Jeffrey Schloss - Introduction Evolutionary Theories of Religion, filozofia
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
//-->Introduction: EvolutionaryTheories ofReligionScience Unfettered or NaturalismRunWild?Jeffrey SchlossThe sciences long remained like a lion-cub whose gambols delighted itsmaster in private; it had not yet tasted man’s blood . . . Science was notthe business of Man because Man had not yet become the business ofscience . . . when Darwin starts monkeying with the ancestry of Man, andFreud with his soul, and the economists with all that is his, then indeedthe lion will have got out of its cage.C. S. Lewis, ‘Inaugural Lecture’, Cambridge University ()Explanation on the Prowln a sense this is a book about the uncaged lion. While the oft-citedexplosion of scientific knowledge is striking (Rescher;Gilbert),it also understates the character and cultural significance of recentdevelopments. What has happened beyond a mere increase in amountof information is, of course, that entire regions of human experiencepreviously considered off-limits or at least seemingly recalcitrant toscientific elucidation have become fair game for its explanatory prowess.Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, the life and behavioral scienceshave become progressively unified under the single explanatory rubric ofevolutionary theory. Darwinism is not just about ‘ancestry’ anymore (asif it ever were—Dewey).Nor, contra the above quote, do theories.Lewis: .Ii n t r o duc t i o nof the human psyche or economics involve separate disciplines. Overthe last several decades, and even over just the last few years, there hasbeen a proliferation of evolutionary proposals for consolidating previouslydisparate explanatory approaches to human cognition and behavior,including the crucial phenomenon of religion.These developments have been enabled—the cage has been ‘unlocked’ asit were—by important theoretical keys, particularly in population genetics,cognitive science, and game theory. But there is more at work than this. Asecond lock comprised of social reticence to developing biological accountsof human behavior, due, in part, to a reaction against overly zealousattempts in the first half of the twentieth century, has been pried open ina couple of stages (Sahlins;Segerstrale).First, the emergence ofsociobiology and evolutionary psychology in recent decades has involved,as Mary Midgley somewhat facetiously but accurately observes, the break-down of a ‘precarious truce’ between evolutionary theorists and humanbehavioral scientists, in which it was ‘agreed not to deny the reality ofhuman evolution, so long as nobody attempted to make any intellectualuse of it’ (Midgley:p. xi). Second, and the subject of this volume,evolutionary analysis has very recently focused specifically on religion:‘Up to now, there has been a largely unexamined mutual agreement thatscientists and other researchers will leave religion alone . . . pioneers are nowbeginning, for the first time really, to study the natural phenomena ofreligion through the eyes of contemporary science’ (Dennett: , ).What precisely is going on for the ‘first time’? Of course, the attemptto understand the rational and natural foundations of religious belief isnot in itself new. Two hundred years before Lewis’s observation and acentury before Darwin, Hume opened hisNatural History ofReligionwith,‘As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance,there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit,that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin inhuman nature’ (:).Moreover, contemporary evolutionary accountsare not completing a job that only began with Hume. Prior to Hume’s vig-ilant skepticism, there was a longstanding tradition within the communityof faith—from Pascal to Aquinas to Anselm and Augustine—of debatingthe adequacy of rational arguments for belief, the root of faith in nativedispositions, and the relationship between reason and nature (Porter).Nevertheless, current research on religion is indeed quite new in atleast two ways. First off, the traditional critical emphasis on Hume’si n t r o duc t i o n‘two questions’—religion’s foundation in reason and its origin in humannature—has largely been pared down to just one. This understandablyensues from the fact that current discussions are primarily scientific, andlooking for natural causes, not assessing metaphysical arguments, is simplywhat science does. But more is at work than the metaphysical neutralityof science. There is also a widespread confidence that science is able toprovide an explanation that is not just necessary but sufficient for under-standing religious belief: when rational justifications for religion are widelyunderstood to constitute a null set, all that is left to investigate are its causes.InNaturalismandReligion,Kai Nielsen makes the claim thatby now it has been well established that there are no sound reasons for reli-gious belief: there is no reasonable possibility of establishing religious beliefsto be true; there is no such thing as religious knowledge or sound religiousbelief. But, when there are no good reasons for religious belief . . . and yetreligious belief, belief that is both widespread and tenacious, persists in ourcultural life, then it is time to look for thecausesof religious beliefs . . .(:)Now even this is not a wholly new enterprise. Spinoza viewed the assurancethat God directs things toward His purposes as illusory, and set out toexplain ‘why so many fall into this error, and why all are by nature so proneto embrace it . . . ’ ( []:).What seems to be unprecedented, inthe public domain, is leveraging this position with the modern culturalauthority of science, and, in the scientific domain, the relinquishment ofneutrality on issues that, by both the logic of its method and tradition of itsemployment, science has not heretofore adjudicated. Daniel Dennett, themost philosophically sophisticated public exegete of evolutionary theoriesof religion, rightly laments the ‘unfortunate pattern in the work that hasbeen done. People . . . either want to defend their favorite religion from itscritics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion . . . ’(:).Actually, in evolutionary studies of religion there are prominentexamples of the latter and virtually none of the former. But my pointconcerns not so much the ends to which the science is put, but theassumptions with which it begins. While there are plenty of overt andacerbic attempts to use science to discredit religion (Dawkins;Stenger),this by no means characterizes the field. What does characterize it isthe a priori emphasis on the adequacy of natural causal explanations.I am not speaking here merely of the methodological commitment toeschew employment of supernatural causes in scientific explanation, buti n t r o duc t i o nof the prevailing assumption thatreasonsfor belief in supernatural entitiescan safely be uncoupled from an explanatory account of why peoplehold such beliefs. In the spirit of emphasis on Hume’s second question,Dennett himself dissociates causal explanations of religious beliefs fromconsideration of their truth or falsity. Not arguing one way or another, heindicates ‘I decided some time ago that diminishing returns had set in onthe arguments about God’s existence, and I doubt that any breakthroughsare in the offing, from either side’ (:).While this would seem toembody the very methodological neutrality he endorses, matters are morecomplicated. For one thing, proffering an explanation for why someoneholds a belief independent of its rationale—positing causes and dismissingreasons—is not itself a neutral posture toward the belief. Moreover, it turnsout that ‘diminishing returns’ does not refer to an argument that has miredin stalemate, could go either way, and is best not to get ensnared in, butrather to one that has been decisively settled and does not warrant furtherinvestment: ‘flattening all the serious arguments for the existence of God’is a feat that has been adequately accomplished (Dennett).None of these comments are meant to be remonstrative. Indeed, ifreligious (or other) beliefs are either false or groundless, and are neverthe-less widely held—as many beliefs about the paranormal and supernaturaldemonstrably are—this surely warrants both recognition and explanation.My point is simply that such recognition represents a salient, recent,and prominent (though by no means invariant) feature of evolutionaryapproaches to religion. And it is an issue on which contributors to thisvolume disagree.The second significant aspect of current theories is that not only dothey emphasize natural causes over reasons for religious belief, but also theyunderstand the latterin terms ofthe former. And, unlike earlier Freudianand Marxist naturalistic explanations of religion, evolutionary accountsinvolve causal processes that have empirical ramifications and are positedto be universally influential—across all aspects of human behavior and inall biological phenomena. ‘Everything we value—from sugar and sex andmoney to music and love and religion—we value for reasons. Lying behind,and distinct from, our reasons are evolutionary reasons, free-floating ratio-nales that have been endorsed by natural selection’ (Dennett: )..This was anticipated in Dewey’s claim nearly a century ago that ‘the influence of Darwinupon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principleof transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life’i n t r o duc t i o nThis second distinctive is by no means entirely worked out or uncontro-versial. Even within evolutionary biology, there is considerable debate overthe extent to which and in what sense human reasons can be adequatelyunderstood in terms of selection’s ‘rationales’ (Buller;Dennett;Goulda;Gouldb;Maynard Smith;Orr;RoseandRose).Or, to use the language of game theory, how well psychologicalutilities map the utility of fitness. Moreover, the relationship betweenevolutionary reasons and the endorsement of selection is not always clear.This involves prominent debates over the adaptationist paradigm. But also,even when the adaptive rationale for a trait is unquestionable—as in sexualreproduction or the genetic code—we still may have no explanation forhow the characteristic evolved to begin with: function does not providean account of a trait’s origin. Stephen Gould’s admonition on this pointis especially relevant when it comes to evolutionary accounts of religion:‘a crucial, but often disregarded, distinction [exists] between “reasons forhistorical origin” and “basis of current utility”. The common conflationof these entirely separate notions has engendered enormous confusion inevolutionary theory’ (:).The above issues are much larger than, but set the general context for,evolutionary theories of religion. In what follows, I will describe morespecifically the landscape of current discussion on which contributions tothis volume are situated.Scientific AccountsAlthough the philosophical literature on scientific demarcation is vast andunsettled, most scientists are not philosophers and most of their workdoes not involve the need to identify, much less publicly justify, whatabout it is properly ‘scientific’. This has not been the case when it comesto evolutionary theory in general and scientific explanations of religion(:).E. O. Wilson asserted this with more bravado if less nuance at the beginningof his seminalSociobiology,which formally launched the field: ‘self-knowledge is constrainedand shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic systems of thebrain . . . What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system?They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued toexplain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths’(:).Dennett’s notion of a ‘free-floating rationale’ that is both ‘behind and distinct fromhuman reasons’ is a considerably more elegant framing (Dennett; ).
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]