brightis a neologism to describe a person who holds a naturalistic worldview]. All these young people said they never heard an adult say in such a matter of fact way that he was an atheist. It was sort of shocking and amazing to them. And after that, a bunch of people who were speaking there said,
Oh yeah, me too. I’m a bright too.When I wrote about this in a New York Times op-ed piece, the effect was just electrifying. I had hundreds and hundreds of letters and emails from people who were saying,
Don’t stop there, you’ve got to do something more.Well I didn’t want to write a book about atheism. But I did want to apply my work on evolutionary theory, especially evolution of culture and consciousness to religion. So I spent a couple of years boning up on the literature, learning more about it and writing that book.
Everywhere you look in human cultures there’s religion. That can’t be an accident. There are really just two possibilities: one is just genetic and the other is cultural. It could be that there are genes, that there have been adaptations of some sort which predispose us for religion, which says nothing here nor there about whether it’s good for us. There are genes that predispose us for myopia too. And the other interesting possibility is once language evolved and human culture began to go explosive maybe religions arose or some aspects of religion arose as what Boyd and Richardson call rogue cultural variance.
If we understand that culture evolved, the capacity for cultural transmission evolved and made possible the transmission of lots of acquired knowledge from parents to offspring. That’s a vertical transmission just like genes. You have a dual pathway with cultural transmission. But once you have that second information highway then it can be piggybacked by all sorts of things which may not themselves be good for people but that can simply exploit the machinery that has evolved for other purposes. Those are the rogue cultural variances or what Richard Dawkins calls memes.
Once you start seeing culture as composed of replicating units or at least in large measure replicating units that are being transmitted and replicated competitively, then three possibilities arise. The things that evolve and then spread, evolve and spread because they’re good for us or because they’re just neutral for us and they’re not worth the trouble to get rid of. Or it may even be that they’re bad for us. They’re like bad habits, but they’re very infectious bad habits. These are all possibilities. So that gives us a framework then for looking at in what category do religions fit. I don’t claim to have the answers, I just have the questions.
Everything we do and everything we think is ultimately due to causal factors in our brain. The denial of that is just frankly preposterous. We know enough now about the brain, that it is just true. There’s no immaterial mind doing anything. It’s just the brain. But that doesn’t settle anything about why these particular effects occur and why they accumulate and why they survive. Why do some belief sets thrive and others go extinct?
Again, all sorts of reasons. In the case of scientific belief sets—theories—since science has actually evolved sieves or thresholds which select for truth, you actually can put some serious credence in what survives that daunting selection process. Not perfect, far from perfect. But that is one set of institutions which itself has evolved to favor well-grounded true theories. Let’s take for instance finance, the banking system. The data gathering by banks and stockbrokers is significant, tremendous amount of data that are gathered. Why can we rely on it? Because we see it is in the interests of those bankers to get an accurate accounting of markets and prices. These have been cunningly designed to filter out the false and pass on the true. It’s not quite science but it’s systematic truth gathering.
If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection… Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.If we cannot trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth, even about something as significant as God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science?
First of all, the question of why we should have faith in any system of belief generation is a good question, I’ll grant that. But the religious response to that is patently question-begging. God, who is good, makes sure that the system is benign and that’s how we can trust it when it tells us that God is good in the system. It’s like saying that the Bible says so and the Bible is the word of God. The fact that the Bible says it’s true because it’s the word of God is obviously no evidence that it’s the word of God. There’s no non-circular argument from religion for reliability of belief. But there is for science.
Imagine creatures on another planet, if you like, so as different from us as you like, and they are evolving, and in their competitions they became not just like plants but they become mobile, like locomotors, and you can see immediately that they are going to be able to extract information from their environment in order to guide their locomotion. But that’s to say truth. The ones that extract false information are doomed, they are going to walk off a cliff. There is a built in presumption that any sense organs in any organism that evolves are going to be biased in favor of passing on the truth. But of course that only gets us the kind of truth-tracking that you get in a smart dog or a dolphin. But even there, think about how hard it is to trick a raccoon. If you’ve ever tried to fool a raccoon you know they’re pretty hard to fool. That is, they are pretty robust truth-finders. They will see through a lot of deceit. So we have that background. Let’s just call that animal wit or the wily intelligence of the fox.
What do we add to that? We add human culture and language. Manifestly we have these systems. Cultural evolution permits a refinement of that capacity, and in particular, the refinement of representations. We are the only organism on the planet that represents its reasons, and because we represent our reasons, we can represent the falling short. We can measure how far off we are from perfection and then we can devise ways of correcting it. And that’s how you can get an evolutionary account that shows why we should trust our beliefs if they are science-derived.