New computer program shows how faith may have evolved

c. 2008 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Religion, it seems, has always depended on the kindness of strangers. Like Blanche DuBois, the Southern belle of Tennessee Williams’ play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” faith is beset by a world that often tramples on imagination and rewards strict rationality. Fate led DuBois to a mental hospital, but religion […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Religion, it seems, has always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Like Blanche DuBois, the Southern belle of Tennessee Williams’ play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” faith is beset by a world that often tramples on imagination and rewards strict rationality.


Fate led DuBois to a mental hospital, but religion has thrived for milliennia in every known culture, anthropologists say. For neo-Darwinists, looking at it from a strictly evolutionary standpoint, that poses a puzzle.

Why, for example, would early humankind sacrifice valuable meat to an unseen god, or practice dangerous forms of ritual mutilation? It might be required by religious faith, but it’s a risky way to spend limited time and resources.

So how did religion pass through the narrow gate of natural selection?

Anthropologist James W. Dow thinks he has an answer: Religion, he says, is actually saved by non-believers.

And he’s got a groundbreaking computer program, dubbed “evogod,” to prove it.

Dow, a professor emeritus at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., devoted much of his career to studying religion in Mexico. But he’s also a trained mathematician.

Evogod uses mathematical models to simulate a pre-literate culture, when the brain was undergoing most of its evolution, Dow says. Scholars often use such models to study human behavior, such as how crowds react under certain circumstances.

Dow populated his simulated society with two groups of people: one that professed a belief in things unseen and unverifiable (think: spirits, gods, etc.), and another that did not. Dow assumes religious faith is a hereditary trait.

In the beginning of the simulation, the groups who talked about “unreal” things, as Dow terms it, died out every time. Bottom line: They weren’t paying enough attention to their environment to survive.

Yet when the program was tweaked and realists began to help the imaginative, believers survived. In other words, a “realist” can provide vital information about the environment (“Hey, beware of the lion’s den over there”) to help the believers survive.


Evogod doesn’t explain why they would give such helpful information, but “it tells us that if they do give such benefits, the biological evolution of religious behavior can occur,” Dow said.

Dow’s study has been greeted as a godsend in the ongoing quest to explain how religion evolved.

Richard Sosis, a University of Connecticut anthropologist, counts himself among the evolutionists. And he has a theory about why the non-religious would help believers out.

Religion can foster a sense of solidarity and cooperation, which helps a culture survive, according to social scientists.

When believers commit to certain “costly” behaviors, it sends a positive signal to the rest of society. Or, as Dow puts it, “If a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god, then people feel like they’re willing to sacrifice for the community.”

For example, when we see ultra-Orthodox Jews praying beneath the hot Middle East sun all day by the Western Wall, we think: Wow, they are really dedicated to something other than themselves, that’s admirable.


Sosis gives another example: New York City couples will sometimes seek Mormon nannies by advertising in Utah newspapers. They know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints frowns upon smoking, drinking and carousing. So they figure Mormons must be good baby-sitters.

“The whole point is there’s something trustworthy about Mormons,” Sosis says.

But not everyone agrees with an evolutionary approach to religion. Some scholars, such as Luther H. Martin of the University of Vermont, think religion is a byproduct of brain functions that evolved for other purposes.

If scholars can’t even agree on what defines “religion,” he says, it makes little sense to look for it in genes. “It’s difficult to know what’s evolving, what’s being talked about,” Martin says.

And Georgetown University theologian John F. Haught says, “Dow’s paper is one more attempt to provide a purely naturalistic explanation of religion.”

“I accept Darwinian evolution,” he says, “I have no doubt that religion can be adaptive, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Its truth lies at a level of depth that science cannot grasp.”

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Of course, many other Americans don’t think religion _ or any part of God’s creation _ evolved at all. Dow says his paper “was not intended as an argument for atheism.”


“A scientific view of religion can be useful,” he says. “It need not be a substitute for religion, which has many valuable perspectives, especially on human life.”

KRE/PH END BURKE

800 words, with optional trim to 725

Photos of James W. Dow and ultra-Orthodox Jews at the Western Wall are available via https://religionnews.com _ search by “Western Wall.”)

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