Hard-Wired Skepticism: Scientists and the “Evolution” of Religious Belief

From http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com

Imagine if you were told by a group of scientists that "the Chinese mind does not exist."

At first you are puzzled and wonder if they mean that statement metaphorically, as in “the American mind” or the “Arab mind” are not true cultural phenomena. But they dismissively shake their heads and say that they mean it quite literally: Chinese humans do not have a mind. Our belief that Chinese people have a “mind”, they say, is simply a neurological accident or perhaps a byproduct of natural selection.

Now, your initial response might be to protest and offer reasons why the scientists are wrong. More likely, you’d simply dismiss their claim as being profoundly stupid. Whatever the reaction, your opinion of science—or at least these scientists—would probably be diminished by the exchange.

Unfortunately, a recent article in New York Times is likely to produce a similar effect. In a claim that is only slightly less absurd than denying that Chinese people have minds, evolutionary biologists and cognitive scientists attempt to explain why humans maintain a belief in a deity:

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.

What is most disconcerting is how almost all of the “scholars” mentioned in the article take such a decidedly unscientific approach to the question. As philosopher Alvin Plantinga claims, the sensible meaning of the term “science” is any activity that is (a) a systematic and disciplined enterprise aimed at finding out the truth about our world, and (b) has significant empirical involvement. In order to answer this question, then, we need to take the two main competing hypotheses that could be true (Hypothesis X: God exists; Hypothesis Y: God does not exist) and test to see which one leads to the most empirically valid answer.

Instead of pursuing truth, these scientists start with a bizarre presupposition (whether God exists or not is irrelevant to the question of why people believe in God) and then begin quibbling about such questions as what evolutionary problems might have been solved by religious belief. The obvious problem with this approach it disregards the most likely explanations: either we are designed by God to believe in Him or such belief was an adaptive response to His existence.

Most people who believe in God, however, do not have to look to the adaptive response of Sahelanthropus tchadensis to find the answer. Instead, they look to their own experience. I believe in God because I have an intimate, personal, and continuous experience with the Creator of the universe; I have a justified, true belief in His existence.

For cognitive scientists to say that belief in God is based on an “evolutionary byproduct” is about as silly as telling me that Yao Ming is a zombie. It makes me wonder, if they can be so completely mistaken about this, what else could they be wrong about? Claims based on such flimsy presuppositions do nothing but undermine my confidence in the field of evolutionary biology.

At least I think it does. Then again, my skepticism could just be neurological accident or hard-wired due to adaption. Once you start believing in evolutionary psychology, its hard to know what to believe -- or if we have the ability to believe anything at all.