The Missing Element in New Atheist Critiques of Religion

Many of the leading ‘new atheists’, especially those who are biological or social scientists, but also some philosophers and others, have been concerned to provide naturalistic explanations of how religion evolved and of the factors that continue to sustain it. These explanations are intended to displace, and weaken the appeal of, the sorts of traditional accounts the religious themselves are apt to provide. The accounts are framed mostly in the terms of evolutionary psychology, of evolved cognitive mechanisms, genetic predisposition and neuroscience. Often they are little more than plausible conjecture, but that is not the project’s chief difficulty. Although some of the mechanisms invoked probably do play a part in the evolution of religious tendencies and the appeal of religion, they are insignificant compared to the psychosocial factors, especially the influence of the interactions between child and parental caretakers, which the new atheists almost completely ignore. Not unders...