Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an article by Robin Marantz Henig which explores current scientific thinking on the question of why people are religious. What is the best explanation, scientists are asking, for the fact that belief in God or gods is almost universal? Henig writes:
Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.
Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God - evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there?
In short, are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?
I think Reformed philosophers would reply that of course we're "hard-wired" to believe in God. That's almost precisely the point Paul was making in Romans 1. It's what John Calvin meant when he wrote about the sensus divinitatis, the sense of God that everybody seems to have as long as they don't squelch it.
Of course, this isn't what many scientists have in mind when they talk about belief in God being a product of our evolutionary past. Their agenda is to discredit belief in God by showing that it's nothing but an illusion foisted upon us by our genes to equip us for life in the paleolithic epoch.
This little parlor game can be played as well by theists, however. I wonder, for instance, if next these scientists are going to take up the question why many people don't believe in God. Are atheists actually genetic mutants intellectually maladapted to their environment and doomed to be eliminated by natural selection? Is atheism simply an evolutionary aberration, like Down's syndrome, such that the person who suffers from it really can't help holding the beliefs he does? If so, then the rationality that atheists enjoy claiming for themselves is an illusion. Their belief, or lack of it, is a completely non-rational, genetically determined state of mind.
Isn't this fun?
RLC