Usually when the subject of religion crops up in Nature (the
top ranking scientific journal), it’s because some perceived great obscurantist
evil has to be exposed. The impression given has been that there is definitely nothing
good or intellectually wholesome to be found in religion. At best, it’s for the
weak minded. However, recently Nature published the report of a very large
study by Purzycki and colleagues (“Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and
the expansion of human sociality” 2016, Nature 530:327-330). They conducted an
experiment investigating how the beliefs of people in eight different, widely
separated, communities about their god/s affected how they viewed anonymous,
distant, coreligionists. Long (and
interesting) story short, the more you believe your god knows about your
thoughts and motives, and wants you to be nice to fellow believers (even if you
don’t know them and they live far away), and the more you believe that
he/she/it has power to punish you if you don’t do what he/she/it wants, the
more you’ll do what they want. So the effect is that you’re kinder to strangers
you have no genetic links with. Simple “selfish gene” accounts struggle to
explain why humans have come to live in large socially complex cooperative
groups rather than small, selfish, genetically related ones. Religious belief,
which simple observation shows is rampant, seems to provides at least one
explanation.
There’s lots about the experiment that’s really interesting,
and some aspects that seem distinctly odd. It’s not clear to me whether the
label “Christian” has much of a meaning in the Biblical sense, at least in
Western Europe. It seems merely to name a vaguely connected set of cultures
that for a long time have been separated by quite some distance from the person
one of whose titles provides the label. It would be churlish to claim this, and
not accept that there are devout Muslims who feel the same way about the word “muslim”
being applied broad-brush to large swathes of the world. After all, if I claim
that your average IRA man planting bombs and shooting policemen in Northern
Ireland in the 1970’s can’t in any sense be called a Christian without the word
being emptied of usefulness, doesn’t the same logic apply to the “muslims”
trying set up their Caliphate in Syria/Iraq? Yet this is portrayed as being
about Islam and muslims, rather than power and politics. But that aside, there’s
something more interesting about the publishing of this paper.
It’s now apparently intellectually respectable to take religion
seriously. Strange as it may seem, this is a change. It used to be that religion
was an epiphenomenon to be dismissed, or that it was a primitive intellectual parasite
that the advance of science would finally put an end to. Or that it belonged to
humanity’s violent adolescence, a passing phase we would collectively grow out
of. It turns out that as a minimum, the influence of religion, for good or ill,
now seems to be accepted as playing some fundamental roll in the development of
complex societies. None of this means that what is actually believed by the religious
(and that is probably all of us) is true, or even helpful. It’s just that it is
observably deeply ingrained in us all. Indeed that it is probably all
encompassing.
Now of course I see all this from a particular perspective. Because
it’s just what I would expect if in fact we were all the product of (creatures
of) a “moralistic” God, who held us accountable for our actions. A God who had designed
us to know Him, and enjoy Him. Even if we denied Him, these facts of our design
would not disappear; how could they? They’re just brute facts. The way things
are. If we tried to observe the state of things from a standpoint of neutrality
as to whether He (or “they”) were real, these features of how we are made, and
how this worked itself out in our relationships would still be observed.
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