Most evolution is not evolutionary
If you see biological evolution as a static and slow process, then in comparison, transferring knowledge across generations is a lively process.
Thoughts and knowledge are like live music. When the band stops playing, the music is gone.
Most evolutionary traits are transferred between generations. It has nothing to do with genes or random mutations — they only account for a little bit. With humans this is almost completely the case, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the same for animals.
If you see religion as a language, then the original point of religion was shared knowledge and life lessons for people with bad parents.
For example: you have two groups of humans. Half of them know that you should boil water, and the other half doesn’t. Who do you think survives? Imagine the impact this has on the evolution of a species.
You would also expect that if it were only evolution, then every human would be more or less the same. But we correctly figured out that having a wide spread of different people is actually an advantage for survival as a group. That variety is probably also useful for long-term survival.
Another important factor in evolution is stability. Stable people always survive. Unstable people do, or don’t. Emotionally stable, energy distribution during day is stable.
Religion is a language that describes reality. Maths is a language that describes reality. Both basically try to do the same thing. When you are a mathematician, you see maths everywhere — you see shapes, numbers, patterns. A religious person sees religion everywhere.
The flaw in the thinking that I see mathematicians make is that they imply that a spiral, for instance, is really visible in a flower. It’s not. A flower is a flower, and you see a resemblance of a spiral in it. Religion works exactly like that: baseline reality is the same, but you use a different underlying pattern to describe that same reality.
You could just as easily argue that numbers don’t exist at all: I have never seen a number flying around in my room.
Why religion can’t solve 1 + 1
The main difference between religion and science is that in religion the observation always starts with the uniqueness of one object.
For instance: don’t talk about “lungs”, but about a lung, or my lung, which is so unique that it has nothing to do with other lungs. Therefore, 1 + 1 can’t be solved: the left “1” is not the same as the right “1”, so you can never get the answer 2. In the case of the spirals of a flower, there are literally never two identical spiral patterns.
Maths, in that sense, is a language that generalizes more easily. It suggests that 1 + 1 is the same everywhere in the world. A religious person would say: which 1? One apple? Is it one apple plus one apple? I have never seen two identical apples, so we can’t solve 1 + 1.
Religion is often used as an explanation for terrible behaviours, like war, violence against women, or violence against people who are different — which is horrible. But at its core, it is meant as a scientific language, strange as that may seem.
People who make AI basically say: if we spend all of Earth’s resources on AI, all our problems will be solved. But the only reason we have problems like this is because of companies like the ones building AI. It’s never enough.
We don’t really need AI. AI isn’t going to solve the fundamental problem, which has more to do with greed than anything else.