Spinal Fire Scientia Est Potentia

The Religious Impulse and Extinction
By John Kedrowski

Much has been made lately about the importance of religion in our lives. We see the religious impulse growing and growing in the world around us and many of us reasoning folk are left to wonder and worry about it. I am convinced that religion is a maladaptive trait in humanity and will lead to further conflict and possibly our extinction. Thusly, it should be discarded. Others argue that it is part of the human essence and cannot be dispended.

There is no human essence.

There is nothing static or permanent in the human condition. We all evolved and that means that what we see here is a snapshot in time, a temporal stilling of the great river of our genes by our reason. Our perspective betrays us though. We, whose life spans are incandescently short in comparison to the Earth, have no intuitive grasp of the things happen over thousands, millions and billions of human generations.

Religion evolved like any other human characteristic. You can note its appearance in the fossil record just as if an ant colony began to build a new type of hive. We can't know for sure what the environmental conditions were at the time that led to the evolution of religion, but certain theories have invoked everything from group identification, abstract awareness of death, use of illicit chemicals, etc.

These conditions have not remained static and neither has religion. As a whole, it has diversified as it spread from human to human as generations passed through different environments. At every point on the journey, religions grew and changed in response to the environmental conditions, sometimes completely reinventing themselves in short bursts of punctuated equilibrium.

Lets assume humans were to go extinct tomorrow and a new form of intelligent life evolved in fifty to one hundred millions years. The strata that would form when certain conditions were right would capture this process for a possible futuristic paleontologist to see. This being, if the society in which it was born was astute enough to rediscover Darwin's insight, would correctly identify our current behavior as ornamentation.

A rough approximation could be made of the physical environmental of the time, but there would be no explanation for the massive and intricate structures that developed because of our religion. With the conceit of hindsight, this paleontologist could see this process in other strata. 400 millions before that time, trilobites underwent a similar transformation. Some of them grew massive horns and others developed intricate lacework patterns in their exoskeleton. All of this cost them a great amount of energy to build and there is no explanation for it.

Another thing these futuristic paleontologists would see with the conceit of hindsight is that all forms of life go extinct when they undergo an ornamentation phase. The explanation is simple, too much energy is expended for purposes other then survival in the changing environmental conditions.

Our environmental conditions are changing in ways that all humans on this planet have ever experienced in all of our long years of evolution. Globalization is connecting us to nearly every other human on this planet. It is possible for all of our thoughts and ideas to be shared and it is possible for every group to physically interact with every other group.

What will all of the old behavioral relics of religious ornamentation do under these conditions? How can the massive organized groupthinks that developed in the middle ages adapt to this? How long do we have to wait for one group or another to use a nuke to deal with the infidels?

Religion has become maladaptive to the current human condition. There are lots of things that could cause our extinction. Most of those things are beyond our control. One of them that we are able to influence is our behavior. All religion, through dogma, encourages just the type of interactions with all other human beings that promote conflict. Globalization requires the use of our reason. Peace is impossible without it because we'll never figure out how to live with one another.

In my opinion, this is why you see the new type of atheist rising out of the woodwork. People like Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, etc, have sensed the way the evolutionary river is flowing and they are rightly afraid of its direction.