Religion is anachronistic. Shared myths are essential to darwinistic success

Religion is anachronistic.

It is astonishing that they still exist in our age of information, logic, and science.

Well, superstitions are not necessarily (reverse) correlated to advance in science - physics, mathematics, chemistry, or biology. But they should have been correlated to advances in thinking and logic.

I expected modern men to reject religion by using simple logic. Scientific skepticism, the Socratic method, 3,000 years old tools. What is new is not the methods themselves, but the quantity (to speak in Hegelian terms). 

I.e., 2500 years ago, only 1 in 100,000 people learned proof, evidence, syllogism, inference.

The change over the last 200 years, however, has been dramatic - not only qualitatively, but quantitatively. Literacy and access to knowledge reached phenomenal levels: 95% of the population can read and watch videos about these topics, about Plato, evolution, the scientific method. And yet, despite exposure to evidence and logic, people still believe that the Earth was created by an imaginary being in six days. And then He rested, got sleepy, and forgot about the dinosaurs.

That is why I am shocked. A thousand years ago, fine - nobody had heard of Plato, nobody knew how to read, nobody went to school. So people muttered (sic) religious sermons, because that was all they heard from the local priest — semi-illiterate himself.

But I would have expected that today, with so much information available, 90% of the population would have some kind of intellectual revelation. To say: “Wait, this is nonsense: gods, creationism, miracles, hell, purgatory, sin, saints.”

But that didn’t happen. It is a fascinating social phenomenon. The overwhelming majority still believes in imaginary friends, gods, saints, miracles, relics, creationism.

The phenomenon is phenomenal (sic). It shows that social bonds, and the importance of myths in social construction, overwhelmingly outweigh logic or science in terms of their importance for evolutionary, Darwinian success.

Communities that believe in shared superstitions and myths achieve greater evolutionary success. From a sociological perspective, that is an extraordinary conclusion.