Abstract
In this critical notice to Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, we focus on the question of whether Wright’s God is one which can be said to be an adaptation in a well defined sense. Thus we evaluate the likelihood of different models of adaptive evolution of cultural ideas in their different levels of selection. Our result is an emphasis on the plurality of mechanisms that may lead to adaptation. By way of conclusion we assess epistemologically some of Wright’s more controversial claims concerning the directionality of evolution and moral progress.
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Notes
Page references are to The Evolution of God unless otherwise stated. We are grateful to Gabiola Lipede, Claude Loverdo, Daniel Darg, Hugo Mercier and an anonymous reviewer of Philosophia for their comments and suggestions concerning many of the ideas presented in this essay.
It should be noted that attempting to account for the evolution of God and religions presupposes not only that these entities change but also that there is a certain commonality between their distinctive and separate manifestations, something that links, for example, the hunter-gatherer’s belief in spirits with the organized religions of theologians , the castes of priests, or the New-Age spiritualities. Suffice it to say that this is a controversial matter. Anthropologist Maurice Bloch once said that explaining religion as a natural property of the human psyche amounts to something similar to explaining the British House of Lords as a natural property of our species (Whitehouse 2010). Both religion and the House of Lords are human institutions and both rely on distinctive elements of our evolved human psyche in different ways. The wide spectrum of practices and beliefs that we call “religion” (or the family of beliefs and behaviours related to the supernatural) is not a natural kind in any meaningful sense. Nor is it an entirely conventional kind either. For even if during most of the history of our species as hunter-gatherers a word referring to religion did not even exist, this family-resemblance or polythetic - category of beliefs and behaviours scores high as one of the universal characteristics of known human societies.
Otherwise, it may be considered exaptationist “just-so” story-telling. That is, the testing of an alternative hypothesis to adaptationism also requires us to consider and test when possible the adaptationist hypothesis.
Each question will be glossed over in various ways, and for all of them “adaptation” should be understood as referring to a given specific environment. One should notice also that when we use the term “God”, we mean here more generally “the belief in God or holding certain beliefs in supernatural agents.” It is also important to specify that we use the term “belief”, but by this we intend to keep things simple only for the purpose of communication. We recognize that this term is problematic, especially with respect to the study of religion and the idea of supernatural agents. For a more satisfying approach to the nature of beliefs see Tamar Szabo Gendler “Alief and Belief ”, Journal of Philosophy, 2008, 105:10.
Interestingly, although much of Wright’s account can be said to be functionalist in thrust, he does not solicit the cultural group selection explanation explicitly and indeed surprisingly he relegates David Wilson’s cultural group-selectionist approach to a few words on note 2 of the appendix at the end of the book.
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Viciana, H., Bourrat, P. Is God an Adaptation?. Philosophia 39, 397–408 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9294-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9294-1