THE UNEXAMINED FAITH IS NOT WORTH HOLDING:

The Structure of Scientific Evolutions: Evolution's place in a created universe. (William Saletan, Aug. 10, 2009, Slate)

In a series of books—Three Scientists and Their Gods, The Moral Animal, and Nonzero—Wright has pushed the idea of pre-existing architecture from the chemical to the biological to the cultural level. He believes that the structure of our world has favored the evolution of societies based on peace, commerce, reciprocal altruism, and mutual benefit. His latest book, The Evolution of God, takes this argument further: God may or may not have shaped biological and cultural evolution (just by establishing an initial algorithm), but these processes have definitely shaped Him. The evolution of the human brain led to religion, and our ideas about God have subsequently changed in concert with cultural progress. On the whole, despite history's ups and downs, God has become more peaceful, more beneficent, and more compatible with a scientific understanding of the world.

Not everyone is thrilled with Wright's version of God. To many religious people, a nonpersonal deity that never intervenes in the ordered world is no deity at all. But the more interesting critique has come from scientists. Many of them don't like theism, even in Wright's deistic form. They prefer simple explanations. They think that biological evolution can account for religion's emergence and that this form of explanation is uniquely God-free.

The most notable of these scientific critics is Nicholas Wade, a reporter for the New York Times. Wade is the author of Before the Dawn, an ingenious reconstruction of human prehistory from genetic and linguistic evidence. This fall, he has another book coming out: The Faith Instinct. In a preview on the Times Web site, he agrees with Wright that "morality has a genetic basis and may well have evolved over the millennia into forms that are objectively higher." But Wade thinks religion's original function was clear:

to instill, through group cohesion, morality within a group and hostility toward those outside it. So in very early human societies, groups with strong religious behavior would have prevailed over less cohesive adversaries. We are descended from the religious groups, the argument goes, and that is why everyone harbors a religious instinct. …

Wade concludes: "Natural selection also explains rather well how religious behavior would have conferred such advantages on early human societies that it became a part of human nature."

The questions of religious faith's role in a Darwinian universe and of Darwinism's role in a Created one are certainly interesting enough as academic exercises, but that of belief in Darwinism in a purely Natural universe is the big enchilada. For exactly the same reasons that the internal logic of Darwinism requires that religion be merely an evolutionary affect, so too must Darwinism itself be. It's quite exquisite--to exactly the extent that one has faith in Darwinism that faith is undermined by Darwinism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 10, 2009 11:18 AM