[Editor’s Note: I ran out of steam on this one, due to a newborn and a dissertation due date. This blog will be my last in this series before moving on to the global warming controversy (hint: both sides really annoy me) and then tax policy].
There have been several attempts by the skeptic to explain religious belief - two that I have addressed in some detail (seeking comfort, regulating ethical behavior) and some I haven’t (evolutionary by-product, seeking meaning in life, seeking power, etc). I have only a final observation: we may observe that it is unlikely that all of those theories could be true. For example, if religious belief were a by-product of evolutionary development as some claim, that would seem to undermine that claim that religion was invented as a way to regulate ethical behavior. Or if religion was invented merely as an attempt to gain power and control people’s minds (think Gary Oldman’s character in The Book of Eli), then it doesn’t seem possible that religion was invented for the sake of comfort.
I say this because atheists and agnostics seem to think that they are on the same page, and congratulate each other on ‘exposing’ religion. You may over-hear this sentence in coffee shops: “Well, I just think religion is….” And then everyone at the table fills in the blank differently: “…an attempt to control people’s minds, ….an evolutionary development, ….a futile quest for meaning in a meaningless world.” I’m all for dialogue and disagreement, of course, but in this case, those in the dialogue seem to be content to know that they have the same opinion (i.e. that religion belief is misguided). But they simply seem to gloss over the fact that their various justifications for their common opinion are incompatible.
And I’m not just thinking of the undereducated agnostics in coffee shops, but also of highly educated anthropologists and sociologists who write important books on the subject. What we have to keep in mind is that scholarship on the origin of religion is constantly contradicting previous scholarship. I think that this should make us skeptical of any attempt to ‘sum it up,’ – that is, to present some grand narrative that claims to explain the origins of religious belief in general. It seems that every direction I turn, I hear someone offering a new and better theory about the origin of religion, which in turn is undermined by a newer and even better theory. Perhaps this tells us something about this ubiquitous human phenomenon.
