The Evolutionary Biologist's Case for Religion

0:00 There are various versions of this conversation,

0:02 and they have arbitrary levels of difficulty.

0:06 The easy one is whatever the nature of an ancient religious tradition is,

0:13 we can be agnostic about whether or not it

0:16 is divine and somehow outside of the universe that we

0:19 have easy access to, or whether it is fully

0:23 the consequence of emergent properties in a material world.

0:28 Whichever that is, one of the functions that religion serves best,

0:32 and in fact, maybe uniquely or almost uniquely,

0:38 is solving deep game theory problems.

0:43 So primary among them is the collection

0:45 of what are called collective action problems,

0:48 where each individual following their own incentives causes the sum

0:54 total of the behaviors to reach a suboptimal outcome.

1:00 So the tragedy of the commons is such a puzzle.

1:03 Prisoner's dilemma is such a puzzle.

1:05 But there are many such things where we can say together we would like

1:10 to leave the world in as good a condition as we found it or better.

1:15 But the problem is each individual is in a position

1:19 to enhance their own well-being at an expense to the world.

1:26 And if they are morally required to restrain

1:29 themselves from that, they do not preserve the world.

1:32 What they do is they enable their competitors to succeed.

1:35 And so we are constantly running up against

1:37 the destruction of the world because of the game theory,

1:40 not because we don't understand that we shouldn't destroy it or that we

1:43 can't say it would be great if nobody acted to destroy it,

1:46 but because it is pointless to hurt yourself in an effort to do

1:50 something that you yourself have no impact on whether it gets done.

1:54 So I hope that wasn't too complex.

1:55 But the point is, if you have a religion,

1:59 whether there is an actual God who is looking over us,

2:03 or that is simply an agreement of how we are to behave as if there is a God,

2:08 you can say, well, it is not my right to do this thing that destroys the world.

2:14 And to me, in my own framework,

2:16 there is a profound consequence if I violate my obligation,

2:20 therefore I will not violate my obligation.

2:22 And as long as everyone is in on that same agreement, it actually works.

2:26 So you can solve the game theory problem.

2:29 The world doesn't get destroyed.

2:31 Problem is everybody has to be in on that agreement.

2:34 And if you have a world in which you have a bunch

2:36 of people of faith who are resisting the pull of the game theory,

2:40 and you have a bunch of secular folks who don't think it means anything,

2:45 then the secular people have a very

2:47 temporary advantage and everybody pays the cost.

2:51 Right?

2:52 So one of the reasons that I think we have to have

2:55 this conversation is that that is now happening at every scale.

2:58 Not only do we have a world in which

3:00 secularism is causing all of the game theory to force

3:04 the entire world to face the penalties of the liquidation

3:09 of the well-being that is at our disposal,

3:12 but we also have a conflict even between religious traditions.

3:16 And so there must be, I think, an overarching structure that includes the values

3:23 that we should all agree on, that everyone,

3:27 whatever continent you live on, should agree the world is not ours to destroy.

3:31 We are stewards of it.

3:32 But we don't have that superstructure.

3:36 And as a result, the game theory is haunting us in a way because

3:39 of our technology that it wouldn't have 300 years ago or a thousand years ago.

3:46 So that's a long-winded way of saying this conversation is

3:51 a prototype for how do we take a secular materialist, be Christians,

3:57 Muslims, Jews, Hindus, how do we have a conversation in which we say,

4:03 well, what do all of these traditions agree on?

4:06 What do they not yet agree on?

4:08 What does this tradition have to learn from that tradition?

4:11 How does that conversation happen?

4:14 Well, I think that in some ways I want to bring it back to, I'm a Christian,

4:20 and I do believe that Christianity offers,

4:24 because of the notion of love, I think, is the deepest metaphysical principle.

4:30 This notion also that reality is grounded in self-sacrifice,

4:33 I think, is ultimately the solution to this problem.

4:37 But I do think that this is something that honestly,

4:39 the only way that we can get to it is for Christians to live it out.

4:44 It's difficult to, you know, I think that one of the reasons why we're here

4:49 is because Christians have dropped the ball to some extent,

4:52 that we've dropped the ball, that we've dropped the ball,

4:54 that we have not been proper images of what Christ has taught in the world,

4:59 and therefore we have a faded, you know,

5:02 kind of thin version of that in reality.

5:06 And so obviously we should have the conversation,

5:07 but that conversation should be done by people who are shining examples,

5:12 you know, and that's why it's so much,

5:14 you know, we kind of need saints, we need people that exemplify it,

5:17 you know, and the truth is that if you look at, you know,

5:21 how, let's say, in the early centuries,

5:24 how people were converted to Christianity,

5:26 which mostly because of that, they saw the Christians, you know,

5:30 adopting their abandoned children,

5:31 they saw the Christians caring for the people that were suffering,

5:35 and they were like, "Well, what is this thing?

5:37 There's something in me that's telling me that there's,

5:39 that's not my virtue structure,

5:40 but there's something telling me that there's something more going on here,

5:44 I don't know what it is, and that's what kind of led them to seeing that.

5:48 I don't know, Jordan,

5:49 it's kind of a, it's a, it's a frustrating answer because it's

5:52 kind of saying we have to live up to what we believe.

5:55 Well, let's see, let's throw,

5:56 I'm gonna work backwards to give myself time to get to the big ones as the end.

6:01 So one example that comes to the foreground as you were speaking is,

6:06 I think around 200, maybe late 100s,

6:10 there was a purge happening among Christians in southern France,

6:14 and the Roman governor was being particularly vicious,

6:17 and one of his peers was sort of defending the Christians,

6:22 and the Roman governor just sort of turned him and said, you know,

6:25 "Gaius, I would mistake you to be a Christian," and he goes,

6:28 "But I am a Christian," at which point he was torn,

6:31 you know, he was immediately tortured and killed,

6:33 but the point was the people who were watching that said, "Wow,

6:36 this guy was willing to live to the Roman virtue of telling the truth,

6:41 more powerful than the Romans would." Like

6:43 a Roman at that point would have been like,

6:44 "Yeah, no, I mean, no, I'm just being very, you know,

6:47 judicious," but the point was he was so committed to the values

6:50 that he was willing to step directly in, and he wasn't mistaken.

6:53 He knew he was going to get killed when he said it,

6:55 but he chose to stick to the thing that was right rather than preserve his life.

6:59 Well, let me just point out why

7:02 that mirrors exactly what I'm saying about game theory.

7:06 If you, again, I have to be agnostic on this point

7:10 in order for the whole audience to get it.

7:13 It doesn't matter whether the story is literally accurate,

7:19 or whether the story is simply a metaphor that we take to be accurate,

7:23 but if you have a belief that there is

7:27 an infinite reward that comes from behaving according to your values,

7:32 even when the cost of doing so is not only absolute,

7:35 the cost of your life, but the cost of dying horribly this instant.

7:40 If you believe that there's something big enough to warrant

7:43 that, then the point is you don't defect from those values,

7:47 even when the game theory is blinking red at you, "Hey,

7:50 do the other thing." So a world of people who share

7:54 the same agreement with respect to how we fix the collective action problems

7:59 is a much better world than one in which we all get

8:03 to figure out our own relationship to that game theory and, in fact,

8:07 give advantage to those who are least prone to self-sacrifice.

8:14 But the question is, where is this better that you mentioned?

8:18 If it's simply a metaphor that it doesn't have a truth in its own right,

8:24 where does the better come from?

8:26 Where does the perception that this is better?

8:30 Because maybe the best thing to do is to run through the game theory

8:33 thing and just kill your enemies

8:35 and your descendants will be the ones that survive,

8:39 even if it's just you in the end.

8:41 I want to give you what I think is the right analytical answer

8:44 to that, and I know it is unsatisfying and I think I know why it is,

8:48 and I know it doesn't land, but maybe we'll get there.

8:51 But human beings are a...

8:55 we are a creature.

8:58 I believe it is secure that that creature

9:01 is the product of an evolutionary process.

9:04 We can debate the fine details

9:05 of that, but I think I can defend that successfully.

9:09 But the consequence of it is that we are structured to be effective.

9:15 We are not structured to be accurate.

9:18 Now sometimes being accurate is the way to be effective,

9:21 and that's why we have the capability of being accurate.

9:24 But the higher purpose as built by evolution is

9:29 to do the thing that achieves the evolutionary objective.

9:34 And the consequence of this is that we individuals are

9:39 persuaded of our own significance in a way that's ridiculous,

9:45 even evolutionarily.

9:47 You could not possibly affect the fraction

9:51 of the next generation that contains your genes,

9:55 no matter how carefully you follow that as your North

9:59 Star every hour of every day of your life.

10:02 It just...

10:02 it's a big population.

10:04 You're not going to have an impact on it.

10:06 But the reason that you behave in such a way

10:09 so as to try to increase the number of your genes

10:13 in the next generation is because that is the limit

10:16 of your ability to affect the world in general.

10:19 Historically it has been, right?

10:21 So it might be, you know,

10:23 a person who has 10 times the average number of children in their lifetime,

10:28 but where each of the lineages that they

10:31 have sparked goes extinct 500 years later, their fitness is zero.

10:36 During their life it seems like their fitness is very high.

10:39 So you can behave in a way that seems evolutionarily wise,

10:43 but if it is self-terminating it is the opposite.

10:47 So my point is our sense of our self and our importance

10:51 in all of this is built in for practical reasons because our likelihood

10:56 of affecting things distantly in the future or far away in space is

11:01 pretty low and our ability to affect things here and now is pretty high.

11:06 So we are over-focused on here and now.

11:08 And so anyway, my point is a religious framework can actually correct the...

11:17 it's like glasses on a person with eyes that are misformed, right?

11:21 It corrects the vision so that you don't lose

11:24 track of your role in the deeper evolutionary objective,

11:28 which is, "Hey, let's do everything we can not to go extinct."