I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the evolutionary origins of religious thinking, after having some nagging issues with Jordan Peterson's evolutionary arguments for a religious framework that I haven't been able to properly articulate to myself until now.
It's no secret that I'm an atheist, though it isn't part of my active identity. It mostly just manifests in the sense that I operate under a non-religious metaphysics.
I used to be of the opinion that religions were just memplexes, almost like mental viruses, with mostly harmful sociological effects, especially in the context of a world that had advanced to the point of rigorous science and secular governance.
This worldview was clearly inspired by the new atheist movement and Dawkins style thinking, and was cemented into me when I began studying evolution and ultimately encountered the religious fundamentalists who deny the science.
But over the past few years, my stance on religion has softened considerably. My support for ideological heterodoxy, support for rights such as freedom of religion, and my more recent exposure to exceptionally decent principled conservatives and religious types certainly helped.
Though to be honest, I'd guess that the largest contributing factor was my exposure to the idea that religion was almost an inevitable consequence of the way that the human brain evolved, in the context of a suite of cognitive traits that were beneficial to our ancestors.
For instance, think about what having a larger brain allowed our ancestors to do, and think about what novel cognitive traits were beneficial for their survival.
Things like thinking in abstractions and symbols, understanding causality and the concepts of past and future, the conception of the "self" and a theory of mind, curiosity and asking questions (that may not have answers), the use of language, and confronting the idea of death.
All of these things and many more in the same vein were evolved alongside our bulbous brains. From an evolutionary perspective, I can't imagine a scenario where a population of social organisms with those traits exists for millennia and religion doesn't form in some capacity.
At the risk of invoking one of Gould's (rightfully criticized) spandrels, I don't think that religion itself evolved as an adaptation, but rather that all of the cognitive traits that give rise to religious thinking were adaptive in other contexts.
However, I go further than Gould, and think that religious thinking (and the social environments created by religious memeplexes) became adaptive almost as soon as it appeared, especially in the contexts of social cohesion. And this is were Jordan Peterson comes in.
Peterson argues that religious thinking was specifically adaptive, and at the very least that our behavioral and cognitive traits all evolved in a social environment that was built upon a foundation of religious thinking.
Many of the things that Peterson says are novel, at least to me, in the sense that he's using evolutionary ideas to argue for a religious (mostly christian) metaphysics, which is essentially the opposite of what everyone else who espouses evolutionary thinking tends to do.
Even Gould, in his attempt to reconcile religious metaphysics with evolutionary thinking, only went so far as to propose (the also rightfully criticized) non-overlapping magisteria. Peterson is interesting in that he seems to directly fuse them instead of trying to separate them.
This is a problem for me, because I disagree with Peterson's religious metaphysics, but his evolutionary arguments seem sound. Their novelty means that I haven't seen his ideas criticized on the grounds of his evolutionary thinking, only flat rejection based on his metaphysics.
Peterson uses his evolutionary arguments to bolster his metaphysics, so it's necessary to criticize his arguments in order to reject his metaphysics. But almost everyone has been doing it the other way around. This has made me very uncomfortable up until now.
So without delaying any further, I'll present few which parts of Peterson's arguments have given me most of those nagging feelings in the back of my head, and articulate why I disagree with them on the grounds of (my hopefully more correct) interpretation of evolutionary theory.
Peterson presents a case that it's essentially impossible to be an atheist, whether you think you are one or not, because of our evolutionary history and the adaptive nature of religious thinking.
Related to that idea, he also argues (from interviews I've listened to such as his appearance on The Rubin Report) that a secular society built off of enlightenment values is only possible to maintain by adhering to the religious metaphysics that birthed it.
He connects the concepts of atheism to (or at the very least, a non-religious metaphysics) and the difficulties of postmodernism (et al.) that have been plaguing our social cohesion, and blames many of society's ills on our attempt to deny our religious evolutionary past.
Peterson even compares our current society to the ecosystem that forms on a whale carcass at the bottom of the ocean. Our "enlightened" society is thriving off of the legacy of a religious metaphysics, but it's not continuing the legacy, and the resources are going to run out.
The reason why I disagree so heavily with these ideas is because Peterson assumes that humans dynamically evolved evolved religion, which propelled us to where we are, yet assumes that humans are currently static in our evolved tendencies and can never evolved beyond them.
When Peterson argues that humans have adaptive cognitive traits because we evolved within a social/cognitive environment of religious thinking, it's analogous to when biologists hypothesize that fish have adaptive physical traits because they evolved in a marine environment.
But when Peterson argues that humanity will never evolve beyond religious thinking because of that, it's analogous to a biologist stating that fish will never evolve beyond a marine environment to be terrestrial because of their evolutionary history and current adaptive traits.
Though our very existence, and the existence of all terrestrial vertebrates past and present, is a refutation. Traits that were evolved for a marine environment, such as swim bladders and bony fins, were adapted for terrestrial environments as lungs and weight bearing limbs.
Perhaps the flaw in the argument has become apparent. Essentially, the concept that Peterson has not internalized is that of "exaptation." That traits previously evolved for one purpose can be adapted for another purpose. (I seem to be referencing Gould a lot in this thread.)
My argument would be that religious thinking gave rise to scientific and enlightenment thinking like Peterson describes, but their continued existence does not depend upon the support of religious thinking like a scaffold.
In the same way that the beneficial cognitive traits such as abstract thinking, a conception of causality, past, and future, and a desire to understand the universe gave rise to religious thinking, those traits have recently given rise to scientific and enlightenment thinking.
And just as religious thinking was a cognitive environment that we supposedly adapted to, there is nothing to say that we cannot evolve to be adapted to the novel environments of enlightenment and scientific thinking.
Peterson clearly argues for what he does because he is trying to bolster his religious metaphysics, but I also think that he argues about evolution incorrectly because he came at the field from the direction of cognitive and behavioral psychology.
That he tries to be interdisciplinary and strives for conscience is commendable, and I agree with many other ideas he has, especially regarding robust psychology research. But this has been a problem I've had with his ideas that I haven't really seen anyone else address before.
Though I must admit, because of Peterson's utilization of evolutionary psychology to argue for a religious metaphysics and a more traditionalist societal framework, I have newfound understanding of those who criticize evo psych as nothing more than justification for such things.
It's also become clearer to me why people tend to intuitively (whether maliciously or otherwise) categorize Peterson as "far right" or some other brand of conservative, despite his relatively clear (classical) liberal principles, and beyond his surface level religiousness.
Similar to Sowell's conflict of visions, Peterson is intuitively classified as "conservative" because his vision of humanity seems very constrained. In my new political paradigm, I would classify Peterson as an exceptionally "exogenous" thinker, which would place him far "right."
Combined with my "hyperbolic political spacetime hypothesis," my disagreement with him might stem from his extremely "right" reference frame, which distorts the vertical axis from my perspective and de facto makes him much more teleological than I tend to be.
If you want to know more about these specific ideas related to my new political paradigm, I suggest you check them out in my first blog post here. (I'll hopefully write more posts, once my brain gets up to speed again.)
monophyleticfish.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/a-n…
monophyleticfish.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/a-n…
In conclusion, Jordan Peterson made me think a lot about the evolutionary origins of religious thinking. He's interesting, and has many novel ideas. But I think he's very wrong when it comes to his interpretation of evolutionary principles to bolster his religious metaphysics.
Further, I haven't seen any criticisms of his application of evolutionary principles from within an evolutionary framework, and I've only seen a flat rejection of his metaphysics without properly addressing the interpretation of scientific theory he uses to defend it.
I don't know if there's anything like that out there and I'm just very ignorant of it, or I'm just a slow thinker, but I figured that it was valuable to share my thoughts on this even if I feel like it was overdue, both as my own ideas, and as a general address of Peterson.
I dedicate this thread to Kanye, who reminded me to step up my game again here on Twitter.
