Arguments like this always seem to rather credulously suppose that valuable ideas embedded in religious frameworks bubbled up from pure doctrinal logic and won’t survive long once the ladder is kicked away. But why take that internal claim at face value? economist.com/books-and-arts…
Why, in other words, assume that the dominant doctrine of any particular tradition (or the dominant tradition among several coexisting in the same region) is the most internally coherent, rather than the one that yielded adaptive rules?
“This group has a myth that tells them to cook their meat and sterilize wounds; if they stop believing it, they’ll abandon the behaviors.” Well, maybe. But whatever groups survive will be groups that sustain the behaviors via one story or another.
