Recovering Evangelicals #204 – Putting God in a box?
Why a mechanistic explanation for religious belief/unbelief in humans can actually complement a thoroughly Christian faith.
Over the last two weeks, Dr. Will Gervais unpacked his research looking at how humans — as a species, as groups of nations, and even as individuals — build a religious belief system. He identified a variety of contributing factors which could be “dialed in” to greater or lesser extents, much like an electronic box with a series of dials and switches that could be “tuned” to produce different qualities (not contents!) of religious belief or loss of religious belief. One set of dials and switches pertained to contributing factors which originate from our genes: our brains, neural pathways, signal processing and reflexes. And the other pertained to factors which originate from our cultures: who we learn from, and how.
Luke had already mentioned last week how he found this new perspective on belief/unbelief to be so useful in his own spiritual journey. And in this episode he explains more fully why: this model is so explanatory, and even predictive! He compared this “electronic box” for producing religious belief with a similar “electronic box” which humans developed for predicting the weather. He also compared this very mechanistic explanation for how humans have this built-in mechanism that spontaneously develops and produces a religious belief with a very mechanistic explanation for a newly created universe having a built-in mechanism (physical laws and constants) which spontaneously develops and produces life and biological species, including one species which eventually looked up to the stars for Something Bigger. And he wanted to emphasize how this does NOT need to eliminate God nor a greater reality (you can call this a spiritual dimension). It just gives a different perspective on how to understand this journey we’re all on.
We highly recommend this book.
As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy several of our previous episodes collected thematically under “Human Evolution.”
Find out more about Dr. Will Gervais and this book at his website.
Image by Andrew: thanks Andrew!
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