Via the Carpetbagger report, a computer programmer is using a computer program to try to determine whether evolution led to spiritual beliefs:
The model assumes that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn’t spread unreal information. The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people — those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.
Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when [James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan] included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.
"Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them," Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious.
UPDATE: I finished some edits at 1:08, so if you read this post right away, you may want to check it out again.
Link.
That is very interesting, but to answer what some of the faithful, self-righteous few-- that is, of course, the very specific, annoying set of the faithful, self-righteous few who have been trying to push the whole world around, not to mention the country, of late-- might read into it: this does not mean that God "planned" us to believe in him or in a particular religion.
If you're interested in stuff like this, a good place to look, I think, would be Joseph Campbell's stuff. He wrote several books on mythology including The Hero With A Thousand Faces and there is a CD of an interview of him by Bill Moyers sold at book stores. Joseph Campbell frankly acknowledged earlier civilizations' need for and use of these kinds of stories, and he tried to understand the very common, virtually identical themes and characters that occurred in these stories across the world. Interestingly, this impressive mythology/religion expert was a good friend of, and big influence on, George Lucas. When he was alive, George Lucas' Star Wars series did very well with its spooky, spiritual side (I think I've even heard or read that Lucas eventually modeled Yoda on him). But lo and behold, following Campbell's death in the late '80s, Lucas seemed to run out of a grasp of how to handle not only that aspect, but some of the more archetypal themes of the Star Wars movies, and the new films have somewhat disappointed fans (my guess is, Lucas was unashamed to solicit a lot of feedback from Campbell about his script, and Campbell, not being interested in collecting fees from a movie, was not ashamed to give his advice about what the warrior's path in Star Wars should be like to match our cultural history and ageless mythological themes). Those first three Star Wars flicks from the '70s are really the closest thing my generation had to the myths of much earlier cultures.
Anyway, here is my take on the story about the computer programmer:
People aren't born into the world with science. If no one teaches science to you, there is a lot of stuff to experience in the world that has a big influence on you (and that you have no explanation for- and not even a hope of coming to an accurate explanation for). Religion filled a gap. By making stuff up, people could experience more stability and order in their world- the natural world became less terrifying. Instead of a foreign, hostile environment that behaved fickly, the world became a vast, nurturing womb that operated according to some sort of mysterious justice. Humans' behaving in ways that promoted human survival (virtue) were tied into it, were rationalized as having to have something to do with that grander cosmic order.
It's no mystery that people who could accept these mythological models would be more survivable in past times, when man didn't have the technology, the know-how, to solve the riddle of the circumstances he was living in. But evolution is a process. What was hip yesterday, dies off today, to be replaced by something that better meets the conditions of today. Yesterday, we had to invent a God to give us comfort in our cave when we were scared and jostled by the unpredictable, savage storm outside. Now, humans can learn why things happen the way they do and learn how to predict and even control conditions in our world. It's simplistic, for most purposes, to try to sum up something like religion's role in humanity's history, and to declare it either bad or good. It had a grand place, and to the extent it tried to assert itself too insistently when its time was over, it often had a deplorable place, too. But that was then and this is now, and now there is a lot more to human life than believing in things that aren't real. Evolution often changes its natural selection according to changed conditions, too, and that is how a trait like the programmer thinks he may have identified arises, and perhaps eventually disappears.