Over at First Things, the lovably polemical David Bentley Hart has a column about the strangely universal experience of religious believers throughout the ages doing extreme things (like castrating themselves and worse) for the sake of their faith. Nothing terribly insightful here, but I want to file his last few paragraphs away for the next time we argue about atheism.
I know, obviously, that purely Darwinian explanations of religion have been attempted, and that some kind of evolutionary rationale can be devised to explain just about any phenomenon if one is sufficiently inventive. Most such explanations are utterly impressionistic, of course; and, as with most attempts to use Darwinian theory to explain more than it really can, they are largely exercises in making the implausible sound somehow almost kind of likely…
Anyway, I am not interested in that argument just at the moment; it would take too long and would prove inconclusive. It is simply part of the intellectual burden of modernity, now that every concept of final and formal causes has been explicitly abandoned, that persons of a rationalist bent have to try to see everything (including, impossibly enough, existence itself) as the effect of blind material or physical causes, even if that means taking a shockingly great number of counterintuitive assertions purely on faith.
I strongly agree with him that philosophical materialists use Darwinian theory to “explain more than it really can,” without evidence or proof. Of course this means “taking a shockingly great number of counterintuitive assertions purely on faith.” Many atheists have a hard time conceding that they take anything on faith.