With the advent of the "New
Atheism," and the books by Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris, arguments about the existence of God as well as the value of religious belief have received significant attention over the past several years. In one of my classes we are discussing many of the evolutionary accounts of religious belief, and critically evaluating the claims present in these accounts (see
The Believing Primate for a nice discussion of these issues).
One evolutionary account of religious belief states that such beliefs are unjustified because they spring from a cognitive mechanism known to produce many false positives. This mechanism is called the "Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device" or HADD for short. When HADD is triggered by some feature of our environment, it creates in us a belief in the existence of some unseen agent as the cause of that experience. For example, if one of our evolutionary ancestors heard a noise in the night, HADD would cause them to believe that this was a predator or enemy, even if it is merely the wind in the trees. This is evolutionarily advantageous, because the belief that we are in danger, even if false, will foster the sort of behavior conducive to our survival. HADD is "hyperactive" because it is better for us to experience false positives than false negatives. That is, it is better to believe a predator is there when one is not, than to believe that one is not there when it is, for obvious reasons. The claim, then, is that our belief in a divine being or agent is a product or byproduct of HADD. Since there is no independent evidence to support religious belief, the idea is that we should reject these beliefs as false products of HADD.
But, and in philosophy there's almost always a "but," there are good reasons to doubt the veracity of this account. First, there is independent evidence to support the claim that God exists (see this book for some of this evidence). Second, we need evidence that HADD in fact plays a role in the formation of religious belief. Currently there is much disagreement about this, even among advocates of evolutionary explanations of religion. Third, we need to know whether or not HADD is unreliable in the contexts in which religious beliefs are formed. It is often reliable, especially when it is used with other cognitive capacities. If I hear what seem to be steps in the hallway, a knock on my door, and so forth, HADD usually delivers the truth--there is someone there. Perhaps it is also reliable when we are forming religious beliefs.
Evolutionary explanations of nearly everything are in vogue these days, and of course some of these explanations are correct. However, some of these explanations are deeply flawed. I think the case of religious belief is an instance of the latter. Evolution can explain many things, but it falls short as an ultimate explanation of religious belief.
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