Quote:
Originally Posted by uke_master
Yes, but in a rather vacuous way. All of our attributes are the product of evolution, so of course these ones are too. Just speaking in terms of "advantages" is a bit too simplistic, btw, but sure.
One can try and speak to specific things about humans that promote religious belief and try to come up with specific ways those might provide advantages. For instance, one could speak to how a rational mind that tries to assign agency as causes for events in the physical world could be useful for hunting or whatever but also lead to one trying to assign agency to the existence of the world. Most of these are sort of just so stories, but perhaps some people have decent theories i dunno.
To clarify and expand on this a bit, there are two main views in evolutionary psychology of religion. Some people think that religion is an
adaptation. This is the view that jokerthief is stating here--that religion provides some kind of evolutionary advantage to either specific humans or human populations.
Metsandfinsfan's claim that religion "helps form moral codes which help species grow and exist longer" is an example of this kind of view. It says that religion provides an evolutionary advantage to the religious through the formation and adherence to moral codes. Metsandfinsfans doesn't really say how religion does this, but one theory says that religious rituals act as hard-to-fake signals to other members of the religious group that you can be trusted to act cooperatively, thus increasing pro-social activities.
Richard Sosis is a prominent anthropologist arguing in support of this view.
The other view says that religion is not itself adaptative, but rather is the result of cognitive processes that are themselves adaptative (this is known as the
byproduct view of religion). For instance, some psychologists have claimed that it is advantageous for humans to develop the ability to over-detect agency--identifying incorrectly that a predator is nearby is less costly than not identifying correctly that a predator is nearby--and that this can lead to some of the basics of religious ideas (
this pdf article is a good summary)