Weinstein on religion

Continuing this post, from the same interview.

"I believe that religion must have evolved, that the meaning of long standing religious traditions is a Darwinian meaning. Which does not imply that in our modern circumstances that these ancient stories are the guide to what we should be doing; that is likely to be true in some cases, but it is almost certainly not to be true in many others.

"The fact is that Darwinian evolution does not prepare us for the environments in which we live, it prepares them for the environments from which we came, and we don’t live in the environments where religious traditions evolved.

"So in some sense, even a recognition that these are a kind of ancient wisdom that has been encoded in a cultural package that is easily transmitted, even that recognition leaves us with the profound sense that we must now figure out what to do next, because those stories are not up to the challenges of the 21st century. [...]

"And what I’ve been saying is that religion shows all of the hallmarks of being a Darwinian adaptation and that, therefore, it is as deserving of a proper Darwinian treatment as an eye, or a wing, or an enzyme. That has inflamed many of the people at the forefront of the new atheist movement because, in some sense, I think they see it as coddling a perspective that is anti-scientific.

"Ironically, many of the people in religious communities, who have felt quite beaten up by the new atheists, are responding positively to this message. They don’t agree with it because, of course, the first thing I say is, 'I don’t believe anything supernatural is going on in the universe.' But simply to be taken seriously, and to be told, 'I don’t believe that you are suffering from a delusion, or that you have a mental pathology, that you are, in fact, adhering to these traditions because they have a historical importance.' That has created an awful lot of goodwill amongst thinking believers of which there are quite a large number, and it has inflamed the new atheist community who I think sees it as a betrayal.

"I’m hoping that, as things settle down, the new atheist community will come to understand that a, whether they like it or not, the argument is correct; evolution has produced religion. We know that that must be the case for reasons I’ve argued elsewhere, and that that being the case, if we attempt to move forward on the basis that religion is a mass delusion then, ultimately, what we are doing is we are undermining the credibility of evolutionary thinking, rather than advancing the enlightenment ball."

Also see this wiki on the evolutionary psychology of religion.