Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (19 page)

So not just any case of explicit religion/science inconsistency is a genuine case of religion/science conflict. Furthermore, conflict can happen in several different ways. For example, a scientific theory might not be explicitly inconsistent with Christian belief, but inconsistent with Christian belief together with propositions that can’t sensibly be rejected. A theory might be formally consistent with Christian belief, but still be massively improbable with respect to a set of beliefs or a noetic structure more or less like that of most contemporary Christians, or most contemporary Christians in the Western world (and for that matter, most Christians in the non-Western world). Such Christians will typically believe some propositions F by way of faith, and other propositions R because they are or seem to be deliverances of reason (including memory, perception, rational intuition and so on). A given theory might not be improbable with respect to F and also not improbable with respect to R, but massively improbable with respect to the conjunction of F with R, and hence with respect to a noetic structure that contains both F and R. Such a theory might be so unlikely with respect to such a noetic structure that it wouldn’t be a real candidate for belief. An example would be a theory entailing that if human beings have come to be by way of natural selection culling genetic variability, then no rational human being knowingly sacrifices her reproductive prospects in favor of advancing someone else’s welfare. This isn’t incompatible with F, and perhaps also not incompatible with the deliverances of reason. However, a Christian will think the consequent massively improbable, and might (by virtue of reason) be inclined to accept the antecedent. This theory, then, would be incompatible with the noetic structures of such Christians, even if not logically inconsistent with Christian belief as such. There are still other forms of conflict, as I’ll argue later in this chapter.
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To look more deeply into this question of conflict or compatibility between Christian belief and these theories from evolutionary psychology, suppose we examine one of them more carefully: David Sloan Wilson’s theory of religion.
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This theory is a so-called “functional interpretation” of religion. Both terms deserve comment. First, Wilson explicitly says many times that his theory is an
interpretation
of religion. This is a bit surprising: one wouldn’t think of Newton’s laws, for example, or special relativity as interpretations of something or other. What is involved in the theory’s being an interpretation?
Understanding
of one sort or another, presumably; the thought is that once you see religion as having the function ascribed to it in the theory, then you understand it, or understand it more deeply. You understand why there is such a thing as religion, why religions arise and persist, and what they are
for
—what their function or purpose is. In the particular case of Wilson’s theory, the idea is that religions play an important role in group selection. “Many features of religion, such as the nature of supernatural agents and their relationships with humans, can be explained as adaptations designed to enable human groups to function as adaptive units.”
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(A crucial difference between his theory and those of Atran and Boyer, therefore, is that according to the latter religious belief isn’t in fact adaptive.) He aims to “see if the detailed properties of Calvin’s Church can be interpreted as adaptation to its environment,” and he summarizes his theory as follows:

I claim that a knowledge of the details [of Calvin’s Geneva] clearly supports a group-level functional interpretation of Calvinism. Calvinism is an interlocking system with a purpose:
to unify and coordinate a population of people to achieve a common set of goals by collective action. The goals may be difficult to define precisely, but they certainly included what Durkheim referred to as secular utility—the basic goods and services that all people need and want, inside and outside of religion.
²⁶

The thought is that Calvinism is an interlocking system with a purpose: “to unify and coordinate a population of people to achieve a common set of goals by collective action.” This sounds a bit as if he thinks of Calvinism as a project or activity that people undertake in order to achieve a common set of goals, these goals including at least that secular utility of which he speaks. If this were what he means, he would be wrong: Calvin and the other Calvinists weren’t (and aren’t) embracing Calvinism in order to achieve some kind of secular utility. In fact it is doubtful that Calvinism, or Roman Catholicism, or Christianity or for that matter Judaism or Islam are (wholly) intentional activities in that way at all. Are they human activities undertaken in order to achieve a goal? What is the purpose or aim of being a Calvinist? What is the purpose or aim of believing in God? Well, what is the purpose or aim of believing in other people, or believing that there has been a past? The right answer, one thinks, is that believing in God, like believing in the past or in other people, typically doesn’t have any purpose or aim at all. It isn’t that you believe in God or other people in order to achieve some end or other. You might as well ask me what my purpose or aim is in believing that I live in Michigan or that 7+5 = 12. In one sense these are intentional activities; but they are not undertaken in order to achieve some end or other.

You may reply that there is more to Christianity in general and Calvinism in particular than holding beliefs. This is certainly true:
there is also love of God, and prayer, and worship, and ritual, ceremony and liturgy, for example. These are activities one intentionally undertakes. But again, it’s not clear that there is some
purpose
for the sake of which one undertakes to love God: you love God because he is attractive, such as to attract or compel love. Christians pray because it seems the right thing to do, or because they are instructed to pray, and how to pray, by Jesus Christ. The same holds for worship. When worship is going properly it isn’t something done in order to achieve some end outside itself: it is much more spontaneous and immediate than that, and you participate just because it seems right and appropriate. (Of course you
might
engage in worship to please your parents or spouse or children: but then in a case like that it
isn’t
going properly.) This is a complex subject, and now is not the time to go into it. What is clear, however, is that there isn’t any goal or purpose or end involved, typically, in accepting the central tenets of Calvinism or Christianity, and even if there is a purpose or goal or end involved in worship and prayer, it most certainly is not the achievement of the secular goods Wilson mentions.

But Wilson isn’t really proposing that Calvinists themselves engage in the practice of Calvinism in order to achieve those goals. This practice has goals, all right, but they aren’t the goals or purposes of the people engaged in the practice. It is rather that the aims or goals are provided, somehow, by evolution. And of course it isn’t that these aims or goals are those of evolution, or natural selection; as Wilson is thinking of it, those processes don’t have any aims or goals at all and aren’t aiming at the actualization of some state of affairs. Still, the idea is that some of the structures and processes that result from natural selection do have purposes, purposes they acquire from their roles in maximizing fitness. The ultimate purpose of the heart, he no doubt thinks, is to enhance or maximize fitness; its proximate purpose is to pump blood (and pump it in a certain way), and the idea is that it fulfills the former purpose by fulfilling that latter. The proximate purpose
of the immune system is to overcome disease; this purpose is in the service of its ultimate purpose of maximizing fitness. Whether one can really speak of purpose and proper function for organs such as the heart or liver or brain absent a designer and outside the context of theism is of course a matter of dispute; I say you can’t.
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But this isn’t the place to enter that discussion.

So let’s suppose that a heart or a liver, and also an activity like a religion can have a purpose conferred upon it by natural selection, even if God is not orchestrating and guiding that process. According to Wilson, the purpose of a religion, at least in the case of Calvinism, is “to unify and coordinate a population of people.” That isn’t a purpose endorsed by those who practice the religion; still, he thinks, that is its purpose. Here it is instructive to compare Wilson’s views on religion with those of that great master of suspicion, Sigmund Freud. On Freud’s view, religion (and here he’s thinking especially of theistic religions) is an illusion, in his technical sense. This sense is not such as to entail the falsehood of theistic belief, although in fact Freud thinks theism is false: there is no such person as God. Still, illusions have their uses and indeed their functions. The function or purpose of religious belief is really to enable believers to carry on in this cold and hostile or at any rate indifferent world in which we find ourselves. The idea is that theistic belief arises from a psychological mechanism Freud calls “wish-fulfillment”; the wish in this case is father, not to the deed, but to the belief.
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Nature rises up against us, cold, pitiless, implacable, blind to our needs and desires. She delivers hurt, fear, pain, anxiety, suffering; and in the end she demands our death. Paralyzed and appalled, we invent (unconsciously, of course) a father in heaven who exceeds our earthly fathers as much in goodness and
benevolence as in power and knowledge. The alternative would be to sink into depression, stupor, paralysis, and finally death.

This illusion enables us to carry on and survive: therefore it contributes to our fitness. Is this Freudian claim incompatible with Christian belief? Could I accept Christian belief and also accept Freud’s explanation or account of it? Well, maybe. For it is at least possible that God gets us to be aware of him by way of a mechanism like wish-fulfillment. According to Augustine, “Our hearts are restless till they rest in you, O God.” But then it might be that one way God induces awareness of himself in us is through a process of wish-fulfillment: we want so much to be in God’s presence, we want so very much to feel his love, to know that we are loved by the first being of the universe, that we simply come to believe this. I don’t say that’s in fact the way things go; I say only that it is possible and not incompatible with Christian belief.

There is more to Freud’s account, however, than just the idea that we come to believe in God by way of wish-fulfillment; if that were all he thinks, there would be no reason to call theistic belief an
illusion
. What more does Freud say here? That this process of wish-fulfillment isn’t
reality oriented
, as we might say; it is this that makes theistic belief an illusion. We human beings display a large number of belief-producing processes or faculties or mechanisms. There is perception, memory, a priori intuition, credulity, induction, and much else. We ordinarily think these faculties or processes are aimed at the production of true belief: that is what they are
for
, and that is their purpose or function. There are some cognitive processes, however, that are not aimed at the production of true belief, but at some other desideratum. Someone may remember a painful experience as less painful than it actually was. According to John 16:21, “a woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.” You may continue to believe in your friend’s honesty
long after evidence and cool, objective judgment would have dictated a reluctant change of mind. I may believe that I will recover from a dread disease much more strongly than is warranted by the statistics of which I am aware. A mountain climber, faced with a life or death situation, might believe more strongly than his evidence warrants that he can leap the crevasse before him.

In all of these cases, there is no cognitive dysfunction or failure to function properly; but the processes in question don’t seem to have as their functions the production of true beliefs. Rather, they produce beliefs that in the context are useful in one way or another. And exactly this is the way things stand with Freud’s explanation: an essential part of his account of theistic belief is that it is not produced by truth-aimed cognitive processes, but by a process with a different sort of function. At this point the Christian or any serious theist will disagree with him. The serious theist will think that God has created us in such a way that we come to know him; and the function of the cognitive processes, whatever they are, that ordinarily produce belief in God in us is to provide us with true belief. So even if she agrees with Freud that theistic belief arises from wish-fulfillment, she will think that this particular instance of wish-fulfillment is truth-aimed; it is God’s way of getting us to see that he is in fact present and in fact cares for us. At this point she will have to disagree with Freud.

Something similar goes for David Sloan Wilson. He holds that the purpose or function of Calvinism and Christianity generally is to enhance fitness; a group with a religion of that sort will do well in competition with groups without any such religion (or anything similar). And specifically religious
belief
plays an important role here. The role of such belief is not to reflect reality, he says, but to play a part in the production of what religion produces. As he says: “our challenge is to interpret the concept of God and his relationship with people as an elaborate belief system designed to motivate the behaviors listed.”
In a very interesting passage Wilson proposes that religious belief isn’t reality oriented, but, unlike Freud (and most of those who write on the scientific study of religion), goes on to defend it. The passage is worth quoting in full:

In the first place, much religious belief is not detached from reality…. Rather, it is intimately connected to reality by motivating behaviors that are adaptive in the real world—an awesome achievement when we appreciate the complexity that is required to become connected in this practical sense. It is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal description of the real world, but this merely forces us to recognize two forms of realism: a factual realism based on literal correspondence and a practical realism based on behavioral adaptiveness.