God Could Be a Spandrel
Published Wednesday 7th March, 2007 by Skrik
Spandrels are evolutionary biproducts — things that develop as a result of evolutionary adaption, but that have no intrinsic value in terms of survival. Deities may be the spandrels of the development of the brain, the “nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity“.1
Specifically, deities could be the biproducts of:
- the development of the human propensity to posit the presence of agents (protecting us from organisms that might do us harm),
- our inclination to think in terms of cause and effect (which helps us realise that we may manipulate our world), and
- our empathic abilities (allowing us to cooperate, thus accomplish more).
A side-effect of the development of these three human traits is our willingness to think that there is an agent at work in the universe, who causes the effects we cannot understand, and whose actions appear to be the work of a rational being like ourselves: a god.
That’s the biology, at least that’s the biological proposition. But what of the “evangelistic” attitudes of the “unholy trinity” of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett? Why are they so zealous? Most probably because the encroachment of religion — which is apparently based on mistaken inductive reasoning — on the laboratory — which is deductive — threatens the authority of science. Science contributes to the improvement of mankind. Undermining science, religion would perhaps even undermine our ability to thrive.
Filed under Religion, Weblogging
