Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In response to my last post, “The Futility Of Arguing With Theists,” Chris Crawford offered following insights.
One way to understand the conflict between theists and atheists is to think in terms of evolutionary psychology. The mind is made up of a number of different “mental modules”, each of which evolved to solve a particular class of problems. The two mental modules that bear on this question are the social module, which evolved to help us understand other people’s thoughts and motivations, the more effectively to interact with them, and the language module, which permits language use, but was later recruited to enable rational thinking. Rationalism is still not supported by our genes; it has to be taught, and it is the language module that learns it. Thus, rationalism is not widespread in the species.
Religion is an application of the social reasoning module to understand the physical world. That module posits that the physical world is controlled by immensely powerful but invisible people — gods. Initially, gods were specialized, with a god for each physical phenomenon of interest, but later, during the Axial Age, those gods were consolidated into a single god, yielding monotheism. But the new “One God” retained all the powers of the previous crowd of gods, and was extrapolated to have infinite powers.
Rationalism emerged from the language module, first appearing among the Greeks and slowly, slowly spreading among the species, primarily in mercantile societies in the West. A crucial turning point came when Aquinas proposed to solve theological disputes with rational argumentation, leading to scholasticism. His proposal was condemned as heretical by the authorities at the University of Paris, which of course made his book wildly popular with the students, and within one generation, Aquinas’ thesis went from heresy to dogma.
The Church struggled with rationalism for a long time, and eventually gave up on scholasticism, but the imperative to rationalism remained embedded in the Church’s educational institutions, and when the West went heavily mercantile in the Age of Discovery, rationalism enjoyed greater popularity.
Rationalism is now the standard creed among the educated, but the hoi polloi don’t get it and continue to rely on social reasoning to understand the world. Since the two factions are relying on entirely different modalities of reasoning, they’ll never be able to understand each other, and the schism between them will shortly be the doom of civilization. Sic transit gloria.
Oh, one other thing: the secular expression of the use of the social reasoning module to explain the world is modern conspiracy theory. Same idea: powerful but invisible people are controlling the world.
Quick Response
I basically agree with you. Bertrand Russell taught me long ago that religion was, for most people, not a rational but an emotional endeavor. Thus, our inability to talk people out of their fervently held beliefs. As I’ve written many times, most people don’t want to know they want to believe. And no doubt the evolutionary angle is important to understanding religion. I also like your noting the secular equivalent: conspiracy theories.
