A child warned away from crocodile-infested water has a good reason to listen. Checking the advice personally could be a short education. In chapter 5 of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins pairs that warning with a demand to sacrifice a goat so the rain will come. Both instructions arrive from respected adults, delivered with the same conviction.
His hypothesis is that natural selection could favour a child’s readiness to trust elders. It lets children learn from other people’s experience without repeating every dangerous experiment. But the same trust can carry religious beliefs along with practical knowledge. Religion can then be a by-product of a useful capacity, without having a survival advantage of its own.
I find this convincing. It gives religious belief a plausible route into a human mind through something as ordinary as learning from a parent. The explanation does not require the believer to be unusually foolish.
When I think about religion, I care more about what it gives the believer than whether its claims are true. A false belief can still help someone live; a true account of the world need not make their life better. There is no equals sign between true and good.
If a belief helps someone bear a loss or gives them a community they can depend on, I want to understand that benefit. Refuting the belief does not, by itself, explain what the person would lose by abandoning it.
Nor does calling religion a meme settle this. A meme is something passed on through imitation, such as an idea or practice. Being good at getting copied does not necessarily help the people doing the copying. I would judge a belief by the lives of the people who hold it, not by how far it spreads.
