He sees god as a byproduct of evolution and culture. Religion has always generated positive "social capital" for its members. It allows them to trust each other, knowing everyone in the group has the same world view. As political scientist Robert Putnam put it, the social capital that is generated by religious (and other types of) groups “makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern" more justly and with more stability. It is a valuable asset for a community in that it makes it more stable, stronger, and unified. It is an enforcer of law, order, commonly agreed upon standards, and morality, and is a strong cultural binding agent. Modern religion is an expression of our ancient tribal nature. It is, and always has been, adaptive in an evolutionary sense. This does not mean it comes without drawbacks. The cost of religion to the individual is the ceding of some level of personal control to the larger community, and the implicit agreement to live by the community's religious rules.
Scientists have evidence that religion exploits cognitive "switches" in the brain/mind that presumably evolved as survival adaptations. For example, our "agency detection" capabilities have been with us for tens of thousands of years. Our assumption that some intelligent agent is behind otherwise unexplainable events and our ability to imagine complex hypothetical scenarios eventually resulted in the human creation of gods as those causal agents. There also seems to be a "switch" that rewards individuals for their participation in a local/parochial group (or tribe). Membership in a religion (or military unit, bowling league, school clique, fraternity, debate team, professional work group, sports team, rave, mob, social movement, etc) is inherently gratifying, allowing the individual to temporarily transcend the limitations and concerns of the "self" and permit the group norms and goals to take priority. It can be exhilarating to temporarily relinquish personal responsibility and control and let the larger group take over. Churches fill this need perfectly, better than practically any other type of organization. Research shows that organizations (like religions, cults, military and criminal organizations) that require great sacrifices in belief, action, relationships, information flow, property, and individual rights give back to the participants a proportional feeling of belonging and comfort, and create a very stable operating unit. An interesting aside - communes based on religion (whatever the religion) have a much higher survival rate years or decades later than secular or ideologically based communes. People appear to seek out and embrace group membership, especially in groups that require a lot from its members.
In the last 15,000 years (during the Holocene epoch), human cultural AND genetic evolution reached a fever pitch as population grew and civilization took root, that is, as we became cultural creatures living in large groups. Our religious minds and institutions are products of biological and cultural evolution. They became more complex and refined as we gathered into societies, and probably helped those societies succeed rather than dissolve through the still controversial, but increasingly accepted mechanism of evolutionary group selection (as opposed to the more widely known and accepted individual selection). These byproducts, these cognitive/cultural/social adaptions, came under the sway of natural selection. There is not a solid wall between genetic and cultural evolution - instead they should be thought of as two interwoven strands. What we do with those religious minds is just as culturally constructed as everything else we do. Large organized religions with beliefs in afterlife are relatively recent innovations when considered in the long-term anthropological context. They really only emerged after the development of agriculture in larger scale societies. Once humans started living in chiefdoms and small, stable towns, gods got much more complicated and moralistic. This had to happen to prevent these larger groups from disintegrating into smaller feuding tribal factions. This change served everyone's purpose - it benefitted the individuals by making them safer, happier, and more secure. It benefited the leaders by making it easier to exert control, and it benefited the society as a whole because it became more cohesive, unified, and better able to compete with less focused competitors.
The religious mind is much more than an unmodified byproduct of evolutionary changes that happened 50,000 years ago. It has been strongly shaped by our social evolution. Religious beliefs, shared and enforced by a group of like-minded individuals, promote and combine interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible. As David Sloan Wilson put it, they help people “to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.”
Haidt and Wilson echo Émile Durkheim, an early 20th century sociologist. In his book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim attempted to identify the social origin and function of religion, as he felt that religion was a source of camaraderie and solidarity. His second purpose was to identify links between certain religions in different cultures, finding a common denominator. He wanted to understand the empirical, social aspect of religion that is common to all religions, which goes beyond the concepts of spirituality and god. He defined religion as:
...a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.In this definition, Durkheim avoids references to the supernatural or to god. He argued that the concept of the supernatural is relatively new, tied to the development of science and the separation of supernatural — that which cannot be rationally explained — from the natural, that which can. According to Durkheim, for early humans, there was no distinction. Everything one encountered in life was what we moderns would call supernatural.
Durkheim studied emotions related to group membership. These emotions bind us to the group or social entity as a whole. They manifest themselves primarily in the relationships of the society with other societies. When we act under the influence of these group-directed emotions, we become a part of a whole, whose actions we follow, and whose influence we are subject to.
The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation ... What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to regulate his actions by something other than his own egoism.
He defined and explained a sociological concept he called "Collective Effervescence", where a community or society may at times come together and simultaneously communicate the same thought and participate in the same action (at a sporting event, a religious ceremony, a political demonstration). Such an event then causes collective effervescence, which excites the participating individuals and unifies the group. Humans, as social animals, by their natures are susceptible to collective effervescence. Just as a single frightened steer can cause a stampede in a herd, a emotional contagion can spread through a crowd of people, given the right circumstances. Collective effervescence is the basis for Durkheim's theory of religion as presented in his book, Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim wrote that the universal religious dichotomy of profane vs. sacred results from the lives of these tribe members: most of their life is spent performing menial tasks such as hunting, gathering, and maintaining the camp. These tasks are profane. The rare occasions on which the entire tribe gathers together become sacred, and the high energy level associated with these events gets directed onto physical objects or people which also become sacred.
Our religious, righteous minds made it possible for human beings — but no other animals — to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. If you think about religion as only being a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you’re bound to misunderstand and underestimate it. You’ll see those beliefs as foolish delusions, perhaps even as parasites that exploit our brains for their own benefit, or at a minimum a cause of inefficiency, ignorance, and waste. But if you take Durkheim's approach to religion, which focuses on belonging and the power of unified groups, you get a very different picture. You see that religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years. The cost of that binding involves some blinding as well. Once any person, book, or principle is declared sacred or profane, then devotees can no longer question it or think clearly about it.
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