The Evolution of Religion: What is Next?

Religion is not a single thing. It is a complex set of things. What form it will take in the human future depends on which of its components come to dominate it.

Religion consists of a set of doctrines, as well as spiritual feelings and experiences. Spirituality, based directly on human experiences, will probably continue forever. Our brains have experiences such as the following, which I listed in Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book, Life of Earth: ecstasy; loss of awareness of having a defined body; altruism; need for an authority figure; awareness of death; and belief that phenomena are caused by invisible persons. It is likely that each of these is caused by a particular brain function. They will never go away, except perhaps over a longer period of time than human civilization has yet existed; and we will probably always interpret them as spiritual experiences.

But the doctrines are memes. They are culturally transmitted. However unlikely it seems at the moment, these memes can die away quickly, over a very few generations. I do not expect many of them to die away, but I can at least hope that the more oppressive and destructive of them will become extinct. For example, the idea that God will send most people who have ever lived to a hell in which they will experience conscious eternal torture. This doctrinal belief makes people comfortable with the idea that it is acceptable to torture or harm other people. Another example: the idea that God has given our religious group the unique truth, and has not given it to anyone else. This doctrinal belief makes people comfortable with the idea that they can sweep aside other religious groups by whatever means necessary. The time for belief in God as Supreme Torturer and Dispenser of Unique Truth to Fundamentalists Who Can Enforce It (whether in Christian or Muslim garb) must end as speedily as possible. We should oppose these ideas vigorously and without interruption for as long as it takes to ensure their memetic extinction. One of the best ways to do this is just to educate people—about evolution and about the brain chemistry basis of our thoughts, for example.

And when we do so, should we happen to succeed at some point long after my life is over, what will we have? Perhaps, primarily, we will have spirituality—people who worship God by feeling the inspiration of nature and by living by the Golden Rule. People who think and act the way Jesus did when he was out in the hills. The component of religion that makes people better, not worse. This may be impossible, but it is a future worth working for.

Future Evolution

Evolutionary scientists are not very good at predicting the future. They are very good at reconstructing and explaining the past.

Reconstructing and explaining the past is not as easy as it seems. Evolution has resulted from natural selection—but natural selection has acted differently on every group of organisms, and in every part of the world, and at different rates. There have been countless examples of historical contingency, as Stephen Jay Gould liked to remind us. Genetic drift and the founder effect, among other things, produced unique and unusual sets of genes upon which natural selection acted. Natural selection can only act on whatever genes are available. The story of natural selection is therefore millions of stories.

This is why evolutionary scientists cannot predict the future very well. In the past, evolution has taken millions of directions—and it will presumably keep doing so. We cannot predict the conditions of the future, nor the contingencies (accidents) that may determine which populations will be at the right place at the right time to explode into a new and dominant evolutionary lineage. When scientists try to predict the future, they make it clear that they are using their imaginations, rather than the scientific process (for example, Future Evolution by Peter Ward and Alexis Rockman). Japanese film maker Akira Kurosawa (in his movie Dreams) imagined a post-nuclear-war world with giant dandelions and people who grew horns, which was a mixture of science fiction and traditional Japanese legends.

Just because there are a million directions evolution can take does not mean we cannot make reasonable guesses about some of them. I invite your comments about what you think some of the future directions of evolution might be.