Atheist Antithesis
Innate Religious Beliefs Are Evidence of God, Not of Evolution
by Logan Paul Gage
It is fashionable to note that there is nothing new in the “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, et al. However, they offer at least one genuinely new challenge to theistic belief: a challenge from developmental and cognitive psychology.
Evolutionary biologists typically explain an organism’s existing traits—such as man’s propensity for religious belief—by reference to natural selection; existing traits persist because they provide organisms with survival advantages over competitors. But some biologists, like Dawkins, now see religion differently. “I am one of an increasing number of biologists who see religion as a by-product of something else,” he writes.
Perhaps the feature we are interested in (religion in this case) doesn’t have a direct survival value of its own, but is a by-product of something else that does. . . . [R]eligious behaviour may be a misfiring, an unfortunate by-product of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful.
Averse to saying that religion might be useful (i.e., good for something), Dawkins thinks religion does not aid our survival. It is only a by-product of a certain brain wiring that does.
The rebuttal begins by recognizing that some beliefs and psychological processes are innate, argues Michael J. Murray, a professor of humanities at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania and, with Westmont College biologist Jeffrey Schloss, author of a forthcoming book, The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Evolution of Religion (Oxford University Press).
Part of the New Atheist’s argument is new, but part isn’t, Murray said in an interview with Touchstone. “The claim that religion is adaptive goes back to Weber, Durkheim, Hume (in a way) . . . and to Cicero in one sense.”
What is new “is that we have identified specific cognitive tools (and specific adaptive practices) that give rise to religion and which we can test to determine if they are adaptations or by-products (as much as such things can be tested in any evolutionary framework). In that sense, we have the first serious scientific accounts of the origin of religion.”
These ideas and processing mechanisms, which Murray likens to computer files and programs, respectively, appear innate—built-in rather than accumulated by experience.
Logan Paul Gage is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Baylor University. He and his wife Elizabeth attend St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Waco, Texas. A version of this essay appears in the recently released book God and Evolution (Discovery Institute Press), edited by Jay W. Richards.
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