Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (18 page)

Docile persons tend to learn and believe what they perceive others in the society want them to learn and believe. Thus the
content of what is learned will not be fully screened for its contribution to personal fitness.

Because of bounded rationality, the docile individual will often be unable to distinguish socially prescribed behavior that contributes to fitness from altruistic behavior. In fact, docility will reduce the inclination to evaluate independently the contributions of behavior to fitness….. By virtue of bounded rationality, the docile person cannot acquire the personally advantageous learning that provides the increment,
d
, of fitness without acquiring also the altruistic behaviors that cost the decrement,
c
.
¹⁰

The idea is that a Mother Teresa or a Thomas Aquinas display “bounded rationality”; they are unable to distinguish socially prescribed behavior that contributes to fitness from altruistic behavior (socially prescribed behavior which does not). As a result they fail to acquire the personally advantageous learning that provides that increment
d
of fitness without, sadly enough, suffering that decrement
c
exacted by altruistic behavior. They acquiesce unthinkingly in what society tells them is the right way to behave; and they aren’t quite up to making their own independent evaluation of the likely bearing of such behavior on the fate of their genes. If they
did
make such an independent evaluation (and were rational enough to avoid silly mistakes), they would presumably see that this sort of behavior does not contribute to personal fitness, drop it like a hot potato, and get right to work on their expected number of progeny. From a Christian perspective, obviously, this explanation of the behavior of Mother Teresa and other altruists is wildly off the mark—not even close enough to be a miss.

I suppose the place to look for the most overt conflict would be the accounts of religion itself that are proffered by the scientific study of religion, including evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. Of course many of these theories of religion are incompatible with each other: according to some, religion is adaptive, but according to others it is nonadaptive or even maladaptive (a malignant virus, as Richard Dawkins seems to think); according to some, religion arises by way of group selection, but according to others group selection is impossible. Still, there is no dearth of examples of proclamations that conflict with religious belief (not to mention with each other). For example, Steven Pinker asks: “How does religion fit into a mind that one might have thought was designed to reject the palpably not true?” and states that “religion is a desperate measure that people resort to when the stakes are high and they have exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success—medicines, strategies, courtship, and, in the case of the weather, nothing.” He goes on, resurrecting the old canard about how religion is the result of crafty priests and credulous parishioners: “I have alluded to one possibility: the demand for miracles creates a market that would-be priests compete in, and they can succeed by exploiting people’s dependence on experts. I trust such experts as dentists and doctors; that same trust would have made me submit to medical quackery a century ago and to a witch doctor’s charms millennia ago.”
¹¹

This is perhaps more a declaration of personal dislike for religion than a scientific or semi-scientific pronouncement, but there are many others. Rodney Stark proposed a theory according to which religion is a kind of spandrel of rational thought, an attempt to acquire nonexistent goods—eternal life, a right relationship with
God, salvation, remission of sins—by negotiating with nonexistent supernatural beings.
¹²
The idea is that rational thought, that is, means/ ends or cost/benefit thinking, comes to be in the usual evolutionary way. But having the capacity for such thought inevitably carries with it the capacity to pursue nonexistent goals, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or the ones connected with religion. Taken neat, this theory is clearly incompatible with Christian belief, according to which at least some of the supernatural beings and some of the goods mentioned do indeed exist. Another example: David Sloan Wilson (not to be confused with E. O. Wilson) suggests that religion is essentially a means of social control employing or involving fictitious belief.
¹³
Again, taken neat, this is incompatible with Christian belief.

Among the most important writers on the scientific study of religion would be Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, and Justin Barrett; there is also a popular presentation of some of this material in Daniel Dennett’s
Breaking the Spell
.
¹⁴
Like the early Stark, Boyer takes religion to be a kind of spandrel: it is a consequence or side effect of having the sort of brain we actually have. That we have that sort of brain is to be explained in the usual way, in terms of its contribution
to fitness; but given such a brain, according to Boyer, the development of religion naturally occurs. In essence, he thinks, religion is a whole family of cognitive phenomena involving “counterintuitive” beings (beings who act in ways counter to our ordinary categories): for example, religion often involves beings who can act in the world without being visible. This out-of-the-ordinary counterintuitive character of the beings in question attracts attention and makes them memorable. However they must be
minimally
counterintuitive; too much departure from the ordinary makes them both hard to take seriously and hard to remember. A box of Kleenex that is secretly the ruler of the world, for example, is
too
counterintuitive; a religion of which this was the central feature probably wouldn’t thrive.

Atran endorses several features of Boyer’s theory and adds more: according to him “religion is (1) a community’s costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people’s existential anxieties such as death and deception.”
¹⁵
According to Atran, therefore, not just any old counterfactual and counterintuitive idea will make a religion (a whistling teakettle orbiting the sun, for example, won’t fill the bill); the ideas have to involve supernatural
agents
. And not just any old remarkable agent will fill the bill either (Mickey Mouse, he says, will not); the agents have to address and assuage people’s existential anxieties. So why is it that human beings are religious? Like Boyer, Atran believes that while our minds have come to be and have been developed by natural selection, religion itself isn’t adaptive, but is a byproduct of our cognitive architecture:

Religion is materially expensive and unrelentingly counterfactual and even counterintuitive. Religious practice is costly in terms of material sacrifice (at least one’s prayer time), emotional
expenditure (inciting fears and hopes) and cognitive effort (maintaining both factual and counterintuitive networks of belief).
¹⁶

Now some writers seem to think that in coming up with a suggestion as to the evolutionary origin of religion, they are in some way discrediting it.
¹⁷
Apart from that gratuitous “counterfactual,” however, there is nothing in Boyer or Atran that is inconsistent with theistic or Christian belief (although both seem at best extremely skeptical of such belief). Describing the origin of religious belief and the cognitive mechanisms involved does nothing, so far, to impugn its truth.
¹⁸
No one thinks describing the mechanisms involved in perception impugns the truth of perceptual beliefs; why should one think things are different with respect to religion? According to Christian belief, God has created us in such a way that we can know and be in fellowship with him. He could have done this in many ways; for example, he could have brought it about that our cognitive faculties evolve by natural selection, and evolve in such a way that it is natural for us to form beliefs about the supernatural in general and God himself in particular. Finding a “natural” origin for religion in no way discredits it.
¹⁹

A more promising line of criticism: it might be suggested that the cognitive mechanisms giving rise to religious belief, as opposed to those involved in, for example, perception, are prone to substantial error. The central such suggested mechanism is called an “agency detection device.” Such a device, so the thought goes, would probably deliver many false positives; Stewart Guthrie dubs this device “the Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device” (HADD).
²⁰
This device is hypersensitive, he says, because, while little is lost by a false positive, a false negative can be catastrophic. You glimpse a tiger apparently looking at you from a distance of fifty yards; failure to see it as an agent (looking for lunch, perhaps) can be disastrous. By comparison, attributing agency to trees or clouds or the moon is mistaken, but much more benign. (“Better safe than sorry” shows up in nearly all these accounts.)

But of course the fact that belief in supernatural agents arises from HADD (if indeed that is a fact) doesn’t even tend to show that such belief is among the false positives; that same device is also responsible for many true beliefs, for example, the belief that there are other minds, other people.
²¹
Presumably no one would argue that belief in other minds is dubious or irrational or intellectually second rate on the grounds that it has been produced by an agent detection device that sometimes produces false positives. So merely finding or positing a source of religious belief, as with HADD, does nothing to discredit such belief, and neither does pointing out that the source in question delivers false positives.
²²
So far we don’t have conflict.

Consider the early Stark proposal—that religion is a spandrel of rational thought and is devoted to the pursuit of nonexistent goods by way of negotiation with nonexistent supernatural agents. This proposal is inconsistent with Christian thought or commitment just because it declares these goods and agents nonexistent. But wouldn’t there be another theory, perhaps just as good and even empirically equivalent to Stark’s, that was noncommittal on the existence or nonexistence of these goods? And anyway, would one really want to say that it was part of
science
—part of a scientific theory—to declare these goods nonexistent? Suppose I propose as a theory the conjunction of Newton’s laws and atheism: have I succeeded in producing a scientific theory inconsistent with theism? Hardly. So delete the offending bit from Stark’s theory and call the result “Stark-minus”: would Stark-minus be inconsistent with Christian belief? Stark-minus is something like the claim that (a) religion involves the pursuit of certain kinds of ends or goods—salvation, eternal life, and the like—by way of negotiating with alleged supernatural beings, and (b) that it arises as a kind of byproduct or spandrel of the evolution of the capacity for rational thought. Is
that
theory incompatible with Christian thought? Not obviously.

Or consider Wilson and Ruse. According to their theory, there is really no such thing as objective moral obligation, but it is adaptive for people to think that there is. So think about (Wilson and Ruse)-minus, which is the theory that results from theirs when we delete the bit according to which in reality there is no such thing as objective moral obligation. The resulting theory says only that morality—that is, belief in an objective obligation to treat others the way we would like them to treat us, together with the resulting tendency to behave in accordance with this belief to at least some extent—the theory says only that this phenomenon is adaptive at the group level and has become ubiquitous among human beings by way of group selection. Is that incompatible with Christian belief? Again, not obviously; it
adds little to the obvious claim that morality is a civil good, a claim going back to ancient Rome. (Of course it does add the thesis that morality has come to be by way of group selection; perhaps you don’t think that’s a small addition.) Similarly for Wilson-minus, the theory that results from David Sloan Wilson’s theory by deleting the idea that the beliefs involved in religion are fictitious. Wilson-minus, fundamentally, is the theory that religion arises or at least becomes ubiquitous among human beings by way of group selection, because it is a useful form of social control that involves beliefs of a certain kind. (Thus it pays the same compliment to religion that (Wilson and Ruse)-minus pays to morality.) Is this theory incompatible with Christian belief? Again, not obviously. Or consider Atran: he says that religion is “counterfactual,” by which I take it he means that religious beliefs are (always? typically?) false. Atran-minus would be the result of deleting the claim that religious belief is false from the rest of his theory: is Atran-minus incompatible with Christian belief? Once more, not obviously.

These theories, therefore, do conflict with religion, but in a merely superficial way. They conflict with religion in the way in which a theory that results from conjoining Newtonian physics with atheism does: that theory conflicts with religion, all right, but it certainly doesn’t constitute a serious religion-science conflict.

Here we should briefly pause to ask the following question: what, exactly,
is
a religion/science conflict? As we saw in chapter one, a religion might be itself inconsistent: then of course it will be inconsistent with any scientific theory, but this would be an uninteresting religion/science conflict. Suppose there is a scientific theory that is inconsistent with theistic belief but only a very few scientists endorse it: would that be an example of science/religion conflict? Or does a genuine science/religion conflict require that the theory in question be widely accepted among scientists? But is even that sufficient? What about general relativity and contemporary quantum mechanics? As they stand, they are incompatible with each other; physicists have been trying to develop a theory of quantum gravity to replace them, but so far have been unsuccessful (although
some people look to string theory and its sucessors as a promising source of reconciliation). The deliverances of current science, therefore, contain a contradiction. General relativity and quantum mechanics are inconsistent with each other; hence their conjunction is inconsistent with any religious belief; each is widely accepted among scientists; do we therefore have a religion/science conflict? If so, it would be, again, at best an uninteresting conflict.