I am a student at Carleton College, and for a class I was asked to read a section of your novel The God Delusion. I have read sections of it before during personal crises of faith, and you’ve made some fascinating points, there is one, unfortunately, that I feel must be addressed and reconsidered. The idea that religion is a form of mental illness. With that argument were two faulty points that could be reworded or reconsidered. The idea that religion arrived through a neurological accident that genetically drifted throughout the population. That your view is inherently true, and without question the best and and most logical.
First, your view of the cause of religion. I admit that I cannot argue against your view’s possibility, but that it is unlikely and relies on faulty reasoning. If religion evolved as an accident, as all other biological processes did from a purely scientific standpoint, then the fact that it took up a major biological dominance over the population is highly unlikely to be caused by genetic drift alone. While it is possible, you seem to ignore the possibility that religion has a survival benefit for …show more content…
Neither beliefs are easy, but Tanya Luhrmann highlisghts the difficulties of religious beliefs in the preface to her book When God Talks Back: “Faith is hard because it is a decision to live as if a set of claims are real, even when one doubts: in the Christian case, that the world is good, that love endures; that you should live your life as if the promise of joy were at least a possibility.”(xiv) The comforts given by religion add to the doubt when said comforts are taken away or exist out of reach. There are multiple stories in the bible that are based off of this idea, Jobe, Peter attempting to walk on water, and there are multiple stories of priests in training and pastors losing faith after reading the