My suggestion is this: Common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. There’s no way to develop an ambitious, broad-ranging, self-consistent metaphysical system without doing serious violence to common sense somewhere. It’s just impossible. Since common sense is an inconsistent system, you can’t respect it all. Every metaphysician will have to violate it somewhere.

Common sense, as Schwitzgebel frames it, has “everyday practical interactions with the world.” In broad evolutionary terms, this is the sense formed over millions of years in mostly African environments. The brain-mind which gives rise to “common sense” evolved to handle all sorts of practical and social problems, none of which have anything to do with metaphysics. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a mismatch between the commonsense mind and the metaphysical mind.

Left Fork: Ancestral Mind/ Right Fork: Metaphysical Mind

Knowing that the mind which evolved in ancestral environments is capable of metaphysics doesn’t mean it is good at metaphysics. And if we take the history of metaphysics as a guide or proof, it doesn’t appear we have made much progress or come into closer contact with the singular “Truth” which seems to be its goal.

For me the more fundamental question revolves around what Schwitzgebel calls an “ambitious, broad-ranging, self-consistent metaphysical system.” Why is this desirable? Why is it needed? What would it do?

The quest for a single consistent system seems to be a psychological need which finds its greatest expression among metaphysicians and religionists. I’m not sure why such a system is good or needed for the rest of us.

Why not have one “system” for one class of problems and another “system” for another class of problems? There are different approaches to different problems.  What causes the impulse towards unification, systematization, and consistency? Like Nietzsche and Emerson, I’m suspicious of systematizers and consistency.

Although systematizers are often associated with metaphysics-religion, they also appear in science-atheism. The latter, with whom I often sympathize, have an unfortunate tendency to overstate the case and overestimate what is known. For them, Schwitzgebel has this crazy advice:

You can’t do an empirical study, for example, to determine whether there really is a material world out there or whether everything is instead just ideas in our minds coordinated by god. You can’t do an empirical study to determine whether there really exist an infinite number of universes with different laws of physics, entirely out of causal contact with our own. We’re stuck with common sense, plausibility arguments, and theoretical elegance – and none of these should rightly be regarded as decisive on such matters, whenever there are several very different and yet attractive contender positions, as there always are.

I conclude that regarding the fundamental structure of the universe in general and the mind-body relation in particular something that seems crazy must be true, but we have no way to know what the truth is among a variety of crazy possibilities. I call this position “crazyism.”

Crazyism appears to have great promise; I predict that positivism writ large will eventually prove it true.

As Philip Kitcher reminds us, people can be ethical and moral without religion. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. Most primates, humans included, are intensely social. It’s impossible to be social without simultaneously behaving in ways that are considered “moral” or “ethical.” This aside, there is little to no evidence that religious people in modern societies are more ethical-moral than non-religious people. Moreover, there is little to no evidence that Axial or “ethical” religions have made people or societies more ethical-moral than previous peoples. Our hunting and gathering ancestors were no more or less ethical-moral than “modern” people who have lived in settled societies during the past 10,000 years.

If Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks knew anything about evolutionary ethics and the ethnohistoric record, he wouldn’t be writing silly articles arguing that modern religions are the existential glue that hold societies together. This sort of argument is typical of apologists who believe that history and civilization essentially began with the movement toward angry gods and moralistic religions.

Elsewhere, Juliane von Mittelstaedt reports on ultra-orthodox Jewish women in Israel who cover themselves from head to toe in up to 27 layers of clothes. It is part of a larger story on the fractures these fundamentalists are creating within Israeli society, which is something that caught my attention previously in Ultra-Orthodox Slackers.

Several aspects of the Mittelstaedt story intrigue. First, it appears that most of the women wearing all these clothes have suffered serious abuse; the covering up thus seems linked to shame. Second, ultra-orthodox Jewish men in Israel routinely harangue female soldiers. This is unreal, coming from losers who are exempt from military service. This is a good time to compare and contrast.

Someone in the story astutely observes that if some of these zealots didn’t have religion as cover for their obvious madness, they would probably be institutionalized. While witnessing the antics and ideas of American evangelicals, I’ve had occasion to observe the same sort of thing.

In this mordant piece on the future of funerary, Max Rivlin-Nadler begins with the premise that the industry is in crisis because Americans are becoming more secular and fewer people are willing to pay for the bells and whistles of religious funerals. As evidence of increasing secularism, he notes that some 25% of Americans no longer claim affiliation with a church. As Rodney Stark has been saying forever, just because people don’t go to church or identify with organized religion, this doesn’t mean they are becoming secular. Most are not atheists or non-believers; they simply have alternative “spiritual” beliefs and don’t identify with institutional religion. When funeral directors realize this and begin offering non-traditional “spiritual” funerals, they will be able to tap what Rivlin-Nadlin characterizes as the “secular” market.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead.

Later in the parable the madman realizes that he has come too soon, his message has fallen on deaf ears and those who hear don’t understand. Rarely has a parable, including its infamous assertion that Gott ist tot, been so misunderstood.

This misunderstanding has often scaled to Nietzsche’s work as a whole. When I wrote a thesis on Nietzsche’s “Madman” parable in the late 80s, Nietzsche studies were entering a newly mature phase. Over the last few decades, few thinkers have received more serious and well-deserved attention. This attenti0n has been sustained, as is apparent from two recent pieces on Nietzsche.

In the first Ross Posnock deftly reviews Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s new book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas. Special attention is given to Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who warned: “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.”

For those who have yet to discover this thinker, Brian Leiter provides an introduction and recommends five books to get started; one is a biography, two are interpretive, and two are by Nietzsche. While I like the list, I would add The Gay Science and recommend reading the Safranski biography in conjunction with the three Nietzsche books. After you have gotten your own feel for Nietzsche, Leiter’s two interpretive recommendations would come next.

If we could get the self assured new atheists to read these books, things would be different: more serious, intense, productive, and lasting.

While it would be tempting to date the first skeptical interrogation of — and explanation for –- religion to the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776 CE), we can trace it further back in time to Epicurus (340-270 BCE) and Lucretius (circa 50 BCE). Presaging Hume, Epicurus developed an empirical theory of knowledge based on the senses; he “believed that, on the basis of a radical materialism which dispensed with transcendent entities such as the Platonic Ideas or Forms, he could disprove the possibility of the soul’s survival after death, and hence the prospect of punishment in the afterlife” (Konstan 2009). Although Epicurus did not flatly dispute the existence of the Greek gods, he suggested they were chimerical thought-constructs that served a moral purpose.

Two centuries later, Lucretius advanced these arguments in his poem On the Nature of Things. While Lucretius is little remembered today, his thinking was far ahead of its time:

Lucretius envisages how life first emerged from the earth, and how humans developed from nomadic hunters to city-dwellers with language, law and the arts. In this prehistory the exclusion of divine intervention, while rarely foregrounded, is plainly the underlying motivation. The fertile young earth naturally sprouted with life forms, and the organisms thus generated were innumerable random formations. Of these, most perished, but a minority proved capable of surviving – thanks to strength, cunning, or utility to man – and of reproducing their kind. This account, which has won admiration for its partial anticipation of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, is plainly using a kind of natural selection to account non-teleologically for the apparent presence of design in the animal kingdom.

Much the same anti-teleological program underlies the ensuing prehistory of civilization. Each cultural advance was prompted by nature, and only subsequently taken up and developed by human beings. Hence, it is implied, no divine intervention need be postulated as an explanatory tool. No Prometheus was needed to introduce fire, which rather was first brought to human attention by naturally kindled forest fires. Language emerged because people started to notice how their instinctive vocal responses to things, comparable to animal noises, could be put at the service of their intuitive desire to communicate (for which infants’ pre-linguistic pointing is cited as evidence). The [book] is rich in other cultural reconstructions, including the origin of friendship and justice in a primitive social contract, and of conventional religion in early mankind’s misguided tendency to link visions of the gods, above all in dreams, to their desire to explain cosmic phenomena.

[In conclusion], Lucretius works through a range of the phenomena that physical theorists were standardly called upon to account for: storms, waterspouts, earthquakes, plagues and the like. Once more the exclusion of divine causation undoubtedly motivates the account, the phenomena in question being nearly all ones popularly regarded as manifestations of divine intervention. Lucretius not only explains them naturalistically, but is ready to mock the rival, theological explanations: for example, if thunderbolts are weapons hurled by Zeus at human miscreants, why does he waste so much of his ammunition on uninhabited regions, or, when he does score a hit, sometimes strike his own temple? (Sedley 2008).

The skeptical naturalism of Epicurus and Lucretius was soon forgotten, and completely submerged under the conjoined weight of Platonic philosophy and Christian religion for nearly 1500 years. Although an Italian scholar discovered two complete copies of Lucretius’ work in 1417, On the Nature of Things was not made publicly available until 1563. After its publication, Lucretius’ work contributed to the general ferment – and questioning – that characterized the Renaissance. Ecclesiastical authorities were not pleased with this fact, and duly condemned both Epicurus and Lucretius as atheists.

Greenblatt and I clearly got the same memo on Lucretius and I look forward to reading his book.

References:

Konstan, David.  2009 (Spring).  “Epicurus,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/epicurus/>.

Sedley, David.  2008 (Fall).  “Lucretius,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/lucretius/>.

First, it is extremely discouraging that 150 years after Darwin there appears to be a need to continue publishing books explaining evolution and debunking creationism. As Ronald Numbers’ shows in his masterful history The Creationists, wishful thinking has incredible staying power. Second, did Dawkins really need to publish another book of this kind? It seems as if you have read any of Dawkins’ recent books (excepting his three best, The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, and The Ancestor’s Tale), you have read them all. Given Dawkins’ considerable scientific skills and abilities as a writer, I wish he would cover some different ground.

I am not sure what it is about Spiegel reporters, but they are some of the best in the business. They seem always to know much about their topic and ask great questions. The interview with Dawkins is no exception. It touches on some key issues that deserve further comment.

Spiegel: The American geneticist Dean Hamer postulated the God Gene hypothesis, proposing that humans are genetically hardwired for religious faith.

Dawkins: I’d prefer to say that we have a lot of genetic predispositions for a lot of psychological attributes, which can under the right circumstances add up to religion. But I’m also thinking of things like a predisposition to be obedient towards authority, which might even be useful under certain circumstances. Or a predisposition to be afraid of death or, when frightened, to run to a parental figure. These are all separate psychological predispositions which under the right cultural circumstances end up pushing one into a religion, whichever the religion of one’s cultural upbringing. I wouldn’t call it a God Gene.

Dawkins is spot on with this answer. There are numerous attributes of the human brain-mind that, when combined in consciousness, inevitably give rise to belief in the supernatural. These attributes include, but are not limited to: causal attribution, pattern imposition, agency detection, theory of mind, and commonsense dualism. We have evolved a brain-mind that naturally and spontaneously constructs experience using these attributes, with the result being belief in the supernatural. When you add emotions such as fear, attachment, attraction, and sorrow to the mix, you have an organism that is perfectly primed and highly receptive to certain kinds of cultural patterning or inputs. All religions are built on this biological-neurological substrate.

The next question and answer are less auspicious:

Spiegel: Has religion not been very successful in an evolutionary sense?

Dawkins: The thought that human societies gained strength from religious memes in their competition with others is true to a certain extent. But it is more like an ecological struggle: It reminds me of the replacement of the red by the gray squirrel in Britain. That is not a natural selection process at all, it is an ecological succession. So when a tribe has a war-like god, when the young men are brought up with the thought that their destiny is to go out and fight as warriors and that a martyr’s death brings you straight to heaven, you see a set of powerful, mutually reinforcing memes at work. If the rival tribe has a peaceful god who believes in turning the other cheek, that might not prevail.

Dawkins loses his bearings with this answer. Societies and cultures are not organisms; thus, biological evolutionary processes cannot be used to explain their origins and development or histories — fundamentally different processes are at work. The whole meme thing needs to be junked; it was a bad analogy to begin with and has not gotten any better over time. Ideas are not the same as genes. Dawkins is not getting any closer to the mark by arguing that cultural history is akin to ecological succession.

It is this category mistake — conflating biological evolution with cultural history — that afflicts the large and growing literature purporting to explain the “evolution of religion” by appealing to group level selection. Because societies are not organisms, the transitive property does not apply and we should stop talking about “cultural evolution.” There is no such thing.

Because Dawkins erroneously conflates biological evolution with cultural history, the interviewers are justifiably skeptical:

Spiegel: But following a religion that does not promote the chances for survival seems to contradict evolutionary logic.

Dawkins: Oh yes, clearly there is a conflict between meme and gene survival. We are familiar with such conflicts. They sometimes work out one way, sometimes the other.

Terrible. Humans follow what we today call “religions” for reasons having little or nothing to do with ongoing biological evolution. There are more powerful processes at work and much simpler explanations. These processes and explanations are grounded in economy and politics, not in biology. Modern “religions” — i.e., those which appeared in conjunction with the Neolithic Revolution — have a logic all their own and this logic is not evolutionary.

In this post, I will focus on “predisposition for religion,” which Rowthorn admits is not likely to be governed by a single gene, but is instead “a complex phenomenon likely to be influenced by many genes.” Complex indeed. I think everyone would agree that religion is more complex than diabetes. When scientists search for genes that cause diabetes, they look for thousands of genes or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), not just one or a few. This issue aside, Rowthorn’s assumption that religion is genetic ignores a massively confounding variable — one which cannot be isolated or controlled: culture.

Regardless of when or where a child is born — and irrespective of whatever genes a child inherits — there is a 99% chance that the child will be born and raised in what we can call a “religious” environment. While the details of the religious milieu differ from place to place and time to time, there is almost no place in the world where a child can raised in a non-religious environment.

And even atheists, a tiny minority living mostly in the West, cannot insulate their children from the nearly universal religiosity of the surrounding culture. There is little that a Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris could do, assuming they had children, to prevent them from being exposed to pervasive religiosity or spirituality in the wider British or American culture. It is doubtful that such children would have “atheism genes” that would immunize them from religion.

What would have an effect on their propensity toward atheism would be the things these children had been taught from an early age and the cultural environment in which they live. The same is true of all other children — the vast majority of whom are socialized into religion. Given these facts, why are we even discussing a non-existent “religion gene” or genes?

Rowthorn, R. (2011). Religion, fertility and genes: a dual inheritance model Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2504

Blom sets his book around the happenings of an exceptional Parisian salon — that of Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach — who hosted the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Denis Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophes – several of whom have largely been forgotten in the wake of what Blom considers to be the “sanitized” intellectual history of the period.

The true heavyweights of the salon, argues Blom, were far more mechanistic, godless, and atheistic than its better known members, several of whom have been appropriated and venerated by a metaphysically minded counter-Enlightenment.  It looks to be an informative and provocative read:

Even today, and even in secular western Europe, the bald and confident atheism and materialism of Diderot and Holbach seems mildly shocking. We still cling stubbornly to the idea of an animating soul, a spiritual ghost in the biological machine.

For Mr Blom, the modern, supposedly secular world has merely dressed up the “perverse” morality of Christianity in new and better camouflaged ways. We still hate our bodies, he says, still venerate suffering and distrust pleasure.

This is the message of Mr Blom’s book, hinted at but left unstated until the closing chapters. He believes the Enlightenment is incomplete, betrayed by its self-appointed guardians. Despite all the scientific advances of the past two centuries, magical thinking and the cultural inheritance of Christianity remain endemic.

Those are some fighting words and questionable ideas, but one thing is certain: humans will always cling to the idea of a soul and believe in magic.  Our brains naturally generate these ideas and religions run with them.

Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality.  That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet—or bitter-sweet—poison from childhood onwards.

But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation.

They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable.

But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into ‘hostile life’. We may call this “education to reality’. Need I confess to you that the sole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?

Because nearly one hundred years have past since Freud wrote, we can ask whether his predicti0ns have come true.  Are more people secularized or non-religious than before?  Have most people surmounted what Freud calls their “infantilism” and recognized religion as illusion?

The answer is no.  There are good reasons for this, including the powerful forces of history and culture — the former weighs upon and the latter patterns us in ways that are exceedingly difficult to recognize, and even more difficult to escape.  Indeed, most do not recognize these profound influences, which combine to form the symbolic matrix in which we play out our lives according to rules and expectations which we neither created nor chose.

All this aside, all humans possess an evolved brain-mind that gives rise to beliefs in invisible souls-spirits and forces-agents.  Therefore what we call the supernatural is actually natural, even if it always remains invisible.

In a recent article, Amarnath Amarasingam discusses “The Religiosity of American College and University Professors” — a survey of 1,419 academics published in Sociology of Religion (2009) by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons.  As it turns out, professors are not quite so irreligious as many have assumed:

According to their study 51.5 percent of professors, responding to the question of whether they believe in God, chose the response, “While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God,” or the statement, “I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it.”

While atheists and agnostics in the United States make up about 3 and 4.1 percent of the population, respectively, the prevalence of atheism and agnosticism was much higher among professors: 9.8 percent of professors chose the statement, “I don’t believe in God,” while another 13.1 percent chose, “I don’t know whether there is a God.”

In other words, religious skepticism is much more common among professors than in the general American population. However, the majority are still believers.

Over fifty percent of professors believe in God and slightly less than ten percent do not believe in God!  These are surprising numbers, and should provide comfort to religious parents who worry they are delivering their children to the devil when packing them off for college.

Parents should worry, however, if their children major in psychology, biology, or (amazingly) mechanical engineering:

How do these numbers break down by discipline? Gross and Simmons explore how belief in God is distributed among the 20 largest disciplinary fields.

In terms of atheists, professors of psychology and mechanical engineering lead the pack with 50 percent and 44.1 percent respectively. Amongst biologists, 33.3 percent were agnostic and 27.5 percent were atheist. Interestingly, 21.6 percent of biologists say that they have no doubt that God exists.

In contrast, 63 percent of accounting professors, 56.8 percent of elementary education professors, 48.6 percent of finance professors, 46.5 percent of marketing professors, 45 percent of art professors, and 44.4 percent of both nursing professors and criminal justice professors stated that they know God exists.

The numbers for psychologists are much closer to what I have always assumed about the professoriate in general.  Amarasingam finds the biology numbers “interesting,” as do I.  Evolution apparently plays two ways for biologists — it leads 27.5% to atheism and a not dissimilar number, 21.6%, to undoubted theism.  This does not surprise me.

A deep knowledge of evolution can induce a sense of awe and wonder that fits easily with belief in an all powerful prime mover or creator.  John Haught at Georgetown is a prominent advocate of this idea and has written several excellent books about it.

As for the groups of professors with the highest rates of undoubted belief in God — accounting, education, finance, marketing, marketing, nursing, criminology — I also find the numbers unsurprising.  These are fairly practical trade disciplines not much concerned with troubling questions about ultimate origins or explanations.

In the end, this means there is no simple correspondence between having a PhD and belief-disbelief in God.  Amarasingam sums things up nicely:

What all of these data make clear, and future studies are sure to further complicate, is that the simplistic association of “intelligent” with “atheist” is not backed by the evidence. “Our findings call into question the long-standing idea among theorists and sociologists of knowledge that intellectuals, broadly construed, comprise an ideologically cohesive group in society and tend naturally to be antagonistic toward religion,” write Gross and Simmons.

The idea that “the worldview of the intelligentsia is necessarily in tension with a religious worldview, is plainly wrong.” In contrast, the evidence seems to suggest that instead of leaving religion behind, the intelligentsia, like the rest of society, rationally wrestle with ideas, scientific and religious, and attempt to find answers to the big questions that plague us all.

Blume has found, to no one’s surprise, that people who belong to historically known and modern religious groups have more children than those who are non-religious or secular.  Having made this finding, he then surmises that religion must have evolved because it confers a differential fitness advantage on the faithful.  Another way of putting would be to say that the religious out-compete the non-religious in the bedroom and birthroom.

I do not have any problem with Dr. Blume’s data which show that historically known and modern religious groups are more fertile than their non-religious counterparts.  It has long been known that organized religions encourage members to marry and reproduce.  As Vernon Reynolds and Ralph Tanner demonstrated in The Biology of Religion (1983) (republished in 1995 as The Social Ecology of Religion), the survival of individuals who belong to religious groups often depends on it.  There is strength in numbers.

I do have a problem with using Dr. Blume’s data to argue that because modern religions encourage fertility and their members out-reproduce the non-religious, religion must have evolved because it conferred an evolutionary advantage on people living during the Paleolithic.  We cannot simply assume that relatively modern cultural-social organizations such as religion even existed in the evolutionary past, let alone project such institutions backwards into deep time and assert they were affecting selection.  Blume and I debated these issues here.

Now enter the second scholar referenced in this post’s title: Sue Blackmore.  She has quite an interesting background and her interests are eclectic, as is evident from her profile at the Guardian:

Sue Blackmore is a freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and a visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She has a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford University (1973) and a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Surrey (1980). Her research interests include memes, evolutionary theory, consciousness, and meditation. She practises Zen and campaigns for drug legalisation. Sue Blackmore no longer works on the paranormal.

Blackmore is perhaps best known for her popular book, The Meme Machine, which I have briefly examined but not studied.  The entire meme thing, from its original presentation by Richard Dawkins to its elaboration by Daniel Dennett, neither convinced me nor captured my imagination.  We learned long ago that applying biological principles of evolution to culture history or “cultural evolution” is a bankrupt and misleading enterprise; with this in mind, one might think that equating ideas, symbols or concepts (i.e., “memes”) with genes is an even worse idea.  Meme/Gene is a bad analogy and even worse metaphor, and few were persuaded by this speculative overextension of biology into places where it does not belong.

Sue Blackmore was convinced, however, and maintained — as some still do — that religion was a particularly pernicious meme that magically (i.e., non-agentively) replicated itself among humans like a virus of the mind.  The ideological and normative connotations are hard to miss.  Like Dawkins, Blackmore thinks of religion as a disease — viruses, after all, rarely benefit their hosts.

Recently, however, Blackmore has abandoned her position and made a highly public confession.  I first learned about her conversion while browsing Dr. Blume’s blog and reading that after he presented at the Explaining Religion conference (Bristol University), Blackmore had a Damascus Road experience (or Pauline moment):

As I finished my talk at the “Explaining Religion” conference in Bristol, Susan Blackmore added some tough questions – and then admitted on the spot that the religion-virus-metaphor that she had advocated for years was wrong. And since then, she even wrote a post about the subject at Guardian: “Why I no longer believe religion is a virus of the mind: [Dr. Blume's presentation] at the “Explaining Religion” conference has made me see that the idea of religious belief as a virus has had its day.

Although the “religious belief as a virus” idea never really had a day, except in the minds of a zealous few, I wish to join Dr. Blume in congratulating Blackmore for seeing the light.  This illumination, however, does not mean that religion evolved during the Paleolithic because it conferred fertility advantages on believers.