Religion

Richard Dawkins was on the radio yesterday talking about his book, the God Delusion (which I haven't read yet). He feels that belief in God probably arises as an artifact of evolutionarily adaptive traits like, say, believing what your parents tell you. Altricial young, particularly those born to variable environments, would do well to listen to their parents. So, if parents tell you to believe in God, you should. The problem here is that it doesn't explain why religion has caught on so much better than say, Republicanism.

I've been thinking about this since college, and it recently occurred to me that our propensity to believe in God may have a proximal, direct benefit.

In any social structure that tends toward game-theory mediated altruism (e.g. ours), it would be valuable to imagine how the rest of your community is going to react to your actions. If you're thinking of stealing from someone (or defaulting on a debt), it's a good idea to consider how that will be received by the rest of your social group. If what you do will be received poorly, that might be it for your support network.

If I'm right, God started life as an imagined observer who judges us against our group's moral standards. Consequently, God is a really valuable psychological mechanism. Really, God's only an artifact insofar as S/He seems to be a richly embroidered version of the necessary observer.

Now, I don't believe in God (I really don't care if God exists or not, since it won't affect how I act), but I still think widespread reference to our internal omniscient observers may be the only way to keep society running well. I'll explain using traffic jams.

A prisoner's dilemma occurs when two people can both do better by cooperating than if they try to screw each other but either one can do much better by shifting the loss mostly to the other person. Now if you're waiting at a light and it becomes clear that the light is broken, the group of drivers has two options: First, continue to try to follow rules and, where necessary, fall back on turn-taking and other conventions used for keeping social order. Second, everyone for him or herself. Now, it usually starts off with order and then some jackass or another starts cheating, jockeying for position and going around everyone who's waiting in line.

You'd be a chump to sit still and take that, so suddenly the whole thing devolves into an increasingly nasty snarl. So what's interesting to me here is that if the guy you're cutting off is someone you know, someone you're likely to see at work or in your neighborhood, for instance, you're not going to be so quick to cut them off. You might need their help later, after all.

In a large, anonymous culture, that moral incentive is absent. People may act morally, but usually because of some sense of right, or karma. So, I guess what I'm saying about the psychology that encourages us to believe in God is that it's particularly useful in the modern world. If we can just figure out how to decouple it from moral certainty and divine right, we'd be better off harnessing it than convincing people to ignore it.