Religions Did Not Evolve, They Merely Survived

Daniel Dennett asked why religions have such a hold on us, and why the Enlightenment's confident prediction that they would fade away turned out wrong. His answer was that they have been brilliantly designed, over thousands of years, to do exactly that: to be robust, self-maintaining organisations built to keep us enthralled, and that this design came out of an evolutionary process. I have used Dennett's ideas before and I think he is one of the few philosophers worth reading on this subject. On this particular claim I think he is wrong, and the mistake is instructive.

My claim is simple. No evolutionary process of the kind Dennett describes has occurred. Religions have changed, certainly. But they changed as little as they could get away with, exactly as much as was needed to avoid extinction and not one step more. That is not evolution. Evolution needs variation, lots of it, and selection acting on that variation over enormous numbers of trials. Religions suppress variation as a matter of doctrine, and the number of trials is pitiful. If religions really had been through the kind of trial and error that produces an eye or an immune system, they would not be as clumsy as they are.

What Evolution Actually Requires

It is worth being precise about what the word means, because "evolution" has become a loose synonym for "changed over time" and that is not what Dennett is claiming. He is claiming design: that the features which hold people are there because a selective process refined them. Design by selection has requirements.

It requires a large population of variants. Natural selection shapes the eye because there are billions of eyes, every one of them slightly different, in every generation. The lineage leading to a modern eye passed through something like a million generations, each one a round of trial and error over a population too large to count.

It requires that variation be cheap and continuous. Mutations happen whether anyone wants them or not. Nothing in a bacterium polices its own genome for heresy.

It requires that selection be on the trait in question. If you want a lineage optimised for holding people enthralled, the variants that hold people better must out-reproduce the ones that hold people worse, over and over, for a very long time.

Now count the religions. The total number that have ever existed is somewhere in the thousands, generously, and most of those were tribal religions that never competed with anything and simply died with their tribe. The ones that have been in serious competition with each other, the world religions and their major branches, number a few dozen. Their generation time, the interval between one meaningful variant and the next, is measured in centuries. A few dozen lineages, a few dozen generations. That is not a population under selection. It is an anecdote.

Religions Suppress Variation on Purpose

The second requirement fails even more badly than the first. Religions are the only cultural institutions I know of whose central organising principle is the prohibition of change. The text is fixed. The ritual is fixed. The founder's words are final. Innovation has a name in every religion and the name is heresy, and for most of history the penalty for it was death.

This is the opposite of a system exploring its design space. A religion is a system engineered, deliberately and openly, to stay still. When it does move, it moves because an external force left it no choice: a conquest, a scientific discovery that could no longer be denied, a political order that would not tolerate the old doctrine. And when it moves it moves the minimum distance. I have written about how Yahweh changed from a desert war god into the creator of the universe, and every step of that journey was taken under duress, as late as possible, and no further than necessary. Monotheism arrived when the political situation made the other gods an embarrassment, not because a thousand variant theologies were tried and the monotheist one held its congregations best.

Variation in religion is not generated and tested. It is generated under pressure, mostly in the form of schism, and the schism is then fought as a war. The winner is the side with the bigger army, which is not the same thing as the side with the better design for holding minds. Christianity did not spread through Europe because its memes out-competed the pagan ones in a fair contest for human attention. It spread because Constantine adopted it and because kings who converted then converted their subjects at sword point. Islam spread the same way. Selection by conquest selects for the military and political fortunes of the host, not for the features of the religion.

Look at the Product

The strongest argument, though, is to look at what the supposed design process produced. Dennett's claim implies a product that is refined, that fits its niche with the elegance of a well-adapted organism. Religions are not that. Religions are a mess.

They carry enormous amounts of material that does nothing for retention and a good deal that works against it: dietary laws that make social life with outsiders awkward, prohibitions on medicine, celibate orders that remove their most committed members from reproduction, doctrines that are embarrassing to defend and that drive educated members out. The Shakers designed themselves out of existence. Every religion has a bookshelf of rules that it quietly ignores because enforcing them would empty the pews, and it keeps them on the books anyway because it cannot change the book. An evolved system sheds dead weight. Religion cannot, because shedding is heresy.

Then look at the features that do hold people, the ones Dennett has in mind. Fear of hell. The cost of leaving. Indoctrination of children. Marking members and shunning outsiders. These are real and they work, and I have described the psychological machinery behind them. But notice that they are the same handful of features in every religion, that they were present essentially in their final form in the earliest versions we have records of, and that they are the obvious tricks any human institution would hit on in its first century. A guild, an army, a political party and a street gang use the same ones. They are not refinements. They are the starting kit. Nothing in three thousand years improved on them, which is exactly what you would expect from a system that forbids improvement.

Survival Is Not Design

I have argued elsewhere that religions behave like memes, that they split and compete and propagate by mechanisms that have nothing to do with truth, and I stand by that. But competition and survival are weaker things than design. A rock survives for a billion years without having been designed for it. What survives in a world with little variation and few trials is not the best-adapted variant. It is whatever was adequate and happened to be standing when the music stopped.

That is what religions are. Not brilliantly designed organisms honed to grip the human mind, but adequate early institutions that found a few obvious hooks, nailed themselves to the floor, and have been grimly refusing to move ever since. Their hold on us comes from the hooks, from the fact that human beings were not built to think, and from inertia. The Enlightenment was wrong about the timing, not about the direction: a system that cannot adapt does not go extinct quickly, but it does not get better either, and the gap between it and the world it has to live in only grows.

Dennett credits religion with more cleverness than it has. The honest description is less flattering and, I think, more hopeful. Religions are not sophisticated adversaries. They are old, stiff and stupid, and they are still here because nothing has yet pushed hard enough to knock them over.