Scott Atran replies

I appreciate your trying to get things right. But I still do not understand what you are objecting to, and it may just be my own confusion about what you are trying to say. But let me try to be clear about what I think (as opposed to what I am reported to think).

There can’t be individual fitness advantages of the sort that part-for-whole sacrifice among animals may convey, given that the probability of certifiably obtaining the desired outcome, such as a rewarding afterlife or freedom from catastrophe, ranges between zero and chance. For a bear to sacrifice its paw in a bear trap by gnawing it off, a lizard to leave behind its tail for a predator, or a bee to die by stinging an intruder to save the hive, seem reasonable tradeoffs for survival. Yet, what could be the calculated gain from

- Years of toil to build gigantic structures that house only dead bones (Egyptian, Mesoamerican and Cambodian pyramids)?
- Giving up one’s sheep (Hebrews) or camels (Bedouin) or cows (Nuer of Sudan) or chickens (Highland Maya) or pigs (Melanesian tribes, Ancient Greeks), or buffaloes (South Indian tribes)?
- Dispatching wives when husbands die (Hindus, Inca, Solomon Islanders)?
- Slaying one’s own healthy and desired offspring (the first born of Phoenicia and Carthage, Pawnee and Iroquois maidens, Inca and Postclassic Maya boys and girls, children of South India’s tribal Lambadi, adolescents in contemporary satanic cults)?
- Chopping off a finger for dead warriors or relatives (Dani of New Guinea, Crow and other American Plains Indians)?
- Burning your house and all other possessions for a family member drowned, crushed by a tree, or killed by a tiger (Nāga tribes of Assam)?
- Knocking out one’s own teeth (Australian aboriginals)?
- Making elaborate but evanescent sand designs (Navajo, tribes of Central Australia)?
- Giving up one’s life to keep Fridays (Muslims) or Saturdays (Jews) or Sundays (Christians) holy?
- Or from just stopping whatever one is doing to murmur often incomprehensible words while gesticulating several times a day?

As Bill Gates aptly surmised, “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”

Functionalist arguments, including adaptationist accounts, usually attempt to offset the apparent functional disadvantages of religion with even greater functional advantages. There are many different and even contrary explanations for why religion exists in terms of beneficial functions served. These include functions of social (bolstering group solidarity, group competition), economic (sustaining public goods, surplus production), political (mass opiate, rebellion’s stimulant), intellectual (e.g., explain mysteries, encourage credulity), health and well being (increase life expectancy, accept death), and emotional (terrorizing, allaying anxiety) utility. Many of these functions have obtained in one cultural context or another; yet all also have been true of cultural phenomena besides religion. For Marx, religion was an opiate dolled out by governing elits to suppress the masses; for Martin Luther King religion was a principal means for the downtrodden to throw off the yoke of their oppressors. For John calvin, obedience to authority was obedience to God, however corrupt or malicious authority seemed; Benjamin Franklin wanted the motto of the new American Republic to read “rebellion against tyranny is obedience to God.”

Functional descriptions of religion in given contexts (but never in any context-free way that would amount to a general proposition, scientific or otherwise) often insightfully help to explain how and why given religious beliefs and practices help to provide competitive advantages over other sorts of ideologies and behaviors for cultural survival. Still, these accounts provide little explanatory insight into cognitive selection factors responsible for the ease of acquisition of religious concepts by children, or for the facility with which religious practices and beliefs are transmitted across individuals. They have little to say about which beliefs and practices – all things being equal – are most likely to recur in different cultures and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration. None predicts the cognitive peculiarities of religion, such as:
Why do agent concepts predominate in religion?
Why do supernatural-agent concepts are culturally universal?
Why are some supernatural agent concepts inherently better candidates for cultural selection than others?
Why is it necessary, and how it is possible, to validate belief in supernatural agent concepts that are logically and factually inscrutable?
How is it possible to prevent people from deciding that the existing moral order is simply wrong or arbitrary and from defecting from the social consensus through denial, dismissal or deception?
This argument does not entail that religious beliefs and practices cannot perform social functions, or that the successful performance of such functions does not contribute to the survival and spread of religious traditions.

Indeed, there is substantial evidence that religious beliefs and practices often alleviate potentially dysfunctional stress and anxiety) and maintain social cohesion in the face of real or perceived conflict. It does imply that social functions are not phylogenetically responsible for the cognitive structure and cultural recurrence of religion.

What little scientific evidence there is does seem to indicate that several different cognitive faculties are jointly responsible for waht we commonly recognize as religion but which did not evolve specifically for religion or for any individual or social benefit in particular.