In his book The Righteous Mind,  moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt described religion as a team sport. Haidt compared it to the devoted fans at  universities’s football games. E.O Wilson used a similar analogy to describe ants as what he called eusocial creatures.

Haidt also says such religion is not irrational as many atheists, like the first two I mentioned, assert. Haidt explains that this must have had an effect on our evolution as a species. He calls this evolution by group selection.  I want to point out that evolution by group selection I believe is still controversial. It does not accord with classic Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Religion in a various formats has been around for thousands of years. Such activities over thousands of years must have had some genetic effect, he argues. Is religion hard-wired into us? Is religion baked into our DNA?

This is how Haidt explained it:

“If human groups have been doing this sort of thing since before the exodus from Africa, and if doing it in some ways rather than others improved the survival of the group, then it’s hard to believe that there was no gene-culture coevolution, no reciprocal fitting of mental modules to social practices, during the last 50,000 years. It’s particularly hard to believe that the genes for all those by-product modules sat still even as the genes for everything else about us began changing more rapidly, reaching a crescendo of genetic change during the Holocene era, which is precisely the time that gods were getting bigger and more moralistic. If religious behavior had consequences, for individuals and for groups, in a way that was stable over millennia, then there was almost certainly some degree of gene-culture coevolution for righteous minds that believe in gods and then used those gods to create moral communities.”

Nicholas Wade says it is obvious from looking at these ancient religious practices that they helped groups of people to compete with other groups. He explains the logic of group selection for religious practices this way:

“People belonging to such a [religiously cohesive] society are more likely to survive and reproduce than those in less cohesive groups, who may be vanquished by their enemies, or dissolve in discord. In the population as a whole, genes that promote religious behavior are likely to become more common in each generation as the less cohesive societies perish and the ore united ones thrive.”

Religion survives because it confers an evolutionary advantage on the groups that employ it. Nature selects those groups that are religious!

Isn’t this exactly what sport’s coaches have been preaching for years? Effective teams are more effective than good individuals. Or as Haidt says, “religion is a team sport.”

Haidt says, “Gods and religions in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust. Like maypoles and beehives, they are created by members of the group, and they then organize the activity of the group.”

When groups are able to develop cohesion and trust they can accomplish much more than they could without it. Like the mountainside farmers in Bali I mentioned in an earlier post.

Haidt says that 10,000 years is enough time for such genetic changes to take place, “And 50,000 years is more than plenty of time for genes, brains, groups, and religions to have coevolved into a very tight embrace.”

Haidt says this account of religions (note it is not an account of any one religion in particular, but it could include your favourite religion) has important consequences. Haidt puts it this way:

“In Wilson’s account, human minds and human religions have been coevolving (just like bees and their physical hives) for tens of thousands of years. And if this is true, then we cannot expect people to abandon religion so easily. Of course people can and do forsake organized religions, which are extremely recent cultural innovations. But even those cannot shake the basic religious psychology of…doing linked to believing linked to belonging. Asking people to give up the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon, can be done, but it would take a great deal of careful engineering, and even after ten generations, the descendants of those colonists might find themselves with inchoate longings for gravity and greenery.”

 

Now some of my faithful readers may not like this concept of an evolving religion. On the other hand, one of them has already mentioned that religions evolve, not just people. You may insist on a religion that has been absolutely true without changes for centuries. Just like some people resist the idea that people, or other creatures, evolve at all. Others may find this evolutionary explanation more congenial. What about you?

Nowadays we often think of religion as dividing people. This is the dark side of religion. I will have more to say about this later. It is real and important. But for now I want to concentrate on the light side of religion. This is the side that atheists often ignore. And Haidt, I believe, is an atheist. I am not actually sure of that because nowhere in the book The Righteous Mind that I have been commenting on did he clearly say that.

In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson actually lists a number of ways in which religions have helped groups cohere, divide labor, work together, and prosper. There are many ways, but Jonathan Haidt emphasizes one amazing story. It is the story of rice farmers in Bali.

Rice farming is different from most forms of farming. It requires a lot of cooperation. They must work to create large rice paddies that can be drained at precise time during a planting cycle. As Haidt says, “It takes a cast of hundreds.”

Wilson described how rice farmers capture rainwater that would naturally flow down a steep mountainside. In Bali rice farmers have cooperated to create hundreds of terraced pools in steep mountainsides. According to Wilson, some of those mountains have hundreds of terraced pools. Each must release water into the next one at exactly the right time. How does such a system work?  Haidt says, “At the top of the whole system, near the crest of the volcano, they built an immense temple for the worship of the Goddess of the Waters. And that was the key to it all!”

The lowest level of social organization was what is called a subak, which is actually a group of several extended families that make decisions democratically. Imagine that a business run democratically! We in the west could learn a lot from the Balinese people. Each one of those subaks had its own temple with its own gods. How is that possible? Don’t competing religions have to fight? The answer of course, is why do they have to compete or fight? Actually that is a question not an answer but so what? Each subak then, after democratic decision making, had to do the hard work and they did it “more or less collectively.” Again, that’s important.

Traditionally groups where people have to share a limited resource don’t work well. The problem even has a name; it is so frequent. It is called the problem of the commons. Some people inevitably try to cheat. Let someone else pay for the commons while I take a short cut. Such problems are very difficult to resolve. In many places they lead to fights. Here the subaks each had their own god in their own temple at every fork in the irrigation system. According to Haidt this is how they solved the problem in Bali:

“The ingenious religious solution to this problem of social engineering was to place a small temple at every fork in the irrigation system. The god in each such temple united all the subaks that were downstream from it into a community that worshipped that god, thereby helping the subaks to resolve their disputes amicably. This arrangement minimized the cheating and deception that would otherwise flourish in a zero-sum division of water. The system made it possible for thousands of farmers, spread over hundreds of square kilometers, to cooperate without the need of central government inspectors, and courts.”

Of course, that last bit was going too far. Getting rid of courts meant getting rid of lawyers. Imagine replacing lawyers and courts with gods. This is insane. But incredibly it worked!

Haidt asked some pertinent questions about this:

“What are we to make of the hundreds of gods and temples woven into this system? Are they just by-products of mental systems that were designed for other purposes? Are they examples of what Dawkins called the “time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking, rituals, the anti-factual counterproductive fantasies of religion”?

Haidt enlists a powerful metaphor—the maypole. He asks us to imagine a woman with flowers in her hair dancing in a clockwise circle while she holds one end of a ribbon in her hand with one and the other end of the ribbon attached to a pole—a maypole. This is how Haidt describes it:

“She circles the pole repeatedly, but not in a neat circle. Rather, she bobs and weaves a few steps closer to or further from the pole as she circles. Viewed in isolation, her behavior seems pointless, reminiscent of mad Ophelia on her way to suicide. But now add in five other young women doing exactly what she is doing, and add in six young men doing the same thing in counter clockwise direction, and you’ve got a maypole dance. As the men and women pass each other and swerve in and out, their ribbons weave a kind of tubular cloth around the pole. The dance symbolically enacts the central miracle of social life: e pluribus unum.”

From many, one. The motto of the United States. What many believe is the magic of it’s success. It’s almost like magic. No not magic religion—the spiritual. According to Haidt,

“Whatever its origins, it’s a great metaphor for the role that gods play in Wilson’s account of religion. Gods (like maypoles) are tools that let people bind themselves together as a community by circling around them. Once bound together by circling, these communities can function more effectively.”

This is what religion is all about. As David Sloan Wilson puts it: “Religions can exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.”

This is what religion once did, should do, but doesn’t often do anymore. Now—too often—religion divides rather than connects. That’s why some say God is dead. He doesn’t have to be. You can kill him or bring him back to life.

According to Haidt, relying on Wilson,

“this kind of circling and binding have been doing this for more than 10,000 years. You don’t need moralistic high gods thundering against adultery to bring people together, even the morally capricious gods of hunter-gatherers can be used to create trust and cohesion.”

And with trust and cohesion humans can do incredible things. Things they can never do as individuals. Incredibly good and powerful things; and, of course incredibly bad things.

I am still trying to explain how 3 atheists, particularly Jonathan Haidt, led me to religion. In his book The Righteous Mind, Haidt asserts this: “There is now a great deal of evidence that religion does in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival.” I won’t get into free rider problems here. You will have to read the book to get this. The key is that Haidt claims religion gives groups an evolutionary advantage.

Remember Haidt is a scientist. He bases his theory on scientific data, not faith. First, he looked at studies of the history of 200 communes in the United States by anthropologist Richard Sosi. As we all know there are many kinds of communes but what they all have in common is that they are experiments in living cooperatively. In order to survive they have to be able to bind the members of the commune together. This is a key concept. I also want to remind you, as Haidt did not, that the word “religion” comes from the Indio-Asian word religio, which means connection or linkage. Binding in other words. That’s what religions do. That is the common thread. Religion connects people together and even, I would argue, connects us to the world. I have blogged about this earlier.

Communes were often founded by people who wanted to reject the common moral matrix (this is a Haidt expression) in favor of different principles. Many of them were religions but not all. Some were down right evil. Like the Charles Manson commune. Sosi wanted to know why some communes lasted longer than others. He found some very interesting evidence. Only 6% of secular communes were still in existence 20 years after they were founded while 39% of the religious communes made it that long. That figure jumped out at me. Why would that be? Was God on their side? Neither Sosi nor Haidt claimed that.

Sosi looked at all kinds of factors to try to find the common thread. He found that the common factor to the successful ones was that they demanded costly sacrifices from their members. That seems counter-intuitive doesn’t it? People had to give things up to stay in the commune. Things like giving up alcohol, or tobacco, or food for a time, or traditional clothing. The members had to make a sacrifice to stay. This caught my eye even though Haidt did not mention it either. That is this: I have always been struck by the fact that most religions emphasize sacrifice. Some of them to me seem crude. Like sacrificing animals in the Old Testament. Or even people in some other bloody religions like those of Central America. Christianity of course offered the ultimate sacrifice of God’s son. I have always wondered why sacrifices are important or even good. I am still not sure of the answer. I draw to your attention that it is surely no accident that the words “sacrifice” and “sacred” have a common root.

Commenting on the research of Sosi, Haidt said, “For religious communes the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted.” That to me seemed crazy, but the world of religion is crazy. Sosi had the scientific data to back it up!

But that was not all. Sosi found that secular communes that also demanded a sacrifice were not helped by it. Haidt described the situation this way: “Sosi argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized.” There is that word again.

According to anthropologist Roy Rappaport, “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of necessity.” After all who would agree that one can’t eat the food of animals with cloven feet unless there was some religious reason for it. It otherwise makes no sense. If people make a rational evaluation of customs often they don’t add up and are dismissed. With a religious support such irrational customs can be accepted and many members of the commune refuse to follow and eventually the commune breaks up. Ritual practices avoid that problem Even though rational atheists like the 4 Horsemen for example, would reject the practices because reason does not support them. Such practices can establish cohesion in the group to such an extent that it can survive. In fact, according to Haidt, such practices solve one of the hardest evolutionary problems, namely, how can you get cooperation among a group where they are not kin. If they are kin then even if you don’t get to pass your genes along, your genes are passed along by the kin!

This is how, as Haidt put it: “irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group; function…Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds to the arbitrariness of the practice.”

Getting back to natural selection. Haidt argues, based on Sosi, that

“Gods really do help groups cohere, succeed, and outcompete other groups. This is a form of group selection…Religions that do a better job of binding people together and suppressing selfishness spread at the expense of other religions, but not necessarily by killing off the losers. Religions can spread faster than genes, as in the case of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, or Mormonism in the nineteenth century. A successful religion can be adopted by neighboring people or by vanquished populations.”

Haidt touts David Sloan Wilson who was able to “merge the ideas of the two most important thinkers in he history of the social sciences: Charles Darwin and Emile Durkheim. Wilson showed how they complete each other.” Darwin’s idea was group selection. In other words, how groups could be selected to survive by possessing a trait that made it easier for them to survive and pass on their traits to their offspring. That is what an evolutionary advantage is. Wilson then used Durkheim’s definition of religion as a “unified system of beliefs and practices” that unites members into “one single moral community.” Religions create cohesive groups that can function like an organism. And that helps them to survive. That is the evolutionary advantage religion gives to groups.

I have had an amazing experience. Perhaps it was a religious experience. I am having a hard time believing that even though it happened to me. It really seems like 3 atheists have led me to have a religious experience. No that can’t be. Or can it? I’ll show how that happened.

In 2007, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett had a conversation that sparked a religious revolution. Actually it was an anti-religious revolution. All 4 of them were brilliant religious thinkers. They were the 4 most famous atheists in the world and a video of their discussion went viral. The 4 thinkers were later called “the 4 horseman” in reference to the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse in that weird and wacky book of the Bible, Revelations. If you have ever read it you will likely be convinced it was written by someone under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. How could any of these figures lead me to religion? That is a good question.

The first of the atheists was  Daniel Dennett   and his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. And that really is the point. What kind of natural phenomenon is religion? That is step 1 in this process I am describing.

Dennett, like me considers himself to be an evolutionist. He accepts the theory of evolution, as do the vast majority of scientists. It is by now the foundation of science—the most famous and most accepted scientific doctrine perhaps in the history of science. It started out controversially when Darwin wrote his first book on the subject in 1859, Origin of Species.

Darwin is usually credited with originating the theory of evolution. That is not really true. What he did was launch the theory of evolution by natural selection. Other scientists and thinkers had thought of evolution before Darwin but his wholly original concept was that natural selection was the driving force of evolution.

Well what does all of this have to do with religion? I have earlier  blogged that in my view Charles Darwin is the most important religious thinker in the past 500 years. (https://themeanderer.ca/darwin-the-greatest-religious-thinker)  But I don’t want to repeat that now. I am here looking at Darwin and evolution and religion with a different lens.

Dennett in his book made a remarkable statement. He said, to an evolutionist like him, religious behaviors “stand out like peacocks in a sunlit glade.” He did not mean that in a complementary sense. It was his view that evolution ruthlessly eliminates costly and wasteful behaviors over long periods of time. He viewed religion as a wasteful phenomenon. Why then was it not eliminated?

Evolutionists always think in terms of long periods of time. Over many generations incredible changes can be seen in many small steps. Small changes over long periods of time bring about astonishing changes. That is evolution. So religion sticks out.

This brings me to the second atheist Richard Dawkins who is probably the most famous of the 4 horsemen. He said, “no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking, rituals, the anti-factual counterproductive fantasies of religion.” Again, as you would expect from an atheist, not the most attractive view of religion.

But notice the puzzle here. How could humans have been evolved by natural selection to adopt  religion? Natural selection picks traits that improve the individual’s chances of reproducing. How could religion, as described by these two atheists, have ever been selected? It seems impossible.

You really have 2 choices. One you could admit that religion (or really religiosity) must have been beneficial to humans. Naturally, atheists are usually reluctant to admit that. The second alternative though is much more complicated. There must be some reason that humans somehow came to adopt religions that are self-destructive (according to the atheists). Natural selection wouldn’t possibly do that, would it? Dennett and Dawkins both had complicated explanations for why this happened. Those theories are so complicated it is hard to be convinced by them.

Here comes the third atheist. An unlikely atheist and much less well known and much less of a fundamentalist atheist or militant atheist—Jonathan Haidt. He wrote an amazing book that deals with this fundamental thorny problem (among other thorny problems). This book is called The Righteous Mind and I highly recommend it.  And he comes up with some amazing solutions to this problem, all based on science and in particular his science which is Moral Psychology. He is the one that tried these two contradictory views together and led me to religion. His explanation was much simpler than the 2 atheists and unless you were an atheist trying to prove you are right, this is the theory that you have come up with. In other words, religion is not bad for people; it is actually good for people? It gives people an evolutionary advantage! That is why it was selected.

How can atheists like Haidt get to that position? I will consider that in my next blog post.