 Let's look at one final challenge to religion that's emerged from science and this is a challenge that's emerged from certain empirical data that's only come to the forefront in the last couple of decades. This is a challenge that's been raised from the domain of evolutionary psychology. So evolutionary psychology is a field of study that aims to understand the ways in which evolutionary pressures have shaped human cognition and behavior. These religious beliefs and practices are pervasive across times and cultures. It gives us some reason to think that religion didn't just spread, but in some way was wired into our cognitive machinery. The reason it appears everywhere and across all times is because there's something just about the way that we're designed by evolution to come to hold these beliefs. So then one begins to ask the question, well how would such evolutionary explanations work? How would evolution help to explain that we're wired in such a way that religious beliefs and practices emerge? Well, when evolutionary psychologists began to think about this, they thought this was really an especially puzzling way to try to explain the emergence of religion and the reason for this is because so many religious beliefs and practices seem to harm our biological fitness. That is, religion seems something more like a Darwinian anomaly because what you find in religious traditions is incentives for people to do things like rest rather than gathering more food or doing work to advance our fortunes or providing significant sums of money to the temple or to the priest or to the church when those funds instead could be kept for oneself as a way of advancing one's own fortunes. Taking vows of celibacy, for example, don't seem to enhance your evolutionary fitness. So how do we explain the emergence of religion when it looks like it contains all these fitness harming practices? The challenge was put by the anthropologist Scott Atran in his book, And God We Trust As Follows. Religion is materially expensive and unrelentingly counterfactual and even counterintuitive. Religious practice is costly in terms of material sacrifice, emotional expenditure and cognitive effort in that it requires us to maintain both factual and counterintuitive networks of belief. So given all of its liabilities, is it really realistic to think that evolution can provide us with some explanation for why it's found across times and cultures? I should pause and say, initially, there's something seems to be odd about evolutionary explanations of beliefs. The first time I think anyone comes to this topic, they think, well, I don't believe the things I believe because evolution wired me in certain ways. I believe certain things because people taught me stuff or I've seen certain things happen in history or I've engaged in certain kinds of reasoning, but evolution doesn't do anything to explain that. And while that might be true at the level of individual beliefs, the belief that George Washington is the first president of the United States isn't something you believe because of evolution, but it applies instead at a more general level. So think of it this way. We have certain kinds of cognitive equipment that wires us up in a certain way that when we're stimulated, our senses are stimulated in certain ways, we form certain kinds of beliefs. I see the cup on the table, I form beliefs about cups being on the table, and I didn't teach myself to do that. I didn't learn to do it. No one said to me, when it looks to you this way, there's a cup on the table. I just reflexively form those beliefs. What specific beliefs I perform, I form, that might depend on the circumstances in which I'm in. So maybe something similar is true when it comes to religious belief. That is, maybe we're wired up in a certain way that we're led to form certain kinds of religious beliefs or to engage in certain kinds of religious practices when we're stimulated in certain ways. So what would that look like? Well, we know that the human mind is a cluster of cognitive tools, and these cognitive tools work together, collaborate in certain ways, that they generate certain sorts of beliefs. And according to certain theorists, leads us to form religious beliefs. So for example, these tools lead us to form beliefs in unseen agents. This is a phenomenon that we're all familiar with when we're laying in bed at night and we hear the loud bang noise in the closet. What initially happens to us is that we have a fear of response. We may get goosebumps. Our respiration rate might increase, and we might wonder, who's in there? Who's in the closet? It's sort of an odd belief to form just on the basis of a sound, but it's probably an evolved disposition we have to help us avoid predators. So we tend to infer the existence of unseen agents in the form of uncertain circumstances. Perhaps that's part of the cognitive mechanism that leads us to generate the belief in supernatural agents or in gods. It's also the case that these unseen agents, when we hypothesize unseen agents, we sometimes hypothesize the existence of agents that violate what seem to be certain innate cognitive expectations we have about agents. These are sometimes called counter-intuitive agents in the evolutionary psychology literature. And what happens when we postulate the existence of these so-called counter-intuitive agents is that they tend to be highly memorable. So when we think about the sorts of entities that we describe in folk literature, talking trees, and so on, or invisible agents, agents that don't have bodies, these tend to be very memorable for us. And we tend to generate narratives about them. It's a truth about human culture that we're liable to generate narratives about these counter-intuitive agents. So what evolutionary psychologists have claimed is that there are certain cognitive tools that we have that trigger certain kinds of beliefs. And when those beliefs form in certain sorts of ways, we tend to form narratives about them and to transmit those to others. And these are especially powerful when we attribute to those agents what you might call strategic information. Strategic information from which we might benefit, either because we're placating those agents or because it's providing us with strategic advantages with respect to how we interact with others. And maybe that strategic information is of the sort that, when we act morally towards others, they'll act morally towards us. If these agents are able to communicate that sort of information to us, then it's valuable for us to have an awareness of them and to be involved in them in a way that religious rituals oftentimes describe. So there are many different theories, many different evolutionary theories about the origin of religious belief. And there's lots of data being collected that are aimed at trying to either help us confirm those hypotheses or disconfirm them. But for many religious believers, find this sort of explanation threatening. And they find it threatening because they think it's provided an explanation for how evolution has caused these beliefs in us, even though they're not true. That is that evolution in some way has tricked us into believing that religion is true. That's the conclusion that some religious believers draw. It's also the conclusion that some critics of religious belief have drawn. So what should we think about this? If these evolutionary explanations of the origin of religion are true, do they in fact debunk or undermine or disconfirm religious belief? Well, there are a few reasons to think not. So one is that at least on the face of it, reasoning of this sort seems to commit a fallacy known as the genetic fallacy. So we know philosophically that we can't determine the truth or falsity of a belief simply on the basis of its origin. So I might come to believe that there are 137 people in the library because it's 137 on my watch right now. Now that would be a really bad reason to believe that there are 137 people in the library right now, but that doesn't mean it's false. So we can't draw conclusions about the truth or falsity of the belief just on the basis of the mechanism by which we came to it. Likewise, if this is the mechanism by which we come to hold religious belief, that doesn't show us that these beliefs are false. But some argue that it's not a matter of reasoning to the falsity of religious belief here. It's a matter of showing that it's unjustified. That is, you've come to hold these beliefs in a way that's not justified. So when you look at the watch and it says 137, well, there might be 137 people in the library, but you shouldn't think it. You shouldn't think it on those grounds. And in the same way, if you came to believe in these religious agents on the basis of these evolved dispositions, you shouldn't believe that either. That's unjustified. So is that correct? Well, maybe or maybe not. So imagine the following scenario. Imagine it's true that there is a God who created the universe and set evolutionary processes in motion in such a way that human beings like us emerged, human beings with these dispositions to come to hold these beliefs. And let's also imagine it's the case that the divine being that created the cosmos and set these evolutionary forces in motion wanted that to happen. Wanted it to be the case that those mechanisms would lead you to have these belief-forming capacities that then led you to hold true beliefs about the existence of these supernatural agents. In that case, it would be as if someone in the library were beaming a signal to my watch to show 137, if there were 137 people in the library. And in that case, it looks like, in fact, perhaps the belief is justified. That is, the belief is tied to the target of the belief in the right sort of way that the belief might turn out to be justified. So what does all that really mean? What it means is, if in fact the universe is created in the way that theists claim, then even if these beliefs emerge through these evolutionary processes, they might perfectly well be justified. So if there is such a God, the beliefs are justified. And if they're not, they're not. Unfortunately, none of that really helps us to conclude whether or not those beliefs are justified on their own, just takes us back to the initial question. Is there such a divine being or not?