The first one up is from Epiphenom: The Science of Religion and Non-Belief, a very interesting blog for those of you interested in this stuff.
Did world religions help bring about complex societies?
This is a long post, but hang on in there because it's worth it. There's a wonderful paper just out in Science that sheds new light on a mystery of human behaviour: why do people sometimes do good deeds even when they gain nothing from it.
Some forms of altruism can be easily explained by evolution, but evolution can't explain why people are sometimes generous to completely anonymous strangers. This new study may have found a solution: it isn't something inherent to our nature, but rather something that we learn to do.
You might have seen something of it already - it's featured on several news wires. I'm not going to go into detail on the headline results, because you can find them elsewhere (Wired magazine has a nice write up, for example).
What interests me most about this study is the link they found to religion. But first, here's a quick overview of what they did, and the major finding. The heart of the study was a standard battery of economic games designed to test their subject's understanding of fairness:Now, the logical thing to do in all these games is to hold on to all your money. You have nothing to gain by sharing (the games are anonymous), and all that happens is that you go home with less. However, what usually happens is that people do share some money (usually not 50%, however!).
- In the 'Dictator Game' Player 1 is given a fixed pool of money (equal to 1 day's wages), and can share as much (or as little) as she likes with Player 2.
- In the 'Ultimatum Game', Player 2 is given the chance to reject offers that she feels are insultingly small.
- In the 'Third Party Punishment Game' a third player is given some money as well, and she can spend some of it to punish Player 1, if she thinks that the offer to Player 2 is too small.
What makes this new study unique is that they've put together data from the world over, including the rather marvellous Hadza (you can see the locations on the map). Then they compared how much people contributed with what kind of society they lived in.
They found that contributions were smallest in societies that did not have a market economy (e.g. hunter gatherers). And they found that punishment was lowest in societies formed of small groups.
This potentially resolves the conundrum! What it suggests is that anonymous altruism is not part of our evolutionary make up, but instead is something that we learn from the society around us. The reason big, complex societies can exist is that we drum it into our kids that they must be fair and kind to strangers (against their natural instincts).
So what's the connection with religion?
This comes from The Guardian UK.
The Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens
Rupert Shortt finds the case for religion expressed with uncharacteristic calm
- The Guardian, Saturday 17 April 2010
Peter Hitchens and his brother Christopher, the Trotskyite turned neoconservative fellow traveller, are often compared to Cain and Abel. The mutual antagonism is in some respects surprising. Both brothers have moved from left to right, though Christopher Hitchens's politics defy simple definition. Peter Hitchens's trajectory has been especially stark. Also a former Trotskyite, he now calls himself a "palaeo-con". On religion, Christopher's atheism has remained implacable. Peter exchanged secularist certainties for the Christian sort in the mid-1980s.
The Rage Against God: Why Faith is the Foundation of Civilisation
(US release date is June 1)
by Peter Hitchens
168pp, Continuum Publishing Corporation, £16.99
Buy The Rage Against God: Why Faith is the Foundation of Civilisation at the Guardian bookshop (UK)This sketch of sibling rivalry accounts for The Rage Against God's unusual structure. It is a memoir, as well as an assault on Christopher Hitchens's popular but poorly argued God Is Not Great (2007). In 2008, the brothers engaged in a public discussion about the coherence of religious belief. Peter reveals that they almost came to blows on that occasion, and that he has vowed never to debate with Christopher under the spotlight again. The Rage Against God is meant to be a grown-up substitute for more shouting matches.
Within limits, the project is a success. Though Hitchens sometimes slips into the strident register characteristic of his Mail on Sunday columns, his new book is largely a sober piece of work. On the whole, it is religion's cultured despisers, not Christian apologists, who now display greater shrillness. As the author argues in his foreword, "the difficulties of the anti-theists begin when they try to engage with anyone who does not agree with them, when their reaction is often a frustrated rage that the rest of us are so stupid. But what if that is not the problem? Their refusal to accept that others might be as intelligent as they, yet disagree, leads them into many snares."
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The Financial Times (UK) reviews a whole series of books. The title links are US ordering info from Amazon, although some of these have not been released yet in the US.
The Extra Mile: A 21st Century Pilgrimage, by Peter Stanford, Continuum £16.99 224 pages, FT Bookshop price: £13.59
Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, by David Lewis-Williams, Thames & Hudson £18.95, 320 pages, FT Bookshop price: £15.15
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, by Rebecca Goldstein, Atlantic £12.99, 399 pages, FT Bookshop price: £10.39
God, Philosophy, Universities, by Alasdair MacIntyre, Continuum £16.99 200 pages, FT Bookshop price: £13.59
An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, by Jurgen Habermas, Polity £12.99, 96 pages
In the spirit of things
By John Cornwell
Published: April 24 2010 01:43 | Last updated: April 24 2010 01:43
Religious leaders across Europe are complaining that the continent has become aggressively secular. In contrast to the United States, where the main religions, not least evangelical Christianity, continue to make their presence felt in society, the European Union has resisted any mention of religion in its constitution. From the outlawing of religious symbols in schools in Spain and Italy, to the recent bid by French lawmakers to ban burkas on the streets of France, Europe appears to be bent on purging religion from the public space. In Britain, a country of religious tolerance, secularist equality laws have created conflicts of conscience by legislating, for example, against religious-based adoption agencies that discriminate against same-sex couples.
Meanwhile, extreme forms of British secularism, of the kind promoted by the popular science writer Richard Dawkins, claim that teaching children religion is a form of abuse – in fact, any uninvited exposure to religion offends human rights. Dawkins and his followers depict religion not only as bunkum but dangerous bunkum as evinced by the savagery of the Spanish Inquisition, the murderous mass violence of 9/11 and the paedophile priests scandal.
But are the goals of militant secularism appropriate for a country such as Britain where religion and spirituality are so pervasive in the cultural heritage? Why should employers object to the sight of a British Airways hostess wearing a tiny cross, as recently reported, when Christian symbols are displayed within our art galleries and museums, and on the exteriors of chapels, churches and cathedrals throughout the land? Is it not, in fact, simply human to be spiritual and religious? Such questions are raised in a clutch of books, ranging across a variety of religious themes, ancient and modern.
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From The Wall Street Journal.
Read more.Why Belief in God Is Innate
By MICHAEL SHERMER
According to Oxford University Press's "World Christian Encyclopedia," 84% of the world's population belongs to some form of organized religion. That equals 5.7 billion people who belong to about 10,000 distinct religions, each of which may be further subdivided and classified. Christians, for example, may be apportioned among over 33,000 different denominations. Among the many binomial designations granted our species (Homo sapiens, Homo ludens, Homo economicus), a strong case could be made for Homo religiosus. And Americans are among the most religious members of the species. A 2007 Pew Forum survey of over 35,000 Americans found the following percentages of belief:
God or a universal spirit 92%
Heaven 74%
Hell 59%
Scripture is word of God 63%
Miracles 79%
So powerful is the belief that there must be something else out there that even 21% of those who identified themselves as atheists and 55% of those who identified themselves as agnostics expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit.
Why do so many people believe in God?
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From The National Catholic Register, a review/rejection of God's Brain by Lionel Tiger and Michael McGuire. The review is interesting in its argument against the premises of the book.
Long Before ‘Brainsoothing,’ God Created Serotonin
by Donald DeMarco , Register correspondent
Thursday, Apr 01, 2010 2:35 PMYet another apologia for atheism is enjoying media hype and broad public attention. The latest entry in the genre, God’s Brain (released by Prometheus Books in March), does not do away with God entirely. Rather, it miniaturizes him into a chemical produced by the brain. God is real, but he is a brain secretion.
According to authors Lionel Tiger, an anthropologist, and Michael McGuire, a psychiatrist, human beings invented God long ago as a way of soothing themselves, given the troubling realization that one day they will die. Death, it seems, is too horrible to bear. In self-defense, man created God, together with the comforting thought of an afterlife and religious stories that explained life and the surrounding world.
These consoling myths release serotonin, a brain chemical that acts as a natural stress reliever. The prospect of death gives us “brainpain,” which serotonin alleviates by “brainsoothing.” Thus the brain creates God and religion, and then feeds on its creation to offer comfort. Such a stark realization, of course, should send us back to a primitive state of severe anxiety. The authors, however, do not seem to mind discrediting their readers’ only antidote to the meaninglessness of existence.
Yet they do not want us to be weaned from serotonin or other chemicals that have a calming effect on our nervous system. “While people may not be going to church,” they write, “they are going to the medicine cabinet.” We need these illusions, they inform us.
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This review of Conceiving God: the Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, by David Lewis-Williams, comes from New Statesman (UK).Conceiving God: the Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion
By David Lewis-Williams
Reviewed by A C Grayling - 01 April 2010
Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs.
Are direct arguments against religious beliefs likely to dissuade their votaries? The anecdotal evidence seems to suggest not; robust attacks by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it is said, only annoy the faithful and make them dig further in.
I am not so sure about this. In my experience, waverers and Sunday-only observers can find forthright challenges to religious pretensions a relief and a liberation. They give them the reason, sometimes the courage, to abandon those shreds of early-acquired religious habit that cling around their ankles and trip them up.
Still, Darwin and David Lewis-Williams have a point in thinking, as the former put it, that "direct arguments against [religion] produce hardly any effect on the public, and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science". In the preface to this book, Lewis-Williams says that he intends to follow Darwin's strategy, seeking to achieve by flanking manoeuvres what Dawkins and Hitchens attempt by cavalry charge.
Actually Lewis-Williams does both. There is quite a lot of galloping straight at the opposition with flashing sabre. But the main thrust of the book is incremental: a well-informed and steady march through the history of religion and its conflict with science, reprising what the author describes as the evolution of his own thought about these matters.
OK, then, that should supply a couple of weeks of interesting reading.
by Ronald Aronson 
