religion's roots in evolution and what that means for us

the rather ironic origins and its less humorous consequences

I dislike it when some atheists have a rather lazy outlook on religion that it’s simply a cognitive bias. They disregard a genuine evolutionary phenomenon that could explain it far better than the holier-than-thou ‘I’m simply not brainwashed’ perspective. This is my answer to that lazy conclusion.

Risky Hunting

Imagine yourself as an early human. You hunt, gather, and paint on your cave's walls. Obviously, this is somewhat of a caricature of our ancestors, but it serves as a way to visualise the scenarios that would develop agent detection—and with it: religion.

You and your group of painfully adequate homo sapiens, or perhaps a rarer group of the homo neanderthalensis, sit in the grassy plains of Africa waiting to kill for your dinner. A brush before you begins to rustle. It could just be the wind, but what if it wasn’t? If there was indeed a predator creating that movement, you’d be dead. If there was some prey creating that movement, and your dismissal led to its escape, there might not have been another chance to eat that night. In either scenario, there was a harm which could have been avoided by removing the assumption.

Hypersensitive Agency Detecting Device

This attribution of agency to something that may or may not have happened as a result of said agency led to the evolutionary trait of agent detection. Agent detection refers to the predisposition, often genetic, for animals to presume action or intervention of a sentient being in a scenario whether there was or wasn’t. Our ancestors that survived the hunt by attributing agency to that noise, or shadow, or movement, or whatever else it could have manifested as, were able to procreate. Over time, this reinforced agent detection in not just us, but all animals.

As a byproduct of agent detection, we have a tendency to overexplain in situations where it isn’t necessary, hence the name hypersensitive. As we evolved socially and our technologies advanced, we no longer needed agent detection in our daily lives. Religion had already been serving as a method of social cohesion, and would continue to do so. It had evolved beyond the need for the hunt, but we had not yet evolved beyond the need for religion.

Consequences

Though we arguably have lost the need for religion, we are invariably still plagued with its presence. Pew Research compiled an absurd level of data back in 2012, coming to the conclusion that roughly 85% of the then 6.9 billion humans identified as religious. It isn’t the religions themselves that are dangerous; we simply have outgrown them. In 2015, within a study titled Evolution Controversy: A Phenomenon Prompted by the Incompatibility between Science and Religious Beliefs, the authors Paz-y-Mino-C and Epinosa come to a troubling conclusion. What they found was conclusive evidence that in countries that had lower levels of religious affiliation, there was a higher level of public acceptance of evolution and vice versa. Though it’s ironic that evolution has generated the need for religion and now the religious shun the believers of evolution, what is more concerning is that this isn’t just an issue with evolution. In 2018, McPhertes and Zuckerman released a study titled Religiosity predicts negative attitudes towards science and lower levels of science literacy. The results indicated that despite excluding contested topics like evolution from the study’s method of testing scientific literacy, there still existed a relationship between religious belief, one’s own scientific literacy(or in this case, the lack of), and negative attitudes towards science. This unwelcoming attitude towards scientific advancement hinders human advancement. Large portions of religious groups without fail have refused even the simplest form of scientific advancement. The increase of unvaccinated American children has put us at risk for future outbreaks of diseases.

the obvious solution

Just three months after McPhertes and Zuckerman released their study, James Wilson released Reducing Pseudoscientific and Paranormal Beliefs in University Students through a Course in Science and Critical Thinking. The study involved 313 students going through the course, having taken pre- and post-course questionnaires designed to measure belief in the following categories: religion, phychics, witchcraft, superstition, spiritualism, monsters, precognition, aliens, and alternative medicine. After taking the course, students had a 16.8% decrease in their religiosity and closer to 30% reduction in paranormal beliefs. Similarly, a course in skeptical inquiry has the potential to reduce paranormal beliefs, on average, by 32-45%.

All of this is not to say that religion doesn’t necessarily have its benefits, but do those benefits outweigh its potential for harm? We need it not for a source of morality—if anything, religion in the modern age is preventing an advancement of moral standards, just as it did when it was used to justify slavery—so then what do we need it for?

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