Does Believing in God Arise from Our Evolved Theory of Mind?

In God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (published in 1967 and 1990), Alvin Plantinga offered assessments of the various arguments for believing in God. He concluded that the best argument was based on the analogy between believing in other human minds and believing in the Divine Mind. Although we have direct access to our own minds through subjective experience, we have no direct evidence for other human minds. But except for the radical solipsist, we regard belief in other human minds as a reasonable inference from our experience with other human beings. Similarly, we might conclude that although we have no direct, observational evidence for God's existence, we can reasonably infer the existence of a Divine Mind as a more perfect version of our human mind. Plantinga concluded: "if my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God. But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latter."

(I doubt this conclusion, however, because it is based on a bad analogy.  I have direct experience of a human mind through my subjective experience of my mind.  But I have no such experience of a divine mind.)

Some evolutionary psychologists have recently been converging on an evolutionary explanation of religious belief that might support Plantinga's insight, because they are uncovering a deep, evolutionary link between believing in other minds and believing in God. But while some of these Darwinian psychologists (such as Justin Barrett) see this as showing that Darwinian science is compatible with the truth of believing in God, others (such as Jesse Bering) see this as exposing belief in God as a fictional construction of the evolved human mind. For those like Barrett, religious belief is an adaptive truth. For those like Bering, religious belief is an adaptive illusion.

In contrast to both Barrett and Bering, some evolutionary theorists (like Richard Dawkins) argue that religious belief is not an evolutionary adaptation at all, but rather a byproduct of our having evolved big brains that are capable of big mistakes.

Barrett lays out his position in his book Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, which I have taken up in a previous post.

Bering has summarized his position in a new book--The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (2011). Bering has posted a brief excerpt from this book as an essay for Slate.

Bering builds upon the "social brain" hypothesis of Robin Dunbar and others--the idea that the big brains of primates can best be explained as evolutionary adaptations to the social complexity of primate life. The unique complexity of human social life is correlated with the unique complexity of the human mind.

Navigating our way through the intricacies of human social life requires that we have a "theory of mind"--that we be able to read the minds of other individuals as intentional agents whose actions are governed by their beliefs, desires, and goals. This is difficult, because while we have direct, subjective awareness of our own minds, we have no experience of other minds. We must project our own subjective experience onto others and infer that they are intentional agents like us.

Although there continues to be debate as to whether there is any evidence for chimpanzees or other apes having some capacity for a theory of mind, it is clear that human beings are uniquely good at reading the minds of others. There is some evidence that human infants as early as 9-months old begin to understand adults as intentional agents, and they do this in a way that far surpasses what the chimps can do.

This human capacity for mind-reading is probably rooted in the development of the human brain--particularly, the prefrontal cortex--as suggested by some brain imaging studies. Further evidence for this is that autistic people and others who show deficits in their mind-reading abilities are probably suffering from impairment in those parts of the brain necessary for interpreting the subtle cues of intentional agency in others.

Because we have such a powerful neural system for mind-reading, we are easily inclined to see minds everywhere, even in nonliving objects. In the famous experiment conducted by Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel, the viewers of a film showing geometric figures in motion thought they saw a large triangle "bullying" a "timid" small triangle to steal the affections of a "female" circle.

Similarly, Bering argues, our instinctive theory of mind inclines us to see supernatural minds at work in the universe. Thus, our belief in God's mind is just our overactive theory of mind.

Bering contends that this evolved human instinct for mind reading is responsible for four kinds of illusions--superhuman purpose, superhuman signs, a superhuman afterlife, and superhuman morality.

Our belief in superhuman purpose comes from our projecting mental agency onto the cosmos. We ask about the purpose of life, as if life must be the artificial product of a plan by an intelligent agent with some purpose in mind. Even atheists commonly have some sense of destiny, some vague belief that their life has a purpose.

But if we accept the theory of evolution, Bering insists, then this belief in the purpose of life is a cognitive illusion. We don't have a purpose in life, we simply are. Life has no purpose, it simply is. But our mindlessly evolved theory of mind makes it almost impossible for us to believe that there is no mindful purpose to life.

Our belief in superhuman signs comes from our instinctive inclination to look for hidden messages in natural events as controlled by invisible intelligent agents. It is not enough to know how things happen, because we want to know why they happen. We look for the meaning in things. Consequently, much of religious experience consists in interpreting the supernatural messages in the natural world coming from dead ancestors, spirits, angels, or gods. Even modern scientists continue the tradition of natural theology in considering how the divine order is manifest in nature.

Our belief in a superhuman afterlife comes from our inability to imagine what it would feel like to be dead. We cannot prove to ourselves that we are mortal, because we cannot be conscious of being dead. Thus, as Goethe said, "everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself."

Sigmund Freud explained the belief in an afterlife as wish fulfillment, and therefore as an expression of our fear of death. But Bering argues that this wish-fulfillment theory doesn't account for the illusion. We have lots of wishes that we don't assume to be true. So why is the wish to be immortal so easy to believe? It must be because it matches our instinctive intuitions about the continuity of the mind after death, which we can see in the beliefs of young children.

Our belief in supernatural morality comes from our evolved social psychology of morality. We look for people to blame for our suffering. When we can't blame another person, we look for some invisible intentional agent to give meaning to the suffering.

It's not enough for us to know how bad things happen to good people. We want to know why they happen, which implies that everything is ordered by some cosmic mind with a moral purpose. This natural propensity of the human mind to look for a cosmic moral order is so strong, Bering indicates, that even most atheists (according to some psychological studies) believe that "everything happens for a reason."

Bering's evolutionary explanation for this is that human social cooperation requires that we be intensely sensitive to the opinions of others--we care about what others think of us, and this concern for our reputation gives us the incentive for good behavior. That's why gossip is such a powerful tool for enforcing good conduct and punishing bad conduct. This requires a theory of mind by which we see ourselves through the eyes of others.

If we think others are not looking, we are tempted to cheat. But if we think there are supernatural agents always watching us, then we are less tempted to cheat. Believing in supernatural moral spectators would protect us from doing the things that ruin our reputations, and this would be favored by natural selection.

Of course, Bering recognizes, the doctrinal and ritualistic content of religious belief is set by cultural traditions that vary across history and across societies. But underlying this cultural diversity is a basic cognitive illusion that is universal. Bering writes:

By all accounts, the basic illusion of God (or some other supernatural agent) "willfully" creating us as individuals, "wanting" us to behave in particular ways, "observing" and "knowing" about our otherwise private actions, "communicating" His desires to us in code through natural events, and "intending" to meet us after we die is pretty convincing for most people. (195)

And yet, how does Bering know that this is an adaptive illusion rather than an adaptive truth? He admits that his evolutionary account of religion as rooted in an evolved theory of mind cannot disprove the existence of God. After all, evolutionary psychologists like Justin Barrett defend this evolutionary account, while seeing it as perfectly compatible with believing that God allowed human beings to have this naturally evolved theory of mind so that they could discover Him.

Bering agrees with Barrett that science by itself can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. But still, Bering insists, science can conclude that God's existence is highly improbable. Barrett finds Plantinga's argument plausible: "if my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God." And yet, Bering finds this sort of reasoning silly. Plantinga assumes that believing in the existence of other human minds is comparable to believing in the existence of God's mind. But this is clearly not true. Dealing with other human minds is part of our ordinary human experience. Dealing with God's mind is not.

Bering doesn't realize that this debate has a long philosophical history--from Plato to Cicero to Hume. From Plato's Laws (Book 10) and his Phaedo, we know that Plato understood that the most appealing ground for believing in the divine was to project our experience of mental agency onto the universe, but there are good reasons to doubt the plausibility of such reasoning, as suggested by Cicero--in On the Nature of the Gods--and Hume--in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Although we are innately inclined to see an analogy between human minds and divine minds, it is not clear that the analogy is strong enough to justify religious belief.

Bering doesn't realize that most of what he says about the evolution of religious belief follows the lines of Darwin's reasoning in the DESCENT OF MAN (Penguin Classics, 2004). Darwin saw that "belief in unseen or spiritual agencies" was universal among primitive human beings, and that this probably arose first "when anything which manifested power or movement is thought to be endowed with some form of life, and with mental faculties analogous to our own" (116-117). "The belief in spiritual agencies would easily pass into the belief in the existence of one or more gods. For savages would naturally attribute to spirits the same passions, the same love of vengeance or simplest form of justice, and the same affections which they themselves feel" (118).

Only by deeper rational reflection and observation do we realize that all the order we see in the world does not have to be the product of intelligent and intentional design. As Cicero and Hume suggested, human intelligent design is not the only possible source of order that we observe in the world. For example, in the growth of plants from seeds, we see order arising by nature without mental agency. Furthermore, thinkers like Cicero and Hume recognized the possibility of evolutionary order through the selective retention of heritable traits that enhance survival and reproduction, which can create spontaneous orders that are not intelligently designed by any mind or group of minds.

In the philosophic tradition of Plato, Cicero, and Hume, we can see a deeper question at issue here that Bering passes over quickly without much thought. Can we--or should we--free ourselves of the "adaptive illusion of God"?

On the one hand, Bering seems to think we can't do this. He writes:

It is therefore more than a little foolhardy to think that human nature can ever be "cured" of God by scientific reason. As a way of thinking, God is an inherent part of our natural cognitive systems, and ridding ourselves of Him--really, thoroughly, permanently removing Him from our heads--would require a neurosurgeon, not a science teacher. (200)

On the other hand, Bering rejoices that for the first time in human history, we find ourselves "in the full godless light of this shattered illusion." He admits that this might be detrimental to our moral life, if in fact, we need religious belief to support our morality. But then he concludes: "With or without belief, the consequences for acting selfishly are as much a deterrent as they've always been: those who don't play by the rules will--by and large, more often than not--suffer the human consequences" (201-202).

Plato, Cicero, and Hume would agree that moral order can be based on human nature, human custom, and human judgment, without any religious support. But they also suggested that for many, if not most, human beings, religious belief provides a necessary reinforcement for moral conduct. Darwin suggested the same conclusion in his account of the natural moral sense, in which morality can stand on its own natural ground, even without religious sanction, although religious belief can provide powerful reinforcement for our natural morality.

Some of the political founders of modern liberal republicanism understood this. For example, George Washington, in his Farewell Address, observed:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness--these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Notice that Washington intimates that "the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure" can produce good behavior without religious belief. But "reason and experience" should tell us that most human beings need religious belief as a support for their morality.

Washington helped to establish a new government without a governmental establishment of religion, but one which would secure the free exercise of religion. Doesn't this indicate the best political resolution of this debate between reason and revelation?

If the religious belief supporting morality really is rooted in our evolved theory of mind, then we can rely on it to arise by spontaneous order in any civil society with religious liberty. At the same time, those few who live "in the full godless light of this shattered illusion" can be guided by the moral norms rooted in human nature, human culture, and human judgment.

In a free society, people like Jesse Bering and Justin Barrett can live together, being united by their scientific inquiry into human nature, while being free to disagree as to whether the final ground of explanation is to be found in nature or in nature's God.

A few of the many posts on related themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The MPS in the Galapagos (14): The Evolution of Religious Belief

Originally, Pascal Boyer was to lecture at the MPS conference on the evolution of religious belief.  He teaches in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.  In one short summary of his evolutionary theory of religion, he concludes: "The mind has myriad distinct belief networks that contribute to making religious claims quite natural to many people."

Unfortunately, Boyer lost his passport, and so he could not travel to the Galapagos.  Leda Cosmides agreed to speak in his place, followed by Father Robert Sirico, the founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

Cosmides began by suggesting that Boyer's evolutionary account of religious belief is a Hayekian view of how ideas spread--those that are more successful in conforming to the human mind tend to prevail.  Boyer explains how ideas about the supernatural arise as byproducts of normal cognitive functioning.

According to evolutionary psychologists, the human brain has evolved cognitive functions for detecting intelligent agency and human artifacts, and consequently the brain is naturally inclined to find intelligent agency in whatever looks like it was intentionally designed.  This makes it easy for us to belief in supernatural agents.

Cosmides insisted that this theory of the cognitive evolution of religious belief remains neutral on the issue of whether God exists.

To support this, she could have mentioned the work of Jesse Bering and Justin Barrett.  As I have indicated in some previous posts here and here, Bering and Barrett agree in accepting the evolutionary origin of religious belief.  But while Bering is an atheist, Barrett is a Christian.  A Christian psychologist like Barrett can believe that human beings have a naturally evolved inclination to believe in God, because God has created them that way, using an evolutionary process.  By contrast, an atheist like Bering can see the evolutionary explanation of religious belief as showing that such belief is an illusion.

Following Cosmides, Father Sirico spoke on "Hayekian Social Theory and Religious Truth."  His main idea is conveyed in the last two sentences: "The battle to see the religious mind as an integral part of the social process is part of the same battle to regard the freedom of the marketplace through which economic knowledge develops and which must be allowed to work itself out without the intervention of 'scientists' who purport to have more knowledge than the human experience itself can provide.  However implausible it may seem, the development of society and the development of faith have more in common than might be first supposed" (18-19).

While wondering why Hayek's writing shows so little overt discussion of religion, Father Sirico argued that Hayek's understanding of social order as emerging best through spontaneous evolution is applicable to the evolution of religious belief.  He made three points in support of this claim.

First, he noted how often Hayek cited religious thinkers like Lord Acton and the late scholastics of the middle ages, who supported the idea of social order as the "result of human action but not of human design."

Second, Father Sirico argued that Hayek's condemnation of rationalist constructivism and scientism could apply to the rationalism of the "New Atheists," who try to dispose of all inherited religious beliefs and then reconstruct all our beliefs as personal constructions of reason.

Third, he argued that Hayek's account of how social order arises from a gradual evolutionary development could also apply to the development of religious doctrine.  The doctrines of Christianity arose through many centuries of experience as an evolutionary process of adaptation and refinement.  He found this best expressed in some of the writing of John Henry Newman.

Father Sirico's most interesting thought on this third point was how religious fundamentalism took a constructivist approach similar to socialism.

As I listened to Father Sirico, I wondered whether Boyer would agree with him that religious belief arises from the social marketplace, in which some religious beliefs by trial and error are found to be better adapted to the human mind than are others.  This seemed to be what Cosmides meant when she said that Boyer's evolutionary explanation of religious belief was Hayekian.

In the question and answer period after the two lectures, I asked this question: Do the two of you agree that atheism is contrary to evolved human nature?

They both said yes.  Cosmides said that atheism is not naturally adapted to evolved mental capacities.  She also indicated that she disagrees with Richard Dawkins in his aggressive attacks on religion.

Father Sirico said that the methodological naturalism of many scientists is contrary to natural human experience.

During this discussion period, Father Sirico objected to Hayek's social evolution as lacking a telos.  He said that we need a standard in human nature to set the telos for judging cultural traditions.  He used the example of the multiculturalist support for female circumcision (or genital mutilation) as showing the stupidity of cultural relativism without a natural standard of judgment.

I agree with this.  I would say that there is an immanent telos in human evolution insofar as the 20 natural desires of evolved human nature set a standard by which we can judge societies as better or worse in satisfying those natural desire, including the natural desire for religious understanding.

In some previous posts, I have used the example of female circumcision to illustrate this, just as Father Sirico did.  This is what I mean by "Darwinian natural right."

These lectures concluded the Mont Pelerin Society conference in the Galapagos on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty."  As you can see by my 14 blog posts, this was a remarkably stimulating conference in helping me think about the moral, economic, political, and religious implications of Darwinian evolutionary science.  Combined with my "evolutionary tour of the Galapagos" during the preceding week,  this gave me much to ponder as I continue to develop my argument for Darwinian liberalism.

Debating Darwinian Liberalism (3): Dual Causality and Theistic Evolution

The second premise of Dilley's Syllogism is: "Darwinism denies Christianity."

I disagree.  Darwinian evolutionary science does not resolve the reason-revelation debate in favor of reason over revelation, because that science rightly understood (as I understand it!) recognizes that neither side in this debate can refute the other.  Darwinian evolutionary science also recognizes that there is a natural desire for religious understanding, and so atheism is contrary to our evolved human nature.

In taking this position, I am on the side of Charles Darwin as against Richard Dawkins.  Darwin never claimed, either in public or in private, that his evolutionary science proved atheism.  By contrast, Dawkins has proclaimed that the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 made it possible for the first time in history to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, because evolutionary science provided a rational refutation of revelation.  Remarkably, my nine critics who embrace Dilley's Syllogism agree with Dawkins that Darwinism is atheism, even though they think this Darwinian atheism can be refuted by revelation and intelligent design theory.

The religious appeal to God as the uncaused cause of nature cannot be refuted by reason. All natural explanations of the world--including Darwinian science--must assume that ultimately the order of nature is the unexplained ground of all explanation. But there is no way by rational proof to deny the possibility that nature itself is the contingent product of nature's God.

Darwin recognizes this in adopting the principle of dual causality, which originated in medieval Islamic and Christian theology.  He speaks of the laws of nature as manifested in evolution as "secondary causes," which leaves open the possibility of God's creative power acting through "primary causes" to create the original order of nature itself.  I have elaborated this point in a previous post.

Darwin thus allows for theistic evolution, which has been adopted by a long line of Christian thinkers, including C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Alvin Plantinga.  Darwin rejects the "theory of special creation," which sees God as having to intervene miraculously in nature to specially create each form of life.  But Darwin allows for God to be understood as the First Cause, the uncaused cause of matter and life.

Most of my critics in Dilley's book seem to recognize that Darwin adopted the principle of dual causality, with natural evolution working through "secondary causes" and the Creator working through "primary causes" (3, 25-26, 87, 275-77, 284, 290).  Bruce Gordon, however, seems to reject the principle of dual causality as a blasphemous denial of God's omnipotence (168), which could be interpreted as his endorsement of a radical divine voluntarism that would make natural science impossible by denying the lawful regularity of nature (87, 162).

Darwin's dual causality allows him to conclude The Origin of Species with this famous sentence:  "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, are being evolved."

Dilley suggests that Darwin was not really serious in thus writing about life as "originally breathed by the Creator" into the first organisms, because he believes that for Darwin this language was merely a dishonest rhetorical gesture to placate his Christian readers (25).  Dilley quotes from a letter that Darwin wrote to Joseph Hooker in 1863: "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process.--It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter."  But notice what Darwin is saying here.  He regrets that using the "Pentateuchal term of creation" might be read as endorsing a literal reading of the Creation story in Genesis, which is what Biblical creationists have done.  And yet he wants to recognize the ineluctable mystery of how matter and life originated "by some wholly unknown process." 

Like C. S. Lewis, Darwin probably saw the Creation story in Genesis as a "myth" or "Hebrew folk tale."  (I have written about Lewis's position here and here.)  But he also saw this story as pointing to a mystery--the problem of ultimate explanation--that might be beyond the limits of natural reason.

All explanation depends on some ultimate reality that is unexplained.  All explanation presupposes the observable order of the world as the final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained.  To the question of why nature exists or why it has the order that it does, the only reasonable answer is that we must accept this as a brute fact of our experience.  That's just the way it is! 

Now, of course, some religious believers will argue that we can reason to the existence of God as the simplest way of explaining the existence and the order of the natural world that is presupposed in all scientific explanations.  But those like David Hume can insist that there is nothing in our ordinary experience of the world that would make it likely, or even comprehensible, that something would have the power to create everything in the world out of nothing.  Moreover, the religious believers might admit that they cannot explain why God is the way He is.  Thus, in looking for ultimate explanation, we must stop somewhere with something that is unexplained--either an uncaused or self-caused Nature or an uncaused or self-caused God.  I have elaborated this thought in a previous post.

In response to such mystery, Darwin suggested in The Descent of Man, religious belief might have evolved through the natural tendency of the human mind to project intelligent agency and design onto the world by analogy with our experience of human intelligence.  Intelligent design theory is founded on such reasoning by anthropomorphic analogy.  In recent years, evolutionary theorists like Pascal Boyer, Justin Barrett, and Jesse Bering have elaborated Darwin's thought into a general theory of religious belief as an evolutionary expression of the human mind's propensity for detecting intelligent agency.  This leaves open the question of whether religious belief is an adaptive truth (as Barrett believes) or an adaptive illusion (as Bering believes).  But in either case, religious belief belongs to our evolved human nature.  Thus, as I reported in an earlier post on the MPS conference in the Galapagos, Leda Cosmides and Father Robert Sirico agreed that atheism is unnatural, because it is contrary to our evolved human nature.  Some previous posts on this can be found here, here, here, and here.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism of Natural Religion

In this season of the year, our greetings of "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays" acknowledge our natural human propensity to religious beliefs and rituals, while also acknowledging that in the modern liberal social orders in which many of us live today, we respect religious liberty and toleration.  "Merry Christmas" doesn't favor any one Christian tradition over any other.  And "Happy Holy Days" recognizes that there are some non-Christian religious observances during this season--particularly, the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism that I have defended explains the naturalness of religion as rooted in our evolved human nature.  It also explains why we need religious liberty and toleration so that all individuals have the equal liberty to pursue their natural desire for religious experience in their own way.

My position has provoked lots of criticisms, of which two are most prominent.  The first is that Darwinian Lockean Liberalism is incoherent insofar as Darwinian atheism denies the Christian foundations of Lockean Liberalism.  The second is that Lockean religious liberty and toleration denies the truth of Christian Integralism (Catholic or Protestant) that there is one true church--the true Christian Church established by Jesus Christ--and that this Christian Church can rightly use the secular authority of government to enforce the Orthodoxy of that Church.

I have previously responded to these two criticisms (here and here).  But after thinking more about these issues, I have decided to lay out a slightly revised version of my previous responses.

Various authors have countered my position with a syllogistic rebuttal (Dilley, 2013; Holloway, 2006; West, 2006).  I will call this “Dilley’s Syllogism” because Stephen Dilley formulated it in his Introduction to his edited book Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism:

Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity.

Darwinism denies Christianity.

Therefore, Darwinism denies classical (Lockean) liberalism.

The conclusion of this syllogism is false, because the major premise is only partly true, and the minor premise is totally false.

The major premise has been asserted by those of my critics who are proponents of what they call “Christian classical liberalism” or “theistic classical liberalism” (Dilley, 2013, pp. 19, 23, 158-59).  I have inserted “Lockean” into the syllogism because these critics generally appeal to Locke as “the quintessential classical liberal” (Dilley, 2013, p. 198).  The only doctrinal teaching of Christianity that they mention as supporting Lockean classical liberalism is the idea of imago Dei: that all human beings have been created in the image of God (as declared in Genesis 1:26-27) seems to endow them with the equal moral dignity that supports the classical liberal teaching that all human beings are created equal in their moral dignity as equally endowed by God with natural rights (Dilley, 2013, p. 11). 

Locke seemed to adopt this idea in speaking about the law of nature as grounded in the nature of human beings as God’s “workmanship”:

Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.  For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s Pleasure (ST, 6).

Locke identified this idea of men being God’s property because they are his workmanship with man being created in God’s image, in the sense that all members of the human species were created as “intellectual creatures,” which gave them dominion over the “inferior creatures,” but without giving any human being dominion over any other human being, because all men were equal in having a human mind that was a likeness to the Mind of God (FT, 30, 39, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 56).

But Locke also claimed that natural rights were rooted in every man’s self-ownership (ST, 27).  Now, as Peter Laslett (1970, p. 100) observed, this principle of human self-ownership “almost contradicts his principle that men belong to God, not themselves.”  “Almost”?  Can men both belong to themselves and belong to God?  I have argued that evolutionary neuroscience can explain the human experience of self-ownership as rooted in the interoceptive capacity of the embodied brain.  But the human experience of being owned by God might be harder to explain scientifically.

The apparent contradiction between Locke’s principle of self-ownership and his principle of divine ownership can be resolved by seeing that Locke made what Michael Zuckert has called a “two-track argument,” in which “one track is theistic, the workmanship argument, an argument of natural theology; the other track is the appeal to self-ownership” (Zuckert, 2002, pp. 4-5; 2005, p. 431).  Locke believed that the workmanship argument would require a rational theology that could prove the existence of God.  From “the idea of ourselves as understanding, rational creatures,” we would have to infer “the idea of a supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are” (ECHU, IV.3.18).  Through an anthropomorphic analogy, we could project from the idea of our own minds and other human minds the idea of a Divine Mind.  Thus, man would create God in man’s image (ECHU, IV.3.27; IV.10.1).  But then Locke admitted that having the idea of God in one’s mind does not prove God’s real existence (ECHU, IV.10.7; IV.10.19; IV.11.1).

Since he doubted that reason could prove God’s existence in support of the workmanship argument, Locke developed the self-ownership argument that would provide a purely natural ground for his law of nature.  He wanted to appeal to a rational theology of divine workmanship, but if that failed, he could fall back onto his natural self-ownership argument.  These two tracks—God and nature--are suggested by Locke’s repeated appeals to “the Laws of God and Nature” (FT, 56, 124; ST, 60, 66, 90, 93, 142, 195).  The “fixed and permanent rule of morals” could be “firmly rooted in the soil of human nature,” and human nature could be understood as created by “nature or God” (1997, p. 125).  Notice that the creative source of human nature is nature or God.

Consequently, the major premise of Dilley’s Syllogism is only partly true.  Yes, Locke’s classical liberalism can be grounded in the Christian doctrine of creation in the image of God as supporting the workmanship argument.  But Locke suggested that reason can neither prove nor disprove creationist theology.  And that led him to appeal to the self-ownership principle as a purely naturalistic argument that did not require any theological assumptions.  Another way of saying this is that Locke left the Reason/Revelation debate open, believing that neither side can refute the other.  And so, he often invited his readers to consider both what “Reason” taught them by their natural experience and what “Revelation” taught them through their reading of the Bible (ST, 25).

The minor premise of Dilley’s Syllogism—Darwinism denies Christianity—assumes that the Darwinian scientist believes that scientific reason can refute Christian revelation and thus supports atheism.  But even if this is true for some Darwinian scientists, it is not true for all--not even for Darwin himself.  Moreover, Darwinian evolutionary science recognizes that there is a natural desire for religious understanding, and so atheism is contrary to our evolved human nature.  But even though religious belief is natural for most human beings, what they believe about the supernatural will be determined by faith rather than reason.  And since religious believers can never reach agreement about the content of their faith, they must accept the fact of religious pluralism and recognize how that religious pluralism dictates the religious toleration that secures religious liberty.

Of course, there are Darwinian atheists.  Richard Dawkins, for example, has said that “I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published.”  He thinks the Argument from Design has always been the best of the arguments for the existence of God, because the complexity of the living world appears to be the work of an intelligent designer—just as William Paley’s watch implied the existence of a watchmaker—and so we might infer that God is the Intelligent Designer of the living world.  David Hume rightly criticized this reasoning as illogical because it rests on a false analogy between human intelligent design and divine intelligent design.  We have all seen human intelligent designers at work as part of our ordinary human experience.  But we have never seen a Divine Intelligent Designer creating everything out of nothing.  This is not part of our ordinary human experience.  It is fallacious, therefore, to use apparent design in nature as evidence for the existence of God.  But even if Hume was right about this, Dawkins has observed, Hume did not offer any alternative explanation for apparent design in nature.  It was only in 1859, when Darwin showed how evolution by natural selection could explain complex biological design, that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Dawkins, 1986, pp. 5-6).

And yet Darwin himself denied that his theory of evolution promoted atheism.  Consider what he said about “the Creator” in the last two paragraphs of The Origin of Species.  He rejected the common “view that each species has been independently created,” and he proposed instead that “it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.”  Then, in his famous last sentence, he spoke of the “grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” and that “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” (1936, pp. 373-74).

Here we see that Darwin adopted the medieval Scholastic metaphysics of “dual causality” in distinguishing supernatural primary causes and natural secondary causes (Maurer, 2004).  The Creator did not miraculously create each species of life separately.  But He did originally exercise primary causality in impressing the laws of nature on matter and breathing life into a few forms or into one.  Then, from that simple beginning, the Creator allowed all the forms of life to emerge through the secondary causes of the natural evolutionary process.

At this point in his life, Darwin was what today we would call a “theistic evolutionist” or “evolutionary creationist”—someone who believes that the existence of God as the Creator is compatible with evolutionary science.  Indeed, Darwin said that it was “absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist.”  And even when, towards the end of his life, he became an agnostic, he insisted: “In my most extreme fluctuations, I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God” (1879; 1969, pp. 92-96). 

In the creation/evolution debate among Christians today, many Christian thinkers—such as Francis Collins, Deborah Haarsma, Darrel Falk, Alvin Plantinga, and Justin Barrett—have defended evolutionary creationism in arguing that, just as Darwin said, one can be both a theist and an evolutionist (Collins, 2006; Stump, 2007).  Remarkably, even the “young-Earth creationists,” who believe in the literal six-days-creation story in Genesis and a 6,000-year-old Earth, concede that Darwin’s Origin of Species refuted the traditional belief that God specially created all species of life, because they agree that all species emerged through evolution by natural selection.  But they also insist that God had to specially create all the “kinds” of animals and plants, so that the evolution of species could unfold within the limits of those “kinds” (with “kinds” corresponding to the taxonomic level of “families”) (Wood, 2008, 2011; Wood and Murray, 2003; Ham, 2017, pp. 14-26).   This resembles what Darwin said about the Creator breathing life into “a few forms or into one,” from which all species could then evolve by natural selection.

Darwin and the evolutionary creationists agree with Locke that religious belief is natural for human beings because they are naturally inclined to infer from their knowledge of their own minds and the minds of others that there must be a divine mind that exercises a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to the natural intelligent agency of human minds.  Darwin observed that when “conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity,” he “felt compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man,” which made him a theist (1969, pp. 92-93).  

Similarly, some evolutionary psychologists—such as Justin Barrett and Jesse Bering--have argued that the natural evolution of religious belief is rooted in the propensity of the human mind to detect rational agency in humans and other animals and then to infer a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to that of human minds (Barret, 2004; Bering, 2011).  But as we have seen, this anthropomorphic analogy between human and divine minds is dubious, and even if this explained the natural evolution of the idea of God in the human mind, that would not prove the existence of God.

This led Locke to conclude that believing in the existence of God is ultimately not a matter of reason but of faith.  And since “faith is not knowledge,” we cannot know what the true religion is (Locke, 1870, pp. 94-96; 1997, pp. 248-50; ECHU, IV.17-18).  Consequently, political rulers cannot coercively enforce belief in the religious orthodoxy of the true church, because religious believers cannot agree on what that orthodoxy is.  “Every man is orthodox to himself,” Locke observed in the Letter Concerning Toleration.  And “every church is orthodox to itself” (2010, pp. 7, 21, 38).  The simple fact of religious pluralism—that religious believers cannot agree on religious orthodoxy—supports Locke’s liberal argument for religious liberty and toleration of all religious sects that inflict no injury on others.  Religious liberty and religious pluralism create a free marketplace of religion in which religious movements must compete for adherents.  Those religious groups that succeed in satisfying the natural desire for religious understanding gain a larger share of the religious market (Seabright, 2024).

The mistake of the Christian Integralists (both Catholic and Protestant) in rejecting Lockean religious liberty and toleration and affirming Christian Theocracy (or Christian Nationalism) is their failure to see how any theocratic attempt to suppress religious pluralism must be oppressively unjust and also contrary to the religious voluntarism practiced by the early Christian Churches.

We can see then how a Darwinian Lockean Liberalism can explain natural religion and can secure the religious liberty and toleration that respect religious pluralism and allow every individual to satisfy his natural desire for religious understanding in his own way, while allowing all others the same religious liberty.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

REFERENCES

Barrett, J. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bering, J. 2011. The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. New York: W. W. Norton.

Collins, F. S. 2006. The Language of God. New York: Free Press.

Darwin, C. 1879. Letter to John Fordyce, May 7. Cambridge, UK: Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter No.: DCP-LETT-12041.

Darwin, C. 1936. The Origin of Species & The Descent of Man. New York: Random House, The Modern Library.

Darwin, C. 1969. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Ed. N. Barlow. New York: W. W. Norton.

Dilley, S., ed. 2013. Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Ham, K. 2017. "Young-Earth Creationism." In J. B. Stump, ed., Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

Holloway, C. 2006. The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy. Dallas: Spence Publishing.

Laslett, P. 1970. Introduction. In: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus Criticus, by Peter Laslett. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-152.

Locke, J. 1870. Four Letters on Toleration. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler.

Locke, J. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, M. Goldie, ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Maurer, A. 2004. "Darwin, Thomists, and Secondary Causality." The Review of Metaphysics 57: 491-514.

Seabright, P. 2024. The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stump, J. B., ed. 2017. Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

West, J. G. 2006. Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press.

Wood, T. C. 2008. "Species Variability and Creationism." Origins Number 62: 6-24.

Wood, T. C., and M. J. Murray. 2003. Understanding the Pattern of Life: Origins and the Organization of the Species. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman.

Zuckert, M. 2002. Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Zuckert, M. 2005. "Locke-Religion-Equality." The Review of Politics 67: 419-431.

Did C. S. Lewis's Natural Desire for Joy Show the Supernatural Reality of God and Heaven? The Evolutionary Psychology of Religious Experience

The end of the movie--but not the stage play--"Freud's Last Session" suggests that Freud has been persuaded by Lewis's Argument from Desire for the reality of Heaven.  

On his train back to Oxford, Lewis looks at the book that Freud had slipped into his coat pocket.  It's Freud's copy of Lewis's book The Pilgrim's Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2014, originally published in 1933).  Lewis sees that Freud has written inside the book "from error to error, one discovers the entire truth."  Lewis smiles as his train enters a tunnel, and then the movie fades out.

The quotation is so enigmatic that most viewers will be confused as to what it means, although they can see that Lewis is pleased or amused by it.  As I noted in a previous post, the quotation is an altered version of a quotation from Francis Bacon: "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion."

Anyone who has read The Pilgrim's Regress could see how this applies to the book.  It's the story of the pilgrim John whose journey to an enchanting island takes him through adventures with a series of people, most of whom are allegorical representations of various errors that he must avoid.  In the "Afterword to the Third Edition" of the book, Lewis explained it as a depiction of his own experience of intense Desire as he progressed "from 'popular realism' to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity" (231).  In later writings--particularly, in Surprised by Joy (1955)--Lewis called this Desire Joy, and he said that "in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else" (17).

THE ARGUMENT FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF JOY

In the "Afterword" and in Surprised by Joy, Lewis indicated that there is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Joyful Desire.  When people feel this Desire, they think they know what they are desiring.  A child looks wistfully at a distant hillside and thinks he would be happy "if only I were there."  Or he reads a fairy tale and thinks he would be happy if that fairy-tale land really existed.  A man in love thinks he would be happy if he possessed the perfect beloved.  Or a man longs to travel to foreign lands, and he thinks he would be fulfilled if he could see visit those places.  Or a man driven by ambition to gain great status and power thinks he would be happy if he could satisfy that ambition.  Or a man absorbed by his studies in philosophy or science thinks he would be fully satisfied if only he could achieve a full intellectual understanding of his subject.  

Lewis claims that by his own experience he has proven all of these impressions to be wrong.  Every one of these supposed objects for this Joyful Desire is inadequate because having any of these objects would not satisfy the Desire.

"It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given--nay, cannot even be imagined as given--in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.  This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur's castle--the chair in which only one could sit.  And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist" (PR, 237).

Lewis concludes that the One who can sit in that chair is God.  So our search for Joy can be satisfied by nothing in the natural world but only by our entering the supernatural Heaven where we will be united with God.  Freud was perhaps suggesting his agreement--"from error to error, one discovers the entire truth."

But is this really the truth?  Has Lewis made a cogent argument for this conclusion?  John Beversluis (C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion) has made a good case for saying No.  And I agree with Beversluis that Lewis's desire for Joy--for religious transcendence--is not evidence for the transcendent reality of God and Heaven.  

But I disagree with Beversluis's claim that this is not a natural desire at all.  There are good reasons for believing that the desire for religious transcendence is one of the 20 natural desires of our evolved human nature, although the natural reality of this desire neither proves nor disproves the supernatural reality of its transcendent object.

As Beversluis indicates, Lewis's Argument from Desire can be framed schematically as either deductive or inductive.    The deductive version goes like this (Beversluis, 41):

1.  Nature makes nothing in vain, that is, every natural desire has an object that can satisfy it.

2.  Joy is a natural desire, but not for any natural object because no object in the natural world can satisfy it.

3.  Therefore, Joy is a desire for an object beyond the natural world and that object must exist.

Lewis suggested this deductive form when he used the word "must" in his conclusion: "And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist."

The inductive version of the argument goes like this (Beversluis, 43):

1.  Many natural desires have objects that can satisfy them.

2.  Joy is a natural desire for a kind of satisfaction that no object in the natural world can satisfy.

3.  Therefore, Joy is a desire for an object beyond the natural world and that object probably exists.

Lewis suggested this inductive form when he used words like "a pretty good indication" and "most probable explanation."   In "The Weight of Glory," he wrote:

"Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy.  But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it?  'Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.'  But I think it may be urged that this misses the point.  A man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic.  But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.  In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.  A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called 'falling in love' occurred in a sexless world" (The Weight of Glory, New York: HarperCollins, 2001, pp. 32-33, italics added).

In Mere Christianity, he wrote:

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.  A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food.  A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water.  Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.  If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world" (120, italics added). 

In his play (p. 16), but not in his screenplay for the movie, Mark St. Germain has Lewis repeat this passage but without the sentence on sexual desire. 

Beversluis correctly observes that Lewis's argument--in both its deductive and inductive forms--fails.  The deductive argument fails because it begs the question at issue: the major proposition assumes that "every natural desire has an object that can satisfy it," but that's what Lewis needs to prove.

The inductive argument rests on a false analogy: it's not at all clear that the desire for supernatural transcendence is a natural desire of the same kind as the natural human desires for food and sex or the duckling's natural desire to swim.  From the fact that the natural desires for food, sex, and swimming have natural objects that can satisfy them, it does not follow that a natural desire for a supernatural bliss probably shows that there really is a supernatural object that can satisfy it.

The natural desire for religious transcendence is different in kind from all other natural desires, because it is the only natural desire that aims at a supernatural end that cannot be achieved in the natural world.  Beversluis contends that this desire is so radically different from all other natural desires that it should not be considered a natural desire at all.  Here is where I disagree with him.

Although Lewis does not explain what he means by natural desires, his examples--human desires for food and sex and a duckling's desire to swim--suggest that he means innate desires that arise spontaneously in all normal members of a species as part of their evolved nature.  Natural desires are evolutionary adaptations that are necessary for the survival and reproductive success of a species.  But, Beversluis observes, Lewis's Joy does not seem to be biologically instinctive in this way, because it is not necessary for the survival or reproductive success of the human species.  Moreover, if it were an instinctive desire of evolved human nature, one would expect to find evidence that it is universal for all human cultures throughout human history; but Lewis has not provided such evidence (45, 52-53).

LEWIS ON THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Lewis does suggest, however, an evolutionary explanation of religious experience that could be judged in the light of the modern evolutionary psychology and cognitive science of religion.  Showing the influence of Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), Lewis sketches the evolutionary development of religion through four stages in the Introduction to The Problem of Pain (16-25).  The first stage is what Otto called the experience of the Numinous--the feeling of dread and awe in the experience of the uncanny.  Otto coined the word "numinous" from the Latin word numen for "divinity."  According to Lewis, this arose first among prehistoric human beings.  "Now nothing is more certain than that man, from a very early period, began to believe that the universe was haunted by spirits" (17).  This dreadful and awful feeling of ghostly invisible spirits was "the seed of religious experience" (God in the Dock, 189).

The second stage in religious evolution came with the human feeling that there is a moral law--the sense that we "ought" or "ought not" to engage in certain kinds of conduct.  Human beings agreed in prescribing this moral law although they often failed to obey it.

The third stage in religious development was when human beings identified the Numinous Power as the guardian of that moral law.  The Jews in the Hebrew Bible show this identification of the Numinous with the moral law:  God is righteous and loves righteousness.

Finally, in New Testament Christianity, a man is born who claims to be the son of, or the same as, that Numinous Power who is also the giver of the moral law.  The teaching of the New Testament--the incarnation of Jesus as both human and divine and the promise that his sacrificial death and resurrection will redeem sinful human beings so that they can be resurrected to eternal life in Heaven--is the completion of all previous religious development.  Because now, for the first time in history, human beings can satisfy their deepest natural desire for supernatural happiness by being resurrected after death to eternal life in the presence of God, and thus return to the true home from which they came.

Lewis suggests that this evolution of religious experience through four stages could be explained in two ways.  It could be a fully natural evolution of human religious experience through four stages of the biological and cultural evolution of the human mind.  Or it could be that at each of these four stages of natural evolution, there was some human experience of a supernatural Revelation from God.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, Lewis was a theistic evolutionist, who thought there was no conflict between the natural science of evolution and the supernatural Revelation of Christianity, because Christians should see that God could carry out His will through the natural process of evolution along with some supernatural interventions into natural history (such as the Incarnation of Christ).

So, when prehistoric human ancestors first began to experience the Numinous--feeling dread and awe in the belief that "the universe was haunted by spirits"--Lewis says there are only two possible explanations:

"There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe.  Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given" (Mere Christianity, 20-21).

Presumably, most readers of this passage will dismiss the first alternative--"a mere twist in the human mind"--as unsatisfactory, and thus they might think there is no good alternative to Revelation as an explanation.  But here Lewis displays one of his favorite rhetorical tricks--the false dichotomy.  Anyone who knows anything about the evolutionary psychology of religion will know that to explain the appearance of the first religious experience of a world "haunted by spirits" in human evolution, we are not forced to choose between "a mere twist in the human mind" that is inexplicable and a Revelation that erupts miraculously in human experience. 

THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

In saying that a mental capacity for religious experience would be "serving no biological function," Lewis adopted the position of Alfred Russel Wallace, who agreed with Charles Darwin in developing the theory of evolution by natural selection, but who denied that this could explain the higher mental and moral capacities of human beings.  Wallace argued that since the mental power for religious experience does not serve any biological need for survival and reproduction, this mental power could not have evolved by natural selection.  So natural selection shaped the "animal nature" of human beings but not their "spiritual nature," which must arise from "the unseen universe of Spirit."

But now the evolutionary psychology of religion--as developed by Justin Barrett, Jesse Bering, and others--can show how although the propensity to religious experience has not evolved directly to serve a biological function, it has evolved as a byproduct of innate mental mechanisms directly shaped by biological evolution for detecting agency--for identifying objects in the environment (particularly, animals and other human beings) that move themselves for the sake of goals as guided by mental states like beliefs and desires.  Once such agents have been detected, the human capacity for mind-reading generates predictions about the mental states of these agents and how these mental states might direct their actions.  As naturally social animals whose survival and reproductive fitness has depended on a subtle negotiation of the complex social interactions among human agents, human beings have been endowed by evolution with intuitive mental tools necessary for social life.

For that reason, our agency detection device becomes hypersensitive: we detect agency based on limited evidence.  Particularly, in urgent situations of distress, where we cannot account for what is happening based on natural causes, we are quick to infer supernatural agents at work.  We then want to negotiate with these supernatural agents--spirits, ghosts, or gods--to protect ourselves from harm.  All human societies throughout history show this natural propensity to believe in supernatural agents to be a human universal.  The original expression of that religious experience was in our hunter-gatherer ancestors who had shamans as mediators with supernatural agents, and who lived in a world "haunted by spirits"--feeling the awe and dread of the Numinous, which Lewis saw as "the seed of the religious experience."

The subsequent development of religion beyond this original experience of awful spirits came through cultural evolution, in which some religious traditions had a selective advantage in that some were better than others in satisfying the innate mental tools of the evolved human mind for detecting supernatural agency.  Justin Barrett has argued that the Abrahamic monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--are more naturally attractive to the human mind, because the human mind is naturally inclined to believe in the divine traits of the Abrahamic God--God as moral, God as superknowing, God as immortal, God as superpowerful, and God as Creator.  This would confirm Lewis's claim that Judaism and Christianity became the most humanly satisfying forms of religious development.

But this Darwinian science of the biological and cultural evolution of religion as culminating in Abrahamic monotheism does not either prove or disprove the real supernatural existence of the Abrahamic God.  A Christian evolutionist like Justin Barrett can see this as showing that the natural evolution of religious belief is compatible with believing in the truth of Revelation, because we can believe that God used the evolutionary process to create a human mind that would have a desire for religious transcendence that would be fulfilled by faith in the revealed truth of God and Heaven.  But an atheistic evolutionist like Jesse Bering can see this natural evolution of religious belief as showing the natural human propensity for believing religious illusions.

Thus, Lewis's natural desire for Joy--for the Paradise of eternal life with God in Heaven--does not by itself prove the reality of that supernatural object of his desire.

We are left, then, with the unresolvable debate between Reason and Revelation, in which neither side can refute the other.  But as Lewis saw in his many years of debating atheists and skeptics in the Oxford Socratic Club, a modern liberal social order can secure the freedom of thought that makes it possible to have such a public debate that would not be possible in a more theocratic or illiberal social order.

And even if the Socratic and Darwinian zetetic philosophers lack the absolute knowledge or wisdom that would be necessary to refute Revelation, they can find such joy in the philosophic life of loving wisdom even without ever fully achieving it that they can attain the natural happiness possible in this life, so that they need feel no longing for a supernatural happiness in some heavenly afterlife.  Those living the philosophic life might even find joy in understanding--in at least some limited way--that everything in the Universe, and even the Universe itself, must eventually die.

I have written about the evolution of Heaven and Hell and given some reasons for agreeing with Wallace Stevens that "death is the mother of beauty."

Lewis was mistaken in thinking his desire for Joy was a desire for Heaven.  A deathless life in a heavenly paradise would not satisfy us, because it would not be a human life at all.

A Thousand Posts (2)

2009
In January, my post on "Evolutionary Psychology's Slow Acceptance of Darwinian Morality" pointed to the most important turn in the recent history of evolutionary psychology--the acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality in The Descent of Man. 

In his famous lecture on "Evolution and Ethics" in 1893, Thomas Huxley adopted a Kantian transcendentalist view of ethics and invoked the is/ought dichotomy in rejecting Darwin's claim that the evolutionary explanation of morality was part of the evolutionary science of human nature.  For over a century after Huxley's lecture, most Darwinian biologists--including George Williams and Richard Dawkins--agreed with Huxley's rejection of Darwin's evolutionary ethics.  Therefore, they were disturbed by Ed Wilson's efforts--in Sociobiology (1975) and Consilience (1998)--to revive Darwin's evolutionary study of morality.  In the 1980s and 1990s, I had argued in agreement with Darwin and Wilson, but my argument was scorned by the leaders of evolutionary psychology.  Remarkably, however, by 2009, the tide had turned as the growing research on the evolutionary psychology of morality confirmed that Darwin was right after all.  One of the leaders of this movement was Jonathan Haidt.  I wrote my first post on Haidt's research in November of 2009.  I returned to Haidt in September of 2012 and October of 2016.  In January of 2011, I wrote a post on how Sam Harris had persuaded Richard Dawkins to change his mind and accept Darwinian ethics.

An evolutionary moral psychology assumes the reality of an evolved human nature.  But my colleague at Northern Illinois University--David Buller--has dismissed the idea of human nature as a superstition in his book Adapting Minds, which is a general critique of evolutionary psychology.  In January, I wrote a post arguing that Buller's denial of human nature depends on a silly definition of human nature as consisting only of traits that satisfy three conditions--first, they must be unique to human beings and thus not shared with any other animals; second, they must be invariably and exactly the same for all human individuals everywhere; and, third, they must be eternal essences that are not historically contingent.  It is easy for Buller to argue that human evolution has not produced a human species with such traits. But a sensible definition of human nature does not require these conditions. We could define human nature as constituted by regularities in that suite of generally recurrent anatomical, physiological, and psychological traits that characterize the human species.  These regularities do not have to be uniquely human, invariably the same for all individuals, or eternal essences.  These regularities of human nature include what I have identified as the 20 natural desires.

I elaborated some of these points in April in posts on nature and human nature and on Marjorie Grene's account of natural teleology and the concept of species.  In September, I defended the Aristotelian and Darwinian understanding of species.

In the spring, I taught a graduate seminar on David Hume. In May, I wrote a long post on "A Research Program for a Humean Science of Human Nature."  In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume laid out his grand vision of a comprehensive science grounded on a science of human nature.  Every topic that I have taken up on this blog could be understood as part of this Humean science of human nature rooted in Darwinian evolutionary science. This science could be sketched out according to at least ten broad themes running through my blog posts: (1) Darwinian liberal education, (2) deep history, (3) ethology, (4) behavioral game theory, (5) neuroscience, (6) social history, (7) moral psychology, (8) evolution of religion, (9) evolutionary aesthetics, and (10) the Darwinian future of human nature.

In May and June, I travelled around England and Scotland, and I wrote a series of posts on the natural history of Great Britain based on my travels.  During this trip, I visited Darwin's house in Down and wrote some posts on that.  As I indicated, some of my first reading of Darwin included the notebooks that he began writing after he returned to England from his trip on the Beagle.  I was impressed with those notebooks as showing Darwin's mind at work, and my writing of this blog is in some ways following the style of Darwin's writing in his notebooks.

My visit to Darwin's house and reading about his family life led me to write about how Darwin's pondering the suffering and death of his daughter Annie manifested his understanding of love and death.  I wrote this in response to Peter Lawler's assertion that Darwin advanced an "impersonal theory of evolution" denying the personal reality of love and death.

From the end of June to the end of September, I wrote many posts on the history and philosophy of Platonic moral cosmology, in which I set up a debate between Remi Brague and C. S. Lewis, on one side, and Catherine Zuckert and Joseph Cropsey, on the other.  Brague and Lewis see Plato's dialogues (particularly the Timaeus and book 10 of The Laws) as defending a divinely designed teleological cosmology as setting the cosmic standards for the moral and political life of human beings, but they also see this Platonic moral cosmology as overturned by modern science (including Darwinism) in a way that promotes moral nihilism by teaching that the cosmos is indifferent or even hostile to human concerns.  By contrast, Zuckert and Cropsey see Plato's Socrates as denying, or at least questioning, that moral cosmology taught by Timaeus and the Athenian stranger, and suggesting that instead of finding moral guidance in the cosmos, humans need to look to their own human wants and desires.  Even if the cosmos does not care about or for us, we care about and for ourselves.  This Socrates identified by Zuckert and Cropsey belongs to a tradition of Socratic skepticism that includes Cicero, Hume, and Darwin.

If Zuckert and Cropsey have the correct interpretation of Socrates' position, then Socrates is close to my position--that human morality and politics depend not on a cosmic teleology but on an immanent teleology of human natural desires.  If human beings are by their natural desires directed to certain ends or purposes, then we can see those ends or purposes as intrinsic to their nature, regardless of whether those ends or purposes have any cosmic reference.  Darwinian biology supports such an immanent teleology because it recognizes the goal-directed behavior characteristic of various animal species, including the human species.

While some Straussians like Zuckert and Cropsey reject Platonic cosmic teleology as false, others insist that it needs to be supported as at least a "noble lie" that sustains popular conceptions of natural right, and that the Darwinian denial of cosmic teleology is (as Nietzsche put it) "true but deadly."

In September, I endorsed the "Midwest Straussianism" promoted by Catherine and Michael Zuckert.  The Straussians seem to have affirmed three propositions that are contradictory: 1. America is modern. 2. Modernity is bad. 3. America is good.  To overcome the contradiction, the West-Coast Straussians have denied #1, the East-Coast Straussians have denied #3, and the Midwest Straussians have denied #2.  I agree with the Midwest Straussians that modernity is good, and for me this includes not only modern political thought, but also modern natural science.

From October to December, I wrote many posts on the evolutionary biology of human rights as rooted in evolved human nature, and in doing so, I argued that the idea of human rights does not depend on any religious belief in the creation of human beings in the image of God.  As part of this discussion, I wrote about the debate over female genital mutilation as a violation of human rights.

2010
In January, I travelled to England to direct a week-long seminar at Oxford University on "Evolution and Ethics."  The participants were mostly philosophy professors and students from China.  In October, we met again in China (Beijing) for a conference to present papers coming out of the seminar.  This led to a series of posts on the evolutionary psychology of ethics.

As I anticipated, much of the discussion at the seminar turned on the debate between the Platonic or transcendentalist view of ethics and the Humean or empiricist view. A Darwinian evolutionary understanding of ethics is on the side of the Humean view that sees ethics as rooted in human nature, particularly in human emotions, beliefs, and desires. On the other side, the Platonic view taken by those like Kant looks to a transcendent conception of the Good that is somehow woven into the order of the cosmos. (As I have indicated in various posts, the careful reader of the Platonic dialogues might doubt whether Plato himself--or Plato's Socrates--was a Platonist in this way.)

A growing number of leading philosophers today are adopting a Humean/Darwinian moral psychology supported by recent research in evolutionary science, neuroscience, anthropology, and animal behavior. But one can still see the powerful influence of a Kantian transcendentalism in moral philosophy that regards morality as an autonomous realm of pure reason totally separated from the empirical realm of nature as studied by natural science.

Kantian philosophers like Richard Joyce worry that evolutionary ethics promotes moral nihilism by teaching that morality is fictional. Joyce agrees with Kant that by definition moral judgments presuppose belief in a transcendent world of moral facts beyond the empirical world of natural facts. But since he denies the truth of that belief, because there really are no such moral facts, he concludes that we cannot know that morality is true, and therefore we cannot know that moral rightness and wrongness really exist. Moreover, he argues that evolutionary ethics necessarily leads us to this conclusion that morality is fictional, because an evolutionary account of morality explains it as arising from the natural facts of human desires and capacities without any reference to any distinctively moral facts.

I agree that believing in a moral law grounded in divine will or transcendent reason might strengthen the moral motivation of people with such a belief. But it seems clear to me that people can still have a strong motivation for moral conduct when they believe that morality has no other ground than the evolved human nature of our moral emotions.

That a Kantian philosophical idealism does not necessarily support good moral judgment is indicated by the fact that most of the German philosophers who supported Nazism were Kantian idealists. For me, as I indicated in a post in January, this suggests that the evils of Nazism flowed from a metaphysical tradition of idealist utopian philosophy that stretches from Plato to Fichte to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

My reasoning for rejecting Kantian categorical normativity is clarified in my post on "Philippa Foot and the Hypothetical Imperatives of Natural Goodness" (March).

In 2010, I wrote a lot about the natural evolution of religious belief.  I have identified the desire for religious understanding as one of the twenty natural desires rooted in our evolved human nature. Human beings generally desire to understand the world as governed by gods or God, because this satisfies their natural longing to make sense of things that would otherwise be incomprehensible.

The recent research on the evolutionary and cognitive causes of religious belief goes a long way to substantiate my position. The general reasoning for how religious belief evolved as an innate disposition of human nature is laid out by David Hume and Charles Darwin. This new research provides elaborate theoretical and empirical grounds for their naturalistic account of religion.

One of the proponents of this research is Justin Barrett, whom I met at the Oxford seminar. He is an evolutionary psychologist who argues that the evolved propensity of the human mind to detect intelligent agents supports a natural tendency to believe in divine agents. Barrett is a Christian evolutionist.  His work largely confirms what Hume says in his Natural History of Religion. Barrett is a Christian who sees his evolutionary explanation of religious belief as compatible with his own Christian belief that God has created human beings so that they can discover him.  I have also written about Jesse Bering (in February of 2011), who explains the evolutionary psychology of religious belief in a way similar to Barrett's explanation, but Bering is an atheist.

Also in 2010, I wrote about Rebecca Goldstein's philosophical novel on the "36 arguments for the existence of God" (February), the evolution of Heaven and Hell (April-May), the evolutionary game theory of how religion supports cooperation (April), and Confucianism (June, August, October).  My writing on Confucianism was drawn from my paper on Darwinian and Confucian Ethics for the conference on "Evolution and Ethics" in Beijing in October, which included some of the same Chinese professors and students who were at the Oxford conference in January.

Religious belief is uniquely human because it arises from the uniquely human capacity for symbolic thought and communication that allows human beings to construct a shared imagined reality.  In February, I wrote about how Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have explained human symbolism as one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic.  Recognizing these four levels of evolution helps to explain the "animal culture wars" (April): if "culture" is defined as inherited behavioral traditions, then some nonhuman animals have culture; but if "culture" is defined as inherited symbolic traditions (like religious belief), then this is uniquely human.

In 2010, I wrote a lot about Aristotelianism.  In March and April, I wrote a series of posts on Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl's Aristotelian liberalism and showed how a Darwinian moral and political psychology supported this.  In the fall, I was teaching a graduate seminar on Aristotle, and I wrote some posts in September, October, and December, on "Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics," which went into my paper on "The Darwinian Science of Aristotelian Virtue" for the conference on "Science and Virtue" organized by Peter Lawler and Marc Guerra at Berry College (Mount Berry, Georgia) in November.  In 2013, the papers for this conference were published in The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke, edited by Lawler and Guerra (NIU Press).

In July, I pointed to my essay for "Cato Unbound" on "Darwinian Liberalism," which would lead to papers and lectures in later years on the Darwinian psychology of classical liberalism.

My list of 20 natural desires includes the natural desire for courage in war, because human beings generally desire war when they think it will advance their group in conflicts with outside groups.  The is the one desire that has provoked the most criticism from people who are uncomfortable with the idea that war might be rooted in evolved human nature.  In 2010, I began to write the evolutionary psychology of war in various posts (in February, June, and December).  I returned to this issue in 2011, in response to the publication of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Also, in 2010, I began writing about anarchism (June) and equality in the Lockean state of nature (July), and I would return to these topics in subsequent years.

To be continued . . .

Strauss, Darwin, and the Reason-Revelation Debate

Darwinian science completes the Greek philosophic substitution of "natural order" or "natural morality" for "divine law" by providing a natural explanation for how the order of the cosmos could arise by natural evolution, within which human morality could arise as an expression of evolved human nature. In this way, Darwinian science took the side of reason against revelation, but without being able to refute the possibility of revelation. Thus does Darwinian science fit into the reason-revelation debate as understood by Leo Strauss.

In his lecture in 1948 on "Reason and Revelation," Strauss indicated that the irreconcilable conflict between revelation and philosophy or science is manifest in the conflict between the Biblical story of Creation and Darwinian evolutionary science.

In "Progress or Return?" (1952)--reprinted in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism--Strauss puts this conflict in the context of "the basic question of how to find one's bearings in the cosmos." He explains:

"The Greek answer fundamentally is this: we have to discover the first things on the basis of inquiry. We can note two implications of what inquiry means here. In the first place, inquiry implies seeing with one's own eyes as distinguished from hearsay; it means observing for oneself. Secondly, the notion of inquiry presupposes the realization of the fundamental difference between human production and the production of things which are not manmade, so that no conclusion from human production to the production of nonmanmade things is possible except if it is first established by demonstration that the visible universe has been made by thinking beings. This implication, I think, is decisive: it was on the basis of the principles of Greek philosophy that what later became known as demonstrations of the existence of God or gods came into being. This is absolutely necessary, and that is true not only in Aristotle, but in Plato as well, as you see, for example, from the tenth book of the Laws. An ascent from sense perception and reasoning on sense data, an ascent indeed guided, according to Plato and Aristotle, by certain notions, leads upwards; and everything depends on the solidity of the ascending process, on the demonstration. The quest for the beginning, for the first things, becomes now the philosophic or scientific analysis of the cosmos; the place of the divine law, in the traditional sense of the term, where it is a code traced to a personal God, is replaced by a natural order, which may even be called, as it was later to be called, a natural law--or at any rate, to use a wider term, a natural morality. So the divine law, in the real and strict sense of the term, is only the starting point, the absolutely essential starting point, for Greek philosophy, but it is abandoned in the process. And if it is accepted by Greek philosophy, it is accepted only politically, meaning for the education of the many, and not as something which stands independently" (255-56).  (Also in K. H. Green's edited anthology, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, pp. 113-14.)

As Strauss indicates here, the proofs for the existence of God by inferring invisible divine causes from visible natural effects were first developed by Plato and Aristotle--particularly, in Book 10 of the Laws, where Plato sketched the reasoning for intelligent design theory or natural theology, the same fundamental reasoning later developed in medieval natural theology and in the contemporary intelligent design theory of Bill Dembski and Michael Behe. Paul first introduced this into Christianity in his Letter to the Romans (1:20), when he declared (under the influence of Greek philosophy): "The invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made."

Strauss also indicates, however, the essential fallacy in such reasoning--"the fundamental difference between human production and the production of things which are not manmade, so that no conclusion from human production to the production of nonmanmade things is possible except if it is first established by demonstration that the visible universe has been made by thinking beings." Indeed, this anthropomorphic assumption that our experience of human mental agency can be projected onto the cosmos runs through Plato's reasoning in the Laws and the longing of Plato's Socrates for a cosmos ruled by Nous. Dembski shows this same anthropomorphic assumption when he says: "The point of the intelligent design program is to extend design from the realm of human artifacts to the natural sciences." This rhetorical strategy hides the fact that while detecting the design of human artifacts is a matter of common observation and logic, detecting the design of divine artifacts is not, because while the working of human intelligent design is known by natural experience, the working of divine intelligent design is not.

The rational ascent to divine law is the starting point for Greek philosophy, but a starting point that is abandoned in the move from divine law to natural order or natural law. This requires the fulfillment of Greek natural philosophy, which sought to explain the cosmic whole as a product of nature and chance, within which human art could arise through custom and reason(Laws, 888e-89e).

But Greek natural philosophy faced three seemingly insurmountable problems. The first problem was that despite the weaknesses in the intelligent design argument, there did not seem to be any plausible alternative for explaining the apparent design in the natural world. If the irreducible complexity in the universe is not a product of divine design, then how else can we explain it?

The second problem was that a purely naturalistic explanation of the cosmos could not easily explain human moral order without falling into a radical relativism or nihilism. If the cosmos is not the product of a God who is also a moral lawgiver, does this mean that there is no cosmic support for human morality, which is a purely artificial and therefore arbitrary product of human will?

The third problem is that it's unclear whether even the most successful natural philosophy can refute the claims of revelation. If natural philosophy must assume that miracles are impossible--that there are no breaks in the causal regularities of nature--doesn't this beg the question at issue? How does natural philosophy prove the impossibility of miracles, including the impossibility of miraculous revelation in which some human beings can have a direct experience of God? (Actually, this third problem did not emerge clearly until Greek philosophy confronted the scriptural religions of the Bible and the Koran in the Middle Ages.)

Darwinian science supports the fulfillment of natural philosophy by solving--at least in principle--the first two problems. But it leaves the third problem unresolved.

Darwinian science solves the first problem by showing how natural order can arise through an evolutionary process of spontaneous order emerging from random variation and selective retention, by which irreducibly complex orders can arise without intentional design.

Darwinian science solves the second problem by showing how moral order can arise through the natural evolution of a human moral sense shaped by social instincts, social learning, language, and deliberate judgment. The human good is not a cosmic good, but it is a natural good in so far as it conforms to human nature.

Darwinian science does not solve the third problem--the reason-revelation debate--because it cannot refute the possibility of miracles--the possibility of miracles in natural history that are not detectable by natural science or the possibility that natural evolution itself is a miracle as arising from laws of nature originally created by nature's God or the possibility that some human beings can directly experience a revelation of God's presence.

Darwinian science can explain the evolutionary psychology of religious belief as prompted by the anthropomorphic fallacy, because it can explain this as an extension of our evolved social disposition for "mind reading" and detecting agency. As cognitive scientists like Jesse Bering and Justin Barrett have shown, we can explain the natural desire for religious understanding as the work of a "hyperactive agency detection device," which was first suggested by Darwin in his evolutionary theory of religion in The Descent of Man.

And yet even this does not resolve the reason-revelation debate, because even if we accept this evolutionary explanation of religious belief, we are free to see religion as either an adaptive illusion (as Bering does) or as an adaptive truth (as Barrett does).

In any case, Darwin made it clear--especially in his Autobiography--that in the choice between the life of reason and the life of revelation, he had deliberately chosen the life of reason: "As for myself, I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science."

Related posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.