Quodlibeta

First, a public service announcement: the feedback form appears to be working now. I won't bore you with what went wrong but it seems to have involved to incompatible email systems.

Second, Professor Plantinga's third Stanton lecture was all about Evolutionary Psychology. I missed it and so am relying on third party testimony and the lecture handout but his ideas are fairly clear. He began by introducing us to various 'scientific' attempts to explain what religion is. The earliest effort at this was Freud, who came up with a just-so story with no scientific value at all but plenty of cultural baggage attached. He claimed that religion was based on fear and the need for a father figure. As an aside, some wags have suggested an equally uncompelling Freudian explanation for atheism: that is is based on the Oedipus complex and that atheists are trying to kill their true father by not believing in him. However, modern efforts to 'explain' religion have been based on how it is an adaptive mechanism that gives its believers an evolutionary advantage.

Now, it is fairly clear that religion really is a 'good' thing in this objective sense and writers like DS Wilson accept this. Indeed, for evolutionary psychologists, religion would have to be a useful adaptation or it would have died out ages ago. But, Prof. Plantinga claims that just because this is true, does not mean that there is not something 'real' that causes religious belief. We do not evolve a fear of snakes or a love of sugar unless there are real snakes and real sugar to set it off. And while religion could be caused by some other 'real' effect being confused for God, it is not at all clear what this might be (notwithstanding nineteenth century arguments about thunder gods and fertility cycles). The trouble is that science cannot ask this question because it has tied its hands with the binds of 'methodological naturalism' which rules God out of court.

So, says Prof. Plantinga, evolutionary psychology is what you get when you try to explain religion using only the methods of science. Hence, as an explanation, it is radically incomplete and need cause no concern to the believer who is able to draw on a wider sphere of experience. As a final aside, he looked at historical Jesus studies which, as I have said here many times, can tell us very little about the man. But this does not mean that we cannot open ourselves to other influences to learn about the Jesus of faith. That methodological naturalism is not very good at providing explanations in certain areas is just a weakness of naturalism as a method.