God in science

Just wanted to highlight this New York Times article - Darwin's God - written by Robin Marantz Henig. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

Essentially it fleshes out an interesting debate among scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars believe that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. But what they disagree on is why a tendency to believe evolved. There are two clear camps: Belief itself is adaptive versus belief is just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain. In short, are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?

The writer relates some interesting experiments:

- Anthropologist Scott Attran sometimes presents his students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will. If they don't believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

-The idea of an infallible God is comfortable and familiar, something children readily accept. You can see this in the experiment Justin Barrett conducted recently — a version of the traditional false-belief test but with a religious twist. Barrett showed young children a box with a picture of crackers on the outside. What do you think is inside this box? he asked, and the children said, “Crackers.” Next he opened it and showed them that the box was filled with rocks. Then he asked two follow-up questions: What would your mother say is inside this box? And what would God say?

As earlier theory-of-mind experiments already showed, 3- and 4-year-olds tended to think Mother was infallible, and since the children knew the right answer, they assumed she would know it, too. They usually responded that Mother would say the box contained rocks. But 5- and 6-year-olds had learned that Mother, like any other person, could hold a false belief in her mind, and they tended to respond that she would be fooled by the packaging and would say, “Crackers.”

And what would God say? No matter what their age, the children, who were all Protestants, told Barrett that God would answer, “Rocks.” This was true even for the older children, who, as Barrett understood it, had learnt that, in certain situations, people could be fooled — but they had also learned that there is no fooling God.

The article also asks a prominent member of the byproduct camp, Justin Barrett, who also happens to be a Christian how his view of God as a byproduct of our mental architecture coexists with his Christianity. Why doesn't the byproduct theory turn him into a sceptic?

Barrett replies: "Christian theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship with him and other people. Why wouldn't God, then, design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?"

"Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me - should I then stop believing that she does?"

I like the article because it gives a very good primer into the current debate on the biological explanations for a belief in God. To me, it seems that the harder the attempts at using evolution to account for God and why we believe, the more the evidence points towards the existence of God. The article suggests that we are hard-wired to believe in God. Does that sound familiar?

Ecclesiastes 3:11
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.