We Want Purposes That Evolution Did Not Give Us

From a conversation between Nick Bostrom and Alex O'Connor, a point that has stayed with me: we have almost no intellectual purposes.

Nearly all the purposes we actually operate on are inherited from evolution. Mating, status, the safety of our children, survival. You go to work in order to eat and stay warm, and to secure the same for people you are attached to. Strip a life down to what actually drives the daily decisions and it is mostly this, arranged in various socially acceptable disguises.

Most people have nothing beyond it.

The Gap

And yet we want something beyond it, badly.

That wanting is itself the interesting datum. Evolution did not need to install a desire for purposes that transcend biology — such a desire has no obvious fitness value, and it causes a great deal of suffering in people who cannot satisfy it. Whatever produced it, it was not a straightforward optimisation for reproduction.

The gap between the purposes we have and the purposes we want may be one of the better explanations for religion.

Religion's central offer is not really the afterlife, and it is not comfort in grief, though it supplies both. It is a role: you are here for a reason, the reason was assigned by something larger than you, and your ordinary life is an instance of a cosmic pattern. That is exactly the missing item.

Tradition as a Manufactured Purpose

Here is the part I find most interesting.

Preserving a tradition might be precisely such a self-made intellectual purpose. Continuing a practice because it was handed to you and will be handed on — that is a purpose that is not about eating, not about mating, and not about safety. It reaches past the biological.

Now, belonging to a group is of course evolutionarily aligned; humans who stayed with their group survived. So the tradition-keeping impulse has a perfectly ordinary explanation.

But perhaps that is part of its strength rather than a debunking of it. It supplies a purpose that does not feel biological while remaining fully compatible with what biology built. The satisfaction is real, the fitness benefit is real, and the person experiencing it correctly perceives that they are doing something that transcends their own appetites — because they are, even though the transcendence is itself an evolved capacity.

That is a neat arrangement, and I suspect it explains why traditions are so durable even when their content has stopped being believed.

What This Suggests

If the analysis is right, then a purely negative atheism has a real problem, and it is not the one usually cited.

The problem is not that people need comfort about death. Many manage without it. The problem is that people need a role — something they are for, that is not simply the continuation of their metabolism — and religion has been the main supplier for as long as there have been people.

Telling someone their purposes are biological does not remove the desire for purposes that are not. It leaves the desire in place with nothing attached to it.

Which means the interesting question is not whether religion is true, a matter I take to be settled, but what else can occupy that position honestly. Craft, inquiry, building something that outlasts you, the deliberate maintenance of a practice — these are candidates, and they have the advantage of not requiring anyone to believe anything false.

I do not think they work as well. I think they work well enough, and that saying so plainly is more useful than pretending the need was never real.