Catia Caeiro: In this topic, I would recommend everyone to read the (very popular, I think) book of the ethologist Richard Dawkins - "God Delusion". I've just finished it and it's really amazing! If I ever doubted that I was an atheist, now I'm completely convinced.

 

Jay R. Feierman: I'm glad you brought that up. I also have read that book. You could also read Robert Hinde's book, Why Gods Persist: A Scientific Approach to Religion. Routledge, 1999. Robert Hinde is much more of an ethologist than Richard Dawkins. Hinde is Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Cambridge. In my opinion Richard Dawkins prematurely dismissed religion's value by making an issue over whether or not religious beliefs are true. A belief can be defined in many ways. The two ways that I find most useful are (1) "that which is held to be true" and (2) "a unit of information (that which is necessary to make decisions) that biases behavior in a predictable way." Neither of these two definitions of (religious) belief require the belief to be true. In the first definition one only has to hold the belief to be true (whether it is or not) and in the second definition the belief just needs to bias one's behavior in a predictable way.

 

Most religious beliefs are counter-intuitive and counterfactual, which makes them very good in-group markers that are not dependent on morphological features or on vocal features (accent or dialect). As a result, religion may have been one of the factors that segregated human populations into in-groups and out-groups, as the usual course of events is for a human group to grow > split > culturally differentiate > compete.

 

In the three volume book, Where God and Science Meet, edited by Patrick McNamara (Praeger, 2006), in Chapter 1 Steven Pinker says, ". . . religious psychology is a by-product of many parts of the mind that evolved for other purposes" (p. 8). This so called by-product interpretation of religion is supportive of Richard Dawkins idea that religion is some type of infectious mimetic disease that infects human minds.

 

However, there is another perspective, which is that "contrary to the more intuitive (and more secular) proposition that religious psychology evolved as a by-product of the mind, believing in God may have been what contributed to the creation of many parts of the human mind. Some would call that a 'gift (p. 80).'" The basis for this argument is beyond what can be done in a short posting. However, it is I who wrote that in The Biology of Religious Behavior: The Evolutionary Origins of Faith and Religion, which was just released a few days ago by Praeger http://www.abc-clio.com/products/overview.aspx?productid=111248&viewid=1.

 

There are lots of data that show that in pluralistic industrialized societies that engaging in religious behavior correlates positively with lifespan, health, number of living children, education level, absence of arrests and incarcerations, absence of alcohol and drug abuse and dependence, absence of suicide and homicide, etc. etc. The secular societies of northern Europe are not even reproducing at the maintenance rate, which has caused Rodney Stark (a sociologist of religion) to say in his latest book, Discovering God, that in 50 to 100 years Europe will be predominantly Muslim and China will be predominantly Christian. You can also look at the same type of statistics for the State of Utah in the USA, which the majority of inhabitants are member of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints (Mormons). The data are striking that the Mormons of Utah excel in all of the variables listed above compared to the non-Mormon population living in Utah. In addition, up to the present religion has been a species-characteristic trait of Homo sapiens. In my opinion it was premature of Richard Dawkins to dismiss religion's value to human beings before religion is completely understood, which it is not.