In The Chronicle of Higher Education Tom Bartlett looks at attempts by evolutionary biologists to move beyond neo-atheist claptrap and consider the question of the role religion plays in the process of human evolutionary development. The neo-atheists, such as Dawkins and company, of course, simply believe religion is bad, full stop:
The implication—that religion is basically malevolent, that it "poisons everything," in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens—is a standard assertion of the New Atheists. Their argument isn't just that there probably is no God, or that intelligent design is laughable bunk, or that the Bible is far from inerrant. It's that religion is obviously bad for human beings, condemning them to ignorance, subservience, and endless conflict, and we would be better off without it.
But would we?
Before you can know for sure, you have to figure out what religion does for us in the first place. That's exactly what a loosely affiliated group of scholars in fields including biology, anthropology, and psychology are working on. They're applying evolutionary theory to the study of religion in order to discover whether or not it strengthens societies, makes them more successful, more cooperative, kinder. The scholars, many of them atheists themselves, generally look askance at the rise of New Atheism, calling its proponents ignorant, fundamentalist, and worst of all, unscientific. Dawkins and company have been no more charitable in return.
There are of course many dimensions to the conversation about the social and biological utility of religion, and the article considers some of the prominant theorists on the biological front. But the idea that religion serves an important social function, irrespective of the truth of its metaphysical claims, is by no means a new theory, and is given sociological form in the work of Max Weber and Emil Durkheim and their followers.
The article is well worth reading in its entirely, if for no other reason than to get a sense of both what these scientists are arguing about the evolution of religion, and how poorly they've been received by some of their fellow evolutionary biologists.
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