Nick Wade’s new book The Faith Instinct comes out next week. I’ve been reading it for review, and it’s excellent. He seems (I’m only 60 pages in) to plant himself firmly in the religion-is-adaptive camp. This puts him in a minority among people who write about the natural history of religion. Most take religion to be an accidental by-product of cognitive processes—hair-trigger “agency detection” modules etc. Nice to see the other point of view (and group selection, too) get an airing.
I’ve got that book on order from amazon, and am quite looking forward to reading it, given the caliber of Wade’s previous writings.
But, religion is (evolutionarily) adaptive? In the sense that the belief that an Imaginary Friend in the Sky is watching you and can reward or punish you for your behaviors, no doubt it will usually result in people treating each other better than they otherwise would. And that would indeed provide a survival advantage for members of the group, and provide a converse out-group of sinners/infidels, which will further bind the in-group community together, in both war and peace. That is, there is indeed probably something to the “group selection” side of that—where the culture establishes firm group boundaries for gene flow and selection for particular traits, with marriage/reproduction happening primarily within the group—especially if it encourages women to be baby machines (cf. Catholicism, Islam). But of course that doesn’t mean that it’s an environment which anyone should be brainwashed into living in, even if, when you’re looking just at the widely-embraced, watered-down versions of “religion,” it can be “adaptive” in the sense of producing more surviving offspring.
None of that negates the by-product view, but it does provide a valid “other half” which has previously been missing from these one-sided analyses.
And yet, those two halves do not make a whole. Not even half a one. Because, what about esoteric spirituality? What about all mainstream religions beginning as Scientology-like cults, generally with a charismatic leader? (Of course, the fact that Jesus probably never even lived, but was still the “charismatic founder” of Christianity, pretty much blows the whole “charismatic founder” necessity out of the water.) What about yogis retiring to the Himalayas to live their lives in silent meditation, producing no offspring? Is that behavior also “adaptive”? If not, how do you get from a maladaptive, isolating cult, to an adaptive, community-cohesioning religion?
‘Cause Yogananda (et. al.) was right about one thing: Exoteric religions are degenerate, popularized, misunderstood (i.e., symbols being taken literally) versions of esoteric, meditative experiences. What he and others like him didn’t understand is that those experiences themselves are a product of human neurology, and get connected with the natural world via sympathetic-magical similarities in patterns—e.g., the migraine scotoma looks like a jagged lightning strike, or (in its closed-circle form) a snake about to swallow its own tail.
(I hadn’t known this before, but migraine auras can also look a lot like the Northern Lights—e.g., the souls of one’s ancestors, dancing around the North Star. ["The Cree people call this phenomenon the 'Dance of the Spirits.'"] There are some other amazing animations here—all of which are glimpses into the “other world.” That is, there are tribes [e.g., the Jivaro, IIRC] which, quite “reasonably,” take these forms and form constants as being the archetypes upon which the physical world is based.)
You can’t explain where exoteric religion comes from without understanding esoteric spirituality, with techniques of content meditation originating as internalized shamanic rituals (e.g., the believed path of souls along the Milky Way to the North Star—the “still point of the turning celestial world,” and “doorway” to the world beyond—being sympatically imitated in the climbing and descent of a pole, which was then internalized as the simply visualized climbing and descent of the spine to a point/bindu in the brain and the escape of consciousness through the brahmarandhra, cf. in kundalini meditation). And neither the by-product viewpoint nor the adaptive one can begin to account for the specific, widespread symbols which form the core of all religions. For that you need neurology and sympathetic-magical thinking. And I’d bet dollars to donuts that the latter, in particular, gets barely a mention in Wade’s book.
Like this:
Don’t try and tell me that any (esp.) agrarian culture wouldn’t have seen that as an attempt by the spirit of the crescent moon to communicate with the person experiencing the aura.