Born believers: How your brain creates God via New Scientist
Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem
to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied
away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul
Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the
topic has meant there has been little progress."
The origin of religious
belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to
make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary
adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto
the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors
form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare,
enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes,
religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human
society (New
Scientist, 28 January 2006, p 30)
The religion-as-an-adaptation theory
doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such
unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't
think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in
religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly
compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes.
Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its
origin, but simply how it spread.