Christianity

[Here’s a little light (1,900 words) reading for the weekend. I banged it out rather quickly so I apologize for any typos, misspellings or poor grammar. I’ll monitor this thread over the weekend so I don’t end up posting a hot-button topic and then ignoring it like I did last time.]

Robert Wright has a new book out “The Evolution of God“. [h/t Instapundit]  The Amazon description says:

In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright’s findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony.

I haven’t read the book yet, but based on his previous works I can guess where he is going with this. I’ve been thinking about this subject as well for some time, and I ‘ve been writing up my thoughts on the matter in detail, but since Wright may have beaten me to the punch I thought I would try to get my tiny bit of priority in. (Besides, I owe him for that bar fight in Tucson.)

I believe that religions and all other facets of human culture are subject to and created by natural selection. Even though I am a philosophical agnostic and a functional atheist, I have come to a science-based understanding that religions serve an evolutionary purpose, and that they provide a vital mechanism for enhancing and maintaining cooperation that no secular mechanism can duplicate. 

Traditionally atheists have argued that religions cannot have any functional foundations because there are many different religions with so many different stories about how the universe works. They commonly point out that since most religions contradict each other, the vast majority of religions have to be wrong even if we were to assume that one is right. Science produces just one best explanation for each phenomenon. We don’t have hundreds of different, equally valid models of the solar system. How could religion be any different? Therefore, the existence of many different religions proves that religions are arbitrary, fictional, fabrications like novels. It follows that religion has little to teach us about life and cannot serve as any kind of rational guide for humanity. 

This seems like a plausible argument. I used to believe it myself but in the last 15 years my ongoing study of evolutionary theory convinced me that atheists have missed one crucial piece of evidence:  We don’t have a vast variety of contradictory religions, we have a vast variety religions that all teach the same thing. 

In one critical functional area, all religions are identical.

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