RE: Evolutionary explanation of religion
November 27, 2020 at 7:08 am
(This post was last modified: November 27, 2020 at 7:20 am by The Grand Nudger.)
I'd say that we're looking at an example of failing to highlight some salient detail or relationship. Sure, all along the way, and for any given human behavior - there's an underlying biology to support it. Again, though, it's not because we don't know anything and can't collect evidence about evolutionary change in human beings over the last 50k years that we can say that the belief in gods is not best explained by evolutionary biology.
If some evolutionary change were the salient detail then we would expect the god gene to still be with us, and we would also expect god beliefs and the god gene to have a discoverable hereditary pattern, and we would expect that the distribution of god artifacts would generally reflect that pattern.
This is not what we see. Not any of it. We do, in fact, see the evidence of multitudinous branches of individual creativity and inspiration filtered down through time and culture and consequence and competition - and not just here with gods, we did the same with many of our tools (and I would say, other tools).
Let's try a thought experiment. Random native animists come into contact with god believing colonials. 400 years later, the vast majority of people in the territory are god believers. Was god belief a heritable trait selected for? Is something like that the explanation for god belief in that environment today...or might it have been all the guns the believing colonials brought and employed?
If some evolutionary change were the salient detail then we would expect the god gene to still be with us, and we would also expect god beliefs and the god gene to have a discoverable hereditary pattern, and we would expect that the distribution of god artifacts would generally reflect that pattern.
This is not what we see. Not any of it. We do, in fact, see the evidence of multitudinous branches of individual creativity and inspiration filtered down through time and culture and consequence and competition - and not just here with gods, we did the same with many of our tools (and I would say, other tools).
Let's try a thought experiment. Random native animists come into contact with god believing colonials. 400 years later, the vast majority of people in the territory are god believers. Was god belief a heritable trait selected for? Is something like that the explanation for god belief in that environment today...or might it have been all the guns the believing colonials brought and employed?
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