If Religions are Natural, does that Undermine Atheism?

Sorting through the preacher Dan Foster’s chicanery with a drinking game

The Christian preacher Dan Foster wonders whether “we’re predisposed to belief or non-belief” in God since it looks as though “if children were brought up in a situation where there was never any mention of God, faith, or any other spiritual concepts, such as an afterlife, then they would never believe in God.”

Being ever so “reasonably open-minded,” as he says, Foster researched the matter and discovered, in effect, what Daniel Dennett, one of the “four horsemen” of the new atheist movement showed in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, back in 2007. This is that religion is so universal in human history because it piggybacks on natural human thought processes.

For instance, said Dennett, we take up the “intentional stance” when predicting each other’s behaviour, attributing mental states such as happiness or anger to explain our actions. And we can overextend that strategy and personify inanimate objects or unknown causes of mysterious phenomena. We’re also geared to detecting patterns, as when we see pictures in clouds or other randomly created patterns, so we’re inclined to search for ultimate, familiar explanations rather than rest with uncertainty.

Thus, says Foster, religions are “not going anywhere” because “the very basic, garden-variety ways of thinking that are common to all human beings are the very things that provide the impetus for religious beliefs.”

Consequently, “it turns out that coming to believe in God is not an enormous leap across a chasm called ‘logic.’ In fact, one could argue that the opposite is true. Belief is not a departure from reason but a reasonable destination for normal minds doing normal things.”

Foster concludes by returning to his opening question, “Would I believe in God if I wasn’t raised by parents who believe in God?” Based on this research, he answers, “There is every chance I would.”

Spot the Preacher’s Sophistries

Now, let’s play a little drinking game (assuming you’re old enough to drink). I call it “Spot the Preacher’s Sophistries.” The trick is to try to stay sober while imbibing an alcoholic drink every time you spot a flaw in a preacher’s reasoning.

While sorting through the above sophistry, my drink of choice this evening will be a series of shots of fine whiskey. I wish you luck if you mean to participate vicariously.

Let’s start with the obvious, as I pour the first shot. Foster seems to think the naturalizing of religious belief poses no problem for religions, but that must be an oversimplification, at best, since atheists have been adopting this strategy long before even Dennett, since Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Darwin, and so on. There’s no hint in Foster’s article, though, that his “research” poses a problem, say, for Christian faith.

So, what’s Foster missing? He’s missing the difference between a causal explanation and a rational justification. If a murderer could show that his brain forced him to commit his crimes, would that mean there’s no justification in punishing him? Not really, since how else could a bad person kill someone unjustly, other than by using his brain?

Whether a religious belief is justified or not is independent of the belief’s point of origin. To say otherwise likely amounts to committing the genetic fallacy.

Still, a causal explanation can count against a religion if the explanation conflicts with the religion’s more pious account of how religious belief is formed. Do we come to religious belief because of the Holy Spirit’s promptings, for example, or because of the misfiring of a neural mechanism? If we don’t need to appeal to God to explain why religions exist, theism may become superfluous.

And here I take the first drink since there’s no hint in Foster’s article that his research about a natural origin of religious belief poses any problem for his religion. That’s a massive oversight, bordering on an attempt to conceal the obvious from his readers. Religion may have a natural origin, as famous atheists themselves have shown, but that doesn’t mean religious beliefs are rationally justified, especially in the twenty-first century.

Just ask yourself, “What’s the best explanation of religious belief?”

• Is it that God exists and leads us to form religions based on these accidental abuses of natural thought processes?
• Or is it that God doesn’t exist, and we form religions based on how we’re naturally confused and misled by those thought processes because they evolved haphazardly with no divine oversight and because we’re free to take them out of context?

Now, it turns out that Foster also commits the genetic fallacy in his article, by mistaking a causal explanation of religious belief for a normative assessment of it. (And here I reach for the second shot of whiskey.) This is where Foster calls religious belief “a reasonable destination for normal minds doing normal things.”

Nope, that’s not what his research shows. Is it reasonable to see pictures in the clouds? Well, it’s understandable and explicable, based on appeals to pareidolia and the intentional stance, but is this the proper use of our ability to interpret fellow minds? Or would it be reasonable to start a religion about a holy rabbit based on an act of seeing what looks like a rabbit in the clouds? No, that would be excessive, so Foster’s overreached in his conclusion — and that’s the second shot.

A third shot is warranted by Foster’s confusion about logic, when he says his research shows “that coming to believe in God is not an enormous leap across a chasm called ‘logic.’” On the contrary, if religious belief is caused by some natural process, religious folks would indeed be “coming to believe in God” based on something other than logic.

There’s a difference, for instance, between coming to believe that God exists because you’re convinced by apologetical arguments, and believing it because someone’s holding a gun to your head and demanding that you adhere to a certain religion. If evolution forces most of us to be theists because of how our genes program us to think, we’re not yet arriving at our religious beliefs based on the specific thought process of logic. We could justify those beliefs after the fact, but that wouldn’t be relevant to how we came to those beliefs in the first place.

In short, logic is artificial, not natural. Thus, in so far as religious belief is natural, it’s not yet logical.

And that’s the third shot, but it gets worse because Foster’s confused the proper and the improper or overextended uses of natural thought processes. The intentional stance evolved to enable us to cope with other people or with animals. We overextend that process when we apply it animistically to everything under the sun. That was Dennett’s point, and it’s how this sort of naturalizing of religious beliefs can figure in an atheistic argument.

If we stretch the word “logical,” we can say that using the intentional stance to explain fellow human or animal behaviors is logical — because that’s the adapted function of that heuristic. But that doesn’t make for an evolutionary defense of the extended, exapted use of that trait, as when we look for patterns even in accidents. So no, there’s still a leap over logic even if we grant that natural thought processes are “logical.” And that’s the fourth shot.

The argument from the multiplicity of religions

A fifth shot is merited by Foster’s failure to understand the atheistic argument from the multiplicity of religions, an argument that’s implicit in his initial worry that maybe if children weren’t raised to be religious, they wouldn’t believe in God.

The corollary is that children usually grow up to adopt the religion of their parents who raised them to practice that religion. Indeed, Foster says his article was sparked by an atheistic commenter who told him that “people believe in God because they are indoctrinated as children.”

What Foster does here, then, is pretend the issue is theism in general, rather than the merit of any specific religion. He speaks vaguely of “religion” going nowhere or of the likelihood of still “believing in God” even if you weren’t raised by religious parents. But that’s not the point of this atheistic argument.

Our tendency to search for patterns or to adopt an intentional stance would indeed incline us generally towards theism rather than atheism, assuming we’d eventually experiment enough to abuse those thought processes, overextending them in our search for ultimate explanations.

But the point about brainwashing children is that you only adopt your specific religion because you were raised to do so. The point isn’t that theists are raised to be theists. No, it’s that most Hindus were raised to be Hindus, most Muslims were raised to be Muslims, and most Christians were raised to be Christians. Given that observation, the atheist asks about the chance that any of those religions is correct while all the others are grossly in error.

Given that most religionists are indoctrinated in a similar way to accept different religions, it seems grotesque to imagine that only one religion’s theology is true, and that that religion’s deity threatens to punish the foreign religionists.

If specific religions persist because of how the natural, theism-friendly thought processes are channeled by religious parents in their enculturation of their children, then adding that one religion is better than the others because only one of the world’s theologies is true is superfluous. Why would the Christian’s God blame Muslims and Hindus for being indoctrinated in the wrong faith, given that most Christians are likewise indoctrinated when they’re children?

This kind of argument should be especially urgent for Christians and Muslims since they emphasize the need for the correct religious beliefs to avoid the worst fate in an afterlife.

Is it reasonable to assume that the Christian’s God specifically would have set things up this way, so that we tend to adopt religious beliefs not based on reason or religious experience but because we’re prone to misusing our naturally evolved cognitive traits? These religious beliefs would be precarious, in that case, since they’d be vulnerable to the doubt that maybe the theological defenses are only rationalizations of accidental or reckless abuses of heuristics that were meant to help us survive in the wild, not to figure out the ultimate nature of reality.

Foster misses all of this, though, so I’ll toast his oversight or obfuscation here with the fifth drink.

And as my pours became heavy-handed towards the end, spilling some whisky on the table, I’ll have to end the game at that round number. A solid five shots, marking five blunders in an article that can be read in six minutes (according to the counter at the top). That’s almost a blunder a minute, which is a fine tally. I applaud Foster for his contributions to this game’s merry outcome.

Try out this drinking game on any bit of religious preaching you like. Trust me, you’ll end up drunk.

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