Naturalistic Explanations of Religion

Religion as Natural

Besides directly seeking to undermine the chief claims of theists, atheists have also simply assumed God's non-existence and sought to provide naturalistic explanations of religion. Genetic explanations of religion may be divided into sociological, psychological and biological ones.

Sociological

Sociological (and other sorts of) reductionism is an age-old atheist argumentative strategy. The crudest of these reductionistic hypotheses - the 'imposture' hypothesis, according to which priests or politicians invented religion for the purpose of securing their power over groups of people - can be found among the earliest atheists (for example, the anonymous authors of the clandestine manuscripts.[1] According to this reductionist account, belief in God together with concomitant beliefs such as the immortality of the soul and afterlife rewards and punishments has nothing to do with attempts to explain the world. Rather, it is merely a political imposture.[2]

A more recent and historically immensely influential sociological explanation of religion is the socio-economic reductionism of Marx and Engels. According to the Marxist analysis, religion (as well as morality) is a mere epiphenomenon of the material relations within a particular society. 'Ideological' products such as religious claims are to be explained purely in terms of the socio-economic interests of those who express such ideas. On the Marxist view, religion, like morality, is nothing but the reflection of the dominant material forces (see also Marxism).[3]

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Psychological

Psychological reductionism is also to be found amongst the earliest atheists. Many of the early atheistic clandestine texts attempted to explain religion in a reductionist way in terms of psychological dispositions in order to expose religion as at base irrational.[4]

Psychological reductionism came into its own in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feuerbach, in his The Essence of Christianity (1841) explained belief in God as essentially a projection of human self-consciousness. A more recent (and less positive) variant of the reductionist psychological explanation of religion is the psychoanalytic one. According to Freud, religion is a means of allowing repressed irrational unconscious instincts some sort of (sublimated) outlet. Religion also offers a form of illusory projection arising from human helplessness. Faced with a threatening external world, psychoanalytically unenlightened human beings (and children) experience a need for protection; therefore they project a father figure onto the universe, thus creating an illusory God for themselves.

A further influential psychological reduction of religion is finally that of Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche's historical thesis about their origins of Judeao-Christianity, the religion and particularly the religious morality of the Jews and Christians is the product of their secret resentment against their erstwhile oppressors, the 'strong' pagans, and merely expresses their own will to power. Something like this fundamentally Nietzschean insight often lies behind a general contemporary suspicion of universalising (especially religious) claims as merely disguised attempts at exercising power and control over others (see also Nietzsche).

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Biological

More recently (especially in Britain and the USA) the more influential sorts of reductionist arguments have been biological. Efforts to produce evolutionary (as opposed to sociological or psychological) reductionistic accounts of religion are relatively new, and depend upon recent evolutionary theory as their support. New Atheists tend to see them as the ultimate reductionist explanation of religion (Dawkins, for example, admits that the question of whether religions were deliberately designed by cynical priests or rulers is an 'interesting one', but nevertheless insists that the deeper (Darwinian) explanation of religion will be the one which can additionally explain 'why people are vulnerable to the charms of religion [in the first place] and therefore open to exploitation by priests, politicians and kings').[5] It is these arguments upon which the New Atheists such as Dawkins and Dennett chiefly build their case.

Dawkins in his The God Delusion (2006) and Dennett in his Breaking the Spell (2006) offer a biologically reductionist account of religion drawing upon evolutionary psychology and Dawkins' own meme theory. Dawkins and Dennett alike assume that religion will be amenable to an evolutionary explanation. The basic idea shared by Dawkins and Dennett and found in a similar form in, for example, Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained [6] is that it was not religion itself that was naturally selected in our prehistoric ancestors but rather a propensity which was directly serviceable, religion being a 'misfiring by-product' of that propensity. Drawing upon evolutionary psychology, Dawkins suggests that if the brain is an aggregate of organs or 'modules' for dealing with particular sets of data,[7] religion can be regarded as a by-product of the mis- or over-firing of one or more of these modules.

According to this explanation of religion, religion has a survival advantage insofar as it is a product of the human tendency to 'overshoot' in attributing agency - since from an evolutionary perspective it is better to be wrong in attributing too much agency to things in the environment than another agent's dinner due to a failure to attribute enough agency (e.g., to predators), the religious probably had a survival advantage: 'At the root of human belief in gods lies an instinct on a hair trigger: the disposition to attribute agency - beliefs and desires and other mental states - to anything complicated that moves. The false alarms generated by our overactive disposition to look for agents wherever the action is are the irritants around which the pearls of religion grow'[8]. Dawkins concurs with Dennett that the 'intentional stance' has survival value, pointing for example to experimental studies showing that children are especially likely to adopt the intentional stance towards inanimate (but moving) objects.

Dawkins and Dennett furthermore suggest that the 'replicators' which are benefited by religion may not necessarily be individual organisms or genes but rather 'the religious ideas themselves, to the extent that they behave in a some-what gene-like way, as replicators'.[9] Dawkins defines memes as 'units of cultural inheritance',[10] and regards them as being carried, virus-like, in minds, analogously to how genes are carried in animals' bodies. The meme theory - proposed by Dawkins in order to counter the impression that the gene was 'the only Darwinian game in town'[11] - can generate hypotheses concerning beliefs or ideas which have a direct evolutionary advantage of which religion would be a misfiring by-product. Dawkins, for example, suggests as one such hypothesis the selective advantage children might plausibly have in believing that what adults tell them is always true, even if adults sometimes tell them absurd things. According to Dawkins and Dennett, those religious memes that might plausibly have survival value in the 'meme pool'[12] will be the ones that last, and in general those that last will be the ones which have a very general appeal to human psychology (for example, belief in personal immortality).[13]

Dawkins' and Dennett's position by no means exhausts the range of contemporary biologically reductionist explanations of religion. A further reductionist explanation of religion is in terms of the controversial 'group-selection' theory, namely, that Darwinian selection works at the level of species or groups of individuals. D.S. Wilson, for example, has developed a 'group-selection' theory of the survival advantage of religion in his Darwin's Cathedral.[14]

References

Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained : The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors. London: Vintage, 2002.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006.
Dennett, Daniel. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Schroeder, Winfried. Ursprunge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Tubingen: Frommann- Holzboog, 1998.
Wilson, David Sloan. Darwin's Cathedral : Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Bibliography

Footnotes

[1]↑ Winfried Schroeder, Ursprunge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Tubingen: Frommann-Holzboog, 1998), 213.
[2]↑ Ibid.
[3]↑ Ibid., 114.
[4]↑ Ibid., 222.
[5]↑ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 169.
[6]↑ Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained : The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors (London: Vintage, 2002).
[7]↑ Dawkins, God Delusion, 179.
[8]↑ Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2006), 115.
[9]↑ Dawkins, God Delusion, 165.
[10]↑ Ibid., 191.
[11]↑ Ibid., 196.
[12]↑ Ibid., 199.
[13]↑ Ibid., 201.
[14]↑ David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral : Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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