
(This essay, a dialogue with evolutionary psychology, was my final paper for the Fall 2017 Harvard course "How Hidden Incentives Shape the Mind: The Origins of Our Beliefs and Ideologies." It was later awarded second prize in the Harold O. J. Brown Award on the Doctrine of Creation.)
The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas is among the most influential works in western thought, and its roughly three thousand pages follow a simple structure. Each section has five parts. First, Thomas poses a question like: “Is prime matter created by God?” or “Is God the final cause of all things?” Second, he presents the strongest possible arguments for the position contrary to his own. In the case of the two above questions, Thomas answers “it seems that it is not” and “it seems that he is not,” and then proceeds to lay out strong reasons for these answers. Third, he appeals to some authoritative source to stake a counterclaim, an “on the contrary.” Fourth, Thomas presents broad reasons for doubting the answer initially given. And finally, he replies specifically to each of the original arguments. It is a straightforward style of debate, common in scholasticism, and it repeats throughout the Summa: 1) Question, 2) Answer, 3) On the contrary, 4) Response, 5) Ad (Latin for “against”).
Just for fun, I’ll use this medieval format to engage the modern claim of evolutionary psychology that religion, at bottom, is a survival mechanism of the species, logically absurd but laced with prosocial incentives that justify all our glittery hocus-pocus. At stake, of course, is the question of what we fundamentally are as humans. Creatures made in the image of a loving God? Biological champions chronically duped by notions of religious meaning and ultimate truth? Answers here turn in no small measure on assumptions, conscious or unconscious, about the nature of consciousness itself. What is the significance of an organ, the brain, capable of even asking the question? Of course, the stake is not only philosophical, but also political: different models of the mind reside unaddressed beneath partisan gridlock, underwriting divergent ideas about the conditions of human flourishing. (Think of MacIntyre’s classic, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?)
The issues are vast and complex, and perhaps insoluble. Following a Thomistic lodestar, I wish simply to ask: Whose brain misunderstands itself, the psychologist’s or the theologian’s?
1. QUESTION: Is religion an ideology with hidden incentives that promote survival?
2. ANSWER: It seems that it is.
I
Human beings are a remarkably complex and well-adapted social species, much of whose behavior is motivated by a deep logic of evolutionary incentives that may or may not be discernible to them. At bottom, what humans need most are resources (food and water, and also money because it procures food and water), physical safety and health (shelter, clothes, and medicine), access to high quality or a high number of mates (because children carry forward one’s genes), and access to cooperative partners (to help acquire these other things—hunt food together, build a house together, etc.). These are ultimate needs, because they are essential to the survival of the species. Other needs index to them, and may be called proximate needs.
For example, the perceived need for the trendiest new pair of jeans is really a desire to be fashionable, which in turn is a desire to broadcast one’s status, which in turn is a desire to attract a high quality mate who can not only help produce children (a purpose many of my millennial brethren seem to have forgotten, or if they remember, then deliberately thwart), but also help pay the rent. Those True Religion jeans may be outlandishly expensive, but seen in the right light (i.e. not the sepia light of ads), they may be ultimately necessary. Likewise, people espousing their own “true religion” are usually unaware of how their participation is evolutionarily incentivized, since being part of a close-knit community directly contributes to the procurement of ultimate needs: resources, safety, mates, cooperation.
Hence, religion is at bottom a survival technique.
II
Survival is a challenge in many of Earth’s ecosystems. Not everywhere is Tuscany, alas. In most ecosystems, humans must work together to survive. And given the competitive dynamics of natural selection, humans must work together to fend off not only the caprices of dear Mother Earth—droughts and typhoons and such—but to fend off each another, the tribe thriving next door and wishing to thrive even more at our expense! In order not to be a casualty of group selection, a strong social glue is necessary to bind humans into ever greater and more efficient groups.
At a crucial stage in the evolutionary past (and still in many ways today), religion was that glue. Why? Because it activates what some call a “hive switch,” when one’s usual sense of being Me is somehow dissolved and swept up into a larger sense of We. The We needs a shared focal point of attention and loyalty, a sacred fire around which to dance, and at many times and places in history the fire has been called God. It burns hot and beautifully (we are incentivized to perceive it so), and those who refused to dance around it were often left outside to freeze in the cold. The alternative to dancing was death. So dance we did, and not infrequently the gyrations became animated with a martial spirit. Religion and war can become a powerful symbiosis, an emergent force galvanizing human communities in stunning and often destructive ways.
But even in the absence of war, and long before the advent of modern hive switch triggers like techno clubs, LSD, Monday Night Football, and the Democratic National Convention, for long stretches into the evolutionary past religion has functioned as a remarkably efficient adaptation for producing and maintaining social cohesion.
Hence, religion is at bottom a survival technique.
III
Human beings want to survive. It is the inexorable law—thou shalt live! And the human brain has adapted to obey this law for the good of the entire organism. Competing claims are constantly being triaged, but our neural architecture has developed generally (and stealthily) to privilege the stentorian voice of emotion over the quieter voice of reason. When anything activates our emotions, the reasoning parts of the brain rarely offer a counterargument, but instead begin preparing a case why the emotions are correct to feel as they do. This tendency to post hoc justification is present in many arenas—economics, jurisprudence, sports, relationships—but is particularly strong in religion. The rational parts of the brain that may perceive religious claims to be dubious are drowned out by the emotional parts of the brain which clearly perceive that the survival of the whole organism depends on its inclusion in a cooperative community, and that inclusion comes with the admission price of affirming whatever the community affirms.
Let’s take a test case, a hypothetical Christian named Ryan. Ryan goes to church. His social life revolves around church. His professional and housing opportunities often emerge from church connections. When he travels, his contacts abroad are people from foreign churches. One day he will likely find a (# beautiful, # sexy) mate at church. His cachet is highest at church. This community facilities Ryan’s ultimate needs, and since inclusion comes with the price tag of affirming the divinity of Jesus Christ, the emotional loudspeakers in his brain make it virtually impossible to listen carefully to the other part of his brain that regards such an affirmation as ludicrous.
Hence, Ryan’s religion is at bottom a survival technique.
IV
For social engineering purposes, promoting belief in a powerful, ever-present, and morally vigilant God is useful for a host of reasons:
a) If people internalize the notion that they are always being watched, compliant behavior is likely, and monitoring costs are low. The real Police is in the sky, patrolling constantly, for free.
b) Relatedly, the specter of eternal punishment is effective at scaring the hell—i.e., the hellish behaviors—out of people. Demagogues and cult leaders capitalize on this fear (which is an emotion; recall III, above) in order to produce a well-ordered, obedient populace. Such leaders are incentivized to do so in order to secure their own ultimate needs—unlimited mating partners, etc.
c) The sacrifices people are required to make for religion (“fasting?! tithing?! abstinence?! are you kidding me?!”) not only provide a strong deterrent against free-riders, they also foster a camaraderie that allows religious groups to exceed the normal demographic bounds of kin-based altruism. With its high buy-in requirements, religion scales well.
d) Because successful religions usually have sacred texts, literacy and education are often promoted in religious societies. And literacy and education often come with a helpful byproduct: economic development. This constitutes a strong if hidden material incentive to value sacred writ (provided the sacred writ does not also command you to give away your material goods!).
Hence, and once again, religion is at bottom a survival technique.
3. ON THE CONTRARY: It is an old maxim of debate that “the one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” (Proverbs 18:17)
4. & 5. RESPONSE & AD: The foregoing arguments rely on assumptions that are not self-evident.
I
The model of proximate and ultimate explanations is arbitrarily delimited to the history of the Earth. How do we know there is not an “ultimate” explanation beyond the ultimate evolutionary explanation? Evolutionary rationale deals in millions of years, and this is an impressive span of time, but can it account for the billions of years physicists ascribe to the universe (bearing in mind, of course, that many physicists regard time itself to be unreal, an illusion of perception)? Can it account for the fundamental datum of the universe itself, with all the staggering complexity and precision of its physical laws?
An anecdote will illustrate my point. Several years ago I took an astronomy class entitled “Galactic and Extra-Galactic Astronomy.” In the first month of the course we learned about the Milky Way, home sweet home, and its several billion stars. This was just the beginning, though, a cute anteroom to a sprawling castle. The second and third months of the course took us into the deep reaches of space—which are also the deep reaches of time, telescopes being time machines—until we finally arrived to the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Avoiding astronomical jargon, the CMB is the radiological afterglow of the Big Bang, a highly-charged “dust” uniformly present throughout space, all the way out to the furthest reaches of the observable universe. Physicists are able mathematically to describe the CMB and the Big Bang from which it originated 13.8 billion years ago, all the way up to “Planck Time,” which is a unit of time about a zillionth of second long. The math all coheres (or so it seems) up until the time when the universe was approximately 0.0000000000000000000000000000001 second old.
On the last day of class, breathless after literally traversing the history of the universe, the professor rhetorically asked: “And what happened before Planck Time?” We were on the edge of our seats. This was the Big Question, the truly ultimate puzzle: Why is there something instead of nothing? Where does it all come from? But the professor balked, quipping in reply to his own question: “Well, we can’t talk about theology here, so let’s move on.” Everyone exhaled in disbelief. I thought it was a joke at my expense, the token religious student in the class. But he was utterly serious. The holy grail of curiosity had been set against our lips, and withdrawn.
This story illustrates two things. First, evolutionary psychology employs an “ultimate explanation” that indexes to a moment quite recent in relation to the history of the universe. Ultimately, there is nothing very ultimate about our twirling and beloved fleck of cosmic dust. Second, astronomers and cosmologists genuinely throw up their hands in wonder at the origin of existence itself, meaning that a scientific worldview is no more ultimate than a religious one. Both rely on nonfalsifiable first principles, and are essentially articles of faith.
True, every worldview must reconcile with a certain irreducible opacity, but the important thing is to analyze the location and function of that opacity within the overall reality model. The scientific worldview is strangely comfortable with opacity right at the center of its model of causality. In order to stomach the model, I must first gulp down a huge dose of mystery. The religious model, by contrast, which is by no means devoid of its own opacities and mysteries, simply prefers not to place its unknown right at the center.
II
In a less cosmic and more philosophical vein, the foregoing arguments commit the fallacy of exempting themselves from the criterion applied to others, or in the folksy idiom of my native Montana, are “the pot calling the kettle black.” Research into the origin of ideologies cannot itself be ideologically neutral, since there is no such thing as an Archimedean point from which to view anything. Yet studies on the incentives of religious ideology assume just this; somehow they observe the world from a sanitized high-ground, analyzing others who have been socialized into convenient delusions.
Why are these researchers so sure the convenient delusion is not their own? Might not confirmation bias and motivated reasoning be present in their conclusions, let alone manifest in the topics they choose to study and those they choose to ignore? Recall the observation of Leo Strauss, who asked whether proponents of historicism had carefully considered whether historicism itself might be a historically-conditioned position, or whether they could imagine a successor to it. Or recall the observation of C. S. Lewis about the strange loophole in materialistic appraisals of human psychology: “All attempts to treat thought as a natural event involve the fallacy of excluding the thought of the person making the attempt.”
Let’s make it practical. Say I’m a psychologist studying incentives in the beliefs of a Mormon community in southern Utah. On what grounds can I be sure that my ideas about their ideas are not likewise conditioned by incentives of which I am woefully unaware? My objective data? But the Mormon husband of twelve could also insist that he is being objective, and the question devolves into a morass of competing subjectivities. And if there are incentives for me, as a psychological researcher, to maintain methodological neutrality, what might those be? This is a straightforward question to answer. Secularism, a fairly recent cultural and philosophical movement from which academic psychology recruits nearly all of its practitioners, is such a large and well-organized “tribe” that much of the rational applying to religious groups also applies to it.
If I’m a psychologist studying polygamists and teetotalers somewhere in the red canyons of Utah, or any religious group, I may be incentivized to appear neutral and unbiased in my analysis of their moral tribe since appearing neutral and unbiased is how I earn respect and cachet in my own moral tribe. And when I am welcomed into my tribe, I gain access to the whole suite of ultimate needs: resources, safety, mates, and cooperation.
Hence, and mutatis mutandis, a socialized incantation of the Nicene Creed as the price of admission into the Christian tribe is not really all that different from a socialized incantation of the Scientific Method as the price of admission into the tribe of secularism. If my own emotional brain might prevent me from listening to a rational whisper that doubts the divinity of Jesus, might the emotional brain of a scientist drown out a rational whisper that doubts the absolute nature of the scientific worldview?
III
Human reasoning about many issues, not least ethical ones, is deeply motivated. When beliefs about right and wrong are challenged, the human mind is remarkably efficient at sorting and shifting the data in such a way as to confirm its a priori ethical preference, invalidating all evidence to the contrary. It seems something of this order is afoot in the matter of first principles and faith. It is not just a difference of learned opinions over what happened before Planck Time. Rather, these two frameworks of what a human being is, the religious and the psychological or scientific, are deeply uncomfortable with the ethical norms produced by the opposing framework, and are thus powerfully motivated to rationalize it in a manner that impugns its central tenets. This happens equally in both directions, each community of discourse trafficking in caricatures about the other side, confusing half truths with whole truths.
From the psychological side, one of the most commonly cited notions is that religious belief is thinly-veiled wish fulfillment. “How wonderful to think an all powerful God is in my corner!” What this charge apparently does not consider, though, is that it cuts both ways. Here’s Lewis again, reflecting on the motive of beliefs: “I see my religion dismissed on the grounds that ‘the comfortable parson had every reason for assuring the nineteenth century worker that poverty would be rewarded in another world.’ Well, no doubt he had. On the assumption that Christianity is an error, I can see clearly enough that some people would still have a motive for inculcating it. I see it so easily that I can, of course, play the game the other way round, by saying that ‘the modern man has every reason for trying to convince himself that there are no eternal sanctions behind the morality he is rejecting.’”
The charge of wish fulfillment also cuts deeply into the substance of ethics. One must ask: What happens if meaning is reduced to an illusion, or a psycho-social mechanism? What are the consequences of maintaining that experiences like outrage and love are explained by an ultimately evolutionary rationale? This is what happens: ethics implodes. All that’s left are variously positioned persons reacting to phenomena in variously incentivized ways. Of course, some are more than delighted for ethics about some matters to implode, but in the next breath make sweeping ethical claims on another. But they cannot; the sitting branch is gone. Lewis again says it well: “One can reject morality as an illusion, but the man who does so often tacitly excepts his own ethical motive: for instance the duty of freeing morality from superstition and of spreading enlightenment.”
The upshot: insofar as academic psychology informs the ethical platform of secularism and more specifically of progressive politics, it must acknowledge how the arguments it wishes to marshal in one direction can and will be inevitably turned back against some of its most cherished presuppositions. Said another way, there is a haunting suggestion in the tale of the little shepherd boy David cutting off Goliath’s head with the giant’s own sword.
IV
Regarding cults: drawing conclusions about religion on the basis of the worst-case-scenarios of extremist and mass-suicidal cults is like drawing conclusions about democracy on the basis of the worst-case-scenario of a lawfully elected Adolf Hitler. Every healthy organism has occasional diseases.
APPENDIX: A Just-So Story About Evolutionary Psychology
Every scientist and artist has tools for their craft, and the God who existed before Planck’s Time (recognizing that time emerged at the Big Bang, so “before” is the least wrong way of speaking here) also had a tool for creating life: natural selection. In the same way it takes an artist or scientist a great deal of time to produce a masterpiece (think of Edison’s countless attempts at the lightbulb, or Monet’s many renditions of waterlilies and cathedrals) so the achievement of consciousness took millions of years to perfect. The startling chemical transformations required to produce the emergent phenomenon of a cluster of matter transcending itself in a thought, much less the complex thoughts of creativity and morality, was no easy feat. Just think of it—matter bending back on itself in awareness! Is there another point in the universe as remarkable as the human brain? In concert with this development, the slow and experimental process of crafting a biological organism able to host and function synthetically with such a consciousness machine took not a little time.
When the first creatures we would call human finally traversed the threshold of consciousness, a biologically-based creature realizing “Wow, I think I am thinking!”, the proper response was obvious: gratitude. The creature understood its world, its basic existence, and especially its consciousness, as a marvelous gift, and the best use of the gift itself was to say thank you.
Among the amazing features of the brain is agency. It is a creation actually able to create other things. Originally, the response to such an entrustment was, again, gratitude. However, over time a mistake crept in to human reasoning: we came to think that, because we can create by our agency, we have in fact created agency itself. This mistake led to a consequence far more grave: the illusion of independence, and the loss of the sense of gift.
Other missteps concurrently took place. Because the world is beautiful, the world also is risky. There is no such thing as beauty without risk, or adventure without uncertainty. The risk and uncertainty imbedded into God’s beautiful world is morality. Human brains are moral machines, and its agency can be applied correctly or incorrectly, for the advancement of justice or injustice. God gives certain guidelines to humans, who are free to heed or reject them. Herein lies the risk and uncertainty, all the adventure and joy! In possession of a remarkably odd and powerful faculty called choice, humans eventually weaponized the gift of choice over against the Giver.
Over many thousands of years, as humans developed civilizations through exercise of their God-given agency, the illusion of independence became increasingly entrenched, and the sense of dependence and gratitude diminished apace. Ways of conceiving the world appeared that incentivized forgetfulness of God; ideologies flattering our rebellious streak promised freedom from pesky moral constraints and consequences. Powerful institutions emerged that cultivated a subtly yet profoundly different story about human origins: a story that gets the mechanism right, but the framework deeply wrong.
This modern mythology brilliantly describes God’s paintbrush, God’s hammer—natural selection—yet also insists that all this boggling beauty and coherence emerged randomly, out of nothing, and for no purpose at all. Teleology is taboo. A remarkably incisive account is presented of the how and the what of the natural world, and the audience is so spellbound or intimidated that they do not ask the other obvious questions: whence, whither, and wherefore? The ideological tale studiously omits all suggestion of dependence, gratitude, and obligation, reinforcing humans in the delusion that their ultimate source, end, and purpose are unknown, or—in a more recent innovation—invented by themselves.
But at least there is a consolation prize for all this crippling uncertainty and existential homelessness. So long as you don’t hurt anyone, you can live however you want! Phew. The Police in the sky is a fiction for children. One might even say that this message is not the consolation, but the motivation itself. At any rate, if the brain is good at one thing, it is post hoc justification.
Bibliography
Becker, Sascha O., Pfaff, Steven, and Rubin, Jared. “Causes and Consequences of the Protestant Reformation.” Warwick Economics. January 2016, 1–25.
Doane, Michael. “An Outline of Norenzayan’s ‘Big Gods.’” The Religious Studies Project. Accessed on 1 December 2017. http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/2014/03/05/an-outline-of-norenzayans-big-gods-by-michael-doane/.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion. Vintage Books: New York, 2012.
Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2000.
Norenzayan, A., and Shariff, A. F. “The origin and evolution of religious prosociality.” Science 322 (5898), 58–62.
I would also like to thank Jon D. Levenson, my doctoral advisor, for many conversations about the relationship between religion and other fields.