA replies:
That’s brilliant.
That IS brilliant! While watching Ruth, of “The Ruth Institute” tonight she said something that jogged my memories of my college logic class. She said that modern secularists do not believe in the Fallen Nature of man, but rather that all people are “naturally good, it is just society that makes them bad.” So, what they are saying is that billions of naturally good people somehow become bad once they are in societal groups. Huh! So we are all good individually, but collectively we are bad? How does that work? Will that statement stand up to a logic tree analysis? I wish I remembered how to do one and I would check it. But that isn’t really necessary, the statement is false on the face of it. Put millions of blue marbles in a box and we must expect them to become red. Put millions of “good” people together and we must expect them to become “bad.” Put another way, too much “good” is the same as “bad.” Ok? I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore Toto.
LA replies:
It’s funny the way you put it, but I don’t think that’s what they’re saying. The idea isn’t so much about numbers as about institutions. The idea is that when humans lived in small hunter gatherer groups with very little institutional structure, they were egalitarian. But when complex, agricultural societies were formed, with specialization of jobs, most people being farmers, others being organizers, kings, and priests, that introduced social inequality.
Also, Wade as I understand from reviews is not attacking religion and is not saying it’s a later development. He says humans have been religious as far back as we can look. He’s disagreeing with the Dawkins/Dennett/Hitchens view that religion is bad. He has a middle position. On one hand, he says that religion is a product of Darwinian natural selection, i.e., that it is not true, which will not please believers. On the other hand, he says that religion is beneficial, which will not please the god haters.
Michael P. wrote:
Jonah Goldberg wrote:
Nicholas Wade’s new book, “The Faith Instinct,” lucidly compiles the scientific evidence that humans are hard-wired to believe in the transcendent. That transcendence can be divine or simply Kantian …
If this “belief” is “hard wired,” why would Kant have to spend years writing one of the most difficult and, to the average mind, unintelligible books in order to prove that although we can have no innate idea of God, we can, through reasoned inference, come to believe in God? Wouldn’t we just know it? Also, if the idea is innate, something arising from our DNA, where do all the atheists come from? Are they mutants? Something doesn’t sound right, to me.
LA replied:
Religiosity was “selected” for many ages, but when man began to develop science and technology, then the selective pressures for religiosity grew weaker. I imagine their argument would be something like that.
Michael P. replies:
Yes, most likely. Good to know atheism is such an “advanced” (or “mindlessly modern” adaptive) trait. With all the terrible problems in the world, at least we know that humans have something to look forward to in their collective genetic future. But where do Muslims fit into this picture? Last time I looked they were the ones breeding like rabbits across the globe.:-)
LA replies:
Yes, the dramatic differential in reproduction rates between advanced, non-believing people and backward, believing people does create something of a problem for the idea that atheism represents an evolutionary advance, doesn’t it? But the Darwinists’ answer might be: non-belief has only recently become a negative factor for reproduction. Five hundred years ago, at the beginning of the modern period, when science and technology first began to make large advances, the negative selective factors for non-belief declined, allowing non-believers to begin to spread through the population. At that time traditional sexual morality and family formation customs still prevailed for everyone, so the non-believers also had large families. But in more recent times, increasing individual freedom in advanced societies has led non-believers to have far fewer children, and as a result the believers now have a huge reproductive advantage over the non-believers.
In any case, why are the anti-religion Darwinists so triumphalist? Don’t they realize they are doomed?
Leonard D. writes:
Regarding your reply to Ferg, what makes it all clear is that to progressives, “good” and “egalitarian” are synonyms. Thus, using her marbles as an analogy, the correct analog for “good” is not “color,” it is “height.” Put a few marbles in a box, and none of them are higher than any other. But put a million in a box, and some are very high, others low. This is “bad”; why, some marbles must be oppressing the others!
Leonard D. continues:
Regarding your question:
Is it [the more parsimonious explanation] that in a universe that lacks a God, mind, intelligence, and purpose, a universe consisting of nothing but particles and energy, evolution created, as its highest production, by means of a process of random genetic accidents that were selected because they survived better than other random genetic accidents, a creature who requires for its existence a belief in an imaginary transcendent deity?
Or, is the more parsimonious explanation for the universal human belief in a god or transcendent truth—that God exists?
You are right to dislike parsimony. This is a level of discussion of the question where parsimony is not an appropriate decision technique. Parsimony is not only about simplicity; it is about choosing the simplest explanation that nonetheless fits all the evidence. That is, it is a sort of tie-breaker when you’ve got nothing better. In this case, there is voluminous evidence that must be examined and weighed. [LA replies: I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that I have many times seen people in discussions say, “The most parsimonious explanation is … “, and when they said this, it wasn’t a matter of a tie breaker. They were simply put forward the most parsimonious explanation and said it was preferable on that basis.]
That said, “God exists” is not in itself a sufficient explanation why people believe in God. You must make further assumptions about the nature of God to explain why He made us such that we can and do believe in the supernatural; thus, the “faith instinct” reappears. I.e., you must assume that He wants us to know Him for some reason (why?), and could not think of a better way to cause that than to program us to want to know Him. I think if you really wrote both explanations down completely, you’d see the obvious parsimony of “God exists” melts away.
I have not read Wade’s book, but I suppose you are right in calling speculation about a “faith instinct” just-so stories. Darwinian evolution, being a simple yet powerful theory about a largely unknown history, is extremely conducive of such speculation. In that sense it is not unlike some very simple/powerful theories of history; i.e., “class struggle is the cause of all significant human events.” If you believe that, then you’ll start thinking up all sorts of explanations for historical events which there is no proof of. Nonetheless, unlike the history of human events, there is at least the hypothetical potential for us scientifically to verify or disprove a “faith instinct,” because if it does exist, it must be encoded somehow in our genes, and they are subjects of normal science.
Of course, even if science were to find a “faith gene” (or gene-complex, or whatever), that still would prove exactly nothing about the existence or not of God. As I said above: the “faith instinct” is not absent in the God-did-it scenario. The only thing that finding a faith gene would prove is that reality is consistent with Darwinian evolution as a cause of faith.
LA replies:
You wrote:
That said, “God exists” is not in itself a sufficient explanation why people believe in God. You must make further assumptions about the nature of God to explain why He made us such that we can and do believe in the supernatural; thus, the “faith instinct” reappears. I.e., you must assume that He wants us to know Him for some reason (why?), and could not think of a better way to cause that than to program us to want to know Him. I think if you really wrote both explanations down completely, you’d see the obvious parsimony of “God exists” melts away.
Interesting argument. But I don’t agree.
Here’s the parsimonious argument in a parsimonious nutshell: in this universe, living beings arise whose qualities “fit” the qualities of the universe. Thus the universe has stars that emit light and this light reflects off of objects; and living beings arise that have the need and the capacity to see this light. In the same way, the transcendent God exists, and the only living being that has self-consciousness and reason, man, has the need and capacity to believe in this transcendent God.
That’s parsimonious: the nature of the creature “fits” the nature of the universe that gave rise to him.
And now here’s the Darwinian argument: that a strictly material universe, a universe without mind or deity, evolves as its highest creature a being who universally believes in and needs to believe in a non-existent, imaginary deity, a deity that Darwinism itself utterly denies, a deity whose very existence would falsify Darwinism. According to the Darwinian view, the living beings that are the most advanced product of this strictly material, Darwinian universe completely contradict the material, Darwinian universe that gave rise to them. That is not only not parsimonious, it’s risible.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 31, 2009 02:30 PM | Send
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