Does belief in God improve cooperation? In case you haven’t seen it yet, a new study published today in Nature says that the answer is yes (a better summary of the study is available at ScienceNews). The authors go on to suggest that “beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality.” In other words, the apologists have been right all along – we can’t be good without God.

That is of course a sensationalized caricature of the study, but this isn’t really a surprising result given the data that we have already collected. For example, it has been well established that even just a subliminal hint that we’re being watched will yield more prosocial behavior. We’ve also seen that priming thoughts about God improves prosociality and that exclusion from a group decreases prosocial behavior. And on a related note, there’s good evidence that a belief in free will also increases prosociality. So the data has been pointing toward this conclusion for some time, but what does it really mean?

The evolution of God?

Another bolus of research indicates that we are innately predisposed to God belief. Where the theist claims this as evidence of God’s fingerprint on our subconscious, the naturalist has responded with theories of agency detection. The research above has nothing to do with detection of agents but may still be relevant to the question of an innate God belief. While the benefit of agency detection certainly makes sense in the “you’re better off running away even if it’s only a tiger 2% of the time” sort of way, there’s still a leap to the theistic conception of an omni-God. Could it be that in the millenia which have ushered in civilization, a sort of natural selection acting on cooperation has bolstered and tweaked that innate predisposition into one which favors an all-seeing, omnipresent God who encourages our cooperation under every circumstance?

Chaos in the absence of belief?

The nones are growing at a rapid clip. Do these findings mean that the rise of an unbelieving society will degenerate into moral chaos? It’s obvious that Pat Robertson and much of conservative Christianity thinks that is the case, but perhaps we can flip the question on its head and ask whether the rise of the nones has in part been facilitated by the replacement of God with something else. Consider the far reaching scope of surveillance, the ubiquiti of mobile audio and video capture and the advances in forensics over the years. In the absence of an immediate deterrent, the odds that we will still be held accountable for our actions has increased dramatically over the last few decades. I wager that this has not escaped our attention. But if we are to take Steven Pinker at his word, we have also become more prosocial over time. So unbelief is on the rise concurrent with a rise in prosociality. The research cited above would predict the opposite result – unless some alternative is taking the place of God. Despite all the concern about our loss of privacy, perhaps Big Brother is just what we need.

What do you think?

February……..☑