{"id":3175,"date":"2012-07-18T18:08:15","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T23:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=3175"},"modified":"2012-07-18T18:08:15","modified_gmt":"2012-07-18T23:08:15","slug":"is-atheism-an-evolutionary-adaptation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2012\/07\/18\/religion\/is-atheism-an-evolutionary-adaptation\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Atheism an Evolutionary Adaptation?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another good title for this post might be, \u201cOver the Top Evolutionary Psychology.\u201d\u00a0 There can, in fact, be too much of a good thing.\u00a0 Any lingering doubt I may have had on the matter was dispelled by some links to articles on the \u201cevolution\u201d of atheism<\/a> at the This View of Life<\/em><\/a> website. \u00a0It would seem that a new journal, Religion, Brain and Behavior<\/em><\/a>, has been spawned to \u201cdevelop, support, and catalyze research initiatives into the manifold functions of religion,\u201d apparently from an evolutionary point of view.\u00a0 The latest issue focused on \u201ca scientific study of atheism,\u201d a subject of passing interest to me, since I happen to be an atheist.\u00a0 Reading further in the opening editorial, I found that \u201cAtheism is becoming a topic of fascination for researchers in the scientific study of religion because the naturalness of religion makes atheism unexpected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now it seems to me that I am an atheist because I have devoted some thought to the matter and concluded based on the evidence I am aware of that there is no God.\u00a0 I think that explanation of atheism should be allowable if one also accepts the fact that the human brain did not evolve merely as a convenient lightweight stuffing material for the skull.\u00a0 The scientists at Religion, Brain and Behavior<\/em>, however, are having none of it.\u00a0 Apparently, rejecting the \u201cmoderate\u201d point of view that there is such a thing as human nature, and it is significant, they have gone the Blank Slaters one better.\u00a0 Dismissing the notion that the ability to reason logically and to distinguish truth from falsehood had anything to do with the evolution of the human brain, they seem to have concluded that everything, or at least everything touching on religion, is a manifestation of \u201chuman nature.\u201d\u00a0 In short, they conclude that both atheism and religious belief are actually evolved traits.<\/p>\n

If atheism really is a trait that enhanced fitness, it must have some survival-enhancing function.\u00a0 In a word, it must be \u201cfor\u201d something.\u00a0 Hence the title of one of the issues main articles, \u201cWhat are atheists for? Hypotheses on the functions of non-belief in the evolution of religion,\u201d by Dominic Johnson, embellished with a list of no less than 118 citations of other learned authors.\u00a0 According to Johnson,<\/p>\n

Although there was a significant rise in the prominence of atheism after the Reformation in Europe several authors argue that atheists and skeptics were present throughout human history and are common among traditional societies, suggesting that atheism stretches back some way into human evolution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We are faced, therefore, with the possibility that atheism and atheists have been present throughout human evolutionary history. This sits awkwardly with evolutionary theories that suggest religious beliefs and behaviors are universal, have powerful cognitive underpinnings, and are important to survival and reproduction. How can we square the circle?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Johnson has an elegant answer to this intriguing question:<\/p>\n

The key conclusion is that non-belief unambiguously represents our phylogenetic inheritance\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, our primate ancestors were once all too stupid to imagine such things as supernatural beings, so, like lions and tigers and bears, they were all atheists.\u00a0 Now it seems to me that, besides being unflattering to atheists, this conclusion ignores a rather significant fact.\u00a0 There is a qualitative difference between lack of belief because of inability of conceive of gods, and lack of belief because of the reasoned conclusion that gods don\u2019t exist.\u00a0 That distinction apparently hasn\u2019t occurred to Johnson, who charges ahead, citing a laundry list of reasons that atheism may have evolved, such as,<\/p>\n

Evolutionary game theory shows that traits often do best when they coexist with other different traits. In many natural systems, this forms an evolutionarily stable equilibrium, with declining fitness returns preventing departures from the right mix of types in the population \u2013 so-called \u201cfrequency dependent\u201d selection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The presence of atheists may indirectly improve the fitness of believers by catalyzing their beneficial interactions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and,<\/p>\n

The presence of atheists may force the community to bolster religious doctrine in the face of skepticism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems to me that, if any of these hypotheses are true, atheism must have \u201cevolved\u201d in an awful hurry.\u00a0 If we exclude the \u201clions and tigers and bears\u201d variant of atheism for the reasons cited above, the ability to disbelieve in gods must necessarily have followed the ability to conceive of and believe in them in the first place.\u00a0 Now, unless there were Homo erectus philosophers who discussed these weighty matters around their campfires, one must conclude that atheism \u201cevolved\u201d in a matter of no more than a couple of hundred thousand years, give or take.\u00a0 For that matter, religious belief itself would have had no greater span of time in which to \u201cevolve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Allow me to suggest an alternative to all these interesting adaptive hypotheses.\u00a0 Religious belief did not \u201cevolve.\u201d\u00a0 The cognitive abilities of the human brain evolved, until at some point we became capable of wondering how all this stuff around us got here.\u00a0 When this happened, it must have seemed just as obvious as the fact that the earth didn\u2019t revolve around the sun that it was there because it was created, and by a being or beings much more sophisticated than humans.\u00a0 Sometime thereafter, deliberate rejection of such beliefs became possible.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t this, at least, more \u201cparsimonious\u201d than the notion that every human belief must be directly connected with some kind of a \u201chuman nature\u201d widget in the brain?<\/p>\n

Apparently Johnson doesn\u2019t agree.\u00a0 As he observes in the conclusion to his article,<\/p>\n

Personally, I am skeptical of the main adaptive hypotheses proposed. I favor the null hypothesis of natural variation, in which cognitive mechanisms underpinning religious beliefs vary in whether and how much they generate belief. At one end of this spectrum \u2013 one of the tail ends of the distribution \u2013 we will have people with very low levels of belief, even atheists, just as we always have extremes of other biological and psychological traits.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In response, I quote a response from one of the commenters at This View of Life<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I suggest that it is essential to distinguish between atheism and anti-theism in this regard. If the object of this evolutionary study is atheism, per se, then we are wasting our time. We may as well study whether or not non-belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth-Fairy is adaptive from an evolutionary point-of-view. \u00a0Having said that, if there is an evolutionary basis to non-belief in the super-empirical it lies in the phylogeny \/ adaptivity of human intelligence and reason.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rendered into the vernacular, this elegant bit of academic jargon becomes, \u201cAtheism may exist because human heads evolved to serve as something other than ornate hat racks.\u201d\u00a0 I concur.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have a particularly high regard for human intelligence, but neither do I have such a low opinion of our powers of reason that I consider them incapable of ever distinguishing truth from falsehood.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another good title for this post might be, \u201cOver the Top Evolutionary Psychology.\u201d\u00a0 There can, in fact, be too much of a good thing.\u00a0 Any lingering doubt I may have had on the matter was dispelled by some links to articles on the \u201cevolution\u201d of atheism at the This View of Life website. \u00a0It would … Continue reading “Is Atheism an Evolutionary Adaptation?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[85,48,105,28,7],"tags":[317],"class_list":["post-3175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-evolution","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-human-nature","category-religion","tag-atheism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-Pd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3175"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3178,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175\/revisions\/3178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}