Message 185/234  From Steve Pinker       Sep 28, 98 02:46:40 pm -0400

Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1998 14:46:40 -0400 (EDT)
To: Michael Fuchs 
Cc: amb2c@concentric.net, elizabeth@ifact.com
Subject: Problems with an evolutionary basis for religious belief


Dear Michael,

I hope it isn't just your kind words that led me to appreciate your
note as much as I did. Your criticisms of my explanation of religious
belief are well taken. I think I could defend them by combining all of
my points together and adding yours -- viz., given everyone's
ignorance of the workings of the world, shamans can make it difficult
for others to discriminate their genuine powers from the flim-flam --
but you are correct that an appreciation of actual cause-and-effect in
the world ought to have been a selection pressure that would override
our susceptibility to magic and superstition, and that is a puzzle I
have not satisfactorily explained away. 

By the way I probably did not make it clear enough in the book that I
think that religion is a by-product, not an adaptation (or the "God
module" as V. S. Ramachandran has posited). On pp. 525-526 I
foreshadow that in the case of religion, but it was far from the
discussion of religion itself, so the connection was obscure. My
mechanisms 1-6 were intended as ways that religion might have fallen
out as a byproduct of other parts of the mind. 

Thanks for your observation about the lingering, but conceivably
moribund, power of religion as we come to understand the mind. It is
an excellent point, and you are correct that I vaguely and
absent-mindedly hinted at it in a segue, which is not a substitute for
spelling it out, as you did. I think you're right and that the point
may help to explain some of the fury with which evolutionary
psychology, and to a lesser extent neuroscience, has been greeted in
some parts -- as the title Tom Wolfe's article/speech puts it, "Your
Soul Just Died."

With best wishes,
Steve