Rational Mind as Ultimate Survival Tool

A quick but fun thought for today. Like my first post, this came from an e-mail. The recepient had claimed that though there are no innate ideas, there are innate structures in the brain that allow us to develop later through experience. Specifically, she referenced a study that suggests that certain part of the brain are stimulated specifically by religious belief. My response:

You're absolutely right that there are certain innate structures in the brain that form the foundation for what is developed later. It is really interesting to speculate on where these structures came from, especially this apparent part of the brain that specializes in religious belief. I'm a pretty firm advocate of evolution, and I think it explains a lot. There's a philosopher named Daniel Dennett who teaches up at Tufts University in Boston. He argues that the capabilities of our brain, and in particular, volitional consciousness, emerged from evolutionary pressures. Think about it this way. All animals act on instinct. They are hard-wired to interact with their environment in a particular way. Thus, if something radical happens in their environment, it is very difficult for them to cope. In a lot of ways, animals are very dependent on their particular environment. Human beings however developed an amazing capacity: the rational mind. We can gather and store vast amounts of information about of environment, and using this knowledge,change our environmental conditions in a fundamental way. Disease killed millions, we created medicine. Floods destroyed homes and killed many, we create dams and levees. The rational mind is the ULTIMATE survival tool! So this capacity for rational thought becomes hard-wired into our DNA and becomes the very essence of our species. (This stuff is so cool).

A really interesting question comes from this. Is there an evolutionarily beneficial reason for religious belief? Based on the line of reasoning I just gave, the answer would be an unquestionable no. If it is very beneficial for us to know as much about our environment as possible, then we would benefit most from knowing the exact causes of several environmental phenomena so that we can best avoid death and live the best life possible. If, on a very basic level, we simply attribute various environmental phenomena to a god or supernatural force, we learn very little about what is happening and are thus more likely to be aversely affected by it. In other words, religious belief is harmful from a survival standpoint! So if there are structures in the brain designed for religious belief, perhaps they will disappear over time since they are not evolutionarily beneficial! ;-)

(I should point out that this argument does not logically refute religious belief. It does make a pretty good case for a scientific understanding of the material world as opposed to a religious one. However, religion assumes that there is a world separate from the material, and this argument doesn't address that. Besides, I was kinda being facetious.) Cheers!