159 Comments

• Digg
• Bury

Having religion defined in a simple way? You don't seem to get the basic point of what I've written, because my point is precisely that the whole quest for a "religious gene" presupposes a simplistic definition of religion that doesn't deal with the complexities and ambiguities that scholars in other fields have discovered. To pursue a "religious gene" presupposes that there's such a thing as "religion" that has some kind of common core that could even theoretically be reduced to genetics. If there's no core, then there's absolutely no reason to go pursuing a genetic basis for it in the first place. Like I said, you can pursue genetic ties to certain types of behaviors and attitudes that may sometimes be present in a religious person's religiosity (and which may also be present in a non-religious person in some non-religious way), and that's interesting, but it's a far cry from figuring out a genetic basis for religion.

Again, in case you aren't following the point: if "religion" doesn't exist, then searching for a "religion gene" is inherently misdirected. People who study religion--the beliefs, the attitudes, the actions, and so forth, of religious people--can find no "core" that unites all religions under the umbrella term "religion." (The modern use of the term "religion" comes from a time when philosophers thought they could identify conspicuously Christian-looking core in the belief systems of people around the world, but that view has long since fallen out of favor among most scholars of religion.) If there's no common experience, no common beliefs, no common attitudes, no common actions, that exist across all ways of being religious, then it makes no sense to speak of a "religion gene." All you can speak of are potentially several different genes that might manifest themselves in many different ways in many different forms of religiosity and non-religiosity.

Philosophers, social scientists, and other humanists have a role to play in the understanding of religion because religion deals with ideas, with social dynamics, with emotions, and other factors that, even while having a genetic basis, simply aren't reducible to genetics (unless, again, you want to resort to philosophy to make that self-undermining argument--self-undermining because reducing all thought to genetics would invariably undermine all confidence in the very thought processes that led to the reduction). We have no evidence to suggest that ideas spread as a matter of pure genetic determinism, that a gene determines whether or not you'll believe there is a God, whether you believe in gravity, or whether you believe that there exist minds other than your own. And if all this were purely genetic, again, it would undermine the thought processes that lead to the discovery; science itself would be undermined if it were nothing but the product of irrational genetic determinism, if scientists did nothing but manifest the content of their genes instead of actually think rationally and freely about the contents of their empirical observations.

Humanists study religion by looking at what believe, tracing histories of influence, listening to what people say and write about why they believe, and so forth. Unless you take all that as meaningless, then humanists and social scientists have a vital role to play in understanding the rise and spread of religions. Unless you think that all thought is nothing more than a fully determined manifestation of one's genetic material, then any understanding of religious belief requires studying the beliefs themselves, not just genes.