This is an issue that gets btted around a lot in atheist blogs, and there’s a new study out arguing the answer is no. The argument is that since religion declines as societies become more stable and prosperous, religion can’t be hardwired, at least not at the level of language. Instead, it must be a more superficial response to hardship–in other words the result of nature, not nurture. (HT: Andrew Sullivan).

This argument contains two big fallacies, ones that not surprisingly reinforce each other. The first is stable modern societies as normal and everything before it as abnormal. True, hunter-gatherers didn’t have it as bad as people on the lower rungs of agricultural societies, but they were still a part of nature red in tooth and claw–human evolution would have been impossible otherwise. The comfortable society, where people fret about retirement because they just assume they’ll live that long, is a modern aberration.

The second fallacy is thinking that anything not as deeply hardwired as language cannot be hardwired at all. To prevent human beings from developing language, you basically have to raise them without any human contact. Raise a bunch of deaf children together, and they’ll invent a new kind of sign language. Raise children around parents who communicate with eachother mainly by a crude pidgin, and the children will turn that pidgin into a creol with its own sophisticated rules. Modern society, strange as it is, isn’t going to get rid of language. But modern society does mess with other evolutionarily programmed behaviors. Its abundant, cheap processed foods, high in fat and sugar, mess with the genetic programs that normally get us to eat healthy. Its birth control pills mess with our genetic programs for having a bunch of kids if at all possible. Maybe something about modern society also messes with our natural tendency towards religion.

Knowing that one argument against religion being innate is lousy, though, doesn’t tell us that religion is hard wired, or why it is hard wired. And it seems to me that most of the explanations of religion out there are wrong because they look for one thing that explains religion, when really religion really combines an awful lot of things. When we look at the domain of human irrationality in general, it actually seems to me that humans suffer from two distinct kinds of irrationality, which I’ll call defect irrationality and driven irrationality.

Defect irrationality is when a part of our minds that evolved to give us the right picture of the world doesn’t work quite right. That evolution would give us imperfect truth-finding abilities isn’t any more surprising than that it would given us bodies ruled by design compromises, or that it gives us cheetas that can’t run infinitely fast. Simple superstitions seem to fall into this category. If evolution gives us a causation-detector, we shouldn’t be surprised if that detector sometimes gives us false positives, imaginary causal connections like voodoo, prayer, homeopathy, and baseball magic. In a similar vein, Pascal Boyer has proposed that the need to deal with other humans has made human beings very good at thinking in terms of people’s behavior, and a side-effect of this is that we’re tempted to attribute natural phenomena to the behavior of some kind of people, say nature spirits or gods.

Driven irrationality is when a part of our minds evolved to give us the wrong picture of the world. Probably the first person who saw how this could work was evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers. Trivers noticed that humans have reason to want to present ourselves to each other as competent and benevolent, and that doing so is easier if we believe it. Thus, we’ve evolved to have an irrationally high view of our self-worth, and this includes irrationally holding on to potentially any idea once we’ve had it, because we don’t want to admit we’re wrong. Similarly, humans have reason to want to form strong alliances with other humans, and such alliances can be strengthened by group ideologies. Thus, humans may have evolved an irrational attachment to such ideologies (which, if they declare the superiority of the in-group, can also have the benefit of boosting self-worth). A third example comes from Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind, who proposed that one of the main reasons human intelligence exists is simply so that we can show it off to each other. It may be that inventing and spreading irrational beliefs is an effective (if twisted) way of doing that showing-off.

Probably all of the things I’ve described above are contributing causes of religion as we normally think of it. Then again, they don’t seem to tell the full story. Whenever I read the story of a recent upstart cult like Scientology, it seems to me that there must be some strong cult-forming tendency in human beings not covered by anything above. And while the connection between malfunctioning cause- and agent-detectors is clear, the connection between ideological shibboleths and religion is shakier, because the ideological shibboleth theory fails to explain the peculiar features of religious-belief shibboleths. Perhaps there is some advantage to having as your shibboleth something batshit crazy (most religions), as opposed to merely wrong (Marxism), but it would be nice to hammer down, in detail, why this would be so.

In closing, I’d like to say that the most powerful forms of religion in the world may depend on the above hard-wired features, but they’re probably more a matter of cultural evolution than genetic evolution. Here I’m talking about the dogmatic, “believe or burn” religions, orthodox Christianity and Islam. For those, I think Richard Dawkins’ mind virus hypothesis must be right. As far as I know, the “believe or burn” idea isn’t found in primitive, tribal religions. Indeed, I don’t know of a single instance of it not tracable back to Paul of Tarsus. That sort of idea seems to be something humans aren’t apt to come up with on their own, though it is something we’re apt to spread once someone thinks of it. As long as people want good things rather than bad things for themselves and others, and have some ability to control their own and others beliefs, the belief that a belief brings good things can be expect to spread widely–perhaps allowing the broader religious movements who use the idea to claim half of humanity as followers, as actually happened with Christianity/Islam.