Bradlaugh at Secular Right discusses an article that reports some very inconclusive evidence that somehow belief in God is linked to the evolution of the brain and vice versa. Brad then says that:
I'm curious to know how a religious person processes these news items from cognitive science.
Obviously the fact that the varieties of religious experience can be explained from brain phylogeny does not exclude the possibility that religious experiences are apprehending something that exists as other than brain events, something real in the world outside the skull. Binocular vision has an explanatory pathway from brain phylogeny, but the things we see are real (mostly).
Yet if the possibility isn't excluded, isn't it at least weakened? Do religious people feel this? Well, I'm sure they don't! - but what do they feel? Perhaps one of them could tell us.
I take Brad to be asking whether people who believe in God don't feel that their beliefs are discredited by evidence that religious belief is somehow a function of our cognitive apparatus. Brad evidently thinks that if a belief is a result of the brain's evolution then it is ipso facto less likely to be true.
But this cuts both ways. If belief in God is somehow an evolutionary adaptation then unbelief is also a product of the evolutionary process (either that or it's a degenerate mutant form of belief). If so, the skeptic has no reason to trust that his unbelief corresponds in any way to what's really true. If our beliefs, including our belief in the trustworthiness of our reason to lead us to truth, are simply adaptations that increase the survivability of the species, then we have no reason whatsoever to trust that our beliefs are actually true or that our reason will lead us to have true beliefs.
Survivability of the species may have little to do with what's true. Consider, for example, a belief in a primitive society that the more children one has the greater will be the reward in the afterlife. The belief could be completely false but having it confers a tremendous selective advantage since those who have it are likely to produce more offspring than those who don't.
Nevertheless, set all that aside. Why should it diminish the veridicality of belief in God if it turns out that we are cognitively predisposed to believe? If God exists it might be expected that He would design us to have some sense of His existence. Isn't this essentially what Paul said in the first chapter of his letter to the Roman church? Haven't Christians maintained for two thousand years that the knowledge of God is an a priori conviction inscribed in our consciousness? Why should it be troubling to learn that the predisposition to believe is located in a particular area of the brain?
Indeed, one who believes that life is the product of God's creative purpose and design would respond to Brad by asserting that the odd thing is not that our cognitive apparatus seems to predispose us to belief in God. The odd thing would be if it didn't.
RLC
