Eliezer, here is a reasonably probable just-so story: the reason you wrote this article is that you hate the idea that religion might have any good effects, and you hope to prove that this couldn’t happen. However, the idea that the purpose of religion is to make tribes more cohesive does not depend on group selection, and is absurd in no way.
It is likely enough that religions came to be as an extension of telling stories. Telling stories usually has various moralistic purposes, very often including the cohesiveness of the tribe. This does not depend on group selection: it depends on the desire of the storyteller to enforce a particular morality. If a story doesn’t promote his morality, he changes the story when he tells it until it does. You then have an individual selection process where stories that people like to tell and like to hear continue to be told, while other stories die out. Then some story has a “mutation” where things are told which people are likely to believe, for whatever reason (you suggest one yourself in the article). Stories which are believed to be actually true are even more likely to continue to be told, and to have moralistic effects, than stories which are recognized as such, and so the story has improved fitness. But it also has beneficial effects, namely the same beneficial effects which were intended all along by the storytellers. So there is no way to get your pre-written bottom line that religion can have no beneficial effects whatsoever.
If you mean that the “binds tribes closer together” and related aspects are being grossly underestimated, I agree.
The “costly sacrifices”, too, may have been poorly assessed—the net effect for individuals, in their true circumstances at the time, may have been frequently positive. Or—this is not to be discounted either—believed to be positive.
Eliezer, here is a reasonably probable just-so story: the reason you wrote this article is that you hate the idea that religion might have any good effects, and you hope to prove that this couldn’t happen. However, the idea that the purpose of religion is to make tribes more cohesive does not depend on group selection, and is absurd in no way.
It is likely enough that religions came to be as an extension of telling stories. Telling stories usually has various moralistic purposes, very often including the cohesiveness of the tribe. This does not depend on group selection: it depends on the desire of the storyteller to enforce a particular morality. If a story doesn’t promote his morality, he changes the story when he tells it until it does. You then have an individual selection process where stories that people like to tell and like to hear continue to be told, while other stories die out. Then some story has a “mutation” where things are told which people are likely to believe, for whatever reason (you suggest one yourself in the article). Stories which are believed to be actually true are even more likely to continue to be told, and to have moralistic effects, than stories which are recognized as such, and so the story has improved fitness. But it also has beneficial effects, namely the same beneficial effects which were intended all along by the storytellers. So there is no way to get your pre-written bottom line that religion can have no beneficial effects whatsoever.
If you mean that the “binds tribes closer together” and related aspects are being grossly underestimated, I agree. The “costly sacrifices”, too, may have been poorly assessed—the net effect for individuals, in their true circumstances at the time, may have been frequently positive. Or—this is not to be discounted either—believed to be positive.