Deeper Than Darwin by John Haught

Author:John Haught [Haught, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780429969645
Google: 4R-yDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-05-04T05:06:06+00:00

The Whole Story?

If neo-Darwinian evolutionary psychology is giving us an adequate explanation of religion, if it is telling us the whole story; then of course we would now have to concede that our religious ideas are cognitively empty. They are pure fictions, and lovers of truth should be willing to give them up—as apparently the new Darwinian debunkers of religion have done themselves.

However, it is interesting to watch how the Darwinian anthropologists deal with the notion of truth. While they claim to be in possession of the final truth about religion, they are not terribly disturbed, as were earlier critics of religion, that most of humanity still wallows in the essentially false comforts of religion. There is a new tolerance of religious illusions, an indulgence that critics like Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, W. K. Clifford or Jacques Monod would have found highly objectionable on moral grounds. Why do the new Darwinian critics treat religion so much more gently even if still condescendingly? Is it perhaps because a gene-focused Darwinian unmasking of religion is obliged to conclude that if our ancestors had adhered to a modern scientific ethic of knowledge, we would not be here to point out their naivete? If Paleolithic humans had been in a position to face the “truth” head-on, or if they had idealized “objectivity” in the way Darwinian scientists themselves are supposed to, would they and their genes ever have survived?

Lacking our scientific and technological ways of coping, our ancestors could not have adapted to the natural world without the illusions of religion—at least if we follow the logic of our Darwinian critics. Happily for us, nature endowed our species in its infancy and adolescence with a glorious capacity for self-deception. The human ancestral inability to face the truth has been one of our most adaptive and even endearing features! Thus our Darwinian critics are now in the interesting position of having to embrace the objectivist (naturalist) ideal of knowing as far as their own work and educational vocation is concerned, while at the same time implicitly rejoicing that our ancestors did not share this ideal themselves.

Some of the new Darwinians would even go so far as to encourage the persistence of religious illusions into the future for the sake of gene survival. Influenced heavily by E. O. Wilson and Darwinian anthropology, for example, the philosopher Loyal Rue has recently argued that our own survival and thriving as a species is in great measure the consequence of a genetically based capacity for lying and self-deception. From a biological perspective, the propensity for “guile” can be viewed as a kind of saving “grace.”18 Among animals, nature tends to select deceivers, while those incapable of deception do not survive and reproduce. Likewise, “the role of deception in human adaptive strategies has been so important that we may suspect it to be essential to our survival.”19

According to Rue, the rationally and scientifically awakened human mind must now embrace nihilism as the only “truth” that faithfully reflects the real world.

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