Religion: An Integral Human Experience (2/2)

Religion not only represents a deep psychological need but, as William Hocking from Harvard University emphasizes, also has "some definite and indispensable social function to perform" in spite of the fact that "there is no united voice as to what that function is"[1].

Emile Durkheim, in his masterpiece The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, and despite his wavering agnosticism, effectively showed the functional indispensability of religion to society[2]. Above all, Durkheim's sociological observations persuaded him that there was something "eternal in religion" which was destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought had successively enveloped itself[3].

Even Darwin - contrary to Dawkins' pretentious claim that with "a good dose of science"[4] atheists can still lead a happy and guiltless life - expressed how painful it was to turn one's back on faith. In a letter he sent to J. D. Hooker on 17, June 1868, Darwin nostalgically wrote:

"I am glad you were at the Messiah: it is the one thing that I should like to hear again, but I daresay I should find my soul too dried up to appreciate it, as in old days; and then I should feel very flat, for it is a horrid bore to feel, as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every subject except science. It sometimes makes me hate science"[5].

Many atheistic evolutionists insist that religion is an evolutionary product and therefore, one may justifiably conclude, just as natural (and legitimate) an evolutionary entity as human beings themselves. In some occasions, such evolutionists would emphasize that religion has, pragmatically speaking, evolved to fulfil key social needs and, consequently, has heavily determined the formation of history (for example, the role of Protestantism in creating capitalism or the role of Islam in liberating the Arabs from ignorance and drawing their attention to the importance of thinking and discovery) .

But such evolutionists contradict themselves when they equally depict religion as an aberration, an abnormality, a harmful redundancy, a detrimental epiphenomenon that has to be eradicated, stifled, or at least pushed to the furthest margins of human life. This is like asserting that carnivores have naturally evolved but must be exterminated for their being predators (i.e. killing other organisms and feeding on them) despite the catastrophic repercussions their extinction would bring upon wildlife's ecosystem. The more striking contradiction is their claim that present-day myths and superstitions are natural concomitants of modern man's evolving consciousness yet they miserably fail to explain why myth and superstition should then be treated as unnatural[6].

The incoherency in such materialistic arguments may partially account for evolutionary anthropologists' tendency to speak of 'monotheism' as an advanced myth or, as some would like to conjecture, one of the greatest achievements of latter day higher religions!