Atheist author Dominic Johnson makes argument for religion

[MisterFred]

10. Meh.

Both of those reviews contain exactly the kind of flawed thinking I criticized Johnson for.

Dominic Jonson (Evolution Institute review) is an professor of international relations talking about psychology. And doing it badly, by assuming game theory directly applies. It's another example of assuming the techniques of your competency (in this case international relations) are good for solving problems your competency is NOT designed to solve.

I didn't catch the author for the review in The Economist. But that author assumes that Evolutionary Biology is the best possible discipline to solve the question "Why do people believe in God?" In the process, they adopt several teleological arguments (extrapolating purpose/design from function). Example of how this becomes fail: an alien anthropologist looks through their telescope at the Earth on a hot day. It sees a woman fanning herself with a pamphlet she got at the doctor's office. The Alien anthropologist extrapolates purpose from function and writes an article about how humans design folded paper for use as cooling devices.

Despite a caveat, The Economist's author assumes that organized religion causes successful cultures because large, powerful political or ethnic groups generally exhibit organized religion. This is taking available evidence WAY too far. Anyone trained in the Humanities worth their salt will immediately recognize that we can't assume that organized religion causes large, powerful political or ethnic groups. But scientists convince themselves that enough examples of this happening is "confirmation" of their hypothesis. That would work if it's a repeatable experiment you can run multiple times, altering variables, the way science is supposed to work.

But multiple examples in history are NOT THE SAME as multiple results from a properly designed scientific experiment. Without being able to design and repeat an experiment, we can't verify if high social organization or the large size of a polity tend to establish organized religions, not the other way around (that's the argument I would make - something for another day). Alternatively, you could challenge the assumption that large, powerful societies are an indication of successful humanity (an assumption necessary to define evolutionary advantage as Dominic Johnson has). You could say that there are large, powerful societies because they destroy and assimilate lots of smaller societies, potentially reducing human success (however you define that) overall. That would make it a bad evolutionary strategy to create large and powerful societies, which is an assumption necessary to the work of Dominic Johnson and the writing of The Economist reviewer.

Those reviews are just further evidence that people foolish enough to think that the scientific method is the best approach to all problems of knowledge get suckered into making the same errors over and over again. Humanities are the humanities instead of sciences because they are disciplines that deal with problems of knowledge that the scientific method simply doesn't apply to, not because scholars in the humanities are just old-fashioned and refuse to use the scientific method. The author of the book and the author of the review in The Economist are another pair of scientists suckered into making mistakes by their own ignorance of the fundamentals of their discipline - including their discipline's limitations.