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<\/a>Some readers here may recall that, in fits and starts, I\u2019ve been working very occasionally on a massive project \u2014 planned to result, if it ever results in anything at all, in four or five sizable volumes \u2014 for which my working title has long been The Reasonable Leap into Light: An Argument for Skeptics.<\/em>\u00a0 It is designed to argue, in a painstaking cumulative case, that it is rational to accept the claims of, first, theism; then, second, of Christian<\/em> theism; and, finally, of Restored<\/em> Christian theism.\u00a0 To that end, I share here some passages that I\u2019ve extracted from David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World<\/em> (IVP Books, 2014).<\/p>\n David Skeel is S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.\u00a0 He does a pretty good job, I think, of framing a few of the basic issues that I will consider, should they ever actually see the light of day, in the first three or four volumes of Reasonable Leap\u00a0into Light<\/em>:<\/p>\n Some materialists suggest that our idea-making capacity doesn\u2019t have a purpose at all \u2014 or at least that our mental capacities have far outstripped the most important benefits. . . .<\/p>\n Steven Pinker sums up nicely the notion that our idea-making capacity may be extraneous. \u00a0It is true, he acknowledges, that people in every place and time \u201cconcoct theories of the universe and their place within it.\u201d \u00a0But to his mind, this yearning is \u201cbiologically frivolous and vain.\u201d \u00a0He explains that \u201cgiven that the mind is a product of natural selection, it should not have a miraculous ability to commune with all truths; it should have a mere ability to solve problems that are sufficiently similar to the mundane survival challenges of our ancestors.\u201d \u00a0From this perspective, religion, philosophy and the quest to make sense of why we are here are \u201cthe application of mental tools to problems they were not designed to solve.\u201d \u00a0(40)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He goes on to summarize the theory very concisely:<\/p>\n According to the standard account of evolutionary psychology, the widespread belief in a supernatural being or beings, which appears to date back to the earliest humans, is best explained by a phenomenon known as \u201chypersensitive agency detection.\u201d \u00a0Like other animals, the reasoning goes, we developed an acute sense of possible predators. \u00a0Humans who imagined that every rustling in the tall grass of the African savannah was a lion were more likely to survive than their peers who assumed that the rustling was simply the wind. \u00a0False positives (mistakenly thinking a predator was nearby even when it wasn\u2019t) are better than false negatives (thinking the sound is not a predator when it is) \u2014 at least so long as they did not leave our ancestors so paralyzed by fear that they couldn\u2019t function. (41).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The most extended exposition that I have personally read of that explanation for the omnipresence of religious belief is Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), written by an anthropologist named Stewart Elliott Guthrie. \u00a0Here\u2019s most of the description that\u2019s given on Amazon. \u00a0I\u2019m not in the mood to go track my copy down; this probably comes from the jacket of the book:<\/span><\/p>\n Guthrie says religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism\u2013that is, the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Many writers see anthropomorphism as common or even universal in religion, but few think it is central. To Guthrie, however, it is fundamental. Religion, he writes, consists of seeing the world as humanlike. Although I don\u2019t follow his argument all the way to his reductive conclusion about the origin of religious belief, I think that Guthrie has a point. \u00a0Sometimes, I test my own ability to discern faces in the clouds and, for that matter, in random patterns on our bathroom floor tiles. \u00a0I never fail to find them.<\/p>\n Professor Skeel, too, is unconvinced by such theorizing:<\/p>\n The first thing to note is that the step from hearing a rustle in the tall grass and suspecting a lion to a conclusion that the entire cosmos has been ordered by God is not a small one. \u00a0It is better described as an Olympian leap. \u00a0The usefulness of heightened sensitivity to the possible presence of lions is far more obvious than, for instance, the benefits of detecting gods in or behind the cosmos. \u00a0Some of the more recent accounts attempt to address this shortcoming, positing that the earliest religious beliefs were an accident of our hypersensitive agency, but that religion proved to be an effective means of enhancing the cohesiveness of a particular group. \u00a0Religion was an accident, the reasoning goes, but it proved to be a happy accident (at least in this sense). (42)<\/p>\n But it does not seem likely that our hands, feet, liver and heart are useful adaptations yet our idea-making capacity was an accident. (43)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yesterday (Saturday), my wife and I attended a matinee performance of Twelve Angry Men<\/em><\/a> up at the Hale Centre Theatre<\/a> in Sandy. \u00a0It was very well done. \u00a0I had been looking forward to it because, among other things, I\u2019ve used the all-male cast and title of the play (and of the great 1957 movie version of it<\/a> that featured Henry Fonda, Jack Klugman, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam, E. G. Marshall, Jack Warden, and Ed Begley) in my discussions of the Witnesses of the Book of Mormon (e.g., in a 2019 presentation at the annual FAIR Conference<\/a>). \u00a0But I was a bit surprised (and saddened) yesterday at how relevant I found the play to contemporary national issues.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 Some readers here may recall that, in fits and starts, I\u2019ve been working very occasionally on a massive project \u2014 planned to result, if it ever results in anything at all, in four or five sizable volumes \u2014 for which my working title has long been The Reasonable Leap into Light: An Argument for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":89498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[249,6165,38849,1230,743,38846],"class_list":["post-110756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-evolution","tag-hale-centre-theatre","tag-henry-fonda","tag-reason","tag-religion","tag-twelve-angry-men"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nAs Guthrie shows, people find a wide range of humanlike beings plausible: Gods, spirits, abominable snowmen, HAL the computer, Chiquita Banana. We find messages in random events such as earthquakes, weather, and traffic accidents. We say a fire \u201crages,\u201d a storm \u201cwreaks vengeance,\u201d and waters \u201clie still.\u201d Guthrie says that our tendency to find human characteristics in the nonhuman world stems from a deep-seated perceptual strategy: in the face of pervasive (if mostly unconscious) uncertainty about what we see, we bet on the most meaningful interpretation we can. If we are in the woods and see a dark shape that might be a bear or a boulder, for example, it is good policy to think it is a bear. If we are mistaken, we lose little, and if we are right, we gain much. So, Guthrie writes, in scanning the world we always look for what most concerns us\u2013livings things, and especially, human ones. Even animals watch for human attributes, as when birds avoid scarecrows. In short, we all follow the principle\u2013better safe than sorry.
\nMarshalling a wealth of evidence from anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, theology, advertising, literature, art, and animal behavior, Guthrie offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this perceptual strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience. Challenging the very foundations of religion, Faces in the Clouds<\/span><\/em> forces us to take a new look at this fundamental element of human life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a>