The newly minted firm of DDH&H (authors Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) has made quite a splash with its spirited defense of the atheist view. Nontheists of all stripes can take satisfaction at the holes they've punched in the belief system of that sanctimonious crowd of true believers who go around assuring themselves, and anyone else who will listen, that they are going to heaven and the rest of us to hell. (This has never been a threat that's bothered me much, for who in his right mind would want to be stuck for eternity in a place where there was nobody to talk to but them!).
But is this enough? The ice has been broken, but where do we go from here? Nonbelievers can, of course, just continue the frontal attack, but a better strategy might be to get more analytical and look, for example, at how religion started and why it persists, and what parts of it used to be useful but have become dysfunctional. This added focus would be aimed not so much at the bible thumpers, who are probably beyond our reach, but at that part of the American public who, as Dennett says, aren't true believers in the literal sense but who uphold religion because they have been brought up to believe it's a necessary part of a healthy society.
This next stage could well feature a scientific discussion of the nature of religion, drawing on recent experimental evidence rather than on the well-traveled ruminations of the classic philosophers. There's a small but growing number of scientists who have been working in this field, and they are turning up new data and explanations every year. I see a general theory emerging that explains religion in Darwinian terms, as one of the principal features of human culture that has bound groups together throughout the history and prehistory of our species. According to this theory, religion's forms have varied but the common denominator has been to help ensure that the individual cooperates with other members of the group. God emerges as a device that makes it easier for most individuals to understand how they should behave, and offers rewards and punishments to make them conform. In other words, God is a fiction of the human mind that survives because of its efficacy in inducing behavior that adds to the survivability of the group. It does this in part by reinforcing the "us versus them" mentality.
The problem with this evolutionary device is that when problems get global there's no longer room for a "them." We're all in it together and need universal binders, not just ones that thrive on setting select groups of people apart.
The study of the evolutionary origins and development of religion isn't exactly new, but something big and creative is happening these days in the continuing search to understand religion from the outside. Theories vary, conclusions have yet to be reached, and division in the scientific community has certainly surfaced. In an upcoming article in Skeptic magazine titled "Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion," published online at eSkeptic in July, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson takes Richard Dawkins to task for not applying an evolutionary perspective to his critique of religion in The God Delusion. "If the bump on the shark's nose is an organ, you won't get very far by thinking of it as a wart," Wilson remonstrates, further faulting Dawkins for dismissing the theory of group selection in the evolution of religious belief, and for failing to represent fairly the rigorous empirical work of his colleagues. Dawkins offered a brief retort at eSkeptic the following week, stating that while it's interesting to ask whether religion carries some sort of survival value in the Darwinian sense, the central theme of his book is the question of God's existence. "I referred my readers to Wilson for a fuller treatment of what he calls group selection, and moved on," Dawkins writes. "I thought it a generous gesture at the time, and I see no reason now to regret my choice to write my own book rather than his."
While such exchanges wouldn't appear to unify the secular community, a multiplicity of theories could be turned to its advantage if we were to undertake a full-court press in seriously studying religion from an evolutionary perspective. With a little luck, the discussion could garner media attention and expose humanist ideas to a wider audience, as the recent DDH&H efforts have.
So I vote for encouraging a free-flowing discussion of the nature of religion, in the Humanist magazine and in the humanist/atheist press generally. The secular community will emerge stronger, with a clearer idea of why what we advocate is important, and our numbers could well increase.
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Carl Coon is a former ambassador to Nepal and author of One Planet, One People: Beyond "Us versus Them," published by Prometheus Books in 2004. He is also vice president of the American Humanist Association.
