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In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Ethics and Violence

This volume is among the most recent contributions to the cognitive science of religion, an interdisciplinary field aimed at understanding the diverse aspects of religion as natural human phenomena. Teehan’s specific thesis is that the human mind has developed mental tools through evolution that have shaped and continue to form ethics and religions. This in itself is not a new position, but Teehan offers a writing style that incorporates case studies and is easy to understand for the novice. Moreover, Teehan’s attitude toward religious belief lacks the hostility and ignorance characteristic of the New Atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. In this way it is a welcome introduction to these important issues for those who do not have a particular anti-religious axe to grind. The first chapter outlines the prevailing theories for the evolution of morality, concluding in agreement with the scientific consensus that moral behaviour is primarily intuitive and only rationally justified after the fact. While I take no issue with this conclusion, one of the philosophical problems with the evolutionary psychology of morality has to do with its unfalsifiability; it is very difficult to test according to traditional scientific method. For instance, if I sacrifice food for my children, that act is chalked up to kin selection. If I forego an important business meeting to help a stranger, that may be considered under group selection or indirect reciprocity. If I prioritize myself in those situations, however, that can be understood simply as classic genetic selfishness. Human behaviour is far too complex for every act to be so neatly categorized. Chapter two attends to the evolution of religious belief and ethics. Teehan is a philosopher by trade, so he is heavily dependent on the work of others. Nevertheless, he discusses all of the most influential researchers in the emerging field of science of religion who argue in different ways that ideas of the supernatural are based in anthropomorphism. He agrees with them that the link between gods and ethics is that gods help groups to cohere better if members think that they are being watched by a divine judge, even when no other people are around. The third and fourth chapters consider Judaism and Christianity, respectively, as case studies for the arguments of the first two chapters. Teehan is well aware of the difficulty with selecting only a small portion of a text, but his discussion of the Ten Commandments is still insightful and helps to explain how prohibitions on stealing, murder, and even covetousness contributed to the Hebrews’ sense of identity. With Christianity, he rightly credits Jesus with calling for an ethics that moves beyond one’s own kin group, but does an inadequate job of arguing how it is that Jesus and some others before him championed such an unpopular moral framework. This is not to say that such ideals must have a supernatural source, but that the evolutionary science of ethics as it stands may not be sufficient to explain a universal morality which runs against so many psychological pressures. Probably the most controversial thesis of the book comes in chapter five, wherein Teehan argues that traditional religion, especially monotheism, is inherently violent as well as peaceful.