Evolution Defeats Religion?

Colin Blakemore of the Guardian.co.uk has written the obligatory Darwin article in which he concludes, as the title says "Science is just one gene away from defeating religion". He even disputes that the "why" questions even have any meaning. The "why" questions are the ones that cannot be addressed by science, which works only with "how" questions. What he does not address are the "ought" questions, or a great many other aspects of his Materialist Atheism. His blatant scientism is not in anyway concealed:

"Human beings are supremely social animals. We recognise people and judge their feelings and intentions from their expressions and actions. Our thoughts about ourselves, and the words we use to describe those thoughts, are infused with wishes and wants. We feel that we are the helmsmen of our actions, free to choose, even to sin.

But increasingly, those who study the human brain see our experiences, even of our own intentions, as being an illusory commentary on what our brains have already decided to do.

Perhaps we humans come with a false model of ourselves, which works well as a means of predicting the behaviour of other people - a belief that actions are the result of conscious intentions. Then could the pervasive human belief in supernatural forces and spiritual agents, controlling the physical world, and influencing our moral judgments, be an extension of that false logic, a misconception no more significant than a visual illusion?

I'm dubious about those "why" questions: why are we here? Why do we have a sense of right and wrong? Either they make no sense or they can be recast as the kind of "how" questions that science answers so well.

When we understand how our brains generate religious ideas, and what the Darwinian adaptive value of such brain processes is, what will be left for religion?"

Well, Blake there is more to this than you apparently have conceived. For example, in the recent posting at philosophy news the writer was prescient enough to lay out the fatal issues for materialism:

"Naturalism seems to face some insurmountable problems like the identity problem. If the properties of a first-person experience are metaphysically distinct from the properties of the physical material in which the experience seems to take place, how can they be identical? Do you think naturalism can overcome such challenges?"

For reasons of logic that I post regularly, Philosophical Materialism is a rational dead-end. It is an agenda, not a fact in any sense. For example, the statement above which reads, "When we understand how our brains generate religious ideas..." preassumes that finding neural activity is the same as finding an experience; and if this is the case, then only the neural activity need be identified. The incompleteness of this thought is staggering. If the firing of neurons is identical to an experience, then the experience would be that of neurons firing.

And the self-defeating concept that our own perception of intent is merely illusion practiced upon us by a brain operating independently of our control, reduces immediately to the absurdity: If that is true, then Blake's article is meaningless drivel, produced in an illusion of intent, yet beyond his control or direction. It is this type of contradictory, paradoxical anti-logic that goes into the Philosophical Materialist's war on dualism.

The lack of depth of thought inherent in the recent Darwinasms and journalistic gushings is not too surprising, given that the agenda for these folks is the driving factor, not objective, humble, search for truth regardless of what the truth might be. The agenda is to demolish the "God idea" and to release oneself from the absolutes which attend that concept. The resulting relativist release is refreshing and exhilarating, titillating even... and false. It is rationalization in the pursuit of self-indugence. And scientism ranks high on the scale of self-indulgent thought. It presumes that "why" questions and "ought" questions are just as devoid of meaning as the "how" questions. And that is absolutely necessary for self-indulgent, relativist materialism.

Meanwhile, Blake asks what is left? What is left is personal introspection which is required in order to apprehend and comprehend the universal truths, starting with the First Principles of logic and rational thought. And perhaps the intuition of whether our brains operate beyond the bounds of our own control, or whether we can and do control our own brains. Because if we do not, then the entire universe and the science that describes it is just a huge, commonly experienced delusion.