Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

The God Gene
Monday, March 5, 2007

In WALKING THE BIBLE, I first wrote about the idea that I felt a physical connection to the land and wondered whether this landscape was somehow in my DNA. At the time this sounded laughable to most people, but ever since the genome was decoded and suggested that we carry historical memory around within us, this idea has been gaining traction.

I was thinking about that this weekend as I was reading through the NYTimes Magazine cover story called "Darwin's God." The article looks at a new corner of evolutionary studies examining where religion comes from. While it's hard to summarize in a few paragraphs, here is an excerpt from the opening. It requires free registration to read, or running out to a newstand while the Sunday edition is still on sale.

The magic-box demonstration helped set Atran on a career studying why humans might have evolved to be religious, something few people were doing back in the ’80s. Today, the effort has gained momentum, as scientists search for an evolutionary explanation for why belief in God exists — not whether God exists, which is a matter for philosophers and theologians, but why the belief does.

This is different from the scientific assault on religion that has been garnering attention recently, in the form of best-selling books from scientific atheists who see religion as a scourge. In “The God Delusion,” published last year and still on best-seller lists, the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins concludes that religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. “Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful,” Dawkins wrote. He is joined by two other best-selling authors — Sam Harris, who wrote “The End of Faith,” and Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University who wrote “Breaking the Spell.” The three men differ in their personal styles and whether they are engaged in a battle against religiosity, but their names are often mentioned together. They have been portrayed as an unholy trinity of neo-atheists, promoting their secular world view with a fervor that seems almost evangelical.

Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.

Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there?

In short, are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?

Labels: Religion in America

Posted by B Feiler at 7:05 AM
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1 Comments:

Anonymous said...: Isn't there a Jewish teaching that states before birth, a unborn child has full knowledge of Torah. The knowledge is lost at birth and the person will spend a portion of his life seeking to regain this lost knowledge.

Interesting how old ideas keep resurfacing and are recycled with new words.; March 6, 2007 10:21:00 AM EST