I might join provided linguistics had a prominent place and she herself delivered the sermons.
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“I think Gregory’s real objection here is that even when religion is the product of a long gradual development that doesn’t mean “evolved” is the right word except as a metaphor because these didn’t come from the mechanical process described in biological evolution.”
Yes, I agree that religion and theology “didn’t come from the mechanical process described in biological evolution”. It may be that some people at BioLogos believe otherwise, not sure.
“I think we evolved into religious beings as it was of benefit for group function and success, then Abraham came along and the rest is history.”
So God didn’t communicate with human beings before Abraham? Are you suggesting pre-Abrahamic “theology” was just a “natural emergence” made up in peoples’ minds, rather than arising from “conversation” with (not an anthropomorphic) God? That’s the ERS view. Is it yours too, JPM?
“If I invent a new religion tomorrow, …”
Then that religion you invented would not have technically “evolved” into existence, as “invention” is normally not a “random” or “undirected” process. That “religion” (e.g. Scientology) would rather more clearly and understandably “extend” from your exposition and declaration of it. This is where the language of human intention trumps evolutionary unintentionality.
It would be curious if someone affiliated with BioLogos here were to suggest “it’s natural for human beings to create religions”, as justification for this. Yet that is exactly what ERS posits, without any gods involved. That’s the “evolution of religion” view by people who study it in ERS.
Perhaps ERS-like views are more popular at BioLogos than one might expect?
Just curious. Where do you believe the ability to understand complex figurative language, like the extended metaphor in Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son” comes from?
Of course not. But when people talk about the evolution of human religion, or language, or culture, they are talking about the evolution of corporate capacities and group behaviors in which more complex patterns of behavior that can be traced to evolving cognitive development are considered heritable adaptations that are subject to selective pressures. To the extent that any human religion, language, or cultural practice is dependent on evolved human traits and is a human construct, then it is in a causal chain that evolution has affected.
I think it is natural for humans to create religions, but I think the reason is because there is a supernatural reality humans have capacities to perceive and interact with. To what extent those capacities are evolved and what extent God has directly put them in people, I don’t know. I don’t have much of an ideological problem with the claim that the capacity to perceive the supernatural or interact with the divine is an evolved capacity. I don’t think that is much different than saying an infant does not have the capacity to perceive the divine and must mature in various physical and cognitive ways first. I think humans create religions because the supernatural is part of the world we perceive and inhabit.
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“I don’t think that is much different than saying an infant does not have the capacity to perceive the divine and must mature in various physical and cognitive ways first.”
It’s much more common, and I would argue along with the majority, understandable, to speak about “child development”, rather than “child evolution”.
“Where do you believe the ability to understand complex figurative language, like the extended metaphor in Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son” comes from?”
From being a human person. I don’t attribute nearly as much of my capacities & “propensities” to a biological process of “evolution” as some others here do. It’s a surprise to see Christians who seemingly want to exaggerate the term “evolution” to include (swallow up) religion (as entirely man-made). That surely creates a slippery slope to the view that “everything evolves”, which I believe is a dangerous ideology, as BioLogos has likewise indicated.
“I think it is natural for humans to create religions”
So it was “natural” for L. Ron Hubbard to create “Scientology”? He did what was “simply natural” (and nothing non-natural) in inventing that “religion”? The other option is “religion” is “artificial”, and not something that “naturally evolves”, contrary to what the ERS people insist.
“the field of Evolutionary Religious Studies (ERS) emerged at the end of the 20th Century as part of a more general rethinking of all human-related subjects that gave rise to terms such as Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Anthropology, and Evolutionary Economics. ERS has made rapid progress during the last 20 years, in part by organizing the vast amount of empirical information on religion that has accumulated, much as Darwin was able to organize the vast amount of information on plants and animals during his day.” - David S. Wilson
Okay - then let’s leave that problematic-to-you ‘evolution’ term aside. Would you have trouble acknowledging that your developed capacities (spiritual or otherwise) had a necessary dependence on your mom and dad? Without them, where would you be? There is a passage in which Paul speaks of the physical as preceding the spiritual (I Cor. 15:46). Of course Paul knows nothing of any ‘evolution’ when he wrote that, but I think he is referencing a profound truth that includes all these same kinds of things (including additional physical things like evolution that we can now see is included).
Not ‘swallow up’. (That would be the ‘materialist’ or ‘Scientism’ take on things that some anti-religionists support - and decidedly not what Biologos would endorse.) Say rather ‘emerges from’ - as in religion has emerged from many processes - which (many know) includes evolution. But even if this latter phrase is a sticking point for you; then substitute other less threatening words like ‘physical development’ or ‘growth’ - not that those mean the same thing as ‘evolution’ (they don’t). But the point is that you too, should have no problem seeing spiritual life / religion etc as emerging from prior physical processes of one kind or another.
Obviously. I think an individual child’s development and the emerging cognitive capabilities of the evolving human population in history are analogous in some ways.
How did you get to be a human person? Do you believe your human personhood is a product of special creation, not evolution?
Not what was happening. I think humans and their human capacities are products of evolution. I think religion is the result of humans perceiving and interacting with supernatural realities. I think religions are human constructs. They are “true” to the degree that they correctly perceive supernatural realities. As a Christian, I would say a big part of accessing the truth of supernatural realities depends on divine revelation. Divine revelation is not “man-made,” but we have to do something with it, and what we do with it is a human construct.
I think we might be using natural in several different senses at the same time. I wasn’t using natural in opposition to supernatural, I was using it as in “reasonable” or “usual.” If supernatural reality exists, and I believe it does, than it is reasonable that humans try to understand and interact with that aspect of reality. I can’t speak to L. Ron Hubbard’s motivations in creating scientology, though I have heard they are somewhat suspect. But I think the reason he was successful in creating a religion is that adherents of scientology are trying to understand supernatural realities that, as humans, they perceive in the world. It is natural to want to understand those things.
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“Do you believe your human personhood is a product of special creation, not evolution?”
Wow, you really have to ask that? You actually think I’m a “creationist”!? 
Sorry that is incorrect. I’m not a creationist, and reject creationism.
“I think we might be using natural in several different senses at the same time.”
Yes, that’s the point. I wasn’t only thinking “opposition to supernatural”. There are other options available too, which I haven’t seen you use yet.
“I think religions are human constructs.”
Then they “extend” from human choices and realisation of thoughts into actions. Religion likewise is better understood as “developmental”, not as an “evolutionary” phenomenon. Thinking evolutionarily about religion brings in almost totally irrelevant time scales and topics, sometimes rich in “secular speculation”. It actually takes “things outside of Scripture” and reads them into Scripture (eisegesis).
If you wish to share the same (or at least, very similar) language with atheists and agnostics in ERS about the (natural) history of religion and theology, Christy, that’s up to you. As for me and my house, we choose language that rejects ERS and the evolutionism that is rampant in it. As BioLogos also rejects evolutionism, I am thankful that together we are in good company, even if there’s little actual anti-evolutionism content present on this site.
What I don’t understand is why you restrict the meaning of “evolution” to the biological kind. I’m pretty sure Darwin would have selected the term to describe gradual changes in morphology because it fit. But any other gradual process is just as well described by “evolution” as is the biological kind. Besides cultural change is the mode which most often accounts for change in our behavior now because it is less gradual than waiting for inherited DNA changes to accumulate. But cultures have stabilizing aspects too so “evolution” is still apt.
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I would like to think that might be because there is very little “Evolutionism” on this site. Just physical and biological sciences going where they can go. And other subject areas making use of a perfectly good English word for other comparative or explanatory purposes.
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Good discussion. I have to go to a funeral for a friend and deacon that died of Covid but will get back to this later hopefully.
I hear a lot of people (who are not thinking of evolution) say something like,“There is God shaped hole in all of us, and we fill it with God or gods of our making.” I agree. I think we are just talking about how that God shaped hole was developed, either by special creation or by an evolutionary process, created and sustained by God (for some of us.)
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Some people who accept common descent of homo sapiens biology believe that “humanness” is specially created in some way, either through some divine act of ensoulment or some special divine intervention in human history that imposed the image of God. I think it’s a fair question.
I refuse to humor your silly contention that the word evolution can only rightfully refer to a biological mechanism. Evolution means “development” or “change” over time and I am going to continue to use them synonymously as a normal English speaker.
There are at least three different categories of “evolutionary” analyses of religion. One is in the “Enlightenment” tradition of simplistic models imposed no matter what the actual evidence may be. Like Marx’s simplistic and inaccurate formula for the evolution of societies, this proclaims that humans must have gradually arrived at particular religious positions on a time frame invented by the person making the system. It is a common component of “higher criticism”, e.g., that ancient Israelites could not possibly have believed in absolute monotheism before the return from exile, or making a tabernacle could not possibly occur until well into the first millennium BC, or individual responsibility was invented by Jeremiah and Ezekiel. These formulas completely ignore the fact that people have all sorts of ideas at various times, as well as ignoring the fact that archaeological data often shows these ideas to already be present in the ancient Near East well before the Israelites supposedly couldn’t have thought that.
The version that Gregory is focused on is a more sophisticated version of the same error. Instead of the extreme oversimplification of a highly fixed formula, it has a much more flexible formula. But it’s still the “my formula explains everything” approach, and it still does a lot of trying to shove round pegs into square holes, or even trying to shove icosohedral pegs into solid walls. Like Marx’s “it’s all about money”, or Freud’s “it’s all about sex”, the effort to explain all human behavior, including religious behavior, as merely evolutionary self-interest has a germ of truth and major error. All of those are things that motivate people more than we tend to realize or care to admit, but humans are more complex than any of those suggest. The problem is quickly highlighted by turning their analyses back on themselves. What are Freudians trying to rationalize? Sociobiologists disparage the motives of others as mere evolutionary self-interest while representing themselves as discerning and forthright, thus seeking to impress potential mates, unless there are limits to the validity of sociobiology. Similarly, explanations that supposedly explain anything do not actually explain. For example, claiming that people sacrificing themselves to help strangers is misplaced kin selection, while also talking about how precisely people can take sides based on kinship, is a contradiction. All sorts of things could conceivably have conveyed some sort of biological evolutionary advantage in some situation, but that’s not good proof that an explanation has been achieved. It also runs into the error of Dawkins’ inaccurate insult to atheistic intelligence, that Darwin enabled an intellectually satisfied atheism. Science does not cover everything we might want to know intellectually. (Besides, the origins and continued functioning of the earth and of the universe remained quite poorly explained in Darwin’s day - even the scientific part of origins was not done yet; conversely, intelligent atheists had existed before.) This “evolutionary study of religion” leaps from “here is a possible way to account for the physical aspects of this particular phenomenon within the context of biological evolution” to “we have completely explained it and there is nothing here but mere evolutionary self-interest”.
But we are created by biological evolutionary processes, and this does influence us. (Of course, religious views do undergo non-cyclic change over time and can be said to evolve in that sense, but that in and of itself has no particular connection to biological evolution, just as it has no particular connection to stellar evolution.) There is possible usefulness in asking “to what extent does biological evolution provide useful insights into the development of religion.” Frankly, the answer is “not much”. Although the physical structures of the nervous system develop through evolutionary processes, and there are parallels between the evolution of ideas and evolution of genes, there are also major differences in how ideas evolve and how organisms evolve. Ideas have crossing and mixing far beyond the worst nightmares of bacterial genome analysis, and ideas need not have any specific relationship to pre-existing ideas. Also, much of the key evidence is simply gone. However, it is quite true that the moral law, for example, is not a set of arbitrary commands, but are in our self-interest to obey if we think beyond “what would I like to get away with at the moment” to “what guidelines would best promote long-term well-being of the communities that I am a part of, including humanity as a whole, or even the biosphere as a whole”.
Many of these approaches take at best a simplistic and at worst a grossly misrepresentative picture of religion, which makes the explanations fail as they ignore much of what they supposedly explain.
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“What I don’t understand is why you restrict the meaning of “evolution” to the biological kind.” - MarkD
Why? Balance, careful discernment, and because there are better terms available for studies of “change-over-time” that make it convincing that we should NOT use the term “evolution” for human-social change. And precedent. There’s a long history of rejecting “evolutionary” thinking outside of biology by scholars, meaning by non-creationists.
Hopefully the following will help you to understand, in case you haven’t conducted studies or independent research in cultural fields of thought. In short, “cultural change” and “biological evolution” are fundamentally different type of processes and it’s a category error to conflate them. Human beings have choice, intention, aim, will, purpose, and make plans. None of those is part of biological evolutionary thinking; they belong in a different realm. Whether or not one accepts the theology of imago Dei doesn’t change this generalization. One simply needs to include “teleological” thinking, rather than “ateleological” thinking, if they wish to be taken seriously when (the study of what) human beings (make, build, construct, etc.), rather than “merely biological entities”, are involved.
You seem to be missing the same thing one of the moderators here continues to go on missing or avoiding: social scientific rejections of “evolution” in cultural fields. Unless you dig in and check these out, you’ll perhaps come away continuing to think “there is no criticism of evolution in social sciences & I can use it as liberally and widely as possible, and no one will object on reasonable and convincing grounds”. That would simply be a sad mistake.
Here’s a practical example. Do you know who Sy Garte is? A retired NIH biologist & openly “evangelical” Christian. Sy Garte is well respected here. He and I are in full agreement about aiming to restrict the metaphor “evolution” to biological & other natural sciences. Iow, 75+% of the Academy, of KNOWLEDGE as a whole and in parts, is actually best to explore outside of an “evolutionary” paradigm. https://youtu.be/PC94hDBRu8k
“I refuse to humor your silly contention that the word evolution can only rightfully refer to a biological mechanism.” - BioLogos moderator
“cultural evolution is NOT the same (or even related) to actual biological evolution.” - Sy Garte
It’s actually anything but “silly”, so please BioLogos moderator, consider speaking more graciously about it, rather than with condescending tone. What Sy says is definitely agreeable here (75/2 likes = validation), and takes an important stand against the exaggeration of evolution, which BioLogos does not seem to have much concern or at least voice about anywhere in the Academy. I go farther than Sy to openly reject the notion of “cultural evolution” as a misnomer, since both “cultural development” and “cultural extension” are richer & more widely applicable and reasonable paradigms.
Sy Garte at least is making an attempt to help limit evolution to biology and thus move people away from ideological evolutionism, for which I respect him. He “gets” the cultural threat of ideological evolutionism (from a bird’s eye view distance), which BioLogos is only starting to hint at, and still only in one Common Questions section on the website.
How would you like to rephrase “the evolution of automobiles” or “the evolution of the computer”? They are succinct, straightforward and communicate readily.
Thanks for your fair question, asking about alternative vocabulary. I’m currently working together with 4 software developers (they all know “languages” I have little knowledge of) on a project. Do you wish me to call them “software evolvers”? No, we are “developing” a project, with intention, aim, plan, purpose, and goal (winning a prize & recognition for our build, in this case).
The term “development” is far more powerful than “evolution” wrt “human-made things”.
Would you consider ceasing to speak of anything “evolving” by human hands (mostly intentional), and instead speak of human-made things as “developing”, “changing” & “extending” (from people choosing)?
I’m a huge fan of “university extension” and “agricultural extension”, rather than anything “evolutionary” spoken about in those realms. It’s amazingly liberating to think non-evolutionary wrt culture & choice!!! 
“Development” is more particular in its usage, though. The development of a particular automobile or a particular computer or software project is what would more typically be inferred.
United Nations Development Programme & Goals are “more particular”?
Ridiculous. Darwin did not purchase the trademark on that word.
Egad are you trying to elevate this to a conspiracy theory. You need to get out from your own field more often. It’s a big world out there.
Why is that necessarily analogous? Words have different usage in different contexts.
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Of course Darwin doesn’t have a trademark on “evolution”. (!)
The first usage in English (according to Pelikan) of “evolution” was by the Cambridge Platonists in the 16th century. Obviously I’m not attributing that to C.R. Darwin!
Your world is tiny & myopic compared to the interdisciplinarity I’ve been involved in, MarkD. Sorry. True. Do you wish to challenge this?