Atheism is a disbelief in Gods. "The New Atheism" refers to an exceptionally active group of atheists centered around the work of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens. All four are distinguished intellectuals and scientists. Dawkins and Dennett are especially known as interpreters of evolution for the general public. Legions have become turned on to evolutionary science through their work.
Evolutionary Religious Studies (ERS) is the scholarly study of religion from an evolutionary perspective. Religion has been studied from other scholarly perspectives for centuries. Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and James George Frazier were early scholars of religion. Their goal was to explain religion as a purely human phenomenon, in the same way that scholars try to explain any other human phenomenon, such as government or warfare. This is in contrast to theologians, who are more likely to function as religious believers. A few religious scholars try to show that divine interventions actually happen, but the vast majority subscribe to a position known as methodological naturalism, which restricts explanations to naturalistic causes.
ERS is therefore one of the new kids on the block as far as religious studies is concerned. Its bold claim is that modern evolutionary science can go beyond the many other scholarly perspectives in shedding light on the nature of religion. While evolution was never entirely absent as a perspective, the modern version became prominent at the beginning of the 21st century with books such as Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer, In Gods We Trust by Scott Atran, and my own Darwin's Cathedral. The field has burgeoned since then; a partial list of prominent names includes Jesse Bering, Michael Blume (ETVOL'S religious editor), Joseph Bulbulia, Joseph Henrich, Dominic Johnson, Ara Norenzayan, Anthony Slingerland, Richard Sosis, and Harvey Whitehouse. If they are not yet household names, they should be for any household interested in religion from a scholarly perspective.
What is the relationship between the New Atheism and ERS? This question is surprisingly complex and needs to be answered in at least three steps.
Step 1: They are alike in their rejection of the "actively intervening god" hypothesis. I am choosing my words carefully here. The concept of supernatural agents that actively intervene in the laws of nature and affairs of people is a perfectly good scientific hypothesis that occupied center stage for centuries. It was rejected so thoroughly that it is no longer taken seriously in scientific circles, although anyone who wishes to spend their money testing it yet again is welcome to do so. The New Atheists are deeply convinced about the nonexistence of actively intervening gods. Religious scholars don't shout their convictions from the rooftops, but their adherence to methodological naturalism amounts to the same thing. Finally, rejecting the "actively intervening god" hypothesis says nothing about other conceptions of divinity and religion, which need to be evaluated on their own terms.
Step 2: As a scholarly discipline, ERS is agnostic about what gets done with the knowledge that is created. The New Atheism is oriented toward action. As someone who is trying to put evolutionary science to practical use for many topics, I regard activism as a good thing, as long as it remains ethically and scientifically accountable. I therefore support some aspects of the New Atheist agenda, such as the need to destigmatize atheism. It's a shame that an atheist doesn't stand a chance of being elected to a public office in America, for example.
Step 3: Whenever New Atheists make claims about religion as a human phenomenon, their claims should respect the authority of empirical evidence. Insofar as the new discipline of ERS has added to empirical knowledge of religion, the New Atheists should be paying close attention to ERS. This is especially true for Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, whose names are so closely associated with evolution.
Step 3 should go without saying and I doubt that anyone would disagree with it in principle. Yet, by my assessment, there is a serious disconnect between the New Atheism and ERS at the level of Step 3. I will illustrate with a single example involving Richard Dawkins, but my point is more general and can be empirically tested, as I will also attempt to show.
In a widely viewed video on YouTube, Richard Dawkins is asked by a member of a packed audience to comment on religion as a product of evolution and what its evolutionary advantage might be. In reply, he gives a mini-lecture on the concept of byproducts -- traits that are not advantageous by themselves but nevertheless evolve by being connected to other traits -- using moths flying into flames as a biological example. Their suicidal behavior is obviously not adaptive by itself, but nevertheless persists because moths are adapted to navigate by orienting toward celestial light sources at optical infinity. Dawkins then states his opinion that religion is analogous to self-immolation by moths, providing the example of children who evolved to learn uncritically from their elders (the adaptation), who are then vulnerable to "stupid advice" such as "sacrifice a mongoose's kidneys at the time of the full moon or the crops will fail" (the maladaptive byproduct).
This is Dawkins at his best, explaining evolutionary concepts in a way that anyone can understand. The problem is that the byproduct hypothesis is only one of six major evolutionary hypotheses that can explain any given aspect of religion. The others explain religion as an adaptation to the current environment (at the group level, the individual level, or only for the cultural trait as a parasite), as an adaptation to past environments that has become mismatched to its current environment, or as a neutral product of drift.
In addition, these hypotheses need to be addressed separately for genetic and cultural evolution. To pick a simple example, our tendency to be altruistic toward genetic relatives is an ancient adaptation found in many species that evolved without reference to religion. The way that it became incorporated into religions during cultural evolution can potentially be explained by any one of the six hypotheses, alone or in combination. One possibility is that kinship terminology became a mechanism for promoting cooperation among non-relatives that evolved by cultural group selection. To make matters even more complex, genetic and cultural evolution are intertwined. Genetic evolution could modify our willingness to treat non-relatives as kin when kinship terminology is invoked, for example.
The whole point of the field of ERS is to answer these questions, using the same toolkit of theoretical and empirical methods that evolutionists apply to other human-related subjects and non-human species. The question is, when Dawkins was asked to comment on religion as a product of evolution, how well did his answer reflect what is currently known, based on the hard work of Dawkins' evolutionist colleagues? Is it indeed the current state of knowledge that religion is like a moth to flame and results primarily in silly counterproductive behaviors? Or did Dawkins distort what is currently known about religion as a product of evolution, either knowingly or unknowingly?
At this point, it is important to leave Dawkins and pose the same questions for the New Atheism movement as a whole. In general, whenever people associated with the movement comment on religion as a human phenomenon (step 3), do they respect the authority of empirical evidence to the best of our current knowledge? Or do they bias their portrayal of religion, selectively emphasizing scientific hypotheses that, if true, would promote their activist objectives (step 2)?
The answers to these questions make the difference between a legitimate science-based activist agenda and an ideology that distorts facts to serve its narrow purpose (knowingly or unknowingly). It has been said that almost any position can be supported by selectively quoting the bible. It is equally true that almost any position can be supported by selectively quoting scientific hypotheses. The only thing that distinguishes science from religion, in this regard, is if scientists and intellectuals restrict themselves to the hypotheses that have received empirical support.
By my reckoning, religious meaning systems are far more adaptive than Dawkins acknowledged in his reply to the audience member's question. One of the best recent reviews, by Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich, is titled "The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions." This article shows how byproduct explanations have become interwoven with adaptationist explanations in the ERS literature, in contrast to the first books that were published a decade ago. I also invite readers of this article to view my recent videocast with Joseph Henrich on the cultural evolution of food taboos on the island of Fiji. These taboos could have been ignorant superstitions of the "sacrifice a mongoose's kidney..." variety, but the data told a different and more interesting story.
My assessment of the disconnect between ERS and the New Atheism movement with respect to step 3 is not based on a systematic review of the New Atheism literature -- but such a review could be conducted and I strongly encourage someone with the time and interest to do it. No one would be happier than me to discover that the New Atheists are basing their activist agenda on the best current knowledge of religion as a human phenomenon. But if this is not the case -- if New Atheists are portraying religion any way they please by selectively quoting scientific hypotheses -- then they're no better than bible thumpers.
I close this essay by countering an argument that some New Atheists have made in the past; that they are only concerned with steps 1 and 2, which do not depend upon knowledge of religion as a human phenomenon (step 3). One way to counter this argument is by imagining what would happen if Dawkins gave an answer to the audience member's question more in line with the current ERS literature. What if he had said that religions are fundamentally about the creation and organization of prosocial communities? That all people require a cultural meaning system to organize their experience, receiving environmental information as input and resulting in effective action as output? That all cultural meaning systems confront a complex tradeoff between the factual content of a given belief and its effect upon action? That secular meaning systems often depart from factual reality in their own ways? The effect upon the audience would have been very different than when they were told that religion is like a moth immolating itself or like a child mindlessly being fed useless information.
Saying that the New Atheist movement can proceed on the basis of steps 1 and 2 without reference to step 3 is like saying that it can be totally detached from factual reality when it comes to the nature of religion. Let us all hope that this is not the case.
Follow David Sloan Wilson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/David_S_Wilson
Alan Jones: On Missing Christopher Hitchens
Like most theists, the author simply doesn't get that atheism is simply no belief in the supernatural, such as "gods". Atheists are not out to bring down anyone's religion. EXCEPT where it continues, ever more, to collide with our secular government by trying to remove human and constitutional rights from the rest of us. The religious FORCE us to fight back, as we would fight any other political group trying to do the same.
Atheists are people who do not believe in gods, but in personal responsibility to their fellow humans and the Earth. We are not a "group" or any kind of organization. We do not lobby for tax exemptions or gambling rights as theists do. We do not have "leaders" any more than people who prefer chocolate over vanilla do.
Aside from this, and more, the author knows so little about science that he doesn't even know what a scientific hypothesis is.
Besides, there are whole bunches of people in the world who have absolutely NO interest in your beliefs, much less in studying them. Religion is simply boring and irrelevant to us. Get over yourselves, religious folks. We don't care what you believe. Why can't you reciprocate?
"Aside from this, and more, the author knows so little about science that he doesn't even know what a scientific hypothesis is."
David Sloan Wilson is a working evolutionary biologist that has made substantive contributions to the field particularly with respect to multi-level selectional models.
But for me, and many others, nine eleven really was the crossing of the line, which sparked many atheists, including myself to finally say ok, we cannot be silent anymore, The aggressive rise in opposition to gays, denial of science, the strategic attempts and infiltration of various school boards religious people to get their brand of religion taught in schools.
these,among many other things, have really been the last straw, and now many atheists, are finally saying enough. Many former "agnostics" are finally shedding that mask.
the new atheist movements main goal, and looking at the numbers a successful one, isn't to destroy religion, which religion does a remarkable job of on it's own since it is inherently cannibalistic, but to allow atheists and non-believers in the closet to see they aren't alone, that we are a growing number, and finallyconfront the SOURCE of where nine eleven, the opposition to equal marriage rights, the denial of science, the oppression of women, the torture of children and their genitalia, and the manslaughter of children from medical neglect.... Religion. Confronting religion with empirical evidence that it's human phenomena does not prevent the above.
Nothing that is said by atheists today is any different from what was being said by these atheists in the 1800's.
I think it's in response to religious people feeling emboldened and turning up the noise of their beliefs and having undue influence on government. They forced our hand, and now they are seriously threatened by our bold response. And it makes me feel good.
IMO what is new is 1) prominent intellectuals are being vocal about atheism and are advocating a positive alternative view of the world based on science 2) scientists are rejecting the "Non-Overlapping Magisteria" idea promoted by Stephen J. Gould -- the idea that science does its thing and religion does its thing and that neither can criticize the other 3) atheism is simply becoming a lot more popular, no longer something that only a small fringe believe in but significant numbers that are in the same ball park as major religions.
At the level of observations, we know that we have free will. This causes us to ask: What is the relationship between our self and our body? The naturalistic hypothesis is that free will is an illusion, all that exists is the body. The supernatural hypothesis is that free will is a mystery. The naturalistic hypothesis has no evidence supporting it. The supernatural hypothesis is judged to be true by rational people. The idea of studying religion with only natural causes makes no sense to me.
The naturalistic thesis has all the evidence supporting it. Everything is made of materials, particles, including the brain.
The supernaturalists are demanding special metaphysical realms and souls and minds exist without providing any account of how they exist or how they work.
Folk psychology supports the supernaturalists' libertarian thesis, but that sort of dualism was rejected handily even during Descartes time. Now, modern neuroscientists and philosophers largely reject the supernaturalist dualist and libertarian theses (about mind/body and free will, respectively).
There is no evidence at all for dualism. There is a little bit more evidence for the theory that everything is made of matter or materials, since there is no such thing as a spiritual substance. There is even more evidence for idealism, the theory that the material world doesn’t exist. But the most amount of evidence supports the theory that the human mind is a mystery. In other words, humans are embodied spirits.
I'm an atheist. I've been one since I was a kid. I agree with a lot of what the "new atheists" say but I also agree with your assessment about the disconnect. Its even stronger with the people who comment on sites like this and Dawkins' site. I regularly see screeds about how totally useless religion is and how anyone who doesn't realize that religion is totally useless is (one of the favorite new atheist curse words) an accommodationist.
Even a fairly shallow honest look at history shows that religion has and still does give people serious benefits. (Which is not at all to say I think its an overall good thing much less true) Its rather pathetic that so many new atheists who claim to believe in science end up losing all their objectivity and start to reason more or less like fundamentalists themselves when looking at religion.
What a straw man. I never hear 'hypotheses' ever used to support anything by atheists. This is so much BS, David Sloan Wilson, and I think you need some REAL EMPIRICAL evidence, mister, and not an anecdotal report at that. Personally, I am bloody amazed at the depth of scientific knowledge of 'new atheists' and many of us are top level physicists and biologists doing fundamental research. Our thinking is undeniably scientific in foundation, and atheist would ever mistake hypothesis for theory. It is the apologists and theologists that cause the problem with #3.
You use bait and switch to slide your wishful 'controversy' into the conversation, a controversy that is your agenda and not supported by facts, as you brazenly state AND THEN CONTRADICT!
"My assessment of the disconnect between ERS and the New Atheism movement with respect to step 3 is not based on a systematic review of the New Atheism literature -- but such a review could be conducted and I strongly encourage someone with the time and interest to do it. No one would be happier than me to discover that the New Atheists are basing their activist agenda on the best current knowledge of religion as a human phenomenon"
Then conduct it, and quit quoting your hypothesis as support. Get some empirical evidence yourself, mister. I find you disingenuous at best, and dishonest and bereft of proper logic otherwise.
As for the rest of your post: I suggest doing a search of "atheist charities"......
Not believing in deities does not automatically mean we are indifferent to others.
If an atheist wanted to do "good works" of some kind, why would he want to exclude religious people from contributing to the effort? He probably wouldn't. So atheists don't set up atheist organizations to do good works - they just set up organizations. Would an atheist who set up such an organization be likely to increase contributions by publicizing the fact that he is an atheist? Not in this country.
Most of the great mosques of the past involved slave labor in one way or another, and the great churches were mostly paid for by taxes on very poor people.I don't think they were so great.
I don't agree that the major religions of the world have traditionally motivated good works overall. Islam motivated quite the opposite - raids, massacres, conquests, mass slavery, religious persecution, oppression of women, etc. Christianity motivated many religious wars, massacres, and inquisitions.
whom in Islam are considered "people of the book". Again this is relative to other countries during the middle ages. The Pope was sending his top Bishops to be educated at Islamic Universities in the Iberian peninsula. And when dark age monks were burning the "blasphemous" manuscripts of the Greek philosophers and scientists the Islamic Arabs and Persians alongside Christian and Jewish scholars were preserving, debating and developing these sciences in Baghdad. This perfection is relative but it implies that human development seems evolutionary even the way we organize and that religion historically seems to have played a role. The point is: what should we do today? How can we individually and collectively carry on this evolution of civilization? These are just questions I'm not suggesting that anyone be a theist or an atheist or anything in between. Don't mean to imply Social Darwinism either.
According to the anti-Genesis 1:1 crowd, all that we experience with our senses, microscopes, and telescopes—call it matter and energy—has existed without beginning. Einstein threw a reluctantly accepted curve ball at spatial infinity, but how do we wrap our minds around matter and energy existing without beginning?
In a natural state, the universe would be nothing. Nothing comes from nothing.*
What we usually call natural in the broadest sense—all that we experience with our senses and devices—I consider unnatural, or supernatural, because they are something from nothing, violating what would be the natural state.
The supernatural is sufficiently powerful to claim victories over the natural, such as creation of the universe and the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the powerful pull of the natural is not vanquished nor denied its own negative victories.
The pull of the natural—its rebellion against the unnatural (supernatural)—perhaps finds expression in sin and disasters, manmade and otherwise, events and conditions we may blame on Satan.
The supernatural vs. natural conflict may be the source of, or synonymous with, other bi-polarities: God vs. Satan, creation vs. nothingness, light vs. dark, good vs. evil. Life vs death?
* For the cosmological science involved here, refer to pp 66-67 of The Language of God, by Francis S. Collins, Head of Human Genome Project, now Director, NIH, quoting astrophysicist Robert Jastrow, or to my web page quoting both: https://sites.google.com/site/nflresultsranked/discussion-1/untitledpost
"...how do we wrap our minds around matter and energy existing without beginning?"
So you obviously prefer argumentum ad ignorantiam.
Collins is exemplar in how poorly religious scientists manage to reconcile reason and faith when they actually attempt to do so.
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-strange-case-of-francis-collins/
Is that your evidence, that nothing comes from nothing doesn't seem natural to you? You confuse the lexical 'nothing' from a physics perspective.
The fact that some thing hasn't been scientifically explained or demonstrated today (beginning of the universe, abiogenisis) does not prove evidence of absence, the rest of your post is the naturalistic fallacy.
Firstly, what in Wilson's view are the hypotheses being looked at? How are the hypotheses trying to be disproved? If there are no proper hypotheses, then there's no point to discussing evidence.
Frankly, religion is a complex human phenomenon. There are a lot of different approaches to religion and there are lots of social factors to consider. Formulating good hypotheses in this field sounds like a serious challenge.
It seems to me that religion is a major social and cultural force in the very society of the academics attempting to study religion. Shouldn't that introduce some bias of the academics and skew the results? For example, it seems to me that religion, or at least some like Christianity, are very good at getting the public to see religion as a good thing. If religion were maladaptive (I'm not saying it is) or if religion was a mere biproduct, would someone who is supportive of religion -- even subconsciously -- ever admit to this? I doubt it. I think they'd fall back into the "religion is useful" argument for religion. How do those studying ERS avoid bias from the mere fact that they are participants in some way in the very phenomenon in which they are studying, a phenomenon that invokes powerful human emotions?
Thankfully, in sociology (which is the field of my BS degree), one way to insulate the observer from the observed is through statistical analysis, such as census data from the U.S. Census. Therefore, the next question would have to be, "how does one inquire of the census data concerning the efficacy of religious belief." Or similarly, how does one construct a poll and conduct that poll in such a way as to elucidate the insights one would like to discover concerning the efficacy of religious belief.
One person who was rather successful was Max Weber. His "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" was an interesting examination into the interplay between Calvinist and Roman Catholic religious views and their outward affect on capitalist success. So, in the field of sociology, some progress has been made, building on the efforts of Weber and other sociologists.
How do those studying ERS avoid biases? Good question.
(1) Come up with the right approach and questions for studying something.
(2) Acquire evidence and arguments for the results you hope to acquire as motivated by the approach and questions from (1). Make sure the analysis of evidence and arguments are careful and unbiased.
(3) Double check one last time that your results are correct before presenting to the research community. Look for counterexamples, scrutinize data, etc.
I think it is fair to say that each step has an element of avoiding fooling yourself. In (1) you want to formulate questions that can refute any proposed scientific hypothesis or claim and setup (2) so that what you think might be true can be shown to be wrong. (3) is all about one last look over.
I think you describe (2) perfectly. You want to do things like double blind studies, statistical analysis, etc to take the human factor out of the equation as much as possible and get dispassionate results.
My question was not about (2). (2) tends to proceed by standard techniques of a field. The question is more about (1) and maybe (3). How do you know you are asking the right questions in the first place? What are your hypotheses? ...
How do you know Max Weber didn't ask the completely wrong question in the first place?
I think this gets back to avoiding biases, which you seem to wonder yourself, so I guess I can leave it at that.
I agree its a hard problem but don't see that as something that means we shouldn't try and do it. There are similar examples in scholarship and science. Studying economic or psychology is fraught with all kinds of problems and potential bias that you don't have when studying physics or chemistry. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do it only that we have to be aware of the potential bias.
1) Dawkins is defending the hypothesis he himself believes in. This is not a selection but agreeing with one and disagreeing with the other.
2) Whatever the answer to the step 3 is, it won't make a difference to step 2. Religion is evil even if it was good sometime in or past. Actually Harris believes religion was good at a time.
3) Nothing that an ERS says can be considered a "justification" of religion, only an "explanation" of it. I can know Nazism is evil without knowing why it happened, what are the historical or sociological explanations behind it.
New Atheism is a moral ideology. Nothing which ERS comes up can change our basic stands.
Of course, we know very well that communities and societies can be developed with religion as a socializing factor. We already noticed that. To evaluate the advantageousness of religion in the long run we would have to compare religious communities and societies with non-religious ones. Wilson has not presented any such comparisons in his essay.
If we focus solely on Protestant Christianity, as an example, an ERS explanation of conservative Christian society may have NO explanatory power concerning a liberal Christian society. The problem might be even more extreme if one was to make a comparison of Scientology with Buddhism, as an example.
If an ERS hypothesis has no explanatory power to address every religious ideology - including (for argument's sake) atheism and agnosticism, then how can it be claimed to hold any scientific merit?