One of the great intellectual battles of modern times is between evolution and religion. Until now, they have been considered completely irreconcilable theories of origin and existence. David Sloan Wilson's "Darwin's Cathedral" takes the radical step of joining the two, in the process proposing an evolutionary theory of religion that shakes both evolutionary biology and social theory at their foundations. The key, argues Wilson, is to think of society as an organism, an old idea that has received new life based on recent developments in evolutionary biology. If society is an organism, can we then think of morality and religion as biologically and culturally evolved adaptations that enable human groups to function as single units rather than mere collections of individuals? Wilson brings a variety of evidence to bear on this question, from both the biological and social sciences. From Calvinism in 16th-century Geneva to Balinese water temples, from hunter-gatherer societies to urban America, Wilson demonstrates how religions have enabled people to achieve by collective action what they never could do alone. He also includes a chapter considering forgiveness from an evolutionary perspective and concludes by discussing how all social organizations, even science, could benefit by incoporating elements of religion. Religious believers often compare their communities to single organisms and even to insect colonies. Astoundingly, Wilson shows that they might be literally correct. Intended for any educated reader, "Darwin's Cathedral" should change forever the way we view the relations among evolution, religion and human society.

Darwin's Cathedral

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual founda- tions of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsy- chology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus en- abling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or "agency detector," whose proper (naturally selected) domain encompasses animate objects rele- vant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors, and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, and faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order. However, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious be- liefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.

/pdf/religion-s-evolutionary-landscape-counterintuition-1fyl3dvds8.pdf

Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion

Religion as a hard-to-fake sign of commitment.

In this paper I explore the psychology of ritual performance and present a simple graphical model that clarifies several issues in William Irons’s theory of religion as a “hard-to-fake” sign of commitment. Irons posits that religious behaviors or rituals serve as costly signals of an individual’s commitment to a religious group. Increased commitment among members of a religious group may facilitate intra-group cooperation, which is argued to be the primary adaptive benefit of religion. Here I propose a proximate explanation for how individuals are able to pay the short-term costs of ritual performance to achieve the long-term fitness benefits offered by religious groups. The model addresses three significant problems raised by Irons’s theory. First, the model explains why potential free-riders do not join religious groups even when there are significant net benefits that members of religious groups can achieve. Second, the model clarifies how costly a ritual must be to achieve stability and prevent potential free-riders from joining the religious group. Third, the model suggests why religious groups may require adherents to perform private rituals that are not observed by others. Several hypotheses generated from the model are also discussed.

Why aren't we all hutterites? : Costly signaling theory and religious behavior.

https://media.sabda.org/alkitab-2/Religion-Online.org%20Books/Barbour,%20Ian%20-%20Religion%20in%20an%20Age%20of%20Science.pdf

Religion in an Age of Science

The human factor : evolution, culture, and religion

Technology is a mirror that reflects human nature and intentions: (1) we want certain things done and we want tools to do those things; (2) we are finite, frail, and mortal; (3) we create technology in order to bring alternative worlds into being; (4) we do not know why we create or what values should guide us. Imagination is central to technology. Human nature and human freedom are brought into focus when we reflect on the central role of imagination in technology.

Technology and Human Becoming

In what is called its ‘upper case’ form, transhumanism (TH) projects a fantastical posthuman existence akin to science fiction, but in its ‘lower case’ form it permeates our American culture. TH is expressed in the conviction that we need not settle for our birth-nature; we can alter that nature in ways that we deem desirable. As such, TH represents a fundamental challenge to our understanding of human nature, and in particular what God has created us to become. The encounter with TH is more than an ethical challenge; it is an encounter with the numinous.

The Animal that Aspires to be an Angel: The Challenge of Transhumanism

It is quite impossible to consider human nature within an evolutionary perspective ifwe leapfrog over culture and establish some direct relation between cosmic an human evolution without taking culture into consideration. Culture holds a significant place within the structures of nature, as the epic of evolution portrays nature-cosmic, physical, and biological. Religion emerges within culture, and it plays a role in organizing the human consciousness and in generating the stories, rituals, and morality that constitute the organization of consciousness. Since organization of consciousness determines how culture is conducted, and since we face a global crisis today because of the ways we are conducting our culture, religion's role is critical for the future of culture. Wherever it is attempted, whether in terms of traditional or posttraditional modes, the fashioning of adequate worldviews, rituals, and morality is an essentially religious activity. For both traditional and posttraditional modes, the task is to weave structures of meaning with the sciences of evolution so as to effect the most suitable organization of consciousness.

The Spiritual Task of Religion in Culture: An Evolutionary Perspective

. One of the basic intentions of theology is to extend the explanatory function of the community's faith beyond the community to the realm of wider human experience. In this sense, theology may be called “scientific,’and it will benefit from conforming as much as possible to the characteristics of scientific theory formation. Using the work of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos as a guide, the following theological theory is proposed: Homo sapiens is God's created co-creator, whose purpose is the stretching/enabling of the systems of nature so that they can participate in Gods purposes in the mode of freedom. It is argued that this research program produces new knowledge in relating the Christian faith to scientific views of human being as comprised of both genes and cultures to a theory of technological civilization; to freedom, determinism, and natural selection; and to credible notions of human purpose. Traditional Christian doctrines are related to this research program.

Philip Hefner

Papers

The human factor : evolution, culture, and religion

Technology and Human Becoming

The Animal that Aspires to be an Angel: The Challenge of Transhumanism

The Spiritual Task of Religion in Culture: An Evolutionary Perspective

Theology's truth and scientific formulation