| The evolutionary advantage of Love is that a couple can trust each other and will stay together long enough to raise children. All flaws are overlooked in each other's eyes as they are convinced they have found the perfect mate. Love is blind. No one else can tempt them into abandoning their children and starting over. Each is assured of the other's fidelity and commitment to providing for their progeny. People are willing to die for love because it is that important. Love feels good. It is good to be in love.
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| To make a world without love, it would first be necessary to absolutely guarantee to each person that their children were going to survive and prosper. Such a hypothetical society could be imagined. One-hundred generations of that would seriously undermine the foundation upon which love is based. Romantics who object that love is much more than guaranteeing that children survive are right of course. Love is a feeling. Feelings are grounded on neurological maps of body states. The ultimate source of body states are the chemical mix generated by minute-to-minute processing of thoughts and the external environment. People have evolved to absorb the culture in which they live. Thoughts and memories are shepherded by culture.
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| Without love driving human actions, there would be no sense of purpose that nurturing the next generation clearly provides. Art, literature, why people do what they do, nearly everything - would not apply anymore. The whole program of conquering rival mates, being selected, being in love, raising children, providing for the future, smiling at grandchildren, would fall away. A human without that program would almost be a different species whose values we would not recognize. Certainly teenagers infatuated with each other should not have this most human of activities, their love for each other, dampened by a recitation of the program code.
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| The evolutionary advantage of God is that people can trust each other and will live together in a village in relative peace. The original problem was that a person could not keep an eye on their family and neighbors all the time. Some of them could do something bad and get away with it because they were more powerful. Others could be punished. It was all-together a violent way to live. The solution was for everyone to believe that someone was watching them all the time, would keep track of the bad things they did, and would punish them horribly for infractions. Now they could be trusted because they effectively watched themselves.
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| The whole invisible, judgmental, all-knowing, and all-powerful God program works fine so long as everyone goes along with it. The way you know someone believes it is they perform public actions that would surely convince others. The actions have to sincerely demonstrate belief in things that are outside of normal experience. In contrast, if someone only believes in things they can see themselves, then they cannot be trusted to believe in invisible watchdogs and, in fact, cannot be trusted at all. Believers see it as critical that others share their beliefs and it is so important that some are willing to die for it. The comfort and peacefulness of being in a group of like-minded believers is well-known.
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| To make a world without God, it would first be necessary to absolutely guarantee to each person that everyone else could be trusted. They could be trusted, for example, because they were being monitored at all times and knew that they would be punished for anything bad they did. One-hundred generations of that would seriously undermine the foundation of belief in God. Theists who object that belief in God is much more than guaranteeing that relatives and neighbors can be trusted are right of course. It just feels much better to get credit for your actions from some all-knowing, all-powerful entity. If such an entity was defined as filling the universe or somehow animating the universe, but didn't much care about anything you did, it would be less satisfying. That would diminish every religion's function of providing believers with a purpose. People are good at finding patterns and purpose because they are descendants of those who found that useful.
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| Without God driving human actions much of art, literature and why people do what they do would fall away. A world where humans could guarantee trust because of complete knowledge and swift punishment doesn't sound like much of an improvement over what we have now. A return to the law of the jungle and anarchy also is not so attractive in practice. A society based on people who saw only the world before their eyes, didn't care that there was no purpose, behaved themselves, and enjoyed life to its fullest - would not be following the program built into our own species for forming stable societies. Certainly believers should be left to their own beliefs.
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| It doesn't matter if the beliefs that drive people are true or not. You can look at their beliefs in the same way that you look at antiques. The doctrines provide a view into the lives of Bronze Age tribesmen and Medieval clergy. People necessarily reflect their culture - because absorbing a culture is what people do best. Cultures, just like species, have their run and then become extinct. Without animosity, you can gaze on people's beliefs in all cultures - and recognize the patina of philosophical antiques.
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