The fool hath said in his heart,
There is no God.
Psalm 53:1
"Another theory is making the rounds that social groups invented moralizing gods to keep people under control.
Once upon a time, hunter-gatherers lived in small groups that were able to check on each other. But then a mutation happened, and people started to live in large groups that were too big for everyone to know everyone. As towns grew into cities, tribal chieftans needed ways to keep non-cooperators from getting out of hand, so they invented moralizing gods. And thus, religion became adaptive by natural selection.
This is the theory Ara Norenzayan has been working on for the last few years....
Why is his theory self-refuting?
Here’s the reason: the same evolutionary forces that he uses to describe religion could also be used to describe his own scientism. Because if humans are nothing more than the products of adaptive forces, there is no such thing as reason or
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| Ara Norenzayan |
morality. Writing a science paper as if it is true, trying to be honest with one’s arguments, is a fool’s errand if we are merely creatures acting out mindless forces acting on selfish genes. Furthermore, if moralizing gods are products of adaptive evolution, what does that make him? Poorly adapted! Less fit! Maybe he should join the Christians to pursue the survival of the fittest. Short circuit! If you watched carefully, you noticed Norenzayan filching from the Christian smorgasbord of virtues to make his point: he had to steal standards of morality. How can he say that social cohesion and a stable society are good? That’s a moral judgment. An evolutionist follows the Stuff Happens Law. On that standard, extinction is as moral as survival. So an ecosystem collapses. Who cares? If the evolutionist retorts that he is not claiming a result is moral or not, just whether it survives to be observed, self-refutation still crouches at the door. How can he trust his observations? How can he trust his mind, if it is a product of material forces?" CEH
