The problem with evolutionary materialist story of the origin of religion

In this essay I will use an old argument that evolutionary materialism undermines itself, to discuss the problem with the evolutionary materialist story of the origin of religion.

Evolutionary materialism is the view that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law. How do evolutionary materialists explain the appearance of religion?

In “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” Harari writes “A leading theory about the origin of the gods argues that gods gained importance because they offered a solution to this problem [how to safeguard the fecundity of the flocks]. Gods such as the fertility goddess, the sky god and the god of medicine took centre stage when plants and animals lost their ability to speak, and the gods’ main role was to mediate between humans and the mute plants and animals.”

In other words, according to Harari, prehistoric people needed some way to ensure the fecundity of their flocks and since they didn’t know how to solve this problem they have invented gods to do the job for them. An impossible problem of ensuring flocks fecundity was then replaced by a difficult problem of negotiating with gods.

Boyer, the author of “Religion Explained”, “suggests culturally-widespread beliefs in “supernatural agents” (e.g., gods, ancestors, spirits, and witches) result from the agent detection: the intuitive modular process of assuming intervention by conscious agents, regardless of whether they are present. “When we see branches moving in a tree or when we hear an unexpected sound behind us, we immediately infer that some agent is the cause of this salient event. We can do that without any specific description of what the agent actually is.”

In other words, according to Boyer, religions are a byproduct of our cognition that tends to impute an agent as the cause of any event.

There are other hypotheses for the materialistic evolutionary origin of religion. Despite their diversity, what they have in common, however is the story that prehistoric people have invented powerful fictional agents (gods) that can be negotiated with to help solve various important problems.

For now, let’s note that these explanations presuppose that our mental faculties responsible for presenting us with a worldview can and do invent fictions and so are not entirely reliable.

Now we go to Plantinga in “Where the Conflict Really Lies” and Nagel in “Mind & Cosmos” who take up the point of unreliability of our mental faculties on account of evolutionary materialism. Their objection goes something like this, we can suppose that our basic mental faculties have evolved to be reliable so as to ensure our survival. For instance, prehistoric people needed to reliably detect whether the object they saw ahead of them was a tiger or not, because their survival depended on correctly detecting the tiger. But what evolutionary purpose did higher mental abilities, such us correctly constructing the worldview serve during prehistoric times? Probably none. In that case, on the account of evolutionary materialism we can’t trust our mental faculties to construct the correct worldview. And since evolutionary materialism is part of the modern worldview, we can’t trust that it is correct, on its own account. In other words, evolutionary materialism is self-undermining.

The reply from the evolutionary materialists goes something like this. Of course, prehistoric people did not need to construct scientific theories. Nevertheless, the basic mental faculties that they’ve used in their day-to-day lives, to hunt together, plan together and live together in general, are the same mental faculties needed to construct worldview. And since hunting together, planning together, etc. had to be reliable, the mental faculties we use to construct worldview is also reliable.

Well, either our worldview constructing abilities are unreliable, in which case the story of the origins of religion makes sense. But then, since the same unreliable mental faculties produced evolutionary materialism itself, we shouldn’t trust the evolutionary materialism to be accurate. Or, our worldview constructing abilities are reliable. In which case, the story of invention of the powerful fictional agents (gods) to solve real problems, and persistence of this fiction throughout cultures and ages doesn’t make sense.