Terrorism is not the Reason

"Interest in the scientific study of religion has surged over the past decade. While this development is positive in many ways, it comes largely for an unfortunate reason – global terrorism, exemplified most clearly by the September 11th attacks of ten years ago." There are a handful of things wrong with this statement made by Connor Wood on the Science on Religion blog but I will start with what seems to be the main point. Terrorism is not the main reason for studying religion in a scientific manner. This approach predates his primary example, September 11  attacks, by quite a bit. The development of modern science immediately led to greater scrutiny of religion. To be fair, it is true that the mainstream media has largely ignored this trend until fairly recently. Dennett's book Breaking the Spell was one of the first to get any attention but it was preceded by decades of scholarly research by not only himself but a wide number of others

Whether Wood intended his statement to be delusional and arrogant it certainly comes across that way. Global terrorism is not new, not even here in the US. Unfortunately,terrorism has always been used. Just because the average American had no sense of these horrors does not mean they did not exist on a large scale before 2001. Wood's erroneous piece carries this foolishness over to its basic position, which is not even hinted at in the opening sentences. He never establishes anything resembling scientific evidence that terrorism is explainable through evolutionary theory. He conflates the work of others regarding the evolutionary explanation of religion as a whole with this specific offshoot. For instance, "So religion, while originally merely a random offshoot of other, unrelated cognitive adaptations, is now an adaptive function." There is reason to believe that religion over time became an adaptive function but that says nothing about terrorism. It also says nothing about contemporary terrorism. it could be argued that religion is no longer an "adaptive function." There are, after all, plenty of evolutionary remnants that no longer serve their original purpose. They simply have not become detrimental enough for the evolutionary process to weed them out.

This is not to say I disagree with looking into the root causes of terrorism. If we are to have any hope of decreasing its use we need to study it honestly and thoroughly. And, yes, religion does seem to be a key component but is not the only one. We should never overlook any aspect of this heinous and deadly practice. Socio-economic and political issues are also key factors that should be reviewed.