Evolution and The God Illusion
“If God did not exist we would have to create him” Voltaire. Well, (spoilers) we did.
Science cannot tell us if God exists or not, but evolutionary science can tell us why God exists, and why the concept of God reached fixation in the human species.
1Stone tools provide the first evidence of the evolution of symbolic thought and began to emerge in our hominid ancestors around 2.5 million years ago. The cognitive architecture in the brain had to be in place before the first spark of creativity occurred, before the hominid looked at the crude lump of rock and saw the refined handaxe within it. Just as millions of years later, Michelangelo looked at a lump of marble and saw Pietà.
The evolution of symbolic thought gave rise to art and spirituality, two elements which come together in pre-historic Cro-Magnon cave painting and bone carvings and, crucially, depictions of shamans. The mechanism of symbolic thought also very likely enabled the evolution of language and technology, but this came much later. What is important for this argument, is the proposition that the evolved mechanism of symbolic thought first expressed itself in hominids in the spiritual realm, in an effort to bargain with nature, and assert free will: The moment when the hominid mind began to think outside of the box.
Many view religion and rationality as opposites: that feelings and rationality are not compatible. Evolutionary psychology, at its heart, challenges this concept. The founders of evolutionary psychology conceive of the emotions as a “superordinate program”, a master program that overrides cognitive (conscious) processes in emergencies. This might be inconvenient (an evolutionary mismatch) for those who live in Western cultures where people are rarely attacked by non human predators. But many of us, depending on the luck of birth, or where we find ourselves living, must think of attack by the biggest super predator in the world: humans. Were any of us to lose this adaptive response, such as a Western female journalist reporting from a country at war, with different customs about women and under huge ecological or economical stresses, that would not be a mismatch at all. Ask Lara Logan.
The premise of this essay is that emotions and rationality are vitally linked, not seperate. It is impossible for humans to be purely rational and objective, but this is not an argument for the postmodern idea that everything is subjective. Far from it.
I am asserting an evolutionary perspective that views our evolved dispositions as being in harmony, even when they sometimes seem to contradict one another. To get past the chauvinism of both pure rationalism and pure subjectivism. Both perspectives are incorrect. I want to start with the biggest confusion we appear at odds today. That of religion and materialism.
Religion might be said to be codified human spirituality just as science is codified human innovation and curiosity and ethics is codified morality. They come from the same wellspring – symbolic thought – and are deeply embedded in evolved human nature.
Some may argue that the concept “God” has not reached fixation as many people call themselves atheists. This is akin to a trans activist declaring that their existence debunks the universal laws of biology. Many people instead call their symbolic inclinations spirituality, egalitarianism, empathy, morality or materialist ethics. All come from our ability of symbolic thought.
Some people are even born with rare genetic conditions that give them two heads or six fingers on each hand. We have a concept known as the normal case. This isn’t some form of intellectual colonialism. We need to know what a normal cell looks like to be able to distinguish it from an abnormal malignant one. Statistical anomalies are not the normal case. There is no moral attached to this. They are simply, exceptions that prove the rule. Without the normal case advanced medicine, which has saved and improved the lives of billions of people across the globe, whatever their sex, gender or skin colour, would not exist. Is that the price people want to pay — billions of lives — to falsely assert that, for example, “transwomen are women”? I think not.
It is true that the variable “Importance of God” in the World Values Survey, the largest data set in the world on cross-cultural similarities and differences, is dropping and that this drop is strongly correlated with increases in the standard of living. But this actually supports the hypothesis that humans created God as an anthropomorphized entity that they could appeal to against the despotic amorality of nature in ecologically unstable times (most of hominid existence). We appear to abandon the importance of God in our lives as we achieve the illusion of free will, of dominion, over the amorality of nature. But the symbolic evolved module still exists in our minds. These evolved mechanisms, forged by brutal selection pressures on our ancestors across millions of years, do not then simply retire themselves. It then looks for another focus and can be redirected into politics and identity, as appears to be happening, which in turn leads us into more tribalistic thinking, not less. Political groups are much smaller than members of a unified global religion, more numerous, more diverse, and more internally unstable because their principles are posited top down, not discovered bottom up. Political concepts are also fungible and liable to change, as we see from the fact that the principles of classical liberalism — even from 20 years ago — are now seen by many as “right-wing”.
Religious and Political fervour
In 1963 Thích Quảng Đức, a 66 year old Vietnamese Buddhist monk, immolated himself at a road intersection in Saigon. Many today think this was an anti-war protest against the Vietnam war. It was not. Quảng Đức was protesting against the Catholic persecution Buddhists by the Southern Vietnamese government. In 2024 Aaron Bushnell, a 25 year old US serviceman of no proclaimed religion, immolated himself in protest of the Arab Muslim/Israeli Jewish war. This war, at its heart, a fundamentally religious conflict. Yet, hundreds of thousands of Western atheists allied themselves with Arab Muslims, whose religious covenant explicitly states its religiously sanctioned hatred of Jews, to march against Israeli Jews. I don’t call Arab Muslims Palestinians, because Israeli Jews are also Palestinians. The fact that Jewish Palestinians have lived in the Levant for thousands of years is an indisputable fact. Islam was only invented (and a lot of it based on Judaism) in 610 AD. To say Jewish Palestinians are occupiers, and not the indigenous peoples of the Levant is one of the most incredulous claims to have ever existed. The Arab Muslim/Israeli Jewish war is not a war between Palestinians and Israelis, it’s a war between Islam and Judaism, where avowed and supposedly rational Western secularists have chosen a side based on political tribalism. Are Western secularists, who also like to declare oil and capitalism (both non-religions) the biggest creators of human conflict, so stupid as not to see their own hypocrisy? I’ll just leave that question hanging for you readers to decide.
What is clear, is that political tribalism has taken root in materialist minds, and is now the new religion of secular cultures. You can take away the God, but you cannot take away the symbolic module that exists in every human mind. We all believe in something.
An illusion created by the evolved human mind & its unique capacity for symbolic thought. It is something wrongly interpreted by the senses, but the sense exists. Is it a delusion? No. It is not, as Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion asserts. A delusion is false belief or judgment about an external reality, not an internal reality."
The following is a good example of an illusion. Something our internal senses recognise but misinterpret. The classic example of an illusion is the Muller-Lyre illusion where the mind reads one line as being longer than the other, when they are both the same length.
A less abstract and more ecologically rational example is here:
It’s a picture of a book but many of you may have seen something more saucy before realising. As a sexually reproducing species, we have an evolved mechanism (a module) in our minds to spot members of the opposite sex and secondary sexual characteristics.2 It is imperative for our evolutionary fitness that we spot these and don’t, for instance, mistake an adult female woman for a pre-pubescent child, a dog or a car.3
Was Michelangelo in the grip of a delusion when he looked at a slab of marble and saw the symbol of Pieta in it?
We can quibble over this sure, but know, this takes us back to the very beginning of philosophy. It asks the same questions Socrates asked. Questions that science can still not answer. In this metaphysical realm, material science can posit, but not assert anything as a fact. To assert that there is incontrovertible evidence against the existence of God, is to be scientistic not scientific. There is no indisputable evidence for or against. It is simply beyond our ken.
"So, I have argued from an ev psych perspective that human consciousness and specifically, the human capacity for symbolic thought is responsible for the illusion of God. We created God as an anthropomorphic bargaining chip by which we could assert the illusion of our free will before an implacable, amoral nature. Therefore, if we look at Stephen Fry’s famous excoriation of God,…
…we can see it as a denouncement of human nature itself. His question is actually, how can we do this to ourselves? How can we be so powerless in the face of amoral nature not to put up a fight against it? We actually have. That’s why we created God and religion. Proximately, it aids social unions, when reformed it aids civilisations flourish, and ultimately it is adaptive: it aids our individual evolutionary fitness. At this moment in the history of philosophy and science, if we deny 'God', we deny fully understanding ourselves. It seems atheists are not as smart as they like to think they are.
The human senses do exist in the human consciousness - the only scientific fact we can confidently state however, is that contemporary science does not currently have the tools to understand them or consciousness itself. The human senses are not a pathological mental condition aka a delusion. They can sometimes give rise to a delusion, yes. But this proposition leads us back to the normal case once more. The human evolved symbolic module (for want of a better term) exists in all minds, not a few. Whether it expresses itself as belief in a God or belief in a political ideology. It is the rule, not the exception.
God and organised religion, like it or not, did more to unite disparate tribes across the world than otherwise. Many will now cry, “But millions have died because of religious wars!” as if the first principle was religion and not the human mind — or more accurately evolution — that created God. No, life came before God and “God” is a unique creation of the evolved symbolic module that exists in every human mind. Mao tried to kill religion — the ultimate old — in the materialist Chinese Cultural Revolution which resulted in perhaps the biggest mass murder in the common era.
Now that the importance of God is diminishing in our secular “global village”, disparate and petty tribalism are on the rise.
What is the solution? I don’t know. Calling God a delusion was undoubtedly a fantastic marketing strategy, as was people’s extrapolated belief that if they read the book it would afford them an identity of a grand rationalist with an indisputably high IQ. That was the delusion. The Richard Dawkins forums at that time were full of such grotesques. I remember trying to discuss evolutionary psychology and confidently being told it was a pseudoscience by people echoing the arguments of Dawkins’ Marxist enemies.45 It was simply an appeal to chauvinism, to tribalism, itself. Great marketing sure: terrible meme to unleash on the world. The chauvinism of atheists today is just as grotesque as the chauvinism of religious zealots.
Whatever our response, we must always be careful of panic, hysteria, top-down policy oversteer, zealotry and unintended consequences. I only know that remaining wilfully ignorant about how evolution still predominantly unfolds acts on this ball of earth6 is not wise.
For more information on evolutionary psychology and psychological “modules” see my previous free essay here.
Disclaimer: I’m agnostic
I’m aware that there are some people who do become sexually aroused by, inter alia, children, dogs and cars. These are paraphilias or maladaptive expressions of sexuality caused by either genetic, epigenetic or environmental anomalies. They are not the normal case. They are the exceptions that prove the rule of human sexuality. People who prefer to have sex with children, dogs and cars are not going to have much success passing on their genes to future generations.
https://www.amazon.com/Dawkins-vs-Gould-Survival-Fittest/dp/1840467800
Many of these people migrated to the Atheist+ (atheism + intersectional feminism) when the RDF closed. If the Richard Dawkins forums was merely scientistic Sodom, that place was the Peoples Democratic Republic of Gomorrah.
From Henry IV. Part II.