Dear Mr. Pinker,Hi, I wrote you some fan mail a few months ago in regard to your latest book, and you were nice enough to respond. I'm rewarding this kindness on your part by pestering you again. I will attempt to justify this liberty of mine by noting that I am motivated by a deep and abiding interest in your work--and that I have so far bought, or caused others to buy, at least a dozen copies of _How the Mind Works_. 8^) My pestering, to elaborate, takes the form of a (perceived) insight in regard to your concluding chapter, "The Meaning of Life"--specifically, your attempt to provide an evolutionary explanation for the ubiquitous human institution of religion. My comments are slightly lengthy, and I know you're insanely busy--but if you're interested enough to bear with this for 15 minutes, I'm guessing you'll appreciate the payoff.
You pose the problem, if you'll forgive me summarizing, as "why would a system of computational modules designed to figure out how the world works, and solve concrete mechanical and social problems, also evolve the inclination (found in almost all peoples and times) to believe in the 'palpably not true'--namely religion." You go on to suggest explanations in several areas, including: 1) That a notion of ancestor-worship benefits soon-to-be-ancestors, who are losing their leverage in the ongoing prisoner's dilemma game. 2) Religious dogma benefits the tribe through demarcation of social categories, initiations which weed out those who seek the benefits of tribe membership without committment to paying the costs, and demonizing inconvenient people. 3) Religious power benefits certain members of the tribe, namely shamans and priests, by creating a market for miracles. 4) Religion is a "desperate measure that people resort to when the stakes are high and they have exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success." 5) Religious and mystical concepts adhere generally to all physical rules and concepts, with one or so exceptions. 6) Religious concepts explain certain data which are "stymied by our everyday theories."
I'll preface my explanation (the perceived insight) with replies to your various accounts of the matter:
1 is not hugely convincing. One might see where elders with dwindling power would be INCENTED to institute a religious system to their benefit--but if their problem is powerlessness, whence the power to enforce the system? And enforce it on virtually everyone on the planet? Unless their spirits are in fact coming back and wreaking havoc on the lives of those who slighted them, it would seem that the trait of ancestor-worship--at least to the extent that it sucks any resources--would be selected against (particularly as it benefits those past reproducing age, while costing those below it). It's all bark, no bite.
2, while equally as interesting, also seems inadequate. These social customs which are tribe-beneficial are incidental to our understanding of religion. I.e., there's no readily apparent necessity for an all-powerful being, an afterlife, or a spirit world to implement social castes, initiations, or "witchhunts." You could do all these things without the aid of such wild, "palpably untrue," theories about the universe and the human soul as are provided by religion.
3 is also unsatisfactory in cold light: To the extent that the shaman's techniques are predicated on the palpably untrue, they would be ineffective, even harmful, to those they are used on. Based in part on your account of trust/deceit relationships, and the sort of arms races of defense mechanisms which result, it would seem that the non-shamans would cultivate defenses against quackery--i.e. the quackery-susceptible would be selected against. (You posit that the witch doctors must "have SOME track record or they would lose all credibility"--but bear in mind that to whatever extent they are using valid and effective techniques, they are not using religion as we are discussing it.) But we don't see this result--something like 98% of the planet buys into religion full bore. It's not clear why they would evolve to do this, soley to the benefit of the shaman minority.
4 is very interesting and probably a perfectly accurate account of what individuals are on about when they resort to mystical thinking--but it contributes nothing to our inquiry about how such a trait might have EVOLVED. Unless these "desperate measures" (i.e. beseeching the Gods for success and succor) actually WORK, the urge to resort to them (instead of doing something useful) would be selected against. (One possible counter-argument is that some succor can be gotten even from chimerical (and ineffectual) Gods, and such succor could keep people from despair, and even suicide. But I don't think this gets you there.)
5 is an interesting discussion, but totally reddish and herring-like in regard to the question at hand.
6 (in contrast to all above) is hot on the trail, I think--but cops out after only a single paragraph on the subject. (You use it to segue into the stunning capstone of the book, on the putative inadequacy of the human mind to certain important philosophical problems.) But I think you missed the boat (though you bumped into it) here on explaining the provenance of organized religion and religious belief.
To wit: It is not hugely original to suggest (and it is widely accepted, at least amongst atheistic/agnostic types) that much of religion came about to explain facts of the world which were beyond the science of the people of a given day. When you don't have a grasp of the movement and mass of the moon, bathing Gods (or whatnot) might explain the tides. When your agricultural science is shoddy, peeved deities seem as likely a cause as any for your failed crops (and starving children). And so on and so forth--with volcanoes, eclipses, the seasons, the weather, disease and healing, burning bushes and freezing streams. The mystical is very good at filling in the gaps left by an incomplete rational understanding of the physical world. This account, of course, begs the question of WHY we feel compelled to fill in those gaps in the first place--but I think you've tackled that handily in your book: We evolved to occupy a "cognitive niche" of specialization, and thus "figuring things out" is precisely what it is in our nature to do. And the drive to figure things out doesn't, for better or worse, extend only to those issues to which our cognitive "figuring-things-out" tools are adequate. It keeps reaching. Historically, when the drive to understand has overreached the capabilities of our intellect, the imagination (in the form of religious belief) has taken up the slack. Again, I think most (non-religious) folks would already agree to this account in regard to puzzling physical (i.e. external) phenomena--and how religion was employed to explain them.
My insight, if I have one, is to apply the same explanation to the INTERNAL. In your concluding section you posit several vital, and probably unanswerable, questions about the human mind(/soul): the nature of the self, free will, meaning, knowledge, and morality. And here you DO note that the most popular explanations for these problems are mystical and religious: "Consciousness is a divine spark in each of us. The self is the soul, an immaterial ghost that floats above physical events. Souls just exist, or they were created by God. God granted each soul a moral worth and power of choice. &c." It's a fabulous formulation, but it's interesting to me that you don't connect it to your earlier exploration of the PROVENANCE of religion.
Whereas (in the first section discussed) you try to come up with an EVOLUTIONARY BASIS for religion, it seems to me likely that religion is an EXTERNALITY of our evolutionary makeup (and you do admit the existence of such externalities, or side effects, earlier in the book). That is to say, we are evolved with a drive to figure things out, in order to solve specific problems of survival on the African Savannah. But as our cognitive apparati increased radically in complexity, we also ended up with--and these are all the traits agreed to seperate us from the other animals--these mixed blessings of consciousness, self-awareness, notions of morality, and weak grasps of the existence of such concepts as free will, meaning, etc. We've evolved and multiplied in complexity to the point of having the bare experience of these categories of the mind (not to mention an awareness of the mind itself), this baggage associated with having a hugely complex information processing device--and concommitantly, the need to understand its operation--but NOT to the point of being ABLE to understand the operation of the mind. Hence, religion (souls, creator fathers, afterlives, Great Revealed Books of Proper Moral Conduct) have been used to fill the gap--not because this promotes survival or reproduction, but merely because it satisfies our essential CRAVING FOR EXPLANATIONS which ITSELF was a Darwinistically fit trait. We evolved a mind that needed to understand things--and then we became aware of this mind, at which time it instantly became one of the categories of things we needed (without much initial success) to understand! And we used these "palpably untrue" explanations because they were the best ones we had.
Until now, that is! My hypothesis is that one will find religion in any species sufficiently cognitively advanced to EXPERIENCE these odd higher functions of a hugely complex brain--BUT NOT SUFFICIENTLY COGNITIVELY ADVANCED TO UNDERSTAND ITS OWN WORKINGS! In other words, religion is equally as good at explaining a mind (or soul) whose workings you don't understand, as it is at explaining a world whose workings you don't understand.
However, we've recently made some dramatic progress in understanding how the mind works (wink, nudge), and my other theory is that perhaps you do not directly put forth this connection, either as a result of modesty, or (amusingly characteristic of all of this!) an inability to step back and self-examine the place and importance of your own work (and, of course, those you followed (Tooby, Cosmides, McGinn, et al)). In other words, I'm thinking religion (at least as it relates to explaining souls and our existence here) is an activity typical of hominids living in the period book-ended by whenever it was we achieved sentience (I know, it wasn't, like, noon on a Tuesday...) along the 4 billion year evolutionary curve, on the one hand--and the release of _How the Mind Works_ in AD 1997. (Seriously.)
The fairly good explanation of the physical workings of the universe which we as a species have achieved took one leg out from under the establishment of religion. The understanding--at long last!--of who we are as creatures, how we are made up, and why we act and feel like we do, is, I am guessing, going to pull out the other leg. I can only think and hope that _How the Mind Works_ will ultimately be remembered as a prolegomena to a very enlightened age of humanity (think _Origin of Species_). I'll keep doing my part to spread the good word. 8^)
Sincerely and with best regards,
Michael FuchsP.S. No reply required (though, needless to say, any reply always welcome).
cc: Andrea Barnes, one of the people I enticed into reading the book, and Elizabeth Whamond, who is succumbing currently. (I've been thus far too shy to ask Elizabeth point blank whether she'd actually prefer to make love with an attractive partner, or be smacked on the belly with a wet mackerel--but, she's an odd one, so her answer might not be indicative of anything.)