Presenter Abstracts

Justin L. Barrett
Why Would Anyone Believe in God? An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion

Drawing from cognitive, developmental, social, and evolutionary psychology, and cognitive anthropology and comparative religion, the emerging cognitive science of religion explores the foundational concepts and behaviors that characterize religious systems among ordinary practitioners. One common theme of this field is that religious concepts generally, and God concepts specifically, are encouraged by the operation of ordinary cognitive systems working in ordinary human environments. Hence, belief in religious entities is comparably natural to believing that other humans have minds. Atheism, on the other hand, requires special factors in order to be maintained and spread.

Donald L. Cronkite
Making the Doctrine of Creation Whole: Poetic Contradiction in a Land of Prose

The study of evolutionary biology appears headed for a new synthesis and an even more explanatory role in the study of biology. How will the church respond? Much needs to be done if the Church is to make a positive response to this development. In this paper I will advance the idea that some of the most important doctrines of the Church possess an element of self-contradiction and that this is a good, perhaps necessary thing for teaching us humility before the unfathomable greatness of God. I will consider the doctrine of creation and its diminishing role in the study of nature, paralleling the diminishing role of God in the lives of many modern people. I argue that the supporters of philosophical naturalism used the many imperfections as evidence for an inconsequential deity or no deity at all. In this way they hastened the secularization of science, replacing one religious assumption for another. I will follow these observations with a brief overview of the work of John Haught and others studying a "theology of evolution," a theology which welcomes the findings of evolution as a rich source for theology. I will use certain insights of the theology of evolution to argue that there is great value to the Church for the doctrine of creation to be made whole by the welcoming of a robust version of evolution into its theology. Finally, I will reiterate and expand the value of contradiction in the nature of belief.

Bruce Gordon
Quantum Indeterminacy, Evolutionary Directionality, and Theistic Metaphysics

Various ways that quantum indeterminism could play a role in evolutionary biology will be discussed, and it will be argued that the brute physical indeterminism of the quantum realm is not reasonably regarded as metaphysically autonomous, which makes possible a kind of evolutionary directionality that is consonant with physical theory and may even be mathematically detectable. This leads to a broad reconciliation of evolutionary biology with divine purpose.

John F. Haught
Religion, Intelligence and Evolutionary Explanation

This lecture will ask whether evolutionary biology holds the key to understanding both human intelligence and religious aspiration. While embracing evolutionary science it will raise critical questions about the explanatory adequacy of what may be called "evolutionary naturalism."

James P. Hurd
Religious Deception: Is It Adaptive?

In the absence of a deceiver, deception cannot be said to be "for" any specific purpose. As Fodor says, "...there's a lot of 'because' out there, but there isn't any 'for'" (Fodor, 1998:168). Therefore, evolutionary naturalists (ENs) must be speaking metaphorically when they argue that religious deception is "for" various things. One EN theory is that religion is for "[turning] the group into a societal organism" (Wilson 2002:105). In this account, religion provides a sort of supernatural surveillance that helps insure that people follow group norms and that persuades them to perform costly acts that benefit the whole group. But how can natural selection have adapted us to accept religious illusions? A deception that simplifies complex reality may be useful - for example, a simplified model of how people behave. But a deception that distorts reality must certainly lead to maladaptive actions, and thus could not be favored by natural selection. Finally, if deception is merely something that natural selection does to our brains to make us act in adaptive ways, how can we have faith in our ideas about human behavior, such as theories of deception? We cannot get outside the box.

Dominic Johnson
Hand of God, Mind of Man: Supernatural Agency and Cognition in Human Evolution

Evolutionary biology appears to be incompatible with religion because it is based on underlying genetic or individual selfishness. If so, how can evolution explain the prevalence of altruism, self-sacrifice and charity in the real world? I argue that this paradox can be reconciled because humans have not been subject to the same processes of natural selection as other animals, by virtue of two unique traits: (1) a sophisticated "theory of mind"; and (2) complex language. These facilitate the rapid propagation of information among one's social group, which dramatically increased the costs of selfish acts over evolutionary history. Evolution should therefore be expected to have favored mechanisms that steered individuals away from costly social transgressions. Altruism, generosity and a fear of supernatural punishment are some of the candidate mechanisms. I end by addressing the philosophical question of whether altruism is "real" or only "apparent" in the service of selfish genes.

Joseph LaPorte
How to be a Darwinian Christian

Many Darwinians, and other people as well, think that Christianity and Darwinism stand in tension with one another. Some think that there is a strict incompatibility between Christianity and Darwinism: that the two positions contradict one another. Other Darwinians grant that Darwinism and Christian belief are not mutually contradictory, but they insist that in view of Darwinism there is no longer any good reason to accept Christianity: so Darwinism undermines the rationality of Christianity without being inconsistent with it. In this paper, I examine common reasons for thinking that there is tension of the second, less extreme sort, between Christianity and Darwinism. I argue that in fact there is no such tension. My argument makes liberal use of Plantinga’s externalist account of warrant and rationality.

Tim Morris
David Sloan Wilson's Group Selection Theory of Religion and the Question of Christ and Culture

In David Sloan Wilson's evolutionary account of religion, religious beliefs are attached to reality even though they are fictional in a strict sense. In his view religious belief is rooted in a "practical realism based on behavioral adaptedness" which is to be distinguished from "factual realism based on literal correspondence." He argues that a place for both types of realism, held in some kind of productive tension, is required for human groups to flourish in an evolutionary sense. He proposes that his group selection based explanation of what religion is for does not undermine religious belief, but rather that it encourages us to value religious systems and to "pay them homage with overflowing belief." I will examine Wilson's proposals along two different but related axes: Philosopher of science Del Ratzsch has pointed out that the human richness and multifaceted nature of scientific endeavor can be helpfully revealed by examining the irreducible interactions between scientific data, theory construction and nonempirical factors which he has called "shaping principles." I will discuss Wilson's proposals concerning religion in terms of these interactions, with particular attention given to "shaping principle" elements and their consequences. Secondly, I am convinced that scientific theories of religion and Christian responses to such efforts inevitably raise a variety of issues that can be helpfully addressed in terms of the Christ and Culture question that H. Richard Niebuhr examines in his classic work, Christ and Culture. I will use elements of Niebuhr's Christ and Culture typology to explore and evaluate possible Christian responses to Wilson's proposals.

John T. Mullen
Can Evolutionary Biology Confirm Original Sin?

Though it seems quite natural to equate certain elements of the doctrine of original sin with certain behavioral tendencies that are also consequences of evolutionary biology, there are several obstacles to overcome before a convincing case can be made that evolutionary biology can provide epistemic support for original sin. In this paper I attempt to overcome those obstacles and make that case by making use of a Molinist view of divine providence.

Michael Murray
Evolutionary Accounts of Religion: Explaining and Explaining Away

A variety of recent evolutionary accounts of religion aim to explain how religious belief and practice arise and sustain themselves despite their apparent fitness consequences. Defenders of such accounts often take themselves not only to have explained the origin and persistence of religious belief, but to have "explained it away" as well. In this paper I explore what it would mean for such accounts to "explain" religion at all, and problems with the notion that such accounts can "explain it away."

Alvin Plantinga
Evolutionary Psychology and Scripture Scholarship: More Similar than you Might have Thought

For more than a century, now, there have been frequent and often unsubstantiated claims that science and religion, or more exactly Christianity, are in conflict. One place in which there really is conflict, is between Christian belief and some theories from evolutionary psychology; another is between Christian belief and Historical Biblical Criticism. I argue that in both cases this conflict can be traced back to the practice of constraining science by methodological naturalism. I argue further that this makes the conflict superficial in that this conflict with scientific theories doesn’t give Christians “defeaters” for the beliefs incompatible with those theories.

Del Ratzsch
Humanness in Their Hearts: Where Science & Religion Fuse

One way to view the history of conceptions of science over the past several decades is as a process of progressive recognition and acknowledgement of the depth of the legitimate, ineradicable and even essential role played in science by an ever-expanding array of factors beyond just the empirical and formal. A catalogue of such recognized factors includes not merely essential but relatively well-behaved 'metaphysical' presuppositions, but beyond that various methodological prescriptions and preferences, axiological principles, epistemic values and the like. But the list, I claim, must go even beyond that to a significant collection of more rowdy human factors - including intuitions, emotions, 'feels' and even somatic inputs.

As a way of trying to get a unified and global perspective on all these factors, I propose a 'cognitive terrain' metaphor which not only ties in in interesting ways historically to some theological matters, but which indirectly suggests a way of metaphorically conceiving of some important science/religion issues.

Ralph F. Stearley
Teleological and antiteleological presentations of the history of life

During the last half of the twentieth century, anti-teleological statements concerning the history of life on Earth and processes which contribute to that history have become commonplace among prominent evolutionary biologists. The course of evolution is held to be opportunistic and unguided. On the other hand, many nineteenth-century paleontologists and morphologists sensed that the history of life included many instances of trends in organismal design, trends which exhibited some sort of progress or advance in efficiency. Charles Darwin, for example, saw the phenomenon of progress as a problem to be explained, rather than eliminated, by the process of natural selection.

Christians are compelled to believe that the triune almighty God acts in a purposive manner. Furthermore, Scripture records that God regards His Creation as “good”. Do these considerations provide encouragement for interpreting the history of life as goal-directed? Or are all human interpretations flawed by our finite capabilities?

Perhaps the notion of progress is difficult to quantify and demonstrate with certainty. On the other hand, the notion of “anti-progress” also provides opportunities for selective data presentation and overconfident conclusions on the part of its proponents. The attack on the idea of progress elaborated by the late Steven J. Gould is an example of such a misrepresentation of the history of life.

The Christian must believe that while the Creator could have devised some solitary “optimal” taxon, God chose to promote diversity. Thus taxonomic diversity is itself a goal. That being the case, the provision of created machinery for providing this diversity should be acceptable to the Christian. Discerning Providential supervision of such machinery is a matter of faith interpretation and is inherently no different from faith interpretations of individual life history.

William Struthers
The Neurobiology of the Relationship-Oriented Mind

There has been a significant movement in the past 20-30 years to explore how the mind works and how the brain gives rise to consciousness. While traditionally falling under the domain of philosophy and psychology, consciousness has planted its feet firmly in the realm of neurobiology and the structure and function of consciousness have been cast in an evolutionary framework which assumes naturalism. Experimental biology and neuroscience have adhered to linear models of the brain, however the "binding problem" of consciousness (the fact that there is a subjective unity of our experiences) has eluded linear explanations from psychologists, mathematicians and neurobiologists. The emergence of relational consciousness from the neurobiology of the brain utilizes the current neurobiological research and expands on the ontological nature of consciousness.

These theoretical principles of emergence, relationality and non-linearity will lay the groundwork for the structure of consciousness. By demonstrating that consciousness is relational in nature (i.e. entering into covenants with God, man, and creation), it will be argued that entering into relationships is the function and synthesizing principle of consciousness rather than an evolutionary principles of natural selection and survival of the fittest. The organizing principle of this system is that consciousness is designed for engaging the mind along a number of relational axes.

Charles Taliaferro
Descriptions and Explanations: Some Lessons from the Cambridge Platonists

Raymond J. VanArragon
Naturalistic Explanations of Religious Experience

In this paper, I consider the question of whether naturalistic explanations of religious experiences give those who have such experiences defeaters for the beliefs produced by them. More specifically, I consider the fictional case of Martha who, during a particularly trying time, has a powerful experience that leaves her feeling that God is in control and that everything will be alright. Recollection of this experience produces in her the belief that God communicated to her a message of comfort, a belief that in some sense explains the experience even though she doesn't explicitly hold it on those grounds. Suppose that Martha comes later to accept some naturalistic explanation of her experience, some explanation that does not appeal to God or to any supernatural activity. Does she then have a defeater for that belief? I argue that she may have such a defeater, but that whether she does depends on some other things that she believes.

David Vander Laan
Evolution and the Fall

Christians have been united in affirming that the Bible tells us what we most need to know about God, ourselves, and our world. However, the biblical theme of the fall becomes something of a puzzle for those who affirm evolutionary theory. There is, for example, the simple question of what happened. If the genetic character of humans is the result of a long, incremental process, could our sinfulness be rooted in some particular (and relatively recent) event? If not, in what does humanity's disobedience of God consist? Further, is death somehow a result of human sin? And how could this be if death was integral to the evolutionary process which preceded human beings?

Jitse M. van der Meer
Biology of Moral Behaviour: Fact and Fiction

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology include the study of the biological basis of moral behaviour. This paper offers an evaluation of the evidence related to the biology of altruism as the best investigated moral behaviour. I also describe the role of background beliefs in the interpretation of this evidence. Finally, I argue that there is a moral obligation to minimize the role of background beliefs.

Robert Waltzer
Function in Biology: Its Meaning, Foundation, and Relationship to Design and Evolutionary Explanation

The nature of functional terms will be examined as they are applied in the biological sciences. Issues addressed will include whether function implies purpose and teleology, the role of natural selection in deriving function, current views on function, and the role of design in understanding function. This author will attempt to show that there are inconsistencies in the use and application of functional terms. If true, such inconsistencies may indicate weaknesses in the conventional framework upon which such terms are based. Attempts will be made to present an alternative framework which may have more validity and coherence and preserve the fruitfulness that functional terms and concepts bring to the biological sciences.

Conference Home