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Darwin's Doubt, Non-deterministic Darwinism and the Cognitive Science of Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2010

Robin Attfield
Robin Attfield*
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Alvin Plantinga, echoing a worry of Charles Darwin which he calls ‘Darwin's doubt’, argues that given Darwinian evolutionary theory our beliefs are unreliable, since they are determined to be what they are by evolutionary pressures and could have had no other content. This papers surveys in turn deterministic and non-deterministic interpretations of Darwinism, and concludes that Plantinga's argument poses a problem for the former alone and not for the latter. Some parallel problems arise for the Cognitive Science of Religion, and in particular for the hypothesis that many of our beliefs, including religious beliefs, are due to a Hypersensitive Agency-Detection Device, at least if this hypothesis is held in a deterministic form. In a non-deterministic form, however, its operation need not cast doubt on the rationality or reliability of the relevant beliefs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 85 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 465 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2010

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3 Substantially, this hypothesis was first presented in Guthrie, Stewart, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993Google Scholar); however, it was integrated into the cognitive science of religion and given the name HADD in Barrett, Justin, Why Would Anyone Believe in God (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2004Google Scholar).

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72 I am grateful for comments and suggestions to Justin Barrett, John Lucas, Keith Ward and Martin Warner, who would all, no doubt, disagree with parts of this article. Thanks are also due to the Oxford University Cognition, Religion and Theology Project (funded in turn by the John Templeton Foundation), which made the preparation of this article possible.