Comments on Nathaniel F. Barrett’s “On the Evolutionary Plausibility of Religion as Engagement with Ultimacy”

Nathaniel Barrett’s paper shows how hard it is to maintain continuity between transcendence and intimacy in religion, a commitment with which I’ve wrestled since the beginning of my career. I thank him for the deep thought he has given it, and for appreciating what I have attempted so much better than I. Permit me to respond with several points.

First, he is quite right to say that my account of religion as engagement of ultimacy needs to show not only that engagement with ultimacy is possible but also that there are evolutionary selective pressures to build most of what we mean by religion around engagements with ultimacy. He concludes that we might agree to most of what I say about ultimacy and virtuoso engagement with it while at the same time saying that religion is mostly driven by nonultimate factors. So his deep question is whether my heuristic strategy of identifying religion with engagement with ultimacy ultimately pays off. Or should we define religion some other ways, as sociologists do with its social dimensions, psychologists with the psychological, and so forth?

Second, I am in full agreement that functionalist-adaptationist theories of evolution need to be supplemented if not just replaced by theories that recognize the causative force of value, and I am enthusiastic about Barrett’s own development of such theories. I have worked on the notion of value as inherent in nature, and hence in natural evolution, throughout my career. Value-oriented causation is present not only in semiotically intentional societies but goes all the way down, according to my cosmology. Barrett is right to see that, beyond this claim we share about the causal ubiquity of value in nature, respectable scientific theories of evolution need to be developed that embody this and can be shown to be superior to functional-adaptationism. I’m so glad he is doing that.

Third, nevertheless, religion in just about any sense is interpretive and cultural, employing signs and learned habits. Therefore it cannot be reduced entirely to what can be explained as functionally adaptive for passing on genes; that complete reductionism is not remotely plausible. Certain religious practices might have the side effect of enhancing group solidarity and competitiveness, which is to say that those practices are conditions for enhanced government. Certain ideas such as belief in supernatural agents might be part of functionally adaptive protoscience, with adaptive value for spreading genes, which is to say that when religion employs beliefs in supernatural beings (which it does not always do), it provides support for enhanced science. But, when the question is to explain why religion is as it is and has the forms it does, biological adaptive value is a very crude instrument of analysis. I don’t see why biological evolutionary theory, functional-adaptationist or value-oriented, needs to be brought in to “explain” religion except in some fairly primitive aspects of its development.

Fourth, my hypothesis that religion is engagement with ultimacy depends on having a good theory of ultimacy. The basic argument is that the ultimate realities are environmental factors that are there to be engaged in certain circumstances and that religion consists in the cognitive, existential, and practical ways people engage them. Biological evolutionists do not have to argue hard that scarcity of food constitutes a competitive environment for adaptation. Cultural evolutionists don’t have to argue that societies get into fights and those with better weapons can get the upper hand. I, on the other hand, do have to argue that there are ultimate realities because our usual notions of objectivity in science shy away from talking about the truth of religious issues. I have made those arguments. Whole forests have been sacrificed to my metaphysics. Ultimates is 378 pages long.

Fifth, a significant part of my empirical hypothesis is that the five problematics of ultimacy are what Barrett and evolutionary biologists call “attractor basins.” An attractor basin is a bio/social condition in which a lot of different processes and concerns come together to reinforce one another and develop connections...