What Good Is Religion?
Continued from page 2 Here’s a made-up example, to show another way in which a group-selection theory of religion might work. A tribe with a stirringly belligerent “god of battles” wins wars against a tribe whose god urges peace and harmony or a tribe with no god at all. Warriors who believe a martyr’s death will send them straight to paradise fight bravely, and willingly give up their lives. So their tribe is more likely to survive in intertribal selection, steal the conquered tribe’s cattle, and seize their women as concubines. Such successful tribes spawn daughter tribes that go off and propagate more daughter tribes, all worshipping the same tribal god. Notice that this is different from saying that the idea of the warlike religion survives. Of course it will, but in this case the point is that the group of people who hold the idea survive. There are formidable objections to group-selection theories. A known opponent, I must beware of riding off on a hobby horse far from this colum
