6 - Religion as ancestral trait

Summary

The starting point for the argument presented in this book was the conflict between reason and superstition that the Enlightenment thinkers perceived as the central aspect of the intellectual history of humanity. In the preceding chapters an account has been developed that combines traditional epistemic considerations with recent work on the cognitive and cultural basis of magic and religion, as well as, to a lesser degree, science. The foundation stone for this account was provided by the view that human reasoning has to be understood in terms of bounded rationality theory.

The dual inheritance account that has been offered to explain aspects of religious beliefs and practices suggests that religions owe their longevity to the successful amalgamation of two different independently occurring phenomena. On the one hand, religions involve beliefs that are both attractive due to cognitive by-products and well protected against potentially destabilizing counter-evidence, as is the case with all supernatural beliefs. In this respect religions are to be understood in the context of the biological evolution of human cognitive abilities. On the other hand, religions motivate prosocial behaviour, which helps to maintain the cohesion of human groups. This aspect of religions is adaptive, and either to be explained in terms of the impact it has on the fitness of the individual members of such groups or in terms of the fitness of the cultural groups, themselves.