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Is our reasoning ability overdeveloped? A biological error?

Is our reasoning ability overdeveloped? A biological error?

Last updated on: June 15, 2025 at 8:24 pm by Dan Peterson

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Is our reasoning ability overdeveloped? A biological error? 2025-06-15T20:24:24-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The law school of the University of Pennsylvania, where Professor David Skeel holds an endowed chair (Wikimedia Commons public domain media image)

Some readers here may recall that, in fits and starts, I’ve been working very occasionally on a massive project — planned to result, if it ever results in anything at all, in four or five sizable volumes — for which my working title has long been The Reasonable Leap into Light: An Argument for Skeptics. 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 theism; and, finally, of Restored Christian theism. To that end, I share here some passages that I’ve extracted from David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World (IVP Books, 2014).

David Skeel is S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. 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 into Light:

Some materialists suggest that our idea-making capacity doesn’t have a purpose at all — or at least that our mental capacities have far outstripped the most important benefits. . . .

Steven Pinker sums up nicely the notion that our idea-making capacity may be extraneous. It is true, he acknowledges, that people in every place and time “concoct theories of the universe and their place within it.” But to his mind, this yearning is “biologically frivolous and vain.” He explains that “given 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.” From this perspective, religion, philosophy and the quest to make sense of why we are here are “the application of mental tools to problems they were not designed to solve.” (40)

He goes on to summarize the theory very concisely:

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 “hypersensitive agency detection.” Like other animals, the reasoning goes, we developed an acute sense of possible predators. Humans 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. False positives (mistakenly thinking a predator was nearby even when it wasn’t) are better than false negatives (thinking the sound is not a predator when it is) — at least so long as they did not leave our ancestors so paralyzed by fear that they couldn’t function. (41).

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 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), written by an anthropologist named Stewart Elliott Guthrie. Here’s most of the description that’s given on Amazon. I’m not in the mood to go track my copy down; this probably comes from the jacket of the book:

Guthrie says religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism–that 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.
As 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 “rages,” a storm “wreaks vengeance,” and waters “lie still.” 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–livings things, and especially, human ones. Even animals watch for human attributes, as when birds avoid scarecrows. In short, we all follow the principle–better safe than sorry.
Marshalling 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 forces us to take a new look at this fundamental element of human life.

Although I don’t follow his argument all the way to his reductive conclusion about the origin of religious belief, I think that Guthrie has a point. Sometimes, I test my own ability to discern faces in the clouds and, for that matter, in random patterns on our bathroom floor tiles. I never fail to find them.

Professor Skeel, too, is unconvinced by such theorizing:

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. It is better described as an Olympian leap. The 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. Some 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. Religion was an accident, the reasoning goes, but it proved to be a happy accident (at least in this sense). (42)

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)

A poster for the great 1957 film adaptation (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Yesterday (Saturday), my wife and I attended a matinee performance of Twelve Angry Men up at the Hale Centre Theatre in Sandy. It was very well done. I had been looking forward to it because, among other things, I’ve used the all-male cast and title of the play (and of the great 1957 movie version of it 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). But I was a bit surprised (and saddened) yesterday at how relevant I found the play to contemporary national issues.

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