God Found! He's in your genes

The Evolution of the God Gene

There have been a couple of shots-across-the-bow directed at the neo-Atheists and others who delight in kneeling at the altar of reason. The above article points up the growing evidence that religion and spirituality have imparted an evolutionary advantage to our species:

...This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

Here's the part that will sting the biological determinists (oops, I mean neo-Atheists):

...For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

But don't feel so self assured, devout monotheists:

...For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.

Now Pagans, Rejoice :

...But the evolutionary perspective on religion does not necessarily threaten the central position of either side. That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods...

Carl Sagan was right when he said in "Cosmos" that the interior of the cell nucleus housed the 'holy of holies'. But I've quoted too much from this excellent article by Nicholas Wade. Please give it a read. There's also Karen Armstrong's book "The Case for God":

...The time, in other words, is ripe for a book like “The Case for God,” which wraps a rebuke to the more militant sort of atheism in an engaging survey of Western religious thought. Karen Armstrong, a former nun turned prolific popular historian, wants to rescue the idea of God from its cultured despisers and its more literal-minded adherents alike. To that end, she doesn’t just argue that her preferred approach to religion — which emphasizes the pursuit of an unknowable Deity, rather than the quest for theological correctness — is compatible with a liberal, scientific, technologically advanced society...

Amen! Er, I mean--Amon! Armstrong argues for a point of view which many Pagans are familiar with (and something I've discussed here and on other blogs):

...Both modern believers and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have come to understand religion primarily as a set of propositions to be assented to, or a catalog of specific facts about the nature of God, the world and human life. But this approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas...These and other thinkers, she writes, understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine...

What we do, or how we act, is more important than what we believe.

EO Wilson, of Ants and Humans

Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans

Harvard entomologist EO Wilson just celebrated his birthday. He is in his 80's, yet does not shy away from a fight, although he rarely goes looking for one. But this is an exception:

...The issue is the level at which evolution operates. Many evolutionary biologists have been persuaded, by works like “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins, that the gene is the only level at which natural selection acts. Dr. Wilson, changing his mind because of new data about the genetics of ant colonies, now believes that natural selection operates at many levels, including at the level of a social group....

Soon after Wilson and co-author David Sloan Wilson published this work, they were attacked by Richard Dawkins:

...Their statement evoked a heated response from Dr. Dawkins in New Scientist; he accused them of lying on a minor point and demanded an apology...

You know you must be on the right track, when you illicit personal attacks from Atheist front-man Dawkins! Wilson's hypothesis basically boils down to this:

...It is through multilevel or group-level selection — favoring the survival of one group of organisms over another — that evolution has in Dr. Wilson’s view brought into being the many essential genes that benefit the group at the individual’s expense. In humans, these may include genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even religious behavior. Such traits are difficult to account for, though not impossible, on the view that natural selection favors only behaviors that help the individual to survive and leave more children...

This flies in the face of "selfish gene" advocates (like Dawkins) who at best feel religion and spirituality are archaic traits of no use today (such as our appendix), or at worst dangerous virus-like mutations which need to be immunized against.

“...Groups with men of quality — brave, strong, innovative, smart and altruistic — would tend to prevail, as Darwin said, over those groups that do not have those qualities so well developed,” Dr. Wilson said...“I believe that deep in their heart everyone working on social insects is aware that the selection that created them is multilevel selection,” Dr. Wilson said...

Don't you love that a fellow who studies ants (well, admittedly he is the world's leading authority on the critters) can cause such a ruckus!

I always encourage any new Pagan or Wiccan to immerse themselves in the study of nature. Pick some '...ology' and read all you can on it. Birding is great. So is gardening. How 'bout rocks and minerals? But in my humble opinion, the two most valuable fields to embrace are entomology and astronomy. And both are open to people of limited funds and time, and amateurs are welcome and can even make contributions.

Atheists can dish it out, but can they take it?

Atheism as a Stealth Religion II: Let's Get Real

An article by David Sloan, warning his brethren that some of the shrill dialog generated by "The New" atheists sounds dangerously close to religious pontification. Not only that, it's cult-like:

...can there be any doubt that authors such as Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and Sam Harris are trying to start a movement? They even have their own label -- "The Brights", which thankfully seems to be going nowhere...

I guess being a "Bright" implies being in the outs means you are a "Dullard"! Kudos for coming up with a nick that makes you sound cute and smart, yet implies everyone else is dumb. I suppose it's easy to get intoxicated when you delude yourself into thinking truth is on your side, yet Sloan seems more concerned with atheism becoming a'stealth religion':

...I clearly define a stealth religion as any belief system that distorts the facts of the real world (yes, there is a real world out there, and it does not include people sitting on clouds) for the purpose of motivating a given suite of behaviors. Beliefs in supernatural agents are a particular distortion of factual reality and I want to broaden the discussion to include all distortions of factual reality...

In other words, the ends don't justify the means? Those are words you don't hear coming from a Neo-con too often. Further on:

...Sinclair Lewis (recently quoted by presidential candidate Ron Paul) said "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag carrying a cross." To that we can add "and claiming to be supported by science and reason." No, I am not accusing the New Atheists of having a hidden fascist agenda, but I am making the reasonable point that all forms of authority are vulnerable to abuse, as the sorry history of Social Darwinism attests. We need to be suspicious about arguments cloaked in all forms of authority...

Many in the recent crop of atheists make fantastical claims, for which there is scant evidence. My favorite is the "religion is a virus" clap-trap spouted by Dawkins and others and that ultimately, civilization would be better off if religion went the way of the dinosaur. But they offer no proof of this. Even worse, when challenged, they make claims of special powers! Only they have the ability to perceive reality. Their ideas and opinions are not--heaven forbid--BELIEFS. They are based some acid test of for objective reality which only they can perform. Anyone who offers a contrary opinion is contaminated by 'magical thinking' and is a danger to the human race.

As pointed out by some of the commenters to the piece, history is littered with failed social experiments of those who claimed the mantle of reason and science. One comment about the article was to the point (by 'Bateman'):

"...there is a long history of creeds claiming to be wholly "scientific" and rational that lend themselves to Utopian, authoritarian and/or cultic tendencies: the Cult of Reason, dialectical materialism, Haeckel's Monism, Rand's Objectivism, Fabianism, the Technocracy movement, transhumanism. While they are far fewer in number (and in number of adherents) the ideological variety of atheistic/scientific faiths rivals that of the theistic/supernatural faiths...

I'm glad criticisms such as these are coming from Atheists within the movement. It's healthy.

Ritual and the Family

Study: Religion is Good for Kids

Maybe Richard Dawkins feels religious upbringing for children is tantamount to child abuse, but here's a study by sociologist John Bartkowski that points to a rather different conclusion:

...Kids with religious parents are better behaved and adjusted than other children, according to a new study that is the first to look at the effects of religion on young child development.The kids whose parents regularly attended religious services—especially when both parents did so frequently—and talked with their kids about religion were rated by both parents and teachers as having better self-control, social skills and approaches to learning than kids with non-religious parents...

That's amazing enough, but here's the clincher:

...But when parents argued frequently about religion, the children were more likely to have problems. “Religion can hurt if faith is a source of conflict or tension in the family,” Bartkowski noted...

So maybe some bestselling atheists got it backwards: religion is not the cause so much societal strife, but families and cultures undergoing angst, strife, or transition can use religion as just one more club to beat each other up with.

Science and Religion for 2007

Cosmic resolutions for 2007

A great opinion piece by Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, past chairman of the astronomy department at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington:

...This year Dawkins, in "The God Delusion," argued for replacing righteousness with a blend of Darwinian personal ethos and rational calculation. Unfortunately, he makes his case while chastising the faithful with boundless hubris. His indifferent reductionist philosophy peremptorily discards the morality of religion. Dawkins' book tries to quantify human attitudes and rationalize human spirit, but in so doing it leaves the creation without an ethical context, and thoughtful religious believers dismayed if not a bit bewildered...

I think this is the problem many people have with Dawkins. But I can understand why so many scientist are upset. They have had to endure years of dim witted, yet rather effective, attacks by members of the anti-science and Theocon crowd. In some ways, it's good to see scientists finally goaded into action. Yet the sharpness of Dawkin's attacks are reminiscent of an overly intelligent enraged child, in love with his words and careless of who he hurts. There are many religious and spiritual people who embrace the findings of science. They don't like what the Theocons and Absolutists are doing--any more than scientists do! To pretend otherwise denies some wonderful and powerful allies, who have considerable experience in this fight. Smith goes on:

...it is possible to appreciate both the insights of religion and the lessons of science... Their perspectives, while different, are not necessarily contradictory. Their moral imperatives can enrich and motivate both rational and righteous behavior...

Smith is right. I find the dialog of scientists such as the entomologist E. O. Wilson to be much more helpful than Dawkins. Wilson explores this technique in "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth", an effort to get the two camps to join forces in fighting our common enemies. Smith concludes:

...In 2007, I hope that science and religion can cooperate, not clash, to solve social problems. I hope we listen with tolerance to opposing opinions, and replace hostile, defensive rhetoric with thoughtful analyses. And, not least, we need to become better informed about our marvelous, blessed world...

What a nice wish for the coming New Year!