Episode Details

It took billions of years and billions of life forms, but religion eventually emerged in one species, and filled the globe; and yet disbelief persists?

Today’s guest — Dr. Will Gervais (Brunel University, London UK) — has recently published an exceptional book: Disbelief: origins of atheism in a religious species.  In it, he addresses two interconnected evolutionary puzzles. First, how a tendency toward religious belief became such a deeply-seated characteristic of our species, emerging suddenly in just one species in a world that had produced billions of other biological species who showed no tendency toward religious belief, and that trait then quickly spread to envelop the entire planet.  And second, now that religiosity has become endemic in Homo sapiens, why/how non-belief in gods persists (and possibly becomes more prevalent?) in our pervasively religious world?

Scott and I were both floored by how much food for thought there was in this book, and how much light it shed on Christian belief and atheism!  There was so much to talk about, our conversation with Will went on for two hours, and so we’ve created two episodes from this one interview!

In this week’s episode, we look at the first half of this book. 

First, Will addresses a number of popular perspectives on the origin of religious belief that have dominated the discussion for two centuries: from Marx’s “opiate of the masses,” to Darwinism seeing religion as an evolutionary adaptation, to the New Atheist’s seeing it as an evolutionary accident. We even talk about Daniel Kahneman’s “system 1” (for religion) and “system 2” (for atheism). Ultimately, though, Will shows how these have proven to be very inadequate.

Next, we look at a diversity of concepts and partial explanations that come from two diverse fields of science: one mountain of evidence generated by neurobiologists looking at the cognitive science of religion, and a second mountain of data generated by psychologists looking at how human culture contributes to the emergence of religious belief. 

The neurobiologists point to mechanisms that arise from our biology (brain structures; neural pathways and reflexes; signal processing) that produce cognitive abilities/tendencies such as:

• theory of mind and mind/body dualism;
• agency, counterintuitive agency and hypersensitive agency detection;
• teleology, promiscuous teleology, and intuitive creationism.

The psychologists, on the other hand, point to mechanisms that arise from human culture