Mick Hartley

Here's Nicholas Wade in the NYT, on "the evolution of the god gene":

In the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.

During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

Is this really a "remarkable insight"? I was waiting for some clever elaboration on the reasons why, for instance, agricultural societies might have worshipped ancestors, or why the great monotheisms arose at a certain level of civilisation and swept away their polytheistic rivals, though admittedly you're not going to find out too much on that score in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico – except, of course, for a remarkable correlation between the arrival of horses and metal weapons – and lots of new diseases - with the advent of Christianity.

But really, don't we all know that religion has evolved over the course of human history? - apart, that is, from those believers for whom it's all dark and hopeless and cursed until – poof! – salvation arrived 2,000 or possibly 1,400 years ago. Of course it's evolved.

To be fair, the claim here goes farther than that. He's arguing that religion has been selected for, and confers an evolutionary advantage. Such arguments are now more palatable since the notion of group selection became more widely accepted. And it does all seem very plausible. (Wish they wouldn't use that term "the god gene", mind.)

But this is what I disagree with:

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

Well no – atheists don't portray religion as useless: they portray it as false. I doubt very much that any of the current crop of so-called new atheists would disagree with the idea that religious belief has, in the past, conferred advantages on believers both as groups and as individuals. On the most basic level it must make you feel pretty good about life and the universe and everything if you believe that you're not in fact going to die, but will live on for ever and ever in paradise. The atheist argument is, simply, that this is a false belief. As an addendum to the argument you might want to suggest that nowadays not only is is false, but it's also socially divisive and inimical to the development of a healthy secular society. But that's, as it were, the icing on the cake. That's, perhaps, what makes you a "new atheist". The basic atheist position is that religious beliefs do not correspond with reality. There ain't no god, there ain't no heaven, and when you die you die.

So, the thought that religion evolved because it conferred benefits to early human societies is not at all a problem for atheists. On the contrary, it would be far more of a problem if that wasn't the case. Where does religion come from, then, if it's not an advantageous adaptation? The unwelcome conclusion – the only other possibility, really - would be that it arose because there was evidence for it; because it was a true description of the way the world is. Which is of course the position of the believer.

Now, as we discover more about early religious practice, and about the evolutionary and psychological underpinnings of religion, we have an alternative explanation: we aren't religious because god, or gods, exist, but because to believe conferred an evolutionary advantage. We can now, in a sense, explain religion away.