The God Instinct

Religious beliefs are pervasive. Only a minority of people would declare themselves agnostic, let alone atheist. Why so? Well, one obvious answer is that those religious beliefs are essentially correct and that believers are behaving in an epistemically proper way in believing the truth. A second answer is that we have evolved a propensity for religious belief despite those beliefs being false.

This clearly atheist response can be developed in different ways according to the reasons why this propensity evolved. Roughly, they can be divided into two camps. In the first are those theories that say our religious sides are side-effects of the selection process. A disposition to religious belief was selected but not selected for. In the same way, to take a familiar example, our chins are side-effects of the processes of selection for our jaws. So, one might argue that we have evolved pattern- and cause-and-effect detecting mechanisms that are so sophisticated that they sometimes misfire in 'detecting' patterns and causes that are not there. To take some familiar examples again, in looking for causes of rustlings in the trees, storms, diseases and so on, we invoke the most familiar kinds of causes to the unscientific mind: agents. People make things happen, so unseen people make these strange things happen.

In the second are those who say that they may have been selected for. In an article for the Guardian, psychologist Jesse Bering makes the following claim:

the illusion of God solved a very specific evolutionary problem for our ancestors – that of reputation-harming (and thus gene-compromising) gossip. By inhibiting selfish behaviours that they feared would be punished by supernatural agents, our ancestors would have promoted their prosocial reputations among actual people.

In a reply, evolutionary biologist Denis Alexander argues that we should be wary of such 'just-so' thinking: of looking for evolutionary explanations that make clear sense to us. What we think is a good reason as intelligent beings may well not be the reasons - better, causes - comprising the unintelligent processes of nature.

Sam Harris and Morality

I recently put up a link to an article by Sam Harris in the Huffington Post on whether science can intrude on an area normally considered to be outside its remit, namely morality. In this video clip, Sam Harris discusses his ideas in greater depth. In short, he puts forward a non-reductive moral naturalist or 'Cornell realist' view according to which values supervene on non-moral facts about what is conducive to the promotion of human well-being.