In the Sunday Times, God and evolution get reconciled yet again.  The science writer gives us a few words about his recent book arguing that there is an evolutionary foundation for religious belief.  Contra the title, which says there is a gene for belief in God.  The latter is simply ridiculous.  There is no way at all to get to a genetic foundation, i.e., reproductive advantage, for belief in God.  It is a common conflation - religion and Judeo-Christian monotheism.  Unfortunate as well.  Not only is the conflation intellectually indefensible, it is redolent of a culture myopia so severe as to disqualify anything further from the author.  Even adding in Islam leaves one with a silly view of history.  But Sunday's author is about religious belief, not monotheism.  He offers up a short story about how religious belief might convey some advantage.  It is an interesting thought, but seems not to go very far.  The evidence identified in the article has to do with other things -- an interest in getting high, advantages of high social cohesion.  But there is nothing there, nothing in the article to connect social cohesion with religious belief, or how the propensity to religious belief gets into the genes.  Where is the evidence that the religious survive better or in greater numbers than the non-religious?  That is not something that comes out of archeology.  Where are the examples of the non-religious societies succumbing to the religious?  Anyway, what is the religious here other than causal attributions and limitless magical thinking?  Is it magic that marks religious beliefs? 

In any event, the argument is very bad news for the current religious in this country, at least the folk in the Christian, Judaic, and Islamic traditions.  They all need a free will believing, not a genetic predisposition.  Not so convincing that there is free belief and faith if it is really all  in the genes.