7 The Missing Element in New Atheist Critiques of Religion

By Tamas Pataki

What is the New Atheism?

I had better start by laying my cards clearly on the table. I am largely in sympathy with the so-called ‘New
Atheism’, although I think that it is flawed in several respects and whiffs of negative fanaticism. In my view, the
proposition that there are no gods is indubitable but not incorrigible, i.e. it is open to correction. In other words,
there are no good grounds to doubt the non-existence of gods, but it is imaginable that there could be. This view
is an instance of the fallibilism that is central to the scientific enterprise, and more broadly to the empirical
stance, and most of the New Atheists who are schooled in these quarters have acknowledged the possibility of
error in their most careful statements, even if they think the possibility is miniscule (see, e.g., Dawkins 2006,
Chap. 4, ‘Why there almost certainly is no God’); and even though at times they tend to forget it.
In regard to atheism, then, I think I am in accord with the New Atheists. However, my attitude to
religion is less aligned. I am unable to share the uncompromising hostility to all religion that marks the New
Atheism. This may seem contradictory, but is not. Atheism is one thing, hostility to religion is another. An
atheist is not obliged to condemn or combat religions, even if he or she thinks that they are built on sand, and
may even endorse religions for the good they do, notwithstanding the bad.
Religions are many and immensely diverse, so I hope that in what follows readers will accept that I am
sometimes compelled to speak in generalities that I recognize are not exceptionless. I am inclined to believe that
(most) religions do more evil than good. But religions meet so many social and psychological needs 1 that it is
difficult to conceive what human life would be like in their absence. From the fact that we may judge religions
to be evil it cannot be concluded that the world would be a better place without them. That is because our
judgments about evil are usually particular, not universal. Here is an analogy: most insects are pests but we
know that their eradication would disrupt the eco-systems that sustain us, and ultimately make the world
uninhabitable. Similarly, religion may be noxious, but perhaps, for all we know, a world without religion would
be a much worse place than it is today. A resolution seems to require a prediction that is beyond our powers: we
cannot compute all the relevant variables involved in an alteration as dramatic as the final departure of religion
from human life. For reasons such as these my anti-religious sentiments are more moderate and selectively
directed than those of the New Atheists with which I am familiar. So much for my cards.
Now, atheism has been around for a long time. Socrates was arraigned (wrongly) for failing to
acknowledge the city’s gods in 399BC, and several of his older contemporaries—Anaxagoras, Critias,
Democritus—were notorious for atheism (Bremmer 2007). On any traditional understanding of a personal god
most of the major figures in philosophy since the 17th century have been atheists or Deists, usually secretly. It is
frequently claimed as a counterpoint that most scientists before the 20th century were seriously religious (e.g.
Plantinga 2011). That is true but hardly surprising given that scientific work generally requires institutional
infrastructure on which the Churches held a stranglehold, that university employment required religious vows,
and the unlikelihood of a declared atheist surviving in such an institution or, until recently, even outside of one.

1 Some of these needs are discussed below. See also Pataki (2007).
In any case, since the Enlightenment much of the heavy atheological lifting has been done. Philosophers
confuted the arguments for theism, science provided ever increasing understanding and control of the natural
world, medicine diminished many of life’s horrors, modern biblical criticism and archaeology undermined the
historical authority of the foundational texts, and religious authorities gradually lost their power to intimidate or
eliminate their critics. For most professional philosophers and scientists today theism and indeed the philosophy
of religion are not intellectually live options. 2 That, of course, is not true for the vast majority of the globe’s
population.3
Given that atheism and organized opposition to religion are scarcely new, the latter dating back at least
to the seventeenth century (Anderson 1997), it is incumbent to ask what, if anything, is new about the New
Atheism. We need, I think, to look to indications in three sites: popular publications—on cosmology,
anthropology, biology, evolutionary psychology and philosophy; grassroots atheist, rationalist and humanist
organizations; and academic philosophy and theology.
The popular publications were (and are) the vanguard of the polemical movement. It is sufficient to
mention some well-known figures: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Victor
Stenger, A.C. Grayling, and Michel Onfray.4 Many of the New Atheists are deeply influenced by evolutionary
psychology and cognitive anthropology, and here I mention the work of Scott Atran, Jesse Bering, Pascal Boyer,
S. E. Guthrie, Stephen Pinker and J. Anderson Thomson, some of which is discussed below. Although Dawkins
had been advocating the incompatibility between religion and evolutionary theory since the 1970s, and Dennett
since the 1990s, the theory didn’t acquire polemical wings until the beginning of this century with the
publication of books by Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens and others in the dark shadows of September 11, 2001, the
intellectual depredations of the G. W. Bush administration in the United States, and the intelligent design
controversies crystallized in the Dover decision of 2005.5

2 Graham Oppy (2011; this volume) usefully cites some figures. According to one report 7% of top scientists
are theists and somewhere between 25% and 33% of philosophers are theists, though the latter figure is only an
educated guess. Oppy also notes a slow but ‘gradually snowballing growth’ in the philosophy of religion
literature and ‘an increased take up of work by evangelical Christian philosophers by the major philosophical
presses’, though no ‘corresponding avalanche of publications’ in the prestigious journals. So there is increase of
sorts but, as Oppy remarks, it occurs ‘at the same time that there has been a surge in enthusiasm for Christian
nationalism amongst the citizens of the “red” parts of the United States.’ And even these signs of mild
resurgence must still be viewed against the backdrop of the overall marginality of the philosophy of religion in
the academic world. As Michael Levine notes: ‘Philosophy of religion, as now practised, is regarded by
mainstream philosophy as somewhere between a quaint and poor relation on the one hand, and an irrelevant
anachronism on the other. Furthermore, and even more telling, is that those who study religion—
anthropologists, sociologists, historians, psychologists, biblical studies scholars and the like—have virtually no
connection to such philosophy of religion. They see it as irrelevant to virtually everything they want to know
about religion’ (Levine 2011, 61).
3 It seems probable that demography and human need will ensure that religion survives in recognizable forms.
Although the most recent Global Index of Religion and Atheism (2012) suggests an overall percentage fall in
religiosity, it remains that religiosity is highest amongst some of the poorest, least developed but most populous
nations (excepting China).
4 Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk (2009) anthologize 50 other notables and Warren Bonett (2010)
performed a similar service for Australian atheists.
5 Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. (400 F. Supp. 2d 707, Docket no. 4cv2688).
Eleven parents of students in Dover, Pennsylvania sued the Dover Area School District over a school board
requirement that a statement presenting intelligent design as ‘an explanation of the origin of life that differs from
Darwin’s view’ was to be read aloud in ninth-grade science classes when evolution was taught. The board had
also required that a book advocating intelligent design be used as a reference in the biology teaching curriculum.
The plaintiffs successfully argued that intelligent design is a form of creationism and that the school board
policy violated the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The case was seen as a major defeat for
 The books articulated what many people, at least in the West, opined about the association between
violence and religious fundamentalism, as well as the regressive influence of evangelical and other conservative
Christian groups over a range of moral, medical and scientific research issues in the United States and
elsewhere. In response, religious apologists and organizations expressed what they thought about atheists, often
in rather ‘unchristian fashion,’ and their literary industry proved even more prodigious than that of the atheists.
Conventions and debates were organized, the media found something new to talk about, advertisers and T-shirt
manufacturers profited. In Australia two world atheist conventions (2010 and 2012) were resounding PR
successes; they seeded secular student bodies, invigorated previously dormant secular associations, and gave
heart to many isolated atheists.
As regards the academic professionals, my impression is that, at least initially, the popular literature
made little impact. After all, in terms of argument or doctrinal content, as opposed to polemical posture, the
New Atheists provided little that was new. But more recently distinguished philosophers and other scholars who
are themselves atheists, such as Thomas Nagel (2010) and Philip Kitcher (2011), have rounded on the New
Atheists. And theist thinkers such as Alvin Plantinga (2011), Robert Bellah (2011), Charles Taylor (2007) and
crypto-atheists (panentheists) such as Mark Johnston (2009) have been scathing. The long term impact of these
developments is impossible to predict but my guess is that they will not be terribly significant beyond the
academy.
Let me now turn briefly to that little which is new. First, the New Atheism is evangelical and actively
seeks converts with an enticing vision. Thus in The God Delusion Dawkins says that one of his aims is to ‘raise
consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be
an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled’ (2006, 1). This kind of appeal cannot be
found in the dour atheism of Camus (1991[1942]) or Sartre (2007[1946]), or even Russell (1957), or the bright
dispositions of the Enlightenment. The earlier atheists offered secure epistemological moorings, a vision of
moral progress, and intellectual self-respect, but neither joy nor salvation.
Second, the New Atheists are not seriously concerned with the detailed refutation of theism. That battle
is taken to have been won, on the assumption that Darwin had rendered deity superfluous, and their ancillary
philosophical reflections on the existence of deity are invariably perfunctory. 6 (Some atheists, of course, go
much further in claiming that Darwin disproved the existence of God.) The New Atheists’ primary concerns are
with religion’s vices: religion is depicted as a ubiquitous impediment to moral and intellectual progress. The
sub-title of Christopher Hitchens’ bestseller says it concisely: ‘How Religion Poisons Everything.’ Religion,
Hitchens says, is ‘violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry...’ It is contemptuous
of women and coercive toward children, ‘the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as of slavery, genocide,
racism and tyranny’ (2007, 56). The other New Atheists mostly agree. Dawkins focuses on religion’s cultivation
of a vicious condition he calls ‘unquestioning faith’ (2006, 286). The suicide bombers and Christian murderers
of abortion doctors are motivated by what they perceive to be righteousness because ‘they have been brought
up, from the cradle, to have total and unquestioning faith.... Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no

creationists, but also provided a dire omen of what could happen if religious fundamentalism was permitted to
encroach on rational enquiry.
6 Professional philosophers and some physicists have of course assiduously contested recent, novel
metaphysical and epistemological arguments for theism. But in the main this group does not, I think, identify
with the New Atheism.
justification and brooks no argument’ (2007, 56). And then, passing from the shallows to the mainstream,
Dawkins (2006, 306) concludes that: ‘even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in
which extremism naturally flourishes’.
This is sweeping polemic of almost unprecedented vehemence. There is, however, reason. I don’t need
to dwell here on contemporary religious violence, manifested across almost the entire religious spectrum (see
e.g. Ruthven 2005). Nor is the conflict the New Atheists discern between science and religion—a profound
conflict not only over what is to be believed but why and how it is to be believed adequate to explain it. These
atheists, it seems to me, are spooked by something more far-reaching: an assault on Reason ranging across the
entire fundamentalist spectrum, but manifest in particular in the brew of Christian nationalism, theocratic
hankering and obstinate unreason that touched the seat of power during the G. W. Bush presidency and
continues to colour the Right in America and elsewhere. Some of the threads that unite the various constituent
groups are scriptural fundamentalism (inerrancy and often literalism); hostility to secular dispensations, and
often to democracy; and, for many of them, such as Pat Robertson, the establishment of Christian dominion.
Their exertions have borne fruit. Graham Oppy writes:
Since the mid-1990s a web of overlapping Christian nationalist organizations have
pushed for changes on many different fronts. Major currents in this movement have
included: the push for evangelical Christian home schooling (there are currently more
than 2 million children of Christian conservatives being educated at home in the US);
opposition to legal recognition of gay relationships and other legal entitlements for gay
couples (this issue is one of the mobilising passions of evangelical Christians, and it
played a significant role in the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election); support for
equal recognition of the theory of intelligent design in public school biology classes (the
2004 Dover School Board battle was just one in a long series of courtroom fights over
the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools); the diversion of billions of
dollars of public funds from secular social service organizations to sectarian religious
outfits under George W. Bush’s ‘faith-based initiatives’ program...; the promotion of
programs of sex education in public schools that mention nothing but ‘abstinence’
(while promulgating the misinformation that condoms cannot provide protection against
pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases); the pushing through of a two-pronged
attack on the judicial system that seeks to undermine the power of the Courts (while
simultaneously seeking to stack the Courts with judges sympathetic to Christian
nationalism); and, through a variety of media, entrenching a view of the world and its
history that is radically different from any views accepted by citizens who are not
evangelical Christians. (2011, 15)
To this list I would add their endeavours to restrict scientific research (e.g. stem-cell, climate change), retard
environmental protection measures, subvert the oversight activities of Federal scientific and related authorities,
and campaigning against measures to address global warming. Many of the people involved in these activities
are creationists, including young earthers, and climate-change sceptics.
I do not believe that the majority of religious people are either irrational or stupid, although, speaking
globally, many obviously suffer from limited education and restricted world-views. But many of those whom in
Against Religion (2007) I described as religiose or (roughly) fundamentalist are, I think, irrationally motivated.
What can one make of literate adults who think that the world is 6,000 years old or that hurricanes are produced
by God’s fist trembling over the oceans? That is crackpot stuff and to concede respect to such propositions in
public discourse is to undermine the currency of thought; it’s like giving credence to the idea that the moon is
made of cheese. Let me give some other examples of the unreason that spooks atheists, and, of course, many
who are religious as well. A few years ago in Israel the spiritual head of the Shas political party, Rabbi Ovadia
Yosef, declared that forest fires in which forty people perished were God’s punishment for Jews failing to keep
the Sabbath. When New Orleans was inundated by Katrina in 2005 Yosef agreed with Pat Robertson and Al
Qaeda that the devastation was divine retribution. It’s important to get the flavour of this.
There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, because there isn’t enough
Torah study... Black people reside there [New Orleans]. Blacks will study the Torah?
[God said], Let’s bring a tsunami and drown them... Hundreds of thousands remained
homeless. Tens of thousands have been killed. All of this because they have no God... It
was God’s retribution... God does not short-change anyone.7
Robertson was encouraged by the destruction and subsequently beseeched the Almighty to send a hurricane to
take out sinful Florida as well. These deranged pronouncements could be multiplied. But Yosef controlled four
Shas cabinet ministers: the fate of the Israeli government was within his gift; his shadow hangs over civic life in
Israel and restricts the nation’s scope for political accommodations. Robertson and his fellows are revered by
millions of religious conservatives who are increasing their political clout. 8 The radical Islamists, Yosef and
Robertson are of course not representative—not yet—of the majority of religious believers, but they vividly
illustrate the ignorance and irrationality that are gaining ground across segments of most major faiths. To
understand the combative tone of the New Atheists it is essential to appreciate that they are reacting to a new,
serious threat posed by religion in certain registers, not just to the secular order or to free scientific enquiry but
to Reason itself.
Understandable as the reaction might be, it has lurched into excess: into rash analysis,
counterproductive ridicule and critique by blunderbuss. 9 It has done so, I think, partly because the New Atheists
have only a superficial understanding of religion, of what it is like to be religious in certain registers, and of the
diverse motivations to religious profession. One immediate consequence is that the New Atheism is now viewed
by some critics as being cruel. It is obvious that for many people, especially for those living in desperate
circumstances, where life is brief and with few pleasures, religion provides the most important resource of
security, self-esteem and hope. Illusory as the religious resource may be, it is nevertheless cruel to try to deprive
such people of that resource. The humanity of secular humanism, which is the creed of most atheists, is
inclusive: its benevolence, attentiveness and sympathetic understanding must rain on the irreligious and the
religious alike. If it is not inclusive it negates itself. It is not humanism. The New Atheists (to my knowledge) do
not discuss this issue because, I think, they have limited comprehension of the deep wells of need and emotional
privation from which much in religion springs. And that incomprehension is abetted by some of the superficial
ideas emerging from evolutionary psychology and cognitive science that they rely on for the explanation of

7 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3138779,00.html
8 This was written before the re-election of President Obama in 2012 and I am now unsure whether the assertion
still holds. Since the 2013 elections in Israel Shas no longer holds cabinet positions.
9 Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris in particular all too frequently encouraged ridicule of religion. Dawkins is
quoted by Plantinga as writing in his blog: ‘We need to go further: go beyond humourous ridicule, sharpen our
barbs to a point where they really hurt’ (Plantinga 2011, 46). I raise this issue not because I’m keen to moralize
about it but because it points to an inability to understand what motivates the religious. Philip Kitcher (2011) has
underscored this point. Darwinian atheists, he says, neither offer the best arguments against belief in the
supernatural nor seem aware of the important functions that religions serve. Their loud ridicule is
counterproductive because assaulting a person’s religion can be experienced as profoundly threatening.
Kitcher’s own approach, by contrast, is to explore the threats the religious feel and to articulate secularism as
positive responses to those threats. Many of those threats are economic and social so secular society, he argues,
must be developed so that it can respond to social and economic injustice and the need for collective action; it
must provide support and a sense of purpose and connection to replace the amenities and satisfactions religion
has previously provided.
religion’s origins, persistence and functions. Failing to understand these aspects of religion, the remedies the
New Atheists prescribe to cure it are singularly inept and counterproductive.

Cognitive Anthropology and Evolutionary Psychology

In certain respects the issue I now want to discuss is an old one, the contest between nature and nurture. In the
new accounts of religiosity stemming from cognitive anthropology and evolutionary psychology the influence of
nurture and culture, especially the interactions between infant and parent and the vicissitudes of emotional
development that have long been the subjects of psychoanalysis and developmental psychology—and more
recently of neuroscience (see Fonagy et al. 2004); Fotopoulou et al. 2012); Panksepp and Biven 2012); and
Schore 2003)—have largely disappeared from view. As a result, the accounts of the origins, persistence and
functions of religiosity which the New Atheists draw on and develop are often conjectural and shallow.
The New Atheists’ interest in the origins and persistence of religion arises from an imperative intrinsic
to their program: to replace supernatural explanations with naturalistic ones. Three general approaches can be
distinguished in the camp. The first is allied to the old intellectualist tradition according to which religion is a
pre-scientific explanatory exercise. On the second, religiosity (the disposition to be religious) is an evolved,
adaptive trait. On the third and most favoured approach, religiosity is not adaptive—it has no survival value on
its own—but is a by-product (or spandrel) of evolved dispositions that are adaptive. The adaptionist view is
usually associated with group selection. Its leading proponent David Sloan Wilson (2002) argues that religion is
an evolved phenomenon that improves cooperation and cohesion within human groups, advantaging them in
competition with non-religious groups. It is also possible to hold an adaptionist view without group selection, as
does Jesse Bering (2011), whose views I will discuss below.
Although, as I’ve noted, it is difficult to avoid formulations in general terms it must continually be kept
in mind that religions are complex congeries of ideology, practices, attitudes and institutions and that the kind of
explanation appropriate for one aspect of religion may be quite inappropriate for another. The explanation of
how certain religious beliefs evolved, say, may be of an entirely different order from that appropriate for the
explanation of rituals: the first may have its deep source in the human need for understanding, for example, the
latter in a basic emotion command system such as PLAY (Panksepp and Biven 2012); or something altogether
different. Moreover, while some elements of religion may be adaptive, others may not. So the questions that
guide much of the contemporary research we are examining—whether religion is adaptive or merely a by-
product of adaptations, whether it is a product of individual or of group evolution, and so on—are blunt probes
in need of honing.
In the typical religion-as-by-product explanations that I will consider here, religion is said to piggy-
back on various mental systems or modules selected for advantage in our Palaeolithic past. For example, an
automatic agency detection device (ADD) that notices animate movement is a very useful thing if you are
another creature’s prey. On the principle that it is better to be wrong than sorry such a device is likely to become
hyperactive, an HADD (Barrett 2004). And (so the story goes) the HADD is likely to detect not only the leopard
in the bush but conduces to belief in other animate entities, the sprites and gods lurking there. Similarly, the
capacity to ‘read’ other minds in your group, to grasp their moods or intentions, to be able to adopt ‘the
intentional stance’ or to have (in the current barbarisms) ‘a theory of mind’ (ToM) or capacity to ‘mentalize’
(Fonagy et al. 2002) is an obviously useful social accoutrement to enhance genetic fitness. ToM is likely not
only to induce animism—to attribute life to inanimate things and invoke spirits—but to impute to these things
mental activity. ToM in high gear disposes to belief in invisible minds with purposes, minds much like ours,
minds indeed that know our purposes—gods (Bering 2011). So these evolved cognitive systems have as by-
products a tendency to create religious conceptions, at least of the crude ‘animistic’ sort which this line of
thought holds is basic to all religions. The systems are ‘the evolutionary drivers of religiosity’ (Thomson 2011).
Many such systems are posited. According to Thomson, to believe in a god ‘our mind bounces off no fewer than
twenty hard-wired adaptations evolved over eons of natural selection’ (2011, 33). Then, once the quasi-religious
conceptions are born they take on life as cultural products, as memes, which are perpetuated either by the same
systems that created them or by means such as memetic replication or indoctrination.
How can such claims be critically assessed? One way is to examine the postulated mental systems
piecemeal, determine whether there is independent and adequate evidence for them, and consider whether the
originary consequences claimed for them really follow. Another strategy is to show that other explanations of
the same phenomena, for example psychodynamic explanations, are superior: it may be that the mental systems
exist but that their role in the formation of religiosity and religious conceptions is minor. I will consider
representative examples of both strategies.
Let’s turn first to a mixed story. A.C. Grayling (2009) argues that religion originated in attempts to
explain natural phenomena, and probably was shaped by experiences with hallucinogenic fungi (2009, 147,
152). This intellectualist explanation is consistent with evolutionary thinking since dispositions to understand
and predict may well be selected for advantage. Then, once religion got underway it persisted through the
collaboration of ‘priesthoods and temporal powers needing each other in order to control majority populations’
(2009, 147). ‘The main key’ Grayling continues,
to the survival of all religions is their proselytization of the young. For good
evolutionary reasons, children are highly credulous... But whereas the tooth fairy and
Father Christmas soon leave the scene with fairies and trolls, God or the gods remain,
reinforced by parental, educational, and social institutionalization. (2009, 153)
We need note only one defect in this account. Religion long antedates, by tens of thousands of years perhaps
(Bellah 2011, Chap. 3) the advent of priesthoods and kings, so even if an urge to understand is the origin of
religion, hierarchs can scarcely account for its survival.
The view of religion as (accidental) by-product of primevally evolved cognitive systems may seem
more promising, not only in accounting for religion’s origins but also its persistence. Richard Dawkins
considers several species of this genus of explanation. The right kind of explanation, he argues, must lie in
evolutionary biology because others, such as ‘psychological explanations to the effect that people find some
belief agreeable or disagreeable are proximate not ultimate explanations’ (Dawkins 2006, 168). On one such
biological account, religion is conceived as a by-product of innate gullibility: ‘Natural selection builds child
brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents tell them’ (2006, 176). That is very likely true:
credulousness in the young is a useful attribute for creatures living in small, vulnerable groups. ‘But the flip side
of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility’ (2006, 176). Dawkins avers that because children are gullible they
easily accept the ‘religious nonsense’ they are taught. But, it may be asked, why in the apparent absence of
evidence do they as adults continue to believe it? To this question Dawkins has at least two, perhaps
complementary, answers: like Grayling he appeals to the power of indoctrination, conceived as a kind of
infection; and he appeals to meme-selection.
 The trouble with appealing to indoctrination is that it is not an explanation but a label on a problem.
How does it operate? Why can’t one be indoctrinated in physics or geography? Why are the religious views of
the indoctrinated immune to rational considerations? A specific weakness in the indoctrination story on which
Dawkins pivots so much of his argument is that it doesn’t have a conception of being inducted into
unquestioning faith that goes beyond learning doctrine—maybe a lot of doctrine, maybe by rote every day. But
no matter how learning is intensified at this level, it won’t yield the quality of religious conviction that resists
rational considerations and change of view. Yet any serious account of religious conviction must explain its
frequent tenacity, depth and profound significance for its subject. These features cannot be explained by appeal
to gullibility, regular Sunday sermons or indoctrination as Dawkins and Grayling conceive it. There are in fact
psychological and social factors that can account for these features of religion (see Faber 2004; Pataki 2007; and
Schimmel 2008) but they are not of the sort these authors consider scientifically respectable.
Another proposal Dawkins examines is that religion is a by-product of our tendency to fall in love,
which he thinks is a kind of ‘irrationality mechanism’ built into the brain, conferring certain advantages in
mating and the rearing of young (2006, 185ff.). Religion, then, is a result of ‘love misfiring,’ choosing a wrong,
indeed non-existent, target. I believe there is some truth in this, but Dawkins’ account is much too thin. There
are many religions in which the supernatural folk who are supposed to be the objects of misfiring love don’t care
much about people and votaries don’t care much about them. The Aristotelian text Magna Moralia states that ‘It
would be eccentric for anyone to claim that he loved Zeus’ (in Dodds 2004, 35). The relationships to powerful
beings in tribal religions is often less than worshipful.10
Besides, how do the supernatural folk get into the picture in the first place? Love may ‘misfire’, but
why should that lead to the creation of the extraordinary beings that populate the ideologies of most religions?
Dawkins is alive to this difficulty and acknowledges that evolution may explain only the predisposition to
religion, not its contents. Having officially dispensed with psychological theories that may have filled this gap,
he embarks on an unpromising line of thought: meme evolution, the selection of ideas in the environment of
other ideas, on the model of natural selection: ‘Some religious ideas, like some genes, might survive because of
absolute merit… [others] survive because they are compatible with other memes that are already numerous in
the meme pool ….memetic natural selection of some kind seems to me to offer a plausible account of the
detailed evolution of particular religions…. Simple memes survive by virtue of their universal appeal to human
psychology’ (2006, 201). But this is just a fancy way of saying that some ideas do better than others because
they gratify human wishes. ‘The idea of immortality itself’, Dawkins says, ‘survives because it caters to wishful
thinking’ (2006, 190). (This is not news, and I will make more of it later.) So despite officially denouncing
psychological theory as ‘only proximate’ Dawkins is compelled to smuggle in a rudimentary common-sense
psychology to rescue the meme theory. Without that, his account of why there should specifically be religion
(amongst all other possible objects of misfiring love) and of specific religious content is empty.
So we still do not have an account of how the particular religious memes or ideas arrive on the scene.
Dawkins mentions a range of earlier work on by-product explanations by Paul Bloom, Pascal Boyer, Scott

10 In speaking here of ‘tribal religions’ I follow a long tradition in anthropology and sociology (e.g. Bellah
2011) to designate the religions of relatively small groups with minimal differentiations of power and status
whose rituals are most often focused on ‘powerful beings’ rather than the worship of ‘high gods’. Bellah ’s
examples include the Kalapalo people of Brazil, the Walbiri of Australia and the Navajo of North America
(Bellah 2011, Chap. 3 and 4).
Atran, Daniel Dennett and others; perhaps this work can forge a tighter link between evolved mental systems or
modules and supernatural beings and other religious notions?
As we saw, many different mental systems have been proposed to explain religiosity and religious
ideology. Some, such as transference (in the psychoanalytic sense), and the attachment system first described by
John Bowlby, do, I believe, play a crucial role in the genesis of religiosity (Kirkpatrick 1999; Thomson 2011).
These systems, however, are largely ignored by the cognitive anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists,
possibly because psychodynamic theories have fallen into disfavour. 11 The systems that are favoured include a
hard-wired system supposed to conduce to dualism (and so, supposedly, to the spirit world); hyperactive agency
detection device (HADD); the intuitive psychology system, which is similar to the intentional stance of Daniel
Dennett; theory of mind (ToM) or mentalization; the capacity for decoupled cognition; and those systems that
supervene on the stimulation of various bonding neurochemicals through ritualistic dancing, trance and other
means.12 I want to probe a little deeper the two systems, already noted, that have received most attention in the
literature, HADD and ToM.
In his book Faces in the Clouds (1993), S. E. Guthrie asked why people tend to see human traits in
natural phenomena. He swiftly dismisses the ‘wishful’ or ‘comfort’ theories, according to which we tend to
populate our world with reassuring presences, i.e. spirits and gods, because these beings are as often dangerous
and vindictive as they are benevolent. His answer is that we imagine person-like beings because they are the
most complex beings we know. Our cognitive systems, seeking to make as many and as rich set of inferences as
possible, are inherently anthropomorphic (see Boyer 2002, 163ff.).
Other anthropologists have suggested that something more fundamental underlies this tendency.
According to Justin Barrett (2000; 2004), for example, we evolved devices that detect not only human presence
but any indications of animacy, a useful survival mechanism in a predatory environment; and the more a
creature’s device is biased to over-detection—the more hyper-active—the better its survival chances. This is the
genesis of the HADD system.
The existence of such a system is plausible and independent experimental evidence is claimed for it.
But how does this system get us to believing in supernatural or non-ordinary beings? Thomson says: ‘This
device [HADD] contributes to religious belief because it allows and even favours inference of unseen agents,
almost always human or humanlike agents’ (2011, 64). Perhaps so, but there is still a long stretch from ‘unseen
agents’ (leopards and enemies in bushes) to the gods and powerful beings inhabiting the ideologies of most
religions. Thomson caps his argument by asking rhetorically why it is that we may mistake a bush for a burglar
but never a burglar for a bush. So far as I know I have not seen a burglar, but perhaps I have and mistaken him
for a bush. The more telling point, however, is that I couldn’t infer a burglar unless I already had the concept
burglar. Pari passu it remains unclear how HADD can take us from the rustle in the bush to the concept of
supernatural beings; let alone to the deep emotional involvement with such beings that is the hallmark of most
developed religions.
Boyer says that ‘Barrett is certainly right that our agency-detection systems are involved in the
construction of religious concepts’ (2002, 167). It is unclear whether Boyer believes that HADD merely played
a role in originating these concepts in Palaeolithic (or earlier) times or whether it continues to act in perpetuating

11 The tide however is turning. See, e.g., Solms and Turnball (2002), Fotopoulou et al. (2012).
12 These and other systems are reviewed in Thomson (2011).
them in the present. He would seem to be committed to the latter, given that the cognitive system is claimed to
be hard-wired. It is remarkable then how few sightings of gods we have today; though every now and then Jesus
is discerned in a potato chip. In any case, Boyer emphasizes that HADD is merely one system that interacts with
many others: ‘supernatural concepts are salient because they generate complex inferences, that is, because they
activate many different inference systems’ (2002, 168). He mentions systems which deal with social
interactions, with economic relations (barter etc.), with intuitive psychology, face recognition, and so on. All of
these are brought into play in characterizing supernatural agents: ‘the cognitive systems that shape our regular
interactions with other agents will inform interaction with supernatural agents too’ (2002, 177). Religion, Boyer
asserts, is successful precisely because it engages so many of these systems.
But there is one feature of supernatural agents, 13 according to Boyer, that is not easily explained in
terms of these systems: important gods have full access to strategic information (2002, 178). In the religions he
studies, powerful gods do not necessarily matter, but ‘the ones that have strategic information always matter’
(2002, 183). The gods may not know everything, and some may be stupid or easily fooled (2002, 9), but most
know about behaviours that have social consequences: urinating in the wrong places, stealing, lying etc. Boyer
believes that this feature of the gods and spirits is a result of cultural selection (2002, 188). He suggests that: (i)
it takes less effort to represent limited gods; and (ii) gods focussed on strategic information generate richer
inferences about what matters in social interaction (2002, 191). This explanation is unpersuasive. Why are these
conditions culturally advantageous? If it is possible to attribute social omniscience to some gods it scarcely
seems an effort to go a step further; and a step further would surely generate more inferences not less. One
might be tempted to view the evolution of the Abrahamic gods with their limitless omniscience, for example, in
just such a light. Jesse Bering (2011) has investigated and elaborated the significance of divine access to human
minds and made it central to his account of the origin and persistence of gods; to this recent account we now
turn.
Bering, like other New Atheists, dismisses the ‘comfort’, ‘wishful’, or ‘need-based’ accounts of
religion: ‘I don’t think these types of answer are entirely intellectually bankrupt actually, but I do think they beg
the question. They’re perfectly circular, leaving us scratching our heads over why we need to feel like there’s
something bigger out there or to have a sense of purpose to begin with’ (2011, 5). He also rejects the accidental-
by-product views of Boyer, Dawkins and others. Religion, according to Bering, is adaptive: ‘religion—and
especially, the idea of a watchful, knowing, reactive God—uniquely helped our ancestors survive and
reproduce’ (2011, 7).
The argument, in outline, goes like this: A critical development in human evolution was the capacity
for ToM. Special neural systems are dedicated to this capacity (2011, 24). Once ToM starts cranking it becomes
indiscriminate and we are disposed to see intentions, desires, beliefs, signs and purposes everywhere (2011, 35,
80). The operation of ToM explains our inferences to supernatural minds, the belief in afterlife, 14 the tendency to

13 It should be noted that Boyer’s generalizations about religion are greatly influenced by field work with
African and Pacific islands indigenous populations and by related anthropological work.
14 Bering conducted experiments in which children were shown a puppet play in which an alligator swallows a
mouse. They are then asked whether the mouse can still eat and whether the mouse will miss its mother. The
mouse, they all professed, could no longer eat, but the children unanimously thought it would miss its mother.
Bering interprets the experiment to demonstrate an intuitive conception of a mind-body split and predisposition
towards believing in continuity of mind after death, and therefore an afterlife. He writes: ‘Rather than simply
being inculcated by religious adults, the default belief in young children is that mental capacities survive death,
albeit in some vague, unarticulated way... young children are best envisioned as being naturally prepared to
believe that life has a purpose and the origin of natural theology. God, Bering declares, ‘was born of theory of
mind’ (2011, 190). So far this is an elaboration of HADD: we not only over-detect animacy, we can’t help
applying the intentional stance promiscuously. But Bering introduces a special twist. He notes, and accepts
without question, a view attributed to Raffaele Pettazzoni that ‘regardless of the particular religion one
subscribed to, the central gods were envisioned as possessing a deep knowing of people as unique individuals—
of their “hearts and souls”’ (Bering 2011, 190).
We have seen that this is by no means universally true. Boyer noted that the main gods in some
religions, the creators, are often remote and uninterested in the affairs of humankind. Other anthropologists and
historians of religion have made similar observations on ancient and tribal religions, including those where gods
have not made an appearance. Robert Bellah (2011), for example, points out that tribal and many pre-archaic
peoples do not have gods. There are ‘powerful beings’ with limited powers and knowledge, and they are not
worshipped though ritual surrounds them (2011, 141). It is not until later in social development that powerful
beings, and deified kings, become objects of veneration and worship, and thus gods, as usually understood
(2011, 183). The Kalapalo people of central Brazil, for example, recognize among many other supernatural
powerful beings Agouti who is ‘a sneak and a spy’, Taugi who is ‘an effective trickster who can penetrate
illusions’ and Jaguar, ‘a violent bully who is easily deceived’ (2011, 136ff.).
Yet much rests for Bering’s thesis on the knowingness or omniscience of gods:
For many, God represents that ineradicable sense of being watched that so often flares
up in moments of temptation... In other words, the illusion of a punitive God assisted
their genetic well-being whenever they underestimated the risk of actual social detection
by other people... By helping to thwart genetically costly but still powerful ancestral
drives, these cognitive illusions pried open new and vital arteries for reproductive
success, promoting inhibitory decisions that would have been highly adaptive under the
biologically novel, language based rules of natural selection. The illusion of God,
engendered by our theory of mind, was one very important solution to the adaptive
problem of human gossip. (2011, 192)
Since gossip can ruin reputations and reproductive success persons, with a tendency to religiosity, i.e. belief in
omniscient gods, are selectively advantaged. ‘Our evolutionary ancestors required a fictitious moral watcher to
tame their animalistic impulses, to keep them from miring their reputations under the glare of human carriers’
(2011, 200–1). Thus, ‘God (and others like him) evolved in human minds as an “adaptive illusion” one that
directly helped our ancestors solve the unique problem of human gossip’ (2011, 7). Religiosity is meat for
natural selection.

endorse the concept of an afterlife because it matches their own intuitions about the continuity of mind after
death’ (2011, 124). Again: ‘People in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are
unsure about what happens to the mind after death’ (2011, 113). Those intuitions, Bering thinks, arise from
ToM. Bering’s inferences are too swift. In the first place, the timing for the advent of ToM is controversial
(Fonagy et al. 2004, Part II). A moderate view is that infants are able to make some intentional attributions by 9-
12 months but do not master false belief attribution until 3-4 years of age. By that time, of course, they have
considerable linguistic skills and are well underway to being inducted into a culture. Moreover, belief in afterlife
is not universal across cultures and that fact casts doubt on the ubiquity of the features of ToM Bering is at pains
to enjoin. Also, there is only a tenuous link between the idea of a mind-body split and posthumous existence, as
even rudimentary knowledge of Jewish or Christian eschatology would show: for much of its history the
resurrection of the body was the central issue and the soul was held to be material. Of such matters Bering (and
his camp) appears blithely innocent. My guess is that the experiment shows only that there is a ‘mother-and-me’
versus ‘other things’ split, and that children until quite late, indeed often very late, have only a confused idea of
what is involved in death, or none at all.
The Human Element

I have told these stories largely in their author’s own words because they are so thin and vestigial that a
summary may look like parody. Some lines of objection have been noticed already. It is likely that systems such
as HADD and ToM are part of our evolutionary heritage—though primed, it must be emphasized, in the early
infant-mother matrix (Fonagy et al. 2004, Chap. 3). But it is a long stretch from the operation of these systems
to the complex detail of religious ontology or content and, more to the point, religious devotion. Such
mechanisms are interesting candidates for explaining some aspects of the predisposition to populate the cosmos
with unseen animate beings, but they tell us nothing about the shape, content or functions of religions: the
myths, doctrines, rituals, devotions, institutions etc. And they tell us nothing appreciable about what motivates
people today to religious observance. To mention only some of the most obvious and uncontested motives:
people really are afraid of death; their grief at the loss of loved ones 15 stirs hope that one day they may be re-
united with them; people need group identities and a sense of belonging to sustain self-esteem; they need a
promise of better things to come; many feel the need to be watched over and live in the sight of a powerful
benevolent being; and so on. Religion answers (albeit illusorily in most cases) to such needs, and it is such
needs that perpetuate, and very likely originated, religion. I believe that there are other still more fundamental
human needs at play in the evolution and perpetuation of religion and I will mention some of these below (Black
2006; Faber 2004; Meissner 1984; Pataki 2007).
The human element passes the evolutionists by... or almost. At one point Bering notes that it is hard to
shake off the sense that someone or something is watching you and cares (2011, 159)! Cares? Bering has
presented a case for an inclination to posit spiritual beings, but not a word of argument about them caring. There
is nothing in the accounts of HADD or ToM to suggest that the projected minds should care about us, and
nothing that recognizes the profound significance that relationship to gods can have in persons’ lives.
The evolutionary psychologists we have been considering also fail to seriously consider alternatives to
their hypotheses. Take a few of the issues already noticed. Some gods or powerful beings, we saw, are
omniscient only about socially strategic information such as lying, stealing, bartering etc. Or consider Bering’s
recognition that God cares. It is evident that these are just the sorts of issues that arise in the interactions
between parent and child, and get imbricated with the loving loyalty and fear that children maintain towards
their parents. It would surely be reasonable to surmise, even in the absence of psychoanalytic findings, that
attitudes to parents are perpetuated in later relationships, including the (illusory) ones to gods and ancestral
spirits. At the least, that is a plausible and parsimonious alternative explanation for these phenomena, though
ignored by evolutionary psychologists.
Or consider the sense of being watched over, so central to Bering’s argument. Many people do have
that sense, but it is much more effectively explained, within well-established psychoanalytic theory, by the
activity of a partially dissociated aspect of the self-identified with internalized parental images (Freud’s
‘superego’) than an overactive ToM. Bering tells the story (2011, 88ff) how, after his mother died, in the quiet
harmony of wind chimes jingling he felt her trying to communicate a gentle message. He discerns the play of
ToM. But why, we should ask, mother? Bering, Boyer and the others feign—to adapt the wonderful remark
about behaviourists—emotional anaesthesia. Almost certainly what Bering was experiencing was grief, the

15 Boyer’s discussion of death in Chapter 6 of his 2002 book is one of the most extraordinary evasions of the
features of mourning and of the human element I have encountered.
aftermath of profound loss, and not an over-excited ToM. One of the thoroughly investigated features of grief is
the search for the lost one and the wishful tendency to see them everywhere (Bowlby 1998). And it is probable
that Bering projected his internalized mother imago into the chiming in the unconscious attempt to reconstitute a
relationship with her—not because he couldn’t switch off his ToM.
I have criticized some aspects of the evolutionary accounts of the origins and persistence of some
religious conceptions as inadequate to their purpose. I had earlier argued that the New Atheists, especially the
Darwinian chapter, rely on these accounts to supplant supernatural explanations of religion with naturalistic
ones. I have suggested with a few brief illustrations that psychoanalytic and child developmental theories
provide much more persuasive and fertile explanations for several of the phenomena that the cognitive systems
of the evolutionists are invoked to explain. It seems to me that the New Atheism would do well to turn for its
naturalistic understanding of religions to psychodynamic and developmental theories where the emotional and
wishful (or orectic) dispositions of humankind receive due attention.
There is no space to develop here even the rudiments of a psychodynamic theory of religious
phenomena16 but I do want, finally, to put to rest a major misunderstanding, an objection to the so-called ‘wish-
fulfilment’, ‘needs-based’ or ‘comfort’ theories of religion which appears to be the main reason they are not
taken seriously by evolutionary psychologists, cognitive anthropologists and New Atheists.
Guthrie (2007) says that the wish-fulfilling theories of Feuerbach, Freud, Abram Kardiner and other
psychoanalytically orientated anthropologists are mistaken because many religions ‘have features for which no-
one is likely to wish. The deities of some are cruel and angry, and often complemented by devils or frightening
ghosts. In others the after-life is either absent or fleeting or is a Hades or other unpleasant place’ (2007, 288).
Boyer (2002) asseverates that many religious ideas are anything but comforting: if ‘religious concepts’ are
‘solutions to particular emotional needs [they] are not doing a very good job.... A religious world is often far
more terrifying than a world without supernatural presence’ (2002, 23) and many religions do not promise
salvation or eternal bliss (2002, 237). Bering, as we saw, thinks that comfort theories are circular, question-
begging and hand-waving. Dawkins says they are only proximate explanations and quotes Stephen Pinker who
says the such theories ‘only raise the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can
plainly see are false’ (Dawkins 2006, 168). Dennett (2006, 102) says that such theories are not explanatory
because there is always the further question why these ideas are comforting.
These objections are muddled and superficial. To begin with, wish-fulfilment theories are not circular
or question-begging. Suppose someone asks me why I am not hungry and I explain that I just ate a hamburger.
She could insist that the fact that a hamburger extinguished my hunger raises the further question of why this
organism, my person, should be such that hamburgers extinguish its hunger. Fair enough. But it doesn’t follow
that the hamburger explanation is circular or question-begging. It follows only that further questions of a
different order may arise. One might reasonably ask Dawkins (and Dennett), for example, why they think that
the evolutionary explanations of religious belief are ultimate, as opposed to, say, ones in terms of molecular
biology or physics; since the evolutionary explanations obviously raise questions about processes germane to

16 Freud (1927; 1930) is the place to start. Kirkpatrick (1999) provides an excellent perspective from
attachment theory and Meissner, a Jesuit, provides a comprehensive psychoanalytic account, though critical of
Freud. The psychoanalytic papers in Black (2006) are generally receptive to religion; Pataki (2007) much less
so. The classical psychoanalytic literature on religion remains of immense interest, not to mention the even
vaster Jungian literature.
these disciplines. The adequacy of explanation is relative to context. Relative to the context of psychological
explanation, wishful, comfort or needs-based explanations are neither circular nor question begging.
The argument that ‘wishful’ theories of religion are false because religions have nasty features that no-
one is likely to wish, and gods are often cruel, is not only ignorant of the psychoanalytic theory it is supposed to
refute but offends common-sense. People have all manner of wishes including sadistic and self-destructive ones
and frequently enter into masochistic relationships. In the 1930’s the psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn (1952),
working with abused children, found that even the most abused will cling to their abusive parents and blame
themselves (rather in the way sinners do) as wrongdoers. Fairbairn expressed the motive succinctly: it is better
to have a bad object than no object. Freud pointed out that the need for punishment, sense of guilt, the entry into
sado-masochistic relations, are universal in humankind. Subsequent psychoanalytic work has hugely expanded
our understanding of the terrifying aspects of the inner world which are often projected into perceived enemies
and divine beings. It should not be surprising then that the religious enterprise, which in many ways is a
continuation of relationships with unsatisfactory internalized parental objects (or imagos) and with dissociated
aspects of the self, generates terrifying scenarios and vicious and vindictive supernatural beings as well as
loving and protective ones. The easy rejection of the wishful or comfort theories of religion by the New Atheists
is reckless.
More generally, the New Atheists ignore the psychological and social functions of religion; the ways,
for example, that religious beliefs can sustain and are sustained by unconscious dependence on parents, or can
satisfy various liberally distributed narcissistic, hysterical and obsessional needs. Some of these are usually
harmless: the need to feel loved, to belong, to have purpose; or the need to segregate the pure, sacred aspects of
the self from the sexual, sullied ones. But others, such as the need to be special or of the Elect, or to subordinate,
convert or eliminate others if they threaten an exalted self-conception or your group’s purity, can be malign in
the extreme.
I contend that such emotional and orectic factors—I have pointed only to the tip of the iceberg—are far
more significant in the understanding of religion than the cognitive systems currently being explored by
evolutionary psychologists and cognitive anthropologists and embraced by most New Atheists. Not
understanding the deeper motivations to religion the New Atheists largely misunderstand religion.
Misunderstanding religion they adopt polemical measures that alienate the moderate centres of religion and are
especially ineffective against those religious manifestations—Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism, Christian and
Hindu nationalism, and so on—which really do need forcefully to be countered. I am tempted to surmise that
their intellectualist and nativist accounts of religion’s origins and persistence represent a triumph for American
Puritanism in the social sciences and, in paradoxical concert with most religions, an assault on insight. It is
much safer to discuss subpersonal cognitive mechanisms or modules, or the economics of memes, than to
recognize with the psychodynamic theorists the sensual currents in religious practices and institutions, or the
ways in which divine figures represent and sustain early, difficult relations with parents, preserved
unconsciously.
Although I have argued that the New Atheism errs in important respects I believe that it is performing a
useful service. It has invigorated discussion of religion in the public domain, and from that should flow
discussion of the place of religion in the good society and of what constitutes a good society.
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