Haidt’s mistake is a common one: observe modern or relatively recent cultural formations and then uncritically project them back into the ancestral or evolutionary past. This mistake has other consequences, which are evident in what Haidt calls “innate” or evolutionary moral foundations:  “care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.” These “innate” concerns sound suspiciously modern; I suspect at least a few are products of post-Neolithic and Western societies.

Does anyone really think that the Patrick Henry binary of liberty/oppression is a universal moral concern? Or that for the past 50,000 years, humans everywhere have been so pressed by this binary that it amounts to an evolved moral disposition? During this same span of time, has everyone also evolved a Foucauldian sounding moral sense regarding authority/subversion?

Simply asking these kinds of historical and cross-cultural questions suggests that Haidt isn’t trafficking in evolved moral universals. This kind of naive evolutionary psychology often mistakes the current and local for the ancient and global.

In his recent review of Haidt’s book, John Gray understands this and more. I encourage you to read the whole but for those who don’t have time, these choice excerpts shouldn’t be missed:

Haidt’s account of the emergence of morality is disputed by other evolutionary psychologists, who argue that group selection is a part of Darwin’s inheritance that should be discarded. The debate has been heated and at times rancorous, an exercise in sectarian intellectual warfare of the kind that is so often fought in and around Darwinism. As is often the case, a larger issue has gone largely unexplored. In evolutionary theories of this kind, what exactly is it that is being explained?

Though they think their theories are universally applicable, evolutionary theorists commonly take their local conception of morality for granted. Books such as Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, one of the more impressive of recent applications of Darwinism to ethics, assume that acting morally is a matter of following rules or principles having mainly to do with justice and the prevention of harm. This may seem self-evident to secular social scientists in American universities, but it hardly squares with how most human beings (or most Americans, for that matter) understand morality.

Haidt makes some sharp criticisms of naïve rationalism—the idea, found among the “new atheists” and others like them, that human life may someday be governed by science. But his claims for the usefulness of evolutionary psychology are hardly less naïve and rationalistic. Much of his book is an attempt to apply the findings of evolutionary psychology to the political gridlock that currently exists in the United States. The incongruity of the exercise should not go unnoticed. Whatever the causes of division in Washington, they have nothing to do with evolution. The phenomenon is much too recent for any evolutionary explanation to be remotely plausible. It is also too distinctively American to be explicable in the universal terms of evolutionary theory.

VAINLY INVOKING the universal laws of science to account for the accidents of history, Haidt has fallen into a classic confusion of categories. His analysis of American divisions, he tells us, is an application of “Moral Foundations Theory,” which identifies “the universal cognitive modules upon which cultures construct moral matrices.” But there is more than a hint of absurdity in Haidt’s pronouncements, and it is not because he is necessarily mistaken in his analysis of American politics. He may be right that American political divisions are currently correlated with attitudes to morality in the ways that he specifies. The absurdity comes from neglecting the historical contingencies that have produced the correlations he describes.

In the end, however, Haidt’s attempt to apply evolutionary psychology is yet one more example of the failures of scientism. There is no line of evolutionary development that connects our hominid ancestors with the emergence of the Tea Party. Human beings are not amoebae that have somehow managed to turn themselves into clever primates. They are animals with a history, part of which consists of creating cultures that are widely divergent. Using evolutionary psychology to explain current political conflicts represents local and ephemeral differences as perennial divisions in the human mind. It is hard to think of a more stultifying exercise in intellectual parochialism.

Like distinctions between right and left, typologies of liberalism and conservatism may apply in societies that are broadly similar. But the meaning that attaches to these terms differs radically according to historical circumstances, and in many contexts they have no meaning at all. Dissidents against the Soviet state were no more bound to be liberals than were the people who toppled Mubarak. Are the Salafists who are outflanking the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt on the right or the left of politics? Were the market reformers who dismantled the Maoist economy (but not the state apparatus that enforced it) liberals or conservatives? Such questions are senseless, indeed ludicrous. They involve fitting polities and societies whose histories and present circumstances are profoundly different from ours and each other’s onto a map that was designed to chart the conflicts of a small number of closely related countries.

This is pretty harsh but it needed to be said. If evolutionary psychologists would seriously test their proposals historically and cross-culturally, these sorts of mistakes would be far less common.

With this telos in mind, evolutionary theists assume that the things modern religions sometimes do, such as encourage altruism, must have been embryonically present in the ancient animist past. My primary objection to this argument has long been that animist-shamanist “religion” isn’t much concerned with altruism or “morality.” It’s usually more instrumental in its goals and concerned with things such as the hunt, healing, war, and weather.

But I just read something that has changed my mind. I’ve been looking in the wrong place for evidence of altruism in animist-shamanist beliefs and injunctions. There are no direct injunctions — do this or don’t do that — related to altruism. They are to be found at a deeper level, buried in the cosmology and epistemology of the animist worldview. This epiphany came when I encountered what Nurit Bird-David calls “the cosmic economy of sharing” that is embedded in animism. Such constructs are common to hunter-gatherers who have immediate return economic systems, and are likely representative of ideas that humans had for tens of thousands of years before agriculture.

It seems odd that the cosmic economy idea isn’t found in Bird-David’s more recent (1999) and comprehensive re-assessment of animism but in an earlier (1992) article which discusses the historical impact and empirical validity of Marshall Sahlins’ famous essay on the ontological joys of foraging. During the seven years between the two articles, Bird-David seems to have dropped the cosmic economy of sharing idea which I find so illuminating.

In his essay, Sahlins contends that the idea of scarcity is not a fact but instead is an ideological feature of all agricultural, industrial, and modern societies. This idea usually manifests as fear or desire. We either fear not having enough or we desire more, and all of this is predicated on taken-for-granted scarcity. Sahlins exposes scarcity as ideology by contrasting it with foraging societies which aren’t premised on scarcity and don’t take it for granted. Sahlins explains this difference empirically, by arguing that hunter-gatherers abound in resources and thus are “affluent.”

Bird-David isn’t buying Sahlins’ explanation, primarily because it is based on small-sample studies of hunter-gatherers that were in various ways flawed or questionable. When corrected, it appears that foragers work hard and desire more than was supposed. If this is so, then from where does the hunter-gatherer idea of affluence or abundance come? It is undeniably present in foraging societies, even during times of actual scarcity. It comes, Bird-Davis observes, from their cosmological and animist metaphors.

The cosmic economy of sharing is a natural consequence or logical result of animism, which is the attribution of life or vital force to plants, animals, landscapes, and weather. Having animated and constructed the world as being filled with non-human life, foragers can relate and interact with it. They can, in other words, socialize with everything that inhabits their singular cosmos. They do so through a variety of rituals and myths.

If we stopped at this point, and didn’t consider the deeper implications, this would be unremarkable. We could view it as more or less standard Tylorian animism that amounts to so much magical or pre-scientific thinking. But Bird-David doesn’t stop here because this animism is deeply imbricated with the most salient feature of foraging economies: sharing. The closest thing to a formal rule among hunter-gatherers is the sharing injunction. Those who have food and shelter must share food and shelter. In a sharing economy, maintained partly by relational ritual and partly by mythical metaphor, there is welfare and insurance for all.

When the (sharing) cosmos is considered in conjunction with the (sharing) economy, things begin to make sense. Bird-David identifies four features to the cosmic economy of sharing found in foraging societies:

1.  All animated agencies, or what we call “nature,” socialize with individual hunter-gatherers;

2.  The animated agencies, or what we call “nature,” give food and gifts to everyone regardless of prior kinship ties or reciprocal obligations;

3.  The people regard themselves as children and relatives of animated agencies or what we call “nature”; and

4.  People envision their connection to the animated agencies or “nature” as bonds of sharing between relatives.

Given this cosmos, the proper ritual, and rule observance, everything falls into place. People are born of an animated nature which then supplies the stuff of life.  This otherwise inanimate “stuff” has been shared and given as gift by animate nature. The transitive property is then applied to this premise: because animated nature has shared and given to me, so must I share and give to others (who are my actual or fictive relatives).

So there it is. Altruism has been hiding in the cosmological-epistemological bush all along. A bird in hand may be worth two in the bush, but only if the bird has been ritually obtained and mythically shared.

In the cold language of evolutionary biology, the animist way looks and feels fairly adaptive. Among foragers, this code of conduct is known simply as “the Way.” It is neither set off nor demarcated as being supernatural or religious. This is apparently why it took me so long to see it.

References:

Bird‐David, Nurit. (1999). “Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology. Current Anthropology, 40 (S1) DOI: 10.1086/200061

Bird-David, Nurit. (1992). Beyond “The Original Affluent Society”: A Culturalist Reformulation. Current Anthropology, 33 (1), 25-34

For it to work, the group level selection story first requires a kind of systematic and organized “religion” that is historically rather recent. These are the kinds of religions which, through a variety of mechanisms such as intensified morality and supernatural surveillance, enable the formation of groups larger than prototypical hunter-gather bands.

Because these sorts of religions began appearing no more than 5,000 years ago in conjunction with the rise of the earliest city-states, it is reasonable to ask whether the dynamic being described has much to do with evolution, sensu stricto. Group level selectionists tend to conflate biological evolution with cultural change or what they call “cultural evolution.” Some simply jump from one to the other as if there were no differences between organisms and cultures, while others more subtly argue that biology and culture co-evolve.

These group level selection models assume a relatively homogenous and insular group of people who share the same religious beliefs, and that because of these beliefs (along with corollary institutions), the society is stable, competitive, and successful. It sounds good in abstract theory, even if it ignores the messy realities of the historical and human processes by which religions are constructed and contested.

On the surface, Saudi Arabia would appear to be perfect model for group level selectionists. It is an insular society that revolves around a single form of religion: Wahhabist Sunni Islam. The rulers champion religion, the clerics support the rulers, and the people believe. Saudi society, so the story goes, is bound tightly and ethically together by religion.

It’s a great story until one digs deeper and discovers some of the messy realities and variables which group level selectionists always ignore in their models. In this piece on the soon-to-be-without-head Saudi man who had the temerity to tweet about Muhammad, I was reminded of these realities:

While the most vituperative responses to the Hamza Kashgari affair are no doubt rooted in zealous conviction, the reality is that this episode, and particularly the government’s support for the case against him, has little to do with protecting the sanctity of Islam. Rather, the Saudi regime is playing a calculated political game, one that aims to oppress some critics, to outmaneuver others and to bolster its thin claims to religious legitimacy.

Kashgari was hardly a revolutionary, but his views most certainly were. The kingdom’s government is intolerant of free speech, especially anything that challenges political authority. Dissenting religious and political views, including those expressed by Kashgari, are widely shared inside the kingdom. Among the droves of death threats and the cries of angry critics, Kashgari also commands a sympathetic following. Thousands have rallied in his support. And the regime in Riyadh is well aware, particularly in an era of revolutionary upheaval, that a significant number of its subjects bristle against its authority.

The Saudi royal family has long leaned on the country’s senior clerics to stamp its temporal power with the imprimatur of religious legitimacy. But many in the kingdom see through the claim. Pious and agnostic alike consider the royal family corrupt and irreverent. It is commonly held that Riyadh’s assertion of Islamic authority is spurious, a fiction that the government peddles as an excuse to protect its personal fortunes and power. Whether genuine or not, the result has been the empowerment of a class of religious scholars who are committed to protecting their own authority.

It has long been my contention that when we talk about post-Neolithic religions and their effects on societies, evolutionary analyses aren’t very helpful or enlightening. Biocultural co-evolutionary models can neither capture nor describe things like economy, power, politics, cynicism, corruption, and dissent, all of which affect “religion.” Because religion is the key variable in group selection models, this is a problem.

When your primary variable is highly unstable, and can’t even be defined without making unrealistic assumptions about what religion is and how it works, chances are good that your model doesn’t describe anything real.

Post-Postscript

In this Nature article about Henry Markram’s controversial pitch for a $1 billion brain modeling project, he expresses concerns about modeling similar to those I have about the too tidy models favored by group level selectionists:

At the heart of that approach is Markram’s conviction that a good unifying model has to assimilate data from the bottom up. In his view, modellers should start at the most basic level — he focuses on ion channels because they determine when a neuron fires — and get everything working at one level before proceeding to the next. This requires a lot of educated guesses, but Markram argues that the admittedly huge gaps in knowledge about the brain can be filled with data as experiments are published — the Blue Brain model is updated once a week. The alternative approach, approximating and abstracting away the biological detail, leaves no way to be sure that the model’s behaviour has anything to do with how the brain works, said Markram.

This new perspective owes much to the work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He has been at the forefront of research into moral decision-making, which is grounded in evolutionary theory. Because people have been living in groups for hundreds of thousands of years, it really isn’t surprising that prosocial or “moral” behaviors are often the result of intuition or snap judgments that are later explained by recourse to reason. Humans are the most prosocial of primates and it would be surprising if this ability were not highly developed.

In recent years Haidt has extended these basic insights to politics and other domains (such as religion), where the terrain is much more uneven and confounded by modern culture. The ideas, in other words, have been extended and applied in ways that are questionable. In this recent article on Haidt from The Chronicle, the overextension is apparent.

After being asked how people came together to build cooperative societies beyond kinship, Haidt asserts that “morality” was the key:

A big part of Haidt’s moral narrative is faith. He lays out the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people into groups and enabling those units to better compete against other groups. Through faith, humans developed the “psychology of sacredness,” the notion that “some people, objects, days, words, values, and ideas are special, set apart, untouchable, and pure.” If people revere the same sacred objects, he writes, they can trust one another and cooperate toward larger goals. But morality also blinds them to arguments from beyond their group.

If we take ethnohistoric hunter-gatherers for our model of how people formed larger and more cohesive groups in the ancient past, Haidt’s “morality” answer is patently wrong. These groups were held together by kinship ties first and by extended or fictive kinship second. Their “religions” (i.e., shamanisms) weren’t grounded in morals and weren’t much concerned with morals. While such groups had moral norms and ethical rules, these weren’t twined with supernaturalism and had an independent, non-spiritual basis.

Large communities held together by religion-faith-morals are a recent development in human history, no more than a few thousand years old. The kind of community that Haidt describes is a post-Neolithic formation that has its origins in the Axial Age. So does the idea that religion is a matter of “faith.” These are not ancient or evolutionary ideas. Moralizing gods and religions are relative newcomers to the supernatural world.

Haidt’s mistake here is a common one: observe modern or relatively recent cultural formations and then uncritically project them back into the ancestral or evolutionary past. This mistake has other consequences, which are evident in what Haidt calls “innate” or evolutionary moral foundations:  “care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.” These “innate” concerns sound suspiciously modern; I suspect at least a few are products of post-Neolithic and Western societies.

Todd Schorr's "Hunter Gatherer"

I’ve spent several years immersed in the ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer record and can’t recall much or any concern with liberty-oppression. This is the kind of concern that arises when you have centralized authority and government, which were absent for most of human history. Nor can I recall much concern for authority-subversion. Again, these kinds of concerns are related to centralized authority and government which didn’t exist in our hunting-gathering past. While hunting-gathering societies are concerned with ritual purity, translating this as sanctity-degradation has a distinctly Axial feel to it. Degradation, in particular, smacks of the Christian fall from grace.

Haidt’s “foundational morals” aren’t innate or universal. The list is provincial, limited in both time and space. Had Haidt tested his list against history or made cross-cultural comparisons, this would have been evident.

To tell stories about a world in which all the organic parts are at an adaptive optimum is typical of attempts to domesticate Darwinism’s randomized, liminal world in motion and render it less fearsome. In fact, adaptive optimization covertly restores the pre-evolutionary argument from design, whose affective motive was to make the world (and its Creator) familiar and tame by founding it upon those analogies to the self, reason and human will, that assure the existence of control over Nature’s power and domestication of Nature’s otherness.

This is a slightly revised excerpt from Eric White’s essay “The End of Metanarratives in Evolutionary Biology,” in which he cites Davydd Greenwood’s Taming of Evolution: The Persistence of Nonevolutionary Views in the Study of Humans.

Nowhere are such views or metaphysical narratives more prevalent than among theist scholars who (often with generous funding from the Templeton Foundation) churn out articles ostensibly demonstrating that religion was targeted by natural selection because it is the Greatest Designed Adaptation, ever.

Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals experience a similar motivational state. To test for empathically motivated pro-social behavior in rodents, we placed a free rat in an arena with a cagemate trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the free rat learned to intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate. Rats did not open empty or object-containing restrainers. They freed cagemates even when social contact was prevented. When liberating a cagemate was pitted against chocolate contained within a second restrainer, rats opened both restrainers and typically shared the chocolate. Thus, rats behave pro-socially in response to a conspecific’s distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior.

It may seem gratuitous to point out that rats don’t have religion and I do so only because evolutionary theists often argue that religion evolved because it makes people cooperative and altruistic. Religion, in their view, is an evolutionary adaptation targeted by natural selection because it creates or enhances empathy and pro-sociality.

Those who make this argument usually ignore the fact that empathy, cooperation, and altruism are widespread in nature. Non-human primates are intensely social and quite cooperative, as are elephants and dolphins. Now we can add rats to the list. Religion isn’t necessary to explain these behaviors.

When confronted with these facts, evolutionary theists usually resort to one of two arguments. The first is that religion makes people more empathetic and pro-social than they would otherwise be without religion. While this may true of post-Neolithic religions which first linked supernatural beliefs to “moral” behaviors, this relatively recent development says nothing about the evolutionary origins of religion.

The second argument is that religion would have made human groups more cohesive and given them a competitive advantage over other groups. While it may be true that post-Neolithic religions functioned as ideological glue for larger groups (group size being the most important predictor of group level success), there is no evidence that human group sizes increased until after the domestication of plants-animals approximately 12,000 years ago. Again, this relatively recent development says nothing about the evolutionary origins of religion.

Speaking of group size, if you are considering rats as pets — something I recommend — remember they are social and you will need to get at least 2 and preferably 3 or  more, all of the same sex (unless you want lots of babies, which I don’t recommend). For reasons that weren’t clear to me until yesterday, I’ve always had females. The study found that females are slightly more empathetic and pro-social than males.

Reference:

Bartal, I., Decety, J., & Mason, P. (2011). Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats Science, 334 (6061), 1427-1430 DOI: 10.1126/science.1210789

I first became aware of “theological anthropology” while browsing the Evolution of Religion website, which is a Templeton funded project devoted to finding God’s plan in evolution. Here is the announcement for several nicely funded fellowships at Princeton in which scholars are to devote themselves to the discovery of God’s design in evolution:

The Center of Theological Inquiry welcomes proposals to explore how the explosion of new research in evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology is challenging and changing our understanding of human nature and development, not least in relation to religion and theological accounts of the human condition. Our field of inquiry encompasses these evolutionary and human sciences, theological anthropology, practical theology, psychology of religion, religious studies, and the history and philosophy of science.

There’s more than a bit of mumbo jumbo here but the project boils down to this: now that the Creation account of human evolution has been disproven and Intelligent Design been exposed as fraud, it is our job to interpret evolution through a theological lens; to wit, because God designed evolution and foresaw everything, there are no accidents and everything is adaptive.

Sounds like a horrible way to do science and search for the truth.

The second chapter, which examines the origins of the Iroquois League, highlights the role of religion in group formation and cohesion. Although I have serious reservations about group level selection (and doubt that it exists), the Iroquois may be the closest thing to an historical example.

During the 1400s, the five tribes (Mohawk, Seneca, Onondoga, Oneida, and Cayugas) that eventually formed the Iroquois League were constantly at war with one another and their neighbors.

Map of Iroquois and Neighboring Tribes

Aside from all its other unpleasantness, the constant cycle of retributive war had devastating demographic effects on the tribes.

Though it is difficult to separate fact from subsequent hagiographic fiction, legend has it that Hiawatha lost several children in the warfare and wandered into the forest, grieving and inconsolable. Literally losing his mind, Hiawatha encountered a supernatural being named Deganawidah, The Great Peacemaker. Hiawatha was given rituals and a message that he carried to the five tribes, which heeded the words and formed “The Great League of Peace and Power.” Although this is often abbreviated to “Iroquois League,” the shortened form obscures the purpose of the confederation: peace between the five tribes and power or war against non-member outsiders.

While the Longhouse and wampum rituals are the most famous of those allegedly given to Hiawatha, perhaps the most important were the mourning and condolence rituals which surrounded warfare and slave-taking. Richter explains:

The connection between war and mourning rested on beliefs about the spiritual power that animated all things. Because an individual’s death diminished the collective power of a lineage, clan, and village, Iroquois families conducted “Requickening” ceremonies in which the deceased’s name, and with it the social role and duties it represented, was transferred to a successor.

Such rites filled vacant positions in lineages and villages both literally and symbolically: they assured survivors that the social function and spiritual potency embodied in the departed’s name had not disappeared and that the community would endure. In Requickenings, people of high status were usually replaced from within the lineage, clan, or village, but at some point lower in the social scale an external source of surrogates inevitably became necessary.

The “external source of surrogates” were nearly always war captives. Such captives were inspected, tested, and either adopted into the tribe or ritualistically killed and actually eaten. In the case of adoption, the physical power of the prisoner was appropriated. In the case of eating, the spiritual power was appropriated (giving “food for spiritual thought” an unsettling meaning).

By all accounts, the Iroquois League was powerful and feared. Although it changed considerably over the centuries through its interactions with European powers and colonizers, the League’s success and durability says something important about the power of shared beliefs.

It would be unwise, however, simply to conclude this is an example of group level selection. As is apparent from the taking and adopting of captives, the Iroquois were neither homogenous nor insular. Under group level selection theory, groups must be distinct and there can be only minimal or no immigration.

Even if we assume this is an example of group level selection, it says nothing about the selective origins and evolution of religion. Group level selectionists (most of whom are evolutionary theists) like to argue that religion is adaptive and was targeted by selection because it makes humans more cooperative, prosocial, and “moral.” Of course it has to be this way because God designed the whole thing.

These theorists simply ignore the several lines of evidence which suggest that humans, as the most social of primates who can actually talk about cooperating, were already this way and didn’t need “religion” for small group success. It is only after the advent of agriculture, when group sizes increase exponentially, that something like religiously driven group level selection might come into play.

The Iroquois were sedentary horticulturalists, not Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Numbering around 25,000 people, they were in need of an ideology or religion which could bind the group. Hunter-gatherers, whose group size ranged from 30-150 for the immediate group and 300-500 for the extended group, had no such need.

While I greatly admire Pagels’ work and understand this was a lecture setting, this answer won’t do. The emotional explanation for religion has been around for a long time and was most famously stated by Sigmund Freud in The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Freud explains religion as wish fulfillment, with emotional fear playing the major role. Humans faced with an inexplicable and cruel world create coping mechanism gods: “The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

This is a good explanation as far as it goes but the problem is that it doesn’t go very far. Many things contribute to religiosity, with emotions being only one of several contributing factors. There undoubtedly is a cognitive component to religiosity. Human brains have evolved in such a way that we naturally generate supernatural concepts.

At some time in human history, perhaps 60,000 years ago, minds became fully modern or capable of thinking as we think. Once this occurred, it would not have taken long for people to begin constructing stories about supernatural perceptions. Over tens of thousands of years these stories would have become increasingly elaborate. All modern religions are related, in deep time and through conceptual descent, to these early forms of religion or shamanisms.

Two more recent transformations altered the basic ancestral patterns of supernaturalism. The first was Neolithization or the domestication of plants-animals. When people settle down and begin producing food, shamanisms give way to the earliest organized religions. The second was the transformation wrought on these religions by Axial movements or the Axial Age. Today’s “world religions” all have Axial roots.

The entire history of religions, therefore, has a cognitive component and a cultural component. They work together and it is hard to say one is more important than the other. They are equally essential to explain the persistence of religion.

All cognitive and cultural activities have an emotional aspect to them. In this sense, one can say that emotions play a major role in religiosity even if this role is not (as Pagels suggests) mono-causal.

This is of course simply an abbreviated sketch of religious history. The emotional aspect of this history is treated with considerable sophistication by Robert Fuller in Spirituality in the Flesh: Bodily Sources of Religious Experience (Oxford 2008). Fuller situates these emotions within an evolutionary framework and shows how everything works together to produce what he calls “spirituality.”

Even if you don’t agree with Fuller, his body or emotion based approach to these issues deserves serious consideration and makes considerable sense.

This is Evolutionary Theism. Evolutionary Theists bring several assumptions to their scholarly work and interpret data through the following lens: (1) evolution is not random but is designed, (2) because it is designed, evolution is progressive, (3) evolutionary progress occurs through adaptive change, and (4) this adaptive change is directed toward the evolution of humans. With the evolution of humans, we finally have creatures capable of perceiving and worshiping the God who made it all happen.

As this story goes God designed things so that early humans would apprehend the supernatural and their supernatural beliefs would make them cooperative, moral, and fertile. This God knew that humans would wander in the supernatural wilderness for many tens of thousands of years before they arrived at the (Christian) Truth. The Truth, as imagined by Evolutionary Theists, is that God is author of all.

This is not simple or crude Creationism, whether of the young or old earth variety. Nor is it Intelligent Design, which posits an interventionist entity whose many finely-tuned creations give the false impression there has been evolution. Evolutionary Theism accepts deep time, cosmic change, earth history, and evolutionary processes. But it does so with the understanding that none of this is random: it was designed to unfold in a particular way with a particular goal. Everything has been foreseen and foreordained.

None of this presents a problem so long as it is acknowledged. The problem arises when scholars of this persuasion present their work as if disinterested contemplation of data has led to their conclusions.

While it is not possible to approach data with nothing at all in mind, it is possible to approach data without any a priori commitments to the existence or non-existence of an entity or force called God. Scholars who have such commitments are bound to interpret their data in a particular way. For Evolutionary Theists this interpretation nearly always entails a designed and directed evolutionary progression, with one adaptation after another leading ineluctably to humans who can contemplate the majesty of God.

In paleontology, Simon Conway Morris does this. In evolutionary biology, Michael Blume does it. In evolutionary psychology, Matt Rossano does it. In archaeology, Klaus Schmidt seems to be doing it.

While working on the five-part Göbekli Tepe series for this blog, I came across several articles which noted that the excavator Schmidt is Catholic. There is of course nothing wrong with this but it may explain Schmidt’s premature and probably erroneous interpretation of Göbekli Tepe as the place where shamanistic hunter-gatherers saw the light, sensed the presence of gods (or God), built monuments for worship, and discovered how to domesticate plants-animals. As this story goes, a new “religion” magically or supernaturally appeared and paved the way for subsequent civilization.

If one is an Evolutionary Theist, this extraordinary and otherwise inexplicable progression makes complete sense: history is teleological and the ground was being prepared not only for plants but also for Christianity. If one is not an Evolutionary Theist, the alleged progression is questionable and inexplicable.

It is disingenuous for scientists and scholars who are Evolutionary Theists to present their work as if it were disinterested or compelled by facts and data. At a minimum, they should fully disclose their a priori commitments so we can evaluate their work accordingly.

It is one thing for a theologian such as John Haught to read his faith into evolutionary science and present it as such. It is quite a different thing for scientists and other scholars to read their faith into their science-scholarship without fully disclosing that they have pre-judged the primary issues and their findings flow from this prejudgment.