Religion Under the Microscope

Religion has often viewed evolution — the theory and science thereof — as the enemy.

Now science is asking whether religion itself evolved as a cultural adaptation. Perhaps religion as a cultural system has given its believers survival advantages as a group over competing groups of individuals who harbor no shared religious beliefs.

Perhaps, somewhere in the mists of human prehistory, there was a genetic mutation which made some members of genus Homo capable of living by an unselfish code of mutual aid and assistance. These milder mutants would learn to sacrifice their competitive individual agendas and work together for the common good. Their covenant of mutual aid made their group fitter in an evolutionary sense than any group whose members, lacking the cooperation gene, knew nothing of self-sacrifice.

Maybe, since humans are so good at picking up cues from other humans, the whole idea of mutual aid spread even to groups whose individual members, many or all of them, lacked the cooperation gene.

Could religion have been born as a transmitted social code enshrining self-sacrifice for the common good?

Could we even have religion (or religions, plural) today unless religions are in fact (or at least once were) adaptive in an evolutionary sense: making their possessors fitter to undergo the harsh rigors of survival in an impassive, even hostile environment?

In Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion, biologist David Sloan Wilson says something like this may indeed be so. Though Wilson says he himself is an atheist, he assails The God Delusion, the recent book by fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, for suggesting that human religion evolved more in the way a virus evolves. Even though it harms its host's chances of survival, a virus nonetheless spreads to other hosts, mutates, and thereby ensures its own survival.

To Dawkins, Wilson says, religion is maladaptive to us:

As he sees it, people are attracted to religion the way that moths are attracted to flames. Perhaps religious impulses were adapted to the tiny social groups of our ancestral past, but not the mega-societies of the present. If current religious beliefs are adaptive at all, it is only for the beliefs themselves as cultural parasites on their human hosts, like the demons of old that were thought to possess people. That is why Dawkins calls God a delusion. The least likely possibility for Dawkins is the group-level adaptation hypothesis. Religions are emphatically not elaborate systems of beliefs and practices that define, motivate, coordinate and police groups of people for their own good.

Dawkins, Wilson says, even likens religious enthusiasm today to that old-fashioned experience, demonic possession. A meme, which amounts to the cultural equivalent of a gene, is acting as a virus and infecting our minds, to our detriment.

Wilson supports the alternative hypothesis that religion is a complex cultural adaptation, not for human individuals, but for human groups. He wants to see "hard empirical work" done to determine if his hypothesis, Dawkins' counter-hypothesis, or some other explanation accounts for the evolution of religion in human culture.

A Hinge of History

In "Marriage Bills Cause Concern," an article in The Catholic Review of May 8, 2008, news comes of the opposition of the Archdiocese of Baltimore to two recent bills awaiting Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley's signature or veto. One, Senate Bill 566, "grants unmarried couples the same status as married couples for making medical decisions, while Senate Bill 597 establishes in law a definition of domestic partner and gives domestic partnerships marriage-equivalency status in parts of tax law."

The article says Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien has written the governor to inform him of the opposition of the archdiocese to these bills, partly on grounds that "the legal definition of marriage should not be diluted in order to bestow those privileges."

Suggesting that relationships supported by the legislation would too often be transitory ones not deserving of special legal protections, the archbishop called the legislation an "insult" to

the religious traditions which exalt marriage and regard it as sacramental ... . At a time when communities of faith and society at large strive against formidable cultural forces to address the devastating results of the dissolution of the family structure, [this legislation] would prove counterproductive.

And so the lines are drawn. On one side are those such as myself (a non-gay Catholic) who support the gay community in their efforts to get domestic partnerships, civil unions, and even gay marriages recognized under the law and given equal status with heterosexual unions. On the other side are religious traditionalists such as the Catholic hierarchy who firmly oppose gay unions.

In The End of Traditional Sexual Ethics I suggested the issues surrounding how the Church deals with homosexuality pattern with how it deals with such other matters as abortion, divorce, birth control, sex outside marriage, and even its attitude towards women priests.

The longstanding beliefs of the Catholic Church regarding men, women, sex, marriage, and procreation are out of step with society today. I'd say we are at a hinge point in our cultural history, in fact. The moral attitudes of yore no longer apply today.

The Church's position on matters of sex derives from deep-seated beliefs, inherited from Christianity's Jewish roots, about the procreative capacity of women. As I said in The Anti-Defilement Covenant and embroidered upon in Faiths of Our Fathers and Signs of Sacrificial Solidarity, Judeo-Christian religion has always called for its adherents to sacrifice to show mutual solidarity.

The main thing that the original Hebrews sacrificed to show their loyalty to Yahweh was their erstwhile pagan attitudes about sex. Pagan cultures used sex in their fertility rites and practiced elaborate forms of temple prostitution. Yahweh demanded that a woman's fertility be treated as sacred ... and as the property not of the woman herself, but of the males in her society. Her womb was also symbolically the property of the male deity, who arranged for and blessed the new life she conceived inside her.

So sex, marriage, and procreation became intensely regulated by religious law. What we would in later times call promiscuity was forbidden, for women and for men. Men had to sacrifice their natural inclinations to have abundant sex partners and cleave to their wife alone, so as to be fruitful and multiply in a lawful way. "Knowing" another man's wife or daughter or sister "in the biblical sense" was a sin. A widow had to be married by her dead husband's unmarried brother in order that her fertility continue to be lawfully possessed.

Symbolic of the male's sacrifice as a member of the covenant was his circumcision, the painful removal of the foreskin of his penis.

Homosexuality was an "abomination" in the Lord's eyes. The symbolic, sacrificial meaning of male circumcision was of little value when the man was not interested in "knowing" women in the first place. The pain of ritual circumcision was, in his case, for naught ... and Judaism is a rational religion in which things are not done for nothing.

2,000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth was a circumcised Jew. He was a member of the covenant of the Law of Moses. He was born into a society in which the rules regarding human sexuality had not changed, of a mother whose womb was so sacred she was still a virgin. According to Catholic dogma she remained, and will forever remain, a virgin.

The sacrifice of his life which Jesus made upon the cross was not for naught; it saved all mankind from the wages of sin. The most important picture in the entire Christian gallery is that of the crucifixion. Christ on the cross is, naturally, in the foreground of the image. In the background, however, is the Jewish idea of sin itself, which centers upon various and sundry ways in which a womb can be violated.

Again symbolically, the very earth upon which the cross stands represents a womb. The earth as womb, the source of all life, is a symbol not just in Judeo-Christian religion, but in every religion. In Judeo-Christian religion, the first man, Adam, was made by God from the earth itself.

The Christian Bible, Old Testament and New, comprises a long, convoluted story about the creation, about man falling into sin, about God's manifesting himself to the Jewish patriarchs, about God redeeming not just the Jews but all mankind by the Son's death on the cross and resurrection, and ultimately about, in the final book, the marriage between the returned Jesus, as the groom, and the Bride of Christ: the saved Church as a whole.

The Catholic Church has long preached the sanctity of a woman's fertility in ways that have entailed: finding women to be so constituted that their holiness is separate and apart from that of the ordained male priesthood; holding that abortion is always sinful; maintaining that homosexuality is wrong; asserting that the good order of society depends crucially upon the good order of the family; restricting sex to the marital bed; refusing to sanction divorce and remarriage; prohibiting the use of artificial means of birth control, and so on and so forth.

For nearly 2,000 years, this vision of how things ought to be held up remarkably well, even when the strictures were being observed mostly in the breach.

My how things have changed!

Today we have the majority of Catholic couples using birth control in violation of the teachings of the Church. A sizable percentage of the total number of abortions in the U.S. are performed for Catholic women. The number of divorced and remarried Catholics is large. The number of Catholics who have premarital sex is vast.

There are plenty of the Catholic faithful who are openly or semi-openly gay. A plentiful number of Catholic priests are secretly gay.

At the same time, feminism has succeeded in liberating a great many of us from outmoded ideas about who and what women actually are.

An increasing number of Catholic women, meanwhile, resent the fact that they can't be priests ... as the all-male priesthood in this country struggles year by year to replenish its aging ranks.

And, oh, yes ... as a recent hit Broadway show tells us in song: the Internet is for porn.

All the signs say it: we are presently pivoting upon a hinge of history. We revel in what used to be called sin ... considered sinful because, at bottom, it was behavior that violated divinely established laws having to do with the sanctity of the female womb. By ancient religious strictures, males would ritually sacrifice their own polymorphic, "natural" sexual behavior — as symbolized by circumcision in Judaism and, in Christianity, the baptism which "kills" the original, "natural" self — and would accordingly be designated as patriarchal guardians of female fertility.

That was a hugely successful cultural development. It underwrote the rise of the West. But it's ancient history today. We just don't know it yet.