Science Literature

Scientists are generally committed to realism: the conviction that we are studying a world that is objective rather than subjective and that the external world exists independently of human perception. Whilst this provides a coherent framework for the domains of physics and chemistry, there are major ideological issues to address when we come to scientific analysis of humanity. The phenomenon of consciousness has long been controversial: do we exist as persons or is our sense of consciousness a function of brain cell activity? Similar comments can be made about love, hate, our sense of beauty, and spirituality: are these just chemical reactions? (for more on this, go here)

Is consciousness "a learned repertoire of verbal behaviour"? (source here). What can be said about spirituality?

The realist conviction becomes elusive when we study ourselves! Modern science seems committed to deconstructing humanity so that we are, in essence, physics and chemistry, and our cultural behaviours are either adaptive or socially constructed. This applies to much thinking about spirituality. Evolutionary presuppositions are everywhere to be found. The option that man is a spiritual being is not even on the table for consideration.

"Two schools of thought have dominated the debate. The first views religion as a "by-product" of other evolutionary adaptations such as larger brains. The second sees religion itself as adaptive, arguing that its role in social cohesiveness and other traits may have helped humans survive."

New research by Fincher and Thornhill comes from the second of the schools mentioned above. The thesis is that "religion diversity appears to be tied importantly to infectious disease stress across the globe, and the global pattern is consistent with our model of religion genesis". The mechanism is explained thus:

"Religion marks group members [. . .] and can dissuade people from interacting with those outside the group. In areas with rampant infectious disease, this can be an advantage: No outsiders means no outside pathogens. Isolation can also prevent the exchange of ideas, or religions, in this case. That might lead to the rise of many independent religious systems."

The authors present "an evolutionary history of antagonistic coevolution between parasites and hosts and subsequent religion genesis". The more infectious diseases there are, the more religions spring up. The hypothesis advanced by the authors is that "the more a society disperses and mixes with other groups, the more it risks contracting new diseases - in other words, strangers are bad for your health". The reactions that have appeared so far suggest that people are viewing the hypothesis favourably. However, some concerns are worth highlighting.

The first concern is about causation. What is the cause and what is the effect? How do we know? The authors do not appear to discuss these questions. The areas of high religious diversity are in the tropics, where diseases tend to be more virulent and more numerous. Life in the tropics introduces many challenges that are not faced by those of us living in temperate zones of the Earth. Some analysis of lifestyles in the tropics would appear to be warranted, but this is not supplied by the authors. Philip Ball writes:

"It's an intriguing observation. But as with all correlation studies, cause and effect are hard to untangle. One could equally argue that avoiding contact with other social groups simply prevents the spread of some cultural traits at the expense of others, and so merely preserves an intrinsic diversity that has a tendency to arise anywhere. This, indeed, is the basis of some theoretical models for how cultural exchange and transmission occurs. Where opportunities for interaction are fewer, 'island cultures' are more likely to coexist rather than being consumed by a dominant one."

Secondly, the authors case appears to rest heavily on the thought that religions are closed groups, with social insiders and outsiders. This again is controversial. It is completely alien to the spirit of Christianity, which is to respond to the commission of Christ about reaching out to others. Rachel Zelkowitz writes:

"But Courtney Bender, a sociologist of religion at Columbia University, disagrees [with the hypothesis]. Religions around the planet range from being very open to very closed to outsiders, she says: "You can't just say religions have strong boundaries." Indeed, traditional religious societies often interact with those outside their own group for trade or military alliances, says Richard Sosis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut."

A third concern is about the data sources. The study is undertaken at a broad-brush level with source data about religions drawn from Barrett et al's World Christian Encyclopedia. What is absent is a discussion of what constitutes a separate religion (as distinct from a local variant). For example, animism appears not to be a distinctly identifiable religion: it is subsumed by a long list of tribally-based religions. The authors do not discuss taxonomic questions, and whether they are "splitters" or "lumpers". They do not say how they handle the data about the 33,830 denominations within Christianity. They do not say how they distinguish between scattered pockets of religious followers and communities, nor how they handle the questions about the size of religious communities. The World Christian Encyclopedia is based on census data, and there are a whole host of uncertainties associated with self-assessment.

Zelkowitz observes that "the evolution of religion itself is not well-understood." This is the key to understanding studies of this kind. There is a strong presupposition in the minds of many scholars that religion must be an evolved behaviour and that it must be possible to identify the drivers for the rise of religion as a phenomenon. What few will even consider in their research is whether man is a spiritual, as well as a material, being and that the drivers for religious diversity come from mankind's spiritual nature. This position is, historically, part of the Christian worldview and, at very least, it deserves to be tested and scrutinised fairly by academics. It is the secularised mindset of scientists that prevents them considering such radical alternatives, and it is the strength of ID based science that multiple hypotheses can be considered - without making any presumptions about the outcomes of research. For a previous blog related to this topic, go here.

Assortative sociality, limited dispersal, infectious disease and the genesis of the global pattern of religion diversity
Corey L. Fincher and Randy Thornhill
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, First Cite, July 29 2008 | doi 10.1098/rspb.2008.0688

Abstract: Why are religions far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas? We propose, as an answer, that more religions have emerged and are maintained in the tropics because, through localized coevolutionary races with hosts, infectious diseases select for three anticontagion behaviours: in-group assortative sociality; out-group avoidance; and limited dispersal. These behaviours, in turn, create intergroup boundaries that effectively fractionate, isolate and diversify an original culture leading to the genesis of two or more groups from one. Religion is one aspect of a group's culture that undergoes this process. If this argument is correct then, across the globe, religion diversity should correlate positively with infectious disease diversity, reflecting an evolutionary history of antagonistic coevolution between parasites and hosts and subsequent religion genesis. We present evidence that supports this model: for a global sample of traditional societies, societal range size is reduced in areas with more pathogens compared with areas with few pathogens, and in contemporary countries religion diversity is positively related to two measures of parasite stress.

See also:

Zelkowitz, R., Pathogens And Prayer, ScienceNOW Daily News, 30 July 2008

Ball, P., Is religion good for your health? Nature News, 1 August 2008 | doi:10.1038/news.2008.990

O'Leary, D. Evolutionary psychology: British physicist targets theory-of-the-month on "how religion got started", Mindful Hack, 13 August 2008.