Evolutionary explanations of religion involve "accepting the evolutionist theory whereby religion has been and continues to be no more effective than magic as a technique for covering the gaps in our knowledge and practical abilities. But nothing is less certain that that this is the case. If magic were no more than a clumsy and ineffective technique based on contingent associations and links that do not exist in nature, its persistence in spite of its lack of success would be astonishing and inexplicable; it would serve as proof that our nervous system, regulated by laws of conditioned reflexes, is inferior to that of all other animals, in that it is unable to rid itself of reflexes based on nonexistent links. If such an explanation were true, the very survival of the human species, not to speak of its extraordinary technological achievements, would be an incomprehensible miracle.
The same may be said of the theory whereby religious beliefs proper are reducible to practical instruments, applied to spheres that are subject to chance and not susceptible to human influence: an means of imposing order were control is not possible. If religious belief is simply the result of our wish to control the world, it is hard to see how and why so purely technical an attitude could have involved the human imagination in such aberrations as the search for hidden and technically useless meanings in empirical phenomena, or how and why the idea of the sacred was formed." -Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, 64-65
Scatterings
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