Book Review – Intelligent Thought (Is Religion an Adaptive Phenomenon for Human Survival?)

This blog post reviews the book Intelligent Thought by Clinton Richard Dawkins and discusses whether religion can be viewed as an adaptive phenomenon in the sense that it fulfills human psychological and social needs to increase survival. The role and meaning of religion is explored through various views and arguments for and against the idea that religion is an adaptation.

 

From the origin of humanity to the present day, scientific theories have made many advances. However, there is a problem that even modern scientific theories have not been able to solve, and that is the question of God or the Absolute, or religion. Religion is also as old as human history and has developed in various ways across different countries. Therefore, there have been many conflicts between those who believe in scientific theories and those who believe in religion for hundreds of years. One of them is the question of “Is religion an adaptation?”. This is the question of whether religion should be included within the category of science.
First of all, religion is a form of human spiritual culture that attaches meaning to the most basic of human problems by connecting them to beings or principles beyond experience and borrowing their power to solve human anxieties, mortality, and serious concerns that cannot be solved by ordinary methods. Religion has undergone many qualitative and quantitative changes since the birth of mankind and continues to have a significant impact on human inner life today.
Adaptation is a phenomenon in which an organism changes its appearance, lifestyle, etc. in order to fit into its surroundings or living environment, and it refers to the ability to cope with the environment appropriately and beneficially. According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, we’ve learned why each species of animal looks the way it does and has the habits it has, and this is true for all living things, so it’s also true for humans. For example, walking upright or speaking are adaptations to our environment.
But is the act of believing in religion itself an adaptation? Religion has been able to thrive since the dawn of humanity because it addresses our deepest emotional thirsts and the fundamental moral needs of society. It also allows us to escape the vicious cycle of selfishness and choose collective interests that can also benefit us individually. For these reasons, religious groups have had a higher survival rate than non-religious groups because they have been able to take advantage of these collective and individual benefits, and natural selection has increased the proportion of religious groups.
First, natural selection always starts with a compromise between an organism’s structure and its environment. Humans, both ancient and modern, face many physical and mental crises in their lifetime, and in the process, they must have experienced psychological conflicts and, in severe cases, even threatened their health. Therefore, we can see that survival can be affected by experiencing mental crises. Religion would have provided a sense of mental stability to the groups that believed in it and increased their survival rate.
On the other hand, there are quite a few arguments against the “religion is an adaptation” thesis. In some cases, organisms have evolved to adapt to their environment, such as through mutations or specific body structures. For example, in terrestrial vertebrates, the pharynx is a short passageway that connects the mouth to the esophagus and trachea, so if swallowing food is timed incorrectly, it can block the airway and cause choking. So just as an adaptation isn’t necessarily evolving in a way that makes sense for the environment, just because a group benefits from believing in a religion doesn’t necessarily make it an adaptation.
Furthermore, the scientific theory of adaptation gains validity when its predictions are confirmed, but it can never be proven to be true. Advocates of intelligent design believe that a spiritual force irreducible to matter and energy manipulated DNA to create the diverse creatures and behaviors we see today. They claim that a prime mover or designer provided the blueprint for everything, and that a divine creator directs everything. However, this idea doesn’t hold much water, because religion can never be proven to be true either: “Religion is an adaptation” can only be confirmed by many examples, but no one can prove it. Not only has no absolute or god been identified, but there are as many different kinds of religions as there are people in the world.
Intelligent design advocates are also incapable of logical proof. Intelligent design itself is scientifically unverifiable because it assumes the existence of an intelligent agent, but no one can prove it.
And just because something evolves in a way that doesn’t fit its environment doesn’t mean it’s not an adaptation – the mouth and esophagus of land vertebrates didn’t change much because it didn’t affect their survival rates.
The author of the book, Clinton Richard Dawkins, has argued that religion is a serious enigma that is not easily solved by an evolutionary explanation of human thought and human society. The simple evolutionary explanation that religion is an adaptation that was instilled in us by our ancestors for some task is troubling, meaning that just as there is no gene for science, there is no gene for the complex of beliefs and behaviors that make up religion.
But this is a weak argument in favor of intelligent design. The idea that because there is no gene for it, an intelligent designer must have created it is not logical at all, and cannot be proven.
Science helps us understand how religion is organized in the minds of individuals and in societies, and why religious beliefs don’t disappear in the face of a strictly materialistic view. The latest research in cognitive science, a branch of psychology grounded in evolutionary biology, views religion and the consciousness of supernatural beings as a byproduct of the convergence of different cognitive and emotional mechanisms evolved by natural selection to accomplish everyday tasks.
Finally, I would like to discuss the fact that the rate of non-belief in religion is not low, which does not mean that people who do not believe in religion have failed to adapt – we are discussing whether religion itself is an adaptation, not whether individuals believe in it or not. Belief can also be described as an adaptation, as it has a lot to do with the spread and diversification of religion. Adaptation is not static, it is fluid, so just because the rate of non-belief in a group is currently low does not mean that it is not an adaptation.
To put it simply, religion is a refuge from the many crises that people go through in their “human life”, and therefore brings collective as well as individual benefits in terms of psychological and health-related aspects. Taken together, religion is part of the phenomenon of adaptation.