The Soul Gene

August 1, 2007 by Dr. Mc.

David Barash produced an interesting article for the April 20, 2007 issue of the Chronicle Review of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The DNA of Religious Faith explores the developing literature on the biological origins of religion. His article is well researched for recent works.

Though he cites several publications in the most recent decade that attempt to explain why people are religious, the idea of explaining away the spiritual is not new. He could have as easily mentioned Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), in which he elaborates on a concept that the soul is literally the result of social demands on the individual to conform to regulation. Or how about the way George Herbert Mead took hundreds of pages in Mind, Self, and Society (1934) to explain that our consciousness of self, and thus our uniquely human condition, developed from social interactions that forced us to distinguish ourselves from the masses. He also saw this integrally linked to the development of language, which he pictured as developing from reflexive gestures and sounds of animals. So, though there may be something new in our biology technologies, there is nothing new in the idea of trying to explain away God or the soul. Though the logic may be complex, convoluted, and without empirical evidence, the very idea that learned people could and would do this rocked me during my PhD program. No more. Anything and everything observable can be explained in multiple ways that are logical, yet each explanation is mutually exclusive of the other, e.g., the sun moves around the earth and the earth moves around the sun. In other words, there always exists a completely logical explanation that is untrue. It just may not be the most parsimonious explanation.

Even though Barash assumes a satisfactory material explanation may be found some day, he makes some very revealing observations, including the following quote:

“It is both a fertile field and a frustrating one. On the one hand, religious belief of one sort or another seems ubiquitous, suggesting that it might well have emerged, somehow, from universal human nature, the common evolutionary background shared by all humans. On the other hand, it often appears that religious practice is fitness-reducing rather than enhancing — and, if so, that genetically mediated tendencies toward religion should have been selected against. Think of the frequent advocacy of sexual restraint, of tithing, of self-abnegating moral duty and other seeming diminutions of personal fitness, along with the characteristic denial of the “evidence of our senses” in favor of faith in things asserted but not clearly demonstrated. What fitness-enhancing benefits of religion might compensate for those costs?”

This confession of the difficulties of explaining away God and religion are well said. “Survival of the fittest” comes up quite short when applied to religion. Barash does a good review of ideas posited for religion’s biological origins, but then does just as good a job presenting the difficulties of each attempt. He concludes “sadly, that a convincing evolutionary explanation for the origin of religion has yet to be formulated. In any event, such an account, were it to arise, would doubtless be unconvincing to believers because, whatever it postulated, it would not conclude that religious belief arose because (1) it simply represents an accurate perception of God, comparable to identifying food, a predator, or a prospective mate; or (2) it was installed in the human mind and/or genome by God, presumably for his glory and our counterevidentiary enlightenment.”

Perhaps Barash meant this last statement to emphasize the unreasonableness of “believers” to accept scientific explanations, but he has also pointed out the blinders on most scientific research. Why is he so confident that scientists will indeed NOT sometime in the future conclude that the “ubiquitous” nature of religion is due to a real God? Because the idea is off limits. It cannot be considered, no matter what the evidence indicates. Now who is being unreasonable? Any pursuit of knowledge that a priori assumes that certain possible answers are off limits is by definition pursuing a question outside its defined boundaries to explain.

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