Recovering Evangelicals #203 – the evolution of religious belief and atheism (part 2)
The Dual-Inheritance Model explains so much about the emergence of religion in Homo sapiens millions of years ago, as well as the persistence (growth?) of atheism in a world dominated by religious humans.
This week, we bring you the second half of our conversation with Dr. Will Gervais. We return to the kitchen table where he pulled out a wide variety of ingredients (neurobiological and cultural psychological mechanisms and definitions) one-by-one, and now watch him mix them up together to create a mechanistic soufflé that he calls the Dual-Inheritance Model for religious belief in Homo sapiens. And he shows how this model answers two intertangled evolutionary questions: how Homo sapiens alone became a religious species millions of years ago, and how atheism can still persist today in a world that is completely dominated by religious humans.
The concepts and mechanisms that we learned about from neurobiologists — theory of mind; mind/body dualism; agency and hypersensitive agency detectors; teleology, promiscuous teleology, and intuitive creationism — are still important, but not by themselves enough to explain the emergence of religion. It’s when you add to those the mechanisms and concepts we learned about from cultural psychologists — content- versus context-biased learning; conformist and prestige-biased learning; and, especially, credibility-enhancing displays — that you get something that’s not only exceptionally explanatory, but possibly even predictive!
We learned a lot by making comparisons between beliefs in a variety of well-known characters: Mickey Mouse, the Tooth Fairy, Zeus, Yahweh/YHWH, and Santa Claus. Each one of these has us cranking the dials on Dr. Gervais’s Dual-Inheritance Model in various directions in order to explain the differences between them. And then Dr. Gervais showed how this dual-inheritance model explained why:
- European and Scandinavian countries, who once were the hotbeds of Christian theology for centuries, are now so secular;
- Canada is making its way along the same path, while the U.S. is moving in the opposite direction, toward a hyper-religious society;
- the Shakers and the Latter Day Saints had almost identical starting points, but one quickly flourished while the other went extinct;
- my parent’s generation was hyper-Fundamendalist/Evangelical, my own generation embraced Liberal Christianity, and my children’s generation are “spiritual-but-not-religious.”
We also talked about four very different types of atheists, and how most atheists are not products of reasoning (rationalizing and educating one’s way out of religion and/or into atheism, as the New Atheists would want us to think), but rather products of failing to see enough credibility-enhancing displays (I’m really simplifying here ….. you need to listen to Will explain this).
So this machine is exceptionally explanatory …. but is it predictive? Marx, Durkheim, Freud, Jefferson, Voltaire, the New Atheists and many other widely-recognized and highly-acclaimed thinkers have long been predicting the imminent demise of religion. But this dual-inheritance model predicts that — moving forward into a world full of wealth disparity, racial unrest, political chaos, climate collapse, and imminent pandemics — religion will not only persist, but may even grow!
We highly recommend this book.
As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …
Find out more about Dr. Will Gervais and this book at his website.
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy several of our previous episodes collected thematically under “Human Evolution.”
To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher.
Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted...
Join our private discussion group at Facebook and our YouTube channel.
Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive