It’s not exactly a book on evolutionary psychology, but I recommend this book for some information regarding why we might be neurologically inclined to be religious in the absence of an actual god.
I would point out that it’s not necessarily the case that religiousness was ever positively selected for as something that promoted survival, it could very easily be a consequence of other traits that were selected for interacting with each other. For instance, humans have strong pattern recognition capacities, but also a strong bias in favor of seeing patterns, even if the patterns are imaginary, because in our evolutionary environment, false positives were less likely to be dangerous than false negatives (it’s better to run away from a bush that rustles in the wind than to not run away from a tiger.)
“Evolutionists say that if God makes sense to us, it is not because he is really there, it’s only because that belief helped us survive and so we are hardwired for it. However, if we can’t trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science? If our cognitive faculties only tell us what we need to survive, not what is true, why trust them about anything at all?” -Timothy Keller
This brings to mind the concept of “wronger than wrong. Agreement between map and territory is a matter of degree, not a yes/no proposition. Our senses give us (imperfect) information about our territory, and we have cognitive algorithms which convert that information into our maps. We can perform experiments to test the degree of agreement between our maps and the territory; for instance, if your map says that it’s raining out, and if you go out in the rain, you should experience getting wet, and you go outside and continue to feel dry, you should lower your confidence in that part of your map. There are many examples of cognitive bias, where we find that our intuitive mapmaking abilities lead us astray and cause us to make wrong predictions. But we also find that with training, using proper experiments, statistics and reasoning techniques, we can build maps that show better agreement with our territory than the ones we can construct intuitively (who could have intuited Bose-Einstein condensates in advance of their discovery, for example?)
In light of this, it’s worth asking, if we don’t believe that through properly systematic reasoning we can do better than our intuition, why do we believe in our senses at all?
It’s not exactly a book on evolutionary psychology, but I recommend this book for some information regarding why we might be neurologically inclined to be religious in the absence of an actual god.
I would point out that it’s not necessarily the case that religiousness was ever positively selected for as something that promoted survival, it could very easily be a consequence of other traits that were selected for interacting with each other. For instance, humans have strong pattern recognition capacities, but also a strong bias in favor of seeing patterns, even if the patterns are imaginary, because in our evolutionary environment, false positives were less likely to be dangerous than false negatives (it’s better to run away from a bush that rustles in the wind than to not run away from a tiger.)
This brings to mind the concept of “wronger than wrong. Agreement between map and territory is a matter of degree, not a yes/no proposition. Our senses give us (imperfect) information about our territory, and we have cognitive algorithms which convert that information into our maps. We can perform experiments to test the degree of agreement between our maps and the territory; for instance, if your map says that it’s raining out, and if you go out in the rain, you should experience getting wet, and you go outside and continue to feel dry, you should lower your confidence in that part of your map. There are many examples of cognitive bias, where we find that our intuitive mapmaking abilities lead us astray and cause us to make wrong predictions. But we also find that with training, using proper experiments, statistics and reasoning techniques, we can build maps that show better agreement with our territory than the ones we can construct intuitively (who could have intuited Bose-Einstein condensates in advance of their discovery, for example?)
In light of this, it’s worth asking, if we don’t believe that through properly systematic reasoning we can do better than our intuition, why do we believe in our senses at all?