How Should Freethought Proceed? More Thoughts...

We’ve had many articles considering the best way to dampen the fervour and spread of religious belief. John Kubinski (18), a regular writer for Young Freethought, wades in once more with this excellent essay. In it, he argues that religion is best understood as a moral intuition with evolutionary roots, rather than as a poor attempt at philosophy and empirical inquiry. He argues this insight into the nature of religious belief might be helpful in thinking about the best strategies for dismantling religion.

The first step in addressing any problem is coming to understand the nature of the problem. Freethinkers can mostly agree that religion is irrational, but what is the nature of this irrationality? Often times, I see freethinkers treating religion as what is essentially a philosophy - and they accordingly hold it up to standards of logical rigor and academic competence. While this perspective is helpful in highlighting the illogical and absurd features of religions, it completely misses the mark in the way of offering an accurate explanation of religion. Religion as philosophy is a terrible model for understanding the phenomenon that we are trying to combat. When someone makes a ludicrous religious claim, it’s nothing like stating a conclusion that doesn’t follow from the given premises. Say you showed someone an apple and dropped it ten times in a row, and it fell to the floor each time. If the spectator responds to this observation by saying that apples rise rather than fall when dropped, that would be irrational - because the evidence suggests otherwise. Now, is religion anything like that? I think few would venture to answer yes to that question. Religious irrationality is of a fundamentally different kind than that. Religion is not merely bad philosophy. Religion must be understood as an outgrowth of evolved features of human psychology, and a product of what is in all likelihood the co-evolution of memes and genes. The capacity for religiosity exists in all of us, and is not just the result of poor reasoning, but a human universal that has been a defining feature of our nature for nearly as long as we have existed. Religion comes to us not through reason, but through intuition. And our intuitions are just a set of evolved faculties that come pre-installed in all of our brains.

While I think memetics can offer a valuable approach, I find myself parting ways with some who view it as a full and satisfactory explanation of religion. Memes don’t exist in a vacuum, they modify our intuitions and help give shape to the milieu of human psychology which has its basic features already outlined by genes. This is why I think it can be instructive to think of religion more like tribalism than say…flat earth theory. To continue to use the language of memes, one could say that American (or British, or French, or Chinese, etc.) nationalism is a meme. But it would be highly (and I would say perhaps dangerously) erroneous to conclude that belief in the superiority of the group one belongs to is merely a meme. While the specific flavour of tribalism is memetic, the capacity for tribalism is innate and universal in human beings. In the same way that tribal loyalty is internalized at a very young age, religion is seamlessly absorbed by the youth in a society. The sheer utility of tribalism in organizing human beings in mutually beneficial ways was all that was required for natural selection to favour the evolution of tribalistic beliefs, even if they didn’t match up with reality. Evolution favours brains that generate a useful model of reality, not necessarily an accurate one. An affinity for ritual might better capitalize on the placebo effect, for example. While there is a lot of dispute about the evolutionary adaptive value (if there is any at all) of religion, I think it’s important to make the point that the nature of all human beliefs are fundamentally designed to be instrumental in attaining survival and reproductive success.

Religion is not merely a worldview for people; it is an integral element of their identity that becomes enshrined in moral intuitions about adhering to the codes and practices of one’s tribe. One of the interesting findings of moral psychology has been that moral judgments are made impulsively and intuitively and then later offered rationalizations. We should not be surprised by the hyper-sensitivity religious people exhibit when it comes to criticism of religion, as it is an expected result of our evolved propensity to sanctify and dogmatically defend the social norms we internalize from our tribe. Belief in the religion that one is raised in should probably be conceived of less as a claim about the nature of the universe, and more as a moral claim. If we take the case of racism, it’s fairly obvious that racism was not really an empirical statement about differences between races, but a moral statement of which empirical justifications were later attempted to be produced for. I think it may be instructive to consider that belief in a religion stems primarily from a deep intuitive inclination that belief in that religion is intrinsically good, and that the justifications for the truth of the religion are offered as an after-thought. There is a period in childhood where children are like impressionable sponges that absorb information from peers and authorities, so that they can profit from the discoveries of their ancestors and internalize the norms of their tribe that will allow them to successfully navigate both their social and ecological landscape; the fact that religious indoctrination occurs during this period should be insightful in understanding the type of belief that religiosity is. The religious mentality, like the mentality of tribalism, was not invented by memes, but arises from evolved intuitions - and not just intuitions about the nature of the world around us (though these were certainly instrumental in the formation of religion, as the Wikipedia article on the evolutionary psychology of religion will inform you), but importantly from moral intuitions as well. We all understand that tribalism is not a rational deduction, we should understand that religion is not one either.

While I have sketched a picture of where I think religion fits into the landscape of human psychology, the practical question of what to do about it remains. But before I proceed, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the empowering nature of the truth as revealed by science. With evolutionary psychology, we can finally develop an accurate understanding of the human condition and begin to grasp the nature of problems that have perennially plagued our species, like violence, warfare, tribalism, and even religion. Armed with knowledge and the hope of advancing human well-being, we can try and apply our learned insights rather than stumbling ignorantly and hopelessly, as our ancestors did for millennia, through circumstances which arose by the force of rationales that no one understood.

Taking religious claims to be more equivalent to “my tribe is the best” or “incest is disgusting” than to statements like “the sun is a thermonuclear furnace” does lead us towards the view that rational debate will only be of limited effectiveness in the battle against religion. The best things we can do are encourage self-refection and critical examination, massage other intuitions (like pointing out the myriad of situations in which religious dogma has stood as an obstacle to compassion), and try and explain religion as a natural phenomenon so that theists must confront the possibility that they are hard-wired for irrationality and credulity. In the countless battles against tribalism throughout human history, the tribal instinct has never been destroyed, but rather it has been modified. Our innate capacity for unity has not been eradicated, it has simply been expanded in a way that encompasses more people so that the reach of our empathy is greater than ever before. But perhaps with religion we can attain an even greater type of victory than that, by raising awareness about evolution and thus the need to question our cognitive predispositions.

Lastly, I want to return to the question of rational debate. Fundamentally I think debate is extremely important, even if it is not the most effective tool in winning over religious hearts and minds (though I do get the sense that it is rather efficacious with respect to convincing fence-sitters to become full-fledged atheists.) Of more importance than atheism’s triumph over religion is the liberal ideal of an open and honest society. By having debates about even the most controversial issues, we evince our dedication to free speech and intellectual progress. One of the most redeeming qualities of liberal societies is that there is nothing held off the table when it comes to critical inquiry and examination. I say it is not only a right, but a duty, for people to try and dismantle falsehoods and render irrationality naked and obvious wherever it is found. Some leftist commentators who are dogmatically dedicated to an over-blown definition of tolerance, like Robert Wright, insist that atheists who call religion on its untenable claims are being arrogant and offensive. But what could be of more value than our commitment to the free exchange of ideas? By refusing to succumb to the temptation to immunize even the most holy and sacred of ideas from criticism, we always leave open the possibility that someone in the future will be able to inform us of our errors. It is in the arena of rationality and the evaluation of competing claims where the truth is advanced and progress is made. As Christopher Hitchens often recites, you cannot have light without heat.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Young Freethought's editors.