The Biological Value of Religion

[Mudhammam]

Pickup,
I agree with much of what you stated in the OP, but will offer that it is the explanatory power of religion that is biologically/psychologically valuable; not religion in and of itself, understanding that there are non-religious explanations that serve the purpose for most inquiries. For me, religion was a primitive means of providing explanation for events that were unpredictable on the scale of a single human life or whose secrets were undetectable with prevailing technology: why does the ground shake, why did the mountain explode, why did my village flood, what moves the sun across the sky, what causes the seasons to change, why did the sun darken, what causes illness, etc.? Supernatural explanations for these events were then packaged into a set of beliefs that we call religion. As we continued to provide more natural explanations for the phenomenon we encountered, the religions dissipated into myth.

We still have a biological/psychological need for causal explanation; however, religion is not required. This is the basis for wanting to make the distinction. Whether or not it is a distinction with a difference I think depends on what we are explaining. A Greek goat herder can live his entire life believing that Helios is driving the sun across the sky and no harm will come of it. If the same goat herder subscribes to a primitive notion of demon caused disease then there could very likely be problems for him and anyone he comes in contact with.

Absolutely Cato, though it does seem to me that even if human beings could explain everything about the Universe through naturalistic explanations, religion would not go away. Why? Because at bottom, I think, it's not about a coherent philosophical system so much as it is about an experience people have, and that experience oftentimes relates directly to the fact that for some minds, materialistic explanations lack hope. To quote James (again), "Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this world's outcome" (italics mine). Speaking for myself, I don't think I could believe something on that basis alone, though if I knew I was going to die next week I honestly don't know what my emotional response to such news would be, and that's my point: religion is an emotional, rather than rational, response to the world, but does that negate its aesthetic value? Are humans "designed" (by natural selection, of course) to create religion in the same way we are prone (or rather, need) to create art? And does this actually offer people a solution--through which they are able to survive--where other solutions cannot? If that is even the case for 1% of religious people, that seems to me a profound advantage over materialistic philosophies. Again, to clarify, I'm not saying that I think that makes any religion true in terms of 'reality' outside of our minds--I'm just wondering, speaking only for some people, if that 'reality-outside-the-individual-mind' even ought to actually matter--if the costs of embracing it seem to outweigh the benefits.