Does the free secularized state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee? This question expresses a doubt about whether the democratic constitutional state can renew from its own resources the normative presuppositions of its existence, it also expresses the assumption that such a state is dependent on ethical traditions of a local nature.

It seems like you’d suggest the answer is … no, and that argued from a secular viewpoint.

Our genetic ids and our memetic superegos disagree so often because they’re playing by two different sets of rules.

Freudian nomenclature aside, you are substantially correct. We require cooperation to survive but our genes are inherently selfish. We do have genes that foster cooperation but selfish genes predominate. In nature, selfishness and cooperation have at best a 51%-49% split.

We have culture in the first place in order to override our genetic impulses. If our genes could guide us in all circumstances, we would have wasted the energy on evolving giant brains whose primary function is the manipulation of other humans.

I don’t think that physiology generates a belief in the supernatural. Instead, the story genotypes evolve to forms most easily accepted by the hardwire of the brain. It would be just like our art only uses colors the hardwire of our eyes can easily discern and separate. Different animals can see different colors and different range of spectra. Bees see in ultraviolet and flowers look much different to bees. If we encounter aliens who see in a different spectra their art will be much different than ours.

The idea that our biology and our genes are at war with each other dates back to the first Aldous Huxley. I think that the idea of Original Sin (and similar ideas that are universal) reflect this struggle. The idea of Original Sin holds that all humans are inherently prone to selfish act. This is reflects the selfish nature of the genes that create the foundations of our behavior.

I’ll write a post about this idea in the future.

I realize that this comments thread is getting stale by now, but I still want to make the “more substantive” comment that I mentioned earlier.

You touch briefly in several places on the relationship between genetic behavioral drives and memetic/religious imperatives, but I don’t see where you say why cooperation and self sacrifice shouldn’t be in our genes to begin with. If the religious phenotype is so advantageous, why shouldn’t it be one of our biological drives, rather than requiring a set of ideas that frequently have to battle against those drives.

So here’s my idea (or maybe it’s your idea and it’s taken me four days to grasp it):

Genetic selection by definition only operates on an individual and his/her direct descendants. Accordingly, genetic selection is inherently “selfish”; the adaptive fitness of the population or culture at large only affects my genetic success insofar as it affects the survival of me and my family. Given this set of evolutionary pressures, cooperation will only be adaptive in some cases, and true self sacrifice will be selected against in all but the most extreme circumstances, such as saving the lives of one’s children.

Ideas, in contrast, spread by “contagion” and therefore have a much more complicated environment for determining fitness. If my beliefs prompt me to sacrifice myself in the defense of others, I won’t have any more biological children, but countless people may be more receptive to my ideas — in part because their own genetic drive for self preservation predisposes them to think well of me.

Because of these different fitness functions, our genes and our memes are naturally adversarial. The ideas that I receive from society are primarily a function of how effectively they allowed groups or cultures to survive and prosper, while the mind that receives those ideas is primarily the result of the selective survival of individuals.

So why are our consciences so often at war with our desires? Yes, in part it’s because some biological drives are no longer adaptive — preference for high fat foods, for example. But also it’s because our minds and our bodies really are at war. Our genetic ids and our memetic superegos disagree so often because they’re playing by two different sets of rules. Neither one can “win” in the long run, since human survival requires both viable individuals and viable societies; sacrifice either one and you won’t have many offspring or followers a hundred years from now. In the mean time, however, we’re stuck in the middle while the two forces struggle interminably to find an optimum balance point.

Part of me thinks this idea is absurd and part of me finds it a compelling insight into the human condition.

I have no real background in the science of the issue, but what I have read as a layman convinces me that it is more likely that religion is somewhat inherent to humans as a byproduct of our biology and our intelligence.

I think the basic form of religion might be hardwired. I don’t think we are hardwired to believe in supernatural forces. After all, if it was hardwired, agnostics and atheist would have to constantly suppress the feeling that something divine existed. I think that a lot of people examining the biological roots of religious belief reverse cause and effect. Religions don’t exist because of hardwiring, they exist because of natural selection operating on behaviors. Hardwiring merely influences the form of the genotype story.

I think the idea that religious behavior is hardwired is simply an attempt to reduce religious people to the status of mere animals and to elevate atheist to the status of the only truly human. We should hope that religious behavior is not hardwired because if it is we will simply replace religions with some kind of dangerous secular dogmatism.

My understanding has been that China and the countries that were under its cultural influence do not really have religion in the sense that you’re talking about – a carrot and stick type thing.

China’s and the rest Confucian Asia has a religious culture that is much different from that seen elsewhere but the same basic mechanism of supernatural moral consequence still functions. You can see this most clearly in the concept that a ruler who governs incompetently or cruelly will “lose the mandate of heaven.” Taoism uses a moral physics mechanism like Buddhism. China is simply stuffed with Gods of all sorts and most believed that the spirits of ancestors rewarded and punished good behavior.

The major difference between Confucian Asia and the Western world is that it tolerates a multiplicity of religious beliefs not only for society but also for individuals. Before communism, most Chinese governments paid little attention to religion as long as adherents acknowledge the legitimacy of the government. This maybe because China has always been an empire ruling diverse peoples. The anti-christian elements of the Boxer Rebellion were an exception. Korea has traditionally enforced fairly strict religious conformity to to Korea’s native religion but that religion has a loophole that lets people also adopt tenets from other faiths. Shinto and Buddhism integrated flawlessly in Japan but Christians were ruthlessly suppressed.

I’m just not sure employing mystical incentives is really all that possible in any conscious sort of way. Well I guess it’s possible and probably has happened, but I think we start experiencing a lot of additional costs if religion is deliberately used by some who don’t believe in it with the express purpose of controlling other people.

“I don’t think, however, that science dooms religion. Religious people and religions adapt to changing scientific reality. The Catholic Church believes that evolutionary theory is in keeping with its doctrine. Other sects take view that the genotype stories in the bible are allegories and that the real revealed truth of the bible is the phenotype behaviors. Buddhism is largely immune to scientific refutation because of its vague cosmology and mechanism of moral consequence. Chinese culture also has a fairly unique way of handling the intersection between mystical and secular matters that might prove useful.”

Well that is I think both true and false. I’m no expert on the history of the decline of religion, but I think it’s safe to say that the ancient Greek religion could never have survived the discovery that the sun was not actually a chariot being pulled around by flying horses. Of course Christianity has shown itself highly adaptable (though not with executing some scientists along the way) to new science, but if, for example, it were discovered that Jesus Christ was not actually a real person, that would be a pretty difficult blow for Christianity to recover from.

“If I’m right, then any long-term deviation from adaptive behaviors will autocorrect via natural selection. Communities that lack the adaptive behaviors will fail. We are already seeing that to a great extent among the poor. If maladaptive behaviors become associated with the poor and adaptive ones with the rich, then people will copy the adaptive behaviors. People also see the negative consequences of certain behaviors and change their own behavior accordingly. This is a big part of what happened in the 80’s as people reacted to the excesses of the 60’s-70’s.Of course, a lot of damage could be done before the correction kicks in.”

I guess I am not sure how much you can link religion to these adaptive behaviors, actually. At least not in a natural selection sense. I have no real background in the science of the issue, but what I have read as a layman convinces me that it is more likely that religion is somewhat inherent to humans as a byproduct of our biology and our intelligence. In that case, religion is a constant, not really a variable among societies. At that point, only the kind of religion would matter, not the fact of religion itself. Obviously it would be uncontroversial to assert that it is more beneficial for a religion to encourage social cooperation instead of random murder.

And, I guess, to take it on another tack, I’ll undermine my last paragraph. I’m also just not entirely convinced that the empirical basis of your argument is true. My understanding has been that China and the countries that were under its cultural influence do not really have religion in the sense that you’re talking about – a carrot and stick type thing. I know you indicate Buddhism and karma, but my understanding has been that Buddhism has not been integrated into the culture of that region in the same way Christianity has been integrated into Western culture. I would say the more accurate analog in Eastern culture would be Confucianism, which I do not think would qualify as a religion in the sense that we are discussing it here.

I just don’t think this line of logic is particularly convincing. By that, I do not mean simply that I am not convinced (because I am actually somewhat convinced). Instead, I mean that I’m not sure this kind of reasoning can effectively change behavior.

Yes, I agree. I am not at all sure that an intellectual understanding of consequences is sufficient to control behavior. If it was, we’d all be thin, exercise a lot and use condom whenever we had non-monogamous sex. These are all behaviors that have firm scientific evidence today and yet people find it had to control their base impulses. It might be that you can’t control base behavior except with some kind of mystical carrot and stick. I like to think not but then the universe has demonstrated repeatedly it doesn’t give a damn about what I think.

I don’t think, however, that science dooms religion. Religious people and religions adapt to changing scientific reality. The Catholic Church believes that evolutionary theory is in keeping with its doctrine. Other sects take view that the genotype stories in the bible are allegories and that the real revealed truth of the bible is the phenotype behaviors. Buddhism is largely immune to scientific refutation because of its vague cosmology and mechanism of moral consequence. Chinese culture also has a fairly unique way of handling the intersection between mystical and secular matters that might prove useful.

If I’m right, then any long-term deviation from adaptive behaviors will autocorrect via natural selection. Communities that lack the adaptive behaviors will fail. We are already seeing that to a great extent among the poor. If maladaptive behaviors become associated with the poor and adaptive ones with the rich, then people will copy the adaptive behaviors. People also see the negative consequences of certain behaviors and change their own behavior accordingly. This is a big part of what happened in the 80′s as people reacted to the excesses of the 60′s-70′s.Of course, a lot of damage could be done before the correction kicks in.

You seem to be arguing for preserving religiously motivated behavior as opposed to preserving religion. Please forgive me if I’m wrong, but a simplistic way of phrasing what you’re arguing for would be:

1) Behavior A is supported by all religions, so it must be desirable; BUT
2) We cannot (or perhaps just have not yet) articulated a rationale separate from religion for why this particular behavior is useful; AND
3) The religious reasons for this behavior are totally irrelevant; THEREFORE,
4) We should continue to engage in this behavior because it is likely that this behavior is socially desirable because all religions supported it.

I just don’t think this line of logic is particularly convincing. By that, I do not mean simply that I am not convinced (because I am actually somewhat convinced). Instead, I mean that I’m not sure this kind of reasoning can effectively change behavior.

My point is not that the stories must be true to change behavior, but that people must believe they are true in order for it to affect their behavior. You can’t tell a Christian “listen, the Bible is completely made up but you should still continue to live as if it were true because it is useful generally for society.”

That being said, is it really true that debating whether the stories are true is a pointless waste of time? I think you may be right it is a waste of time to go around disputing the truth of these stories just to do it. But the point I was trying to make was that it is often unavoidable! The evolution debate is a perfect example. We have this scientific understanding of life that conflicts directly with the literal Christian reading. So yes, maybe it’s a waste of time to debate over whether Jesus Christ really existed, or was really crucified, or said what he said. But unless you think it’s a waste of time to understand the origin of life, it cannot be a waste of time to debate over whether God really did create Adam and Eve out of dust, or whether we evolved from other primates.

Finally, I think debating one inherently means debating the other. Again using Christianity as an example, in some abstract sense there’s no reason that disproving the creation story has to undermine the story of Jesus Christ. However, the whole basis of the religion is that the Bible is the word of God and contains perfect truth. When one part of it is disproven, it becomes unclear why the rest of it continues to hold validity.

The truth is, even if religion is functionally useful, each religion generally rests on a set of empirical assertions that have no relation to reality.

Which is irrelevant. The stories do not have to be true in any sense in order to promote adaptive behaviors. Any debate centered on whether the stories are true is simply a pointless waste of time.

… even if you’re right that religion is evolutionarily useful or even necessary, what exactly do you think we should do to avoid “abandoning” it until there’s been some experimentation?

How about starting with morality pertaining to the responsibilities of adults towards children? In the past 40 years, we’ve seen the rise of a narcissistic morality that holds that (1) adults have no responsibility to sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of their children and (2) rationalizes this by claiming that if the children won’t be happy unless the children are happy. We’ve conceptually separated marriage from children and instead centered the institution around making the individual adult happy. We’ve also become a culture with prizes impulsive, self-gratifying behavior over thoughtful self-denying behavior.

We’ve only been able physically to go as far as we have already due to technology mitigating the immediate harms of such behavior. The long-term harm we can only guess at but we can get a clue by looking at the contemporary poor. The traditional family has all but disappeared from the lives of the poor and it is the principle causes of persistent poverty. (Illegal Immigrants move out of poverty much faster than native born poor largely owing to the formers stronger families.)

We abandoned our previous behaviors based on the premises that (1) Since the genotype stories of religion and culture had no basis in fact that therefore the behaviors were not adaptive and (2) that if we could not see an immediate short-term harm then no harm existed.

A lot of what I said is not original. The idea that all religions promote the same behaviors is not original, neither is the idea that religions serves some adaptive purpose.

The only possibly original idea I put forth is that the stories that religions tell, their genotypes, are wholly unrelated to their adaptive function. In principle, there are an unlimited number genotype stories but only a few specific phenotype behaviors. Any genotype story will work as long as it produces the necessary behaviors.

This is important because it shifts the debate away from the stories. Even the most devout person of any faith has to admit that most religious stories are fiction. They can’t all be correct because they contradict each other. This means that if we assume that the behaviors are adaptive only if the stories that create them are true, then we will abandon necessary behaviors for no good reason.

What exactly is the proposal here? Some weird elite cabal…?

Well, okay, here’s some practical steps just off the top of my head:

* Don’t try to use the force of law to eliminate religious expression or ideas from the public square. Speak out and vote against any advocacy group or politician that tries to do so.

* Speak out, publicly and privately, against the pseudo-scientific idea that atheism or agnosticism inevitably implies that all religious traditions are useless or harmful. When someone defends atheism based on illogical, ascientific, or ahistorical arguments, call them on it.

* Look carefully at the ways in which various religious traditions encourage useful or adaptive behavior. Consider how those behaviors can be encouraged in your own life and in the lives of others in your sphere of influence. Share your successes (and failures) with others, both atheists and religious believers.

As Shannon has pointed out before, given that the number of dead bodies left behind by the explicitly atheist political systems of the 20th century pushes nine figures (far worse than even the ugliest religious atrocities, even if you count the Nazis as “Christians”), it’s pretty clear that any honest atheist needs to concede that some very important element has been left out of atheist thought and action. Just about any attempt at discovering that element seems a step in the right direction.

What exactly is the proposal here? Some weird elite cabal who believes that religion is ultimately irrational but dupes the rest of us into keeping religion until it’s had time for “careful, long-term experimentation?”

The truth is, even if religion is functionally useful, each religion generally rests on a set of empirical assertions that have no relation to reality. Often discovering scientific truth means undermining religion because religious assertions, like most superstitions, are not generally careful to comport with reality. See evolution, the Copernican system, or more ancient examples, the discovery that the sun is not actually someone in a chariot flying around the world.

So I ask again: even if you’re right that religion is evolutionarily useful or even necessary, what exactly do you think we should do to avoid “abandoning” it until there’s been some experimentation?

I an article: “One World, Under God” by Robert Wright in the Atlantic Monthly for April 2009. I was not impressed. I think he did not show the same level of understanding that you have.

I think that for all of human history, we’ve been looking at the question of religious diversity backwards.

What do you mean, “we,” Kemo Sabe?

Your observation about the common behavioral aspects of religions has been made before, most significantly by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. In fact, it’s the basis for his whole argument. From the first chapter:

There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own….

Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to – whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired.

Lewis wrote this in 1952, and it’s based on a series of radio talks he gave ten tears earlier, so it’s not a new or revolutionary idea. Obviously the inference Lewis drew from this idea was theological instead of evolutionary or memetic, but his observation on common behavioral codes is identical to yours.

The idea that religion is an evolutionary adaptation is not brand new either. David Sloan Wilson lays out his ideas on the subject here, referring to his 2003 book Darwin’s Cathedral.

Not that there may not be much more that could be written on the subject, and perhaps I’m missing part of the significance of you post, Shannon, but the basic idea seams to have been out there in the public discourse for several years now.

Unfortunately, it seems that many of the more insightful commentators like Wilson have been crowded out by Dawkins’ rantings. He may have actually succeeded in removing critical ideas from the discussion. Jerk.

Since science has helped to prove that many of the superstitious claims of religion are false, and competing religion’s claims to be contradictory, then how can people go on teaching their kids to believe obviously false religious stories?

Science only shows the some religious cosmologies false if you start with the assumption that the divine has to operate though natural law. Modern science does not conflict with Buddhist cosmology and one can explain a literal Biblical creation by saying that God created the universe with the appearance of being old. Alternatively, one can view creation stories as allegory.

The more important effect, however, is that since the phenotype behaviors work in the real-world, people assume that the genotype stories are valid. We use this kind of reasoning in science as well. Since Newton’s equations for gravity worked, people assumed that his story i.e. that gravity was an instantaneous “force” that pulled objects with mass together, must have also been correct. Einstein showed that Newton’s story was incorrect and replaced it with one of his own. Future scientist will replace Einstein’s story with one of their own.

Group cooperation is often only offerred to other members of their religion or potential converts, and outsiders can be classified negatively and not deserving.

Remember that we shouldn’t think in absolute terms of cooperation but only relative advantage. Historically, religions with wider bounds of cooperation replace religions with narrower bounds.

In some cases wouldn’t this reduce cooperation to below that between secular societies?

I see no reason based on empirical evidence why we would expect secular societies i.e. societies in which most citizens are non-religious, to be more cooperative than religious societies. There are many types of exclusion and secular societies can fall prey to them. The very powerful forms of racism that we saw in the from roughly 1820-1945 was based on secular, pseudo-scientific ideas. Eugenics was a mainstream idea from the 1890′s until the 1930′s. Only religious groups like the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention opposed eugenics laws. Communism is a secular philosophy and they spent almost as much time fighting each other as non-Communist.

Secular societies might be more prone to anti-cooperative fads because secular ideas have no psychological inertia. Each generation believes that it can rewrite everything on the fly. People do not feel constrained by a moral authority greater than themselves.

Again, a model that had worked well in the past may not necessarily work well in the present/future….

Yeah, there’s the rub. Times and conditions change and behaviors that work in one environment will fail in another. Clearly, we have to change but the critical question is the mechanism of that change. To date, we have used mere logical deductions based highly incomplete information to decide which old behaviors to jettison and which new behaviors to adopt.

If all you meant was that we are good at deceving ourselves and the corect observation and deduction is hard work and that our means are some times limited, then fine, but please say that in the future.

That’s partially what I meant. I used the “encompass” to convey that we are anything close to omniscient. Most secular criticisms of religious moral rules contain the implicit assumption that any human can understand enough of the universe to predict the long-term consequences of adopting new moral codes. This is clearly incorrect. Logic is subordinate to data. Garbage in, garbage out.

For example, the standard argument against traditional morality usually takes the form of, “I can’t logically discern any harm in traditionally forbidden behavior X therefore no such harm exist.” It’s actually something of the inverse of the “God of the Gaps” argument used by theist which says that “If we don’t understand how a natural phenomena works, then that indicates god did it.” In both cases, the users of the argument turn their lack of information into confirmation.

We can probably eventually puzzle out the function of the behaviors that traditional moral codes foster but that will take time and experimentation. I think we’re just beginning to get an understanding of the basis of human behavior. Yet, the primary arguments against traditional morality have existed for centuries and they all assume that we can evaluate the utility of moral codes without experimental data.

Marxism is based upon this concept.

Instincts like that can only be tamed by a powerful feeling, ritual and tradition. Maybe these secular religions can work, but it certainly seems to me that assuming that the soul of their opposition is important – indeed, as important as their own – does not seem all that characteristic of the believers in secular “religions.” And if your answer is, sure, that’s because we don’t believe in that ghost, the soul, I can respond, that’s fine. But tell me what makes you honor yourself and them as religious people do by speaking of souls. Believing that our rights are god-given may not work for you and I don’t care. I do care, however, if you think they are not innate in the nature of man but rather the gift of your fellow citizens or of your government – or merely a momentary fiction characteristic of a short-lived time and place.