In a new paper, “The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or byproduct?”, Ilkka Pyysiäinen from the University of Helsinki and Marc Hauser from Harvard discuss the evolution of religion and morality (The paper was highlighted by Philip Ball in Nature News and by P.Z. at Pharyngula.) The paper is divided roughly into two parts:
1. A discussion about whether religion is a direct adaptation, that is, whether there are specific genes that favor belief in religion, God, the afterlife, the supernatural, and so on—or whether religion is a “byproduct,” that is, that religious beliefs grow naturally out of other evolved features of the human mind. Pyysiäinen and Hauser favor the latter. They seem to agree with Pascal Boyer (see his Religion Explained), that faith is an outgrowth of the natural human tendency to attribute intentionality to objects, forces of nature, and the like.
I like the “byproduct” hypothesis, if for no other reason than it’s almost self-evidently true. Surely every human behavior is in some sense a byproduct of genes that evolved for other reasons. And if religion, like music-making, jokes, and pornography, is an outgrowth of genes that have evolved for other reasons, then we need not make up adaptive stories favoring a “religion module” in the brain. That imposes some restraint against the injudicious production of untestable stories.
That said, I don’t see decisive evidence one way or the other. Pascal Boyer does make an excellent case for the “byproduct” hypothesis, but it is, after all, just an argument that sounds pretty good, without conclusive data. I’m not sure exactly what data would support one hypothesis over the other, and in the end, if you can’t settle the issue the question becomes scientifically uninteresting.
2. A discussion about whether morality grows out of religion, whether it’s culturally inherited, but not through religious teaching, or whether it’s innate. Here I think we can approach an answer, at least in principle. If morality tends to be similar among people of different faiths, despite their different moral teachings (yes, they all share the golden rule, but they differ in many other teachings), or if morality is similar in atheists and the faithful, or if children brought up without religion but exposed to different cultural teachings tend to converge on the same morality, then we have some evidence of an innate “moral grammar.” Too, as philosophers have pointed out since the time of Plato, even the faithful admit of a morality antecedent to religion: if God told you to do something immoral, you wouldn’t automatically consider it moral.
Pyysiänen and Hauser’s work, described in their paper, supports the idea that morality does not derive from religion, but may in fact be innate. This is based on the results of “morality tests” given to people of diverse religious beliefs and cultural backgrounds. (I urge you to take one of these tests, both to provide more data and to see exactly how they come to this conclusion. You can access the test here.) Regardless of background, faith, or upbringing, people tend to answer the questions in the same way.
Now there are two problems with taking this unanimity as evidence for an evolved morality. First, people could simply be exposed to religious morality in their societies, and their internalizing of that morality could lead to consistent answers to Hauser’s questions. Second, uniform morality could simply be a cultural adaptation without genetic roots: people have learned over time what sort of morality leads to a harmonious society, and we’re simply inculcated from birth with that secular morality. Philip Ball raises this point in his Nature commentary:
It’s debatable, however, whether these moral tests are probing religion or culture as a moral-forming agency, because non-believers in a predominantly religious culture are likely to acquire the moral predispositions of the majority. Western culture, say, has long been shaped by Christian morality.
This is a reasonable objection, but I think it’s belied by the data. I urge you to take the morality test, for if you do you’ll see that the kinds of moral dilemmas embodied therein have nothing to do with the kind of morality imparted by faith, nor do they really comport with the kind of moral teachings that we get from our parents, friends, and schools. When you take this test, you might feel, as I did, that your answers are coming out of some intangible but innate wellspring of moral views. (That, of course, is not good evidence for a genetic adaptation!)
I wrote to Pyysiäinen and Hauser about Ball’s caveat, and Ilkka answered, speaking for the both of them (quote given with permission):
As far as we are dealing with people’s intuitive judgments, it is impossible to attribute these to learned religious views. People just do not respond in accordance with religious doctrines when they have no clue about how learned religious doctrines should be applied. I think Marc’s research shows that religious doctrines can only have an effect on especially salient topics such as abortion. When religious commitments differ and people yet produce quite similar judgments, this shows that religious commitments do not have causal power with regard to moral judgment. If religious people make moral judgments similar to those of nonreligious people, then there is no reason to suppose that religion is the driving force. This means that *explicit* religious commitment is not relevant. But, as you suggest, it might still be that religion affects explicitly nonreligious people’s judgments in an implicit way. However, this, then, means that explicit religious commitment is not the crucial factor.
The next decade, I think, will see an explosion of research about whether humans have an innate “moral grammar”. To me, it’s the most interesting part of evolutionary psychology.
But the faitheists must weigh in as well. Over at Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau tries to make a silk purse out of what, for the faithful, is a pig’s ear:
In other words, morality is independent of religion or religiosity. Religion may be a means to pass down certain cultural norms about moral behavior, but there are plenty of other ways to do the same thing. As one theologian of my acquaintance put it, there are many paths to the top of the mountain.
Theists can take comfort in that notion, secure in the thought that their god(s) shaped the world so that everyone was led to moral behavior. Atheists can take this finding as further proof against the refrain of certain religious people that erosion of religious faith will result in erosion of morality. And the rest of us can take comfort in the notion that we’re behaving well, and the reasons why we behave well aren’t that important.
Well, if there are many paths to the top of the mountain, why are the faithful defaming, fighting, and even killing each other on the way? Let’s face it: faitheists and liberal theologians can preach until they’re blue in the face that morality wasn’t dictated by God, but was—as Robert Wright suggests—simply a happy, inevitable and foreseen result of His creation. But that’s not what religious scriptures say, nor what a huge number of the faithful really think. It always amuses me when accommodationists, especially the atheistic ones, tell religious people what they’re supposed to believe, or where they’re supposed to find comfort.
Pyysiäinen, I. and Hauser, M. 2010. The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or by-product? Trends in Cognitive Science, online.