Reviews of The Faith Instinct
November 19th, 2009
Awhile back Mr. Bradlaugh mentioned he was going to review The Faith Instinct. His alter-ego has now put up a review. And so have I. Unbelievers have much to say about God on High.
Actually unbelievers have nothing at all to say about God on High, according to Derbyshire:
Derbyshire might be correct at this time, contingent on the current state of the art, but in principle the two subjects are quite dependent. Suppose biologists discover a biological tendency to believe in multiple, warlike, sometimes immoral gods. Religious people who believe that a single, peaceful, moral God created human nature (either directly or through evolution) would have a tough time explaining that hypothetical discovery. They could explain it I’m sure, but the point is that they would feel, correctly, that it’s something that demands a theological explanation. It’s not something independent of the content of their belief.
Well yes. There might be an omnipotent Sky God and postmortem sentience. Such things can’t be dispositively disproved, any more than can Russell’s teapot. Inquiries into the biology underlying religious behavior (including mental behavior) can proceed independently of opinions about these things. As I noted in my review, the tally of leading researchers in this field includes at least one atheist and one Christian.
Aaron’s supposition makes no sense. Any “biological tendency” we uncover has to fit the facts of human behavior. You may as well say: “Suppose physicists discover that General Relativity prohibits planets from having more than one natural satellite.” Then there’d be something wrong with the theory, wouldn’t there?
Well, that’s why I said tendency. Didn’t you once say that people probably have a natural tendency not to believe in science? And yet most people in the modern West do believe in it. That is, in contrast to your physics analogy, there might be natural (biological) tendencies that are overcome culturally.
My example of the Greek gods was intentionally extreme, but it didn’t have to be. Isn’t it plausible that scientists might discover that the biological basis of religious belief tends to favor, if only slightly, one religion or type of religion over another? (You could play with this conjecture: what if it varied between populations?) Just for a hypothetical example, suppose this biological basis might favor more authoritarian religious beliefs. Then the biologically disfavored religions, the non-authoritarian ones in this example, would have a theological problem to solve: why did God create humans with this natural tendency towards “false” religious belief?
Biological human nature is not independent of the content of religious belief if that belief includes the claim that human nature itself is God-created.
Vicious circular reasoning, anything goes eh?
Or did you really turned presuppositionalist?
God did not design human beings in accordance with Christian principles, fascist principles, feminist principles, socialist principles, romantic principles, secular humanist principles, vegetarian principles, deep environmentalist principles, biocentric principles, or libertarian principles. Any of these groups could have told God a thing or two.
John McCarthy
@Kevembuangga
I can assure you with a high degree of confidence that God designed me in accordance with strict vagitarian principles.