Thinking Christian

The question at New Scientist was, how did we ever come up with the idea of gods? The answer begins,

It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods. Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. “It’s not that religion is not important,” says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, “it’s that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress.” The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions….

Two thoughts on this:

1) “Science has largely shied away from asking why…. but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions.”

The obvious underlying assumption is that until science tells us, we don’t know; for there is no other way to know but through science.

2) “It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times…. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.”

This is marvelously consistent with our having been created in God’s image, for relating with God. What’s lacking in that answer? Sure, we can also “conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods, and monsters,” but this is easily understood also from a Biblical perspective: our relationship with God has been broken, and in our alienation we worship the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:20-23).

The New Scientist article proposes two cognitive features of humans as sources of our religiosity: the way wementally treat living things as opposed to non-living things, and an “overdeveloped sense of cause and effect.” There’s no need to doubt these are true of humans, from childhood on. There’s also no need to doubt that they contribute to beliefs in that imaginary world. But is there a need to assume that the explanation for religion is entirely natural and evolutionary? No, for God has spoken to us, we have his revelation of where our belief in him first originated, where it has gone wrong, and what he has done through Christ to bring us back to him.  

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Language Log takes frequent note of strange things science journalists say. Their most recent is about the neuroscience of mothers watching children in distress. Here is part of what LL’s Mark Liberman’s had to say:

It’s rhetorically interesting that Ms. Parker-Pope takes the existence of brain differences observed by fMRI as evidence that the reactions in question are “hard-wired”, i.e. innate. No doubt the ability to recognize one’s children and the impulse to empathize with them have a substantial evolved biological substrate. But the fact that the psychological states in question are distinguishable in fMRI scans tells us nothing whatsoever about the balance between Nature and Nurture, in this case or in any other.

….

I guess that it’s the bizarre inference from observation in fMRI scans to innateness that makes this story at all newsworthy.

This is akin to the inference neuroscientists have made (examples here and here) that because they see no soul in their scans, therefore there is no such thing. (The Language Log posts notes later that the researchers themselves were partly guilty for the “bizarre inference.”) There’s an unjustified logical leap in both instances.

In the case of the soul, I suspect this reflects a bias that “if it isn’t science, it isn’t true,” or at least, “if it isn’t science, it isn’t knowledge.”

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