Chapter 1: The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God

This is a preview (Chapters 1 & 2) of The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God, by Craig A. James. You can purchase the full book in paperback or e-book format for a very reasonable price. Copyright © 2022, Craig A. James. All rights reserved. Go to Table of Contents.

Chapter 1: God’s Four-Thousand-Year Marketing Makeover

Abraham Comes to Church

The God worshipped today by Christians, Jews, and Muslims is a pretty cool guy. He is loving, protective, omnipotent, forgiving, fatherly, understanding, wise, fair, and willing to listen to you any time of the day or night. He’s your friend, your advisor, your therapist, maybe even the father you never had. God wants and expects you to be good, but forgives you when you make mistakes, even big ones. He’s the perfect combination of gentleman, father, and statesman, combined with some really kick-ass magical abilities like creating the universe and answering prayers.

What’s not to like?

Plenty … if you look at the whole history of God, not just the present. Want to check with an expert? Let’s just ask the patriarch of all three of these religions: Abraham himself.

Imagine you could somehow make a time machine travel back 4,000 years, snatch up Abraham from his wandering, bring him forward to the twenty-first century, and invite him to your church, temple, or mosque. Abraham wouldn’t even recognize your God. There would be no doubt in Abraham’s mind that you were worshipping a different god that his.

Why? Because Abraham worshipped a god (called Yahweh, El, Elhim, and Jehovah) who was completely different than your modern God.

To start with, Abraham’s God was made of flesh-and-blood, just a regular guy with god powers. He was not omnipotent; rather, Abraham’s god was the God of Armies, jealous and vengeful, more than ready to commit genocide, unleash plagues, destroy whole cities on a whim, even wipe out humanity with a flood. And that is barely a start on the atrocities attributed to Abraham’s Yahweh in the Bible. Abraham’s God was the complete opposite of the loving Almighty God we know today.

Not only that, but Abraham, whom you’d brought forward from his time to yours, would soon ask, “Where are the temples to all the other gods?” And he’d be shocked when you told him that there were none. You see, Abraham, as well as all of his descendants down to Moses’ time and even beyond, were polytheists and pagans. They did not believe that Yahweh was the only god; Yahweh was just one god among the many that the Israelites believed in and prayed to.

In fact, there were so many other gods competing for (and getting) the Israelites’ attention that Yahweh finally made a deal with them: as the god of armies, Yahweh promised that he would give the Israelites military protection, but in return the Israelites had to forgo all other gods and worship only Yahweh.

In the days of Abraham, Yahweh simply didn’t command the same unquestioned loyalty and respect that he does today, and he certainly wasn’t the undisputed, omnipotent God who created the universe.

Yet Abraham’s Yahweh is definitely the same God that our modern religions worship today! The Bible is quite explicit about this.

How can we reconcile these conflicting versions of God? How can Abraham’s god-of-wars be the same guy as today’s benevolent, omnipotent, kindly God Almighty?

The answer is simple: God changed. The loving, omnipotent, fatherly God worshipped by most westerners today is the result of the longest and best “marketing makeover” in history. Generation by generation, not in anyone’s lifetime but slowly, spanning centuries, Abraham’s God had the rough edges smoothed off, the nasty deeds relegated to ancient history, and the angry temperament replaced with a kinder, more benevolent personality. It took a long time -four thousand years — but the result is truly astonishing.

Why did this happen? Did someone realize that Yahweh had an image problem that needed polishing up? Did some marketing team decide that church attendance was down and needed to improve? Did Yahweh himself decided to clean up his image? How did Yahweh change from Abraham’s God of Armies into today’s God Almighty? Who did this celestial makeover?

Religious scholars have an answer. They tell us that Yahweh was always the God we know today, that it’s only our understanding of God that has changed. Noah, Abraham, and Moses lived in simpler times, so God presented himself to them in a simpler way, one they could understand. Abraham’s concept of God was understandable to the nomadic herding people of Abraham’s time.

These religious scholars will go on to explain that, over the millennia, our societies and culture matured, and God was able to reveal more and more of his all-knowing, loving, all-powerful self to us. God guided His prophets, we’re told, through divine intervention to shape our Bibles, Torahs, or Qur’ans, so that today we can hold God’s actual words in our hands and have a true understanding of God’s greatness. Yes, Abraham’s God seems quite different than ours, but only because Abraham lived in simpler times so God revealed a simpler personality to Abraham.

It’s a good story. It makes sense. It’s plausible.

But it’s wrong. We’re here today to offer a different version of Yahweh’s makeover, a new way of looking at this history. This is the story of how humans shaped and changed God’s image to suit our own needs, rather than the other way around. The transformation of Abraham’s god-of-armies to our God Almighty is actually the result of an evolutionary process, the powerful and inexorable forces known as “survival of the fittest.”

But it wasn’t biological evolution at work. Rather, it was cultural evolution: how ideas and concepts are passed across societies and down through history, slowly changing and improving as each generation retells the stories and filters them to their own liking, thereby changing and improving Yahweh’s image over the millennia. And this cultural evolution is not metaphorical; rather, it is a true survival-of-the-fittest mechanism, one that creates an evolutionary process remarkably parallel to the one Darwin described a century and a half ago.

And it wasn’t just Yahweh himself who was shaped by cultural evolution; these same evolutionary forces created and refined all of our religious beliefs.

So just what is “cultural evolution,” and how does it work?

When you study how evolution works — biological evolution, that is — you start at the bottom, with DNA and biochemistry, then work your way up to more complex topics like cells, plants, and animals. We’ll do something similar for cultural evolution: start at the bottom with something called a self-replicating idea, and work our way up to more complex entities like humans and society.

As we go, we’ll weave this together with the history of religion itself, and finally answer one of the oldest questions in history: Why are there religions?

So let’s get started with the simplest of self-replicating ideas: the joke.

The Replicating Chicken Joke

God is a comic playing to an audience that’s afraid to laugh — Voltaire (1694–1778)

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” What a dumb joke. But you’ve heard it, right? And you know the retort. Why is this stupid joke one of the most pervasive and reliable bits of verbal information ever passed from one human to another? Why is it passed with extreme accuracy to virtually every child? What makes children tell it to each other, year after year, generation after generation?

This is not a trivial question. It illustrates a deep and profound fact about human culture: some ideas are passed verbally and with high fidelity across society and down through generations, while other ideas simply fade into oblivion. What is it about the chicken joke that causes it to reproduce itself while other ideas don’t?

The seemingly simple answer is that the joke itself contains the means for its own survival: it makes children want to repeat it. Children aren’t coerced into telling the joke, as they might be for a history lesson or reciting the alphabet. The joke itself contains the motivating force for its own retelling.

In other words, the chicken joke is a self-replicating idea, an idea that, by its very nature, tends to spread itself across society and down through history. A self-replicating idea makes you want to tell it to someone else. Whether it’s a joke, an urban myth, a great story, or a hard life lesson that you want to pass on your children, each self-replicating idea carries within it the seed of its own replication. By its very nature, it motivates you to make a copy in someone else’s brain.

Notice that this is a lot like how our genes work: genes carry information, just as a joke carries information. In the case of DNA, the information is in the form of chemically coded instructions telling a cell how to manufacture certain proteins, the building blocks that are used to build your cells. But the DNA’s reproductive mechanism is just as important: those same proteins ultimately cause the lifeform to make more copies of the DNA, to reproduce. Whether it’s a bacterium splitting into two, or two blue whales engaging in a multi-day mating ritual that ends with a dive into the abyss and copulation, it’s ultimately motivated by information coded in DNA.

Without this motivation to reproduce, a lifeform that carried the DNA would quickly become extinct, and its DNA would simply disappear.

So your DNA shares a fascinating trait with jokes, urban myths and hard-learned lessons: they all carry both a message and mechanism to ensure their own reproduction.

The biologist and author Richard Dawkins was the first to popularize the parallels between genes and self-replicating ideas. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins, built on the work of some earlier linguists and philosophers and proposed that for a species to survive and evolve, it didn’t really matter how information was passed from one generation to the next, only that it happened. If a bird’s genes tell it to nest in trees rather than on the ground, that contributes to the bird’s survival. If a human’s parents show her how to build a hut from mud, or how to make a spearhead from stone, that contributes to the human’s survival. Either way, it is the information that is passed from one generation to the next that’s important. How it is transmitted, whether by genes or ideas, doesn’t matter.

Dawkins recognized the parallels between how genes work and how ideas work, and proposed that self-replicating ideas might follow the principles of Darwinian evolution just as genes do. That is, he proposed that self-replicating ideas could compete with one another for “survival of the fittest,” just like genes do; that ideas, like genes, are in competition with one another, and that as history marches forward, only the “best” ideas survive to be told to the next generation.

Dawkins didn’t think this was just an amusing analogy. Dawkins realized there was something deep going on: even though self-replicating ideas are radically different from biological life, there is an important underlying theory that ties the two together. Because these self-replicating ideas were so much like genes, Dawkins coined the term meme (a “mnemonic gene,” pronounced to rhyme with “gene”). He wrote:

I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. … We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission… “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like “gene.” I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme… Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain…

A long time before Dawkins, Albert Einstein realized that energy and matter were really one and the same, just different aspects of a single thing. Before Einstein, the physicists Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell realized that electricity and magnetism, two seemingly different phenomena, were actually different faces of one physical phenomenon. And even earlier still, René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat showed that algebra and geometry, which might seem like two entirely different studies, were essentially the same thing, just seen from different perspectives.

In each of these cases, great minds recognized that two seemingly different phenomena had a single underlying principle that, once discovered, unified the two concepts into one and gave a deeper understanding of both.

Dawkins realized that it was the replication of information that was the underlying principle common to genes and self-replicating ideas. A century earlier, Charles Darwin had spelled out the principles of natural selection, which in spite of the staggering amount that has been written, boil down to three simple actions: reproduction, mutation, and natural selection (commonly called “survival of the fittest”).

Since we’re now trying to see if Darwinian principles apply to ideas in our brains, we’ll switch our terminology to information science rather than biology: Darwin’s three simple principles that guide the evolution of ideas are: 1) transcription: reproduction, telling someone else your idea; 2) transcription errors: mutations, when it changes with the telling; and 3) data filtering: natural selection, when you only pass on the ideas you like best.

With this grand unification of the two disciplines, Dawkins laid the foundation for the study of cultural evolution, which uses Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to predict and explain the very foundations of human culture and knowledge.

Replicating Information

In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. … It happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
- Carl Sagan

Self-replicating ideas (memes) come in all flavors and sizes, but jokes make especially good examples. A joke is simple, a nice little self-contained unit of information. On top of that, jokes are fun to study. They nicely illustrate the basics of how an idea or concept replicates itself.

The world’s worst symphony conductor heard that his job was going to be given to his greatest rival. In a fit of jealousy, he murdered the rival. But, being a musician, he didn’t cover his tracks very well and the police immediately caught, convicted and sentenced him to death in the electric chair. When they strapped him into the chair and turned on the juice, nothing happened! He just sat there happily humming Beethoven’s Ninth. They tried again and again, to no avail. Finally, he called out, “Give it up, you fools. You can’t electrocute me. I’m the world’s worst conductor!”

This joke reproduced itself as you read this page, so its population just increased by one.

When I tell you a joke, I am essentially carrying out the joke’s version of sex: I am using your brain to make a copy of the joke that was in my brain. It uses your brain’s resources to keep itself alive (stored in your neurons), and if it’s funny enough, you’ll want to repeat the joke to someone else, thereby increasing the joke’s population by one more. This sounds a lot like a virus, doesn’t it?

Elephants are (very roughly) 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10^18) times larger than bacteria, yet both bacteria and elephants contain DNA, and the ultimate goal of each elephant or bacterium is to make more copies of its DNA. Even more amazing is that ultimately, DNA is just information. Although DNA’s information is “written” as particular sequences of chemical “base pairs” on a DNA strand, it is still nothing more than information, like the words on this page. Without a person to read the words on this page, it’s just so many atoms. Without a living cell to interpret the gene’s sequence on the DNA, it’s just another chemical. A dog can’t tell a page of a book from toilet paper, and a rock can’t tell DNA from LSD. But with a person to read the page, or a cell to read the DNA, the information is unlocked.

And that’s all a joke is: information. But jokes, a bacterium’s DNA, and an elephant’s DNA have another important feature that distinguishes them from ordinary information: The very information they contain causes them to reproduce. In the case of bacteria and elephants, it’s the cellular biochemistry that does the job; in the case of a joke, it hijacks our minds and causes us to repeat the joke to others.

Everything else about the life of these three things is incidental to the act of copying themselves, so that their information can “live long and prosper.”

Jokes are a nice, simple (and fun) way to illustrate the basic idea of a meme. But not all memes are so simple. Memes can be incredibly rich, complex, intertwined, and interdependent.

The Expensive Carpool Lane

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
- Bertrand Russell

Here’s a more modern self-replicating bit of information. While writing this book, I got the following email from a relative:

Hi,
I just got this, pass it on. This is serious. Be careful you guys!

New Driving Fines

1. Carpool lane - 1st time $1068.50 starting 7/1/07 (The $271 posted
   on the highway is old). Don’t do it again because 2nd time is going
   to be double. 3rd time triple, and 4th time license suspended.
2. Incorrect lane change - $380. Don’t cross the lane on solid
   lines or intersections.
3. Block intersection - $485
4. Driving on the shoulder - $450
5. Cell phone use in the construction zone. - Double fine as of
   07/01/07. Cell phone use must be “hands free” while driving.
6. Passengers over 18 not in their seatbelts - both passengers and
   drivers get tickets.
7. Speeders can only drive 3 miles above the limit.
8. DUI = JAIL (Stays on your driving record for 10 years!)
9. As of 07/01/07 cell phone use must be “hands free” while
   driving. Ticket is $285. They will be looking for this like crazy -
   easy money for police department.

Sounds pretty awful, and I (like so many others) took this seriously. For a day or two, that is, until it turned up on a well-known rumor-busting web site. The whole email was a fake! All nine “new driving fines” were incorrect. Yet this email spread far and wide. Just about everyone in my own circle of family and friends received it, which means that in a span of a few days, this “urban myth” went from a population of one to something like tens of millions. Wow!

This email was perfectly crafted. It had everything that an urban myth needs:

• It is believable. It was carefully crafted to be slightly outrageous, but not blatantly outrageous.
• It is relevant. It is something we all care about. It is stuff we need to know.
• It is scary. We like to stir each other up.
• It is easy to pass on. Just click the “Forward” button on your email program, select everyone you know from your address book, and voila! it replicates.

Because it was so well crafted, the “New Driving Fines” urban myth became epidemic and spread with exponential growth throughout the state.

This is a really good example of a self-replicating idea. It is information that, due to its very nature, is copied over and over in people’s minds or computers.

A Word about the Word “Meme”

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
- Epicurus

The internet stole the word “meme”! When the first edition of this book was published in 2009, the word “meme” had a very different meaning than it does today, and “memes” were virtually unknown to the general public. Today the word is widespread, but its meaning has changed into a simplified caricature of its former rich, fascinating definition.

Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976. By 2009, several books had been written about memes, including The Selfish Meme by Kate Distin, Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie, and The Electric Meme: A new Theory of How We Think by Robert Aunger. These fascinating and well-researched books explored and expanded on Dawkins’ concepts of self-replicating ideas, the “viral” nature of concepts, and how a study of memes gives deep insights into our culture and our brains.

Each of these authors used Dawkins’ very broad, original definition of the word “meme.” Among the linguists, philosophers, and evolutionists who used the word, the definition of a “meme” included any idea or concept that tended to self-replicate, to be told and retold so that it spread across society of its “own volition” without anyone actively pushing its spread. It wasn’t just about amusing pictures and graphics; the term “meme” encompassed all self-replicating ideas.

And then…

… then the internet stole the word “meme”. Some time in the past decade or so, the term “internet meme,” and later just “meme,” came to refer to “viral” images: humorous or alarming pictures and graphics that spread like wildfire across social media. These new “memes” typically have thought-provoking, edgy, shocking, or funny messages that make people want to share them with one another. They can spread across the internet with exponential growth, just like a contagious virus.

This is a complete hijacking of the word “meme.” These modern graphic images are just a mere shadow of Dawkins’ original concept, a trivial version. Most people have never even heard of Dawkins’ original definition of memes!

But human languages have an inexorable tendency to change. This hijacking of the word “meme” by pop culture is over and done, and can’t be turned back. The word that was once in the lexicon of a few linguists, philosophers, and evolutionists has been stolen and repurposed to the internet’s needs.

Which leaves this author, yours truly, with a dilemma. The original concept of a meme is the heart and soul of everything that follows in this book, yet to continue using it without some explanation would be jarring or confusing to most readers.

To resolve this author’s linguistic catastrophe, I have elected in this edition to continue to use the word “meme” with its original definition, but at the same time to minimize it, instead replacing it where possible with phrases like “self-replicating idea,” or “cultural evolution.” These long phrases aren’t as catchy as the single-syllable “meme,” but they’ll have to do.

So when you see “meme,” try not to think of some catchy photo or graphic on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Instead, remember that is a broad concept that includes any idea that spreads from one person to another due to its inherently interesting message.

A Meme by Any Other Name

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it… He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should be spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

This is a remarkable quote by Thomas Jefferson, the brilliant statesman, scientist, philosopher, and slave owner. It encapsulates the very idea of a self-replicating idea, and it predates Dawkins’ “meme” by nearly a century and a half.

We already learned that the definition of a meme is pretty simple: it’s an idea, a concept, one that is capable of being passed from one mind to another and that contains something interesting that makes you want to pass it on to someone else.

Many other authors have spent varying amounts of space and intellectual energy trying to define the word meme, and each author has a slightly different skew on the subject. Is a meme strictly linguistic, or can it be a song, a painting, or the act of demonstrating how to flake obsidian to make an arrowhead? Is a meme a meme if it’s stored on paper? Or in your computer? What is the difference between a meme and a memeplex? If we can’t define it, how can we study it?

Careful definitions of terms are important in the erudite circles of academic philosophy, sociology, and information theory, but this is an informal book, not a scholarly tome. In this book, a meme is any bit of information that can be passed from one mind to another, by any mechanism, that inspires the holder of the information to repeat it to someone else. If I teach a secret handshake to a friend, and the friend thinks it’s a pretty cool handshake and teaches it to you, then the secret handshake could be a meme.

The key point is this: Both memes and genes are self-replicating information. They reproduce very differently, one via biochemical processes, and the other via person-to-person communication, but at their core, both memes and genes are just information.

Most importantly, the very information contained by a gene or meme is the motivating force for its own reproduction.

A Bit About Evolution

Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle.
- Galileo Galilei

Most readers are familiar with Darwin’s basic premise: species evolved via a process of natural selection. Living things are subject to random changes in their genome, and over millions and billions of generations, this process, which Darwin called “survival of the fittest,” has given rise to the amazing diversity of plants and animals on this Earth.

We saw in the first part of this chapter that memes and genes are both examples of self-replicating information. It should thus come as no surprise that the concept of “survival of the fittest” applies to memes just as it does to biological life. An idea can mutate (change) as it is passed from one person to the next; ideas compete with each other for “space” in your brain; and ideas compete for “reproduction time” by being told to the next person. The best jokes are the survivors, and the worst jokes become “extinct.”

As we will see, these same principles apply to religious ideas: the fittest religious ideas survive and the unfit ones become extinct. And by “fittest” we do not mean the ideas that are true. Rather, these are the ideas that make people want to believe them, whether true or false, beneficial or harmful. An idea can be a survivor because it appeals to our hopes, our vanity, or the promise that Heaven awaits. But an idea can also be a survivor because it preys on our fears and prejudices. We’re afraid of eternal punishment in Hell, we need protection from our enemies, we’re afraid of dying, and we are afraid of the unknown. Ideas that prey on these fears can be just as “fit” (survive just as well) as ideas that appeal via positive emotions.

When memes evolve, it is always towards these survivors — the memes that are more believable and more compelling are the ones that are retold (reproduce), while the memes that are less believable and less compelling fade from memory. This is the classic “survival of the fittest” rule. Keep this in mind as we begin our tour through religion’s history.

Another important aspect of self-replicating ideas and cultural evolution is that it only applies to cultural knowledge. What does that mean?

There are three fundamental types of knowledge for humans: instinct, experience, and culture.

Instinctive knowledge is inborn. Nobody has to teach you to be afraid of heights, to go to your mother in a time of danger, to fear snakes, or that bitter foods shouldn’t be eaten. Nobody has to tell a teenager to have sex (quite the contrary!). This knowledge is “hard wired” into our brains, and also into the brains of many animals.

Experiential knowledge is gained when you discover that grass feels nice under your feet, that thorns hurt if you prick your finger, and that fire is hot. Experiential knowledge is information that you learn by interacting with the world and the people around you. You learn this knowledge by direct experience.

Cultural knowledge comes exclusively via humans’ highly developed ability to transmit ideas from one person to the next, and is almost uniquely human. There has been some work showing that other animals such as chimpanzees and gorillas also pass information culturally, but their abilities are primitive compared to humans’. The collective set of all human brains on this planet is the “ecosphere” of memes, where they reside, change, are passed on, and compete for survival.

Religion is exclusively cultural knowledge. When you were born, you didn’t know anything about religion or gods (it’s not instinctive knowledge), and you didn’t learn about religion by interacting with nature (it’s not experiential knowledge). Someone taught you about religion and god. Even if you don’t believe in God, you still have a god concept in your head. It was put there by your parents and community, and they got it from their parents and community, and so on down through history.

And because of this, religion itself is subject to the laws of evolution. The world contains tens of thousands of religions and sects, and these are in a ten-thousand-year battle with one another for survival and adherents — survival of the fittest. They compete, they change, and they’re passed on as memes across society and down through history. Over those ten thousand years, religions have evolved remarkably. Just as Yahweh himself evolved from Abraham’s time to today, every single tenet of every single religion is also the result of ten thousand years of cultural evolution.

As we will see, this is the lynchpin of religion’s entire history.

Our Path

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
-Voltaire (1694–1778), “Epitres, XCVI”

We will study three paths in parallel. The first is the classical Theory of Evolution, first elucidated by Charles Darwin, one of the greatest minds in history. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is astonishing in its explanatory powers; with the publication of On the Origin of the Species, Darwin founded what is arguably the most important science in human history. We’ll just skim the surface; a full treatment requires volumes, but it’s important to our story.

Second, we’ll learn more about memes, the field of study called memetics. We’ll learn how memes follow nearly the same evolutionary rules as the physical lifeforms that Darwin studied, as these ideas and concepts “live and reproduce” in our brains. We’ll also extend the Theory of Evolution to see how it also sheds light on cultural evolution.

And third, we’ll study religion itself. We’ll show that religion is explained clearly and completely by memetics and by the lessons learned from Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Darwin showed that God did not create Man, and now through the study of cultural evolution, we will show that God did not even create religion. Rather, modern religions are the inevitable result of the Darwinistic evolution of culture and ideas.

And in this case, survival of the fittest does not necessarily mean survival of the truest.

This a preview (Chapters 1 & 2) of The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God, by Craig A. James. You can purchase the full book in paperback or e-book format for a very reasonable price. Copyright © 2022, Craig A. James. All rights reserved.

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Originally published at https://authorcajames.com.