invariably require a transcendent “referee.”
Thus carried to its logical endpoint, the evolution of the human brain from a hierarchy-based and less egalitarian primate brain would inexorably lead to a belief in and need for God.
At face value this conclusion might upset both religious adherents and atheists: the former because it takes God from the spiritual to the bio-natural domain, the latter because it suggests we will never reach a point in our social evolution where we can abandon a belief in some type of God.
Actually neither group need fret over this set of possibilities. First, because it is impossible to know whether natural selection runs contrary to God’s plan or whether perhaps God, in his wisdom has simply given us laws that coincide with the nature He also created which happen to favor survival of the only species capable of religious thought. To suggest there is an inherent incongruence between the idea of a God and the theory of natural selection would be to suggest that God wants us to act in ways that don’t coincide with a world He himself created.
As for the atheists, perhaps nature is all there is. Yet even if that were true, nature would require a lawful foundation, a grounding point by which matter and energy could have formed within the hot, formless plasma known as the cosmic egg. In other words whether or not one believes in a creator, it is difficult to conceive of a universe that began or transitioned from the size of a pin to its current expanse not undergoing some sort of creation process. Even if God doesn’t exist in quite human form, a tenet to which many religions (including arguably Christianity – which views God as a triad consisting of at least two