On Evolution of God-Seeking Mind

On Evolution of God-Seeking Mind

The Darwinian Dilemma

In considering natural selection and the human
mind, a difficult problem for Darwinism has been
this: given that a utilitarian, unconscious brain is
good and sufficient for processing sensed informa-
tion and using it for survival tasks, what evolution-
ary pressure, what survival advantage, can be associ-
ated with sensory distortion and conscious mind?
What were the stages of evolutionary transition
leading to the human mind?

“The task of reconstructing the steps through
which humans must have passed in their evolution-
ary transition is so difficult that many have chosen
to ignore the problem. One extreme approach,
which some may take as a counsel of complete de-
spair, is to proclaim a discontinuity in evolution
when it comes to the human mind” (Donald 1991,
p21).

Donald goes on to elaborate the problems. “No
convincing geographic or climactic conditions
could have produced enough selection pressure to
account for the emergence of modern humans.
Hominid culture was already able to cope with a va-
riety of climates. Although climate may have played
some role, other forces must have been at work”
(p209). Donald then suggests that “the evolution of
humanity is likely to have been driven at the level of
cultural change” (p209). But why? “What change
could have broken the constraints on mimetic cul-
ture with such a vengeance, leading to the fast-mov-
ing exchanges of information found in early human
culture” (p211)? Materialists have not been able to
explain this evolutionary transition. As Searle de-
scribes it, “materialists have a problem: once you
have described all the material facts in the world, you
still seem to have a lot of mental phenomena left
over. Once you have described the facts about my
body and my brain, for example, you still seem to
have a lot of facts left over about my beliefs, desires,
pains, etc” (1997, p43). At least some of these left
over facts are accounted for via a God-seeking mind.

“The mind is almost as hard to define as the soul”,
writes Jones. As he describes the confusion within
psychological theories of the mind, “it has gone
from describing varieties of religious experience to
censuring them, from phrenology to scanning brain
and DNA, and at last—coming full circle—to ex-
plaining belief in Darwinian terms. Psychology is a
journey from the arts to the sciences and back again”
(Jones 1997, p13). On such a journey, I suggest, there
is an evolutionary “bridge” to be found connecting
imagination and religious behavior to the rest of
adaptive behaviors. Neither anthropologists nor
evolutionary psychologists have put forward a via-
ble theory that shows why imagination and con-
scious distortions of sensory experience might have
been more adaptive then the mindless utilitarian
brain that predated them. “The brain is the ultimate
lying machine” (Jones 1997, p13). Why should nat-
ural selection favor such a machine: in particular,
why should it favor something that distorts reality,
and hence, lies to itself? Further, nature tends to be
lavish. If mind is a good survival device, why don’t
we find it elsewhere? Why are there no precursors of
mind to be found in the rest of the animal world?
(Deacon 1997; Donald 1991; Lorenz 1977). These
questions have been thorns in the side of evolution-
ary explanations of mind. One problem has been to
explain natural selection’s favoring of structures un-
expressed in overt behavior: consciousness, imagi-
nation, and also, quite prevalent if not universal
among early Homo sapiens, schizophrenia. Could
schizophrenia, which (Jaynes 1976) suggests to be a
vestige of ancient mind, have come into being as an
adaptation for sensing spiritual guidance, and for
finding a guiding spiritual voice? Looked at in terms
of physical survival, these inner devices would be
disadvantageous. What survival advantage could
there be in fantasizing and in distorting reality?
Steven Pinker suggests that we need not bother with
such difficult or impossible to answer questions. He
says that “we should expect to find activities of the
mind that are not adaptations in the biologists’
sense. But it does mean that our understanding of
how the mind works will be woefully incomplete or
downright wrong unless it meshes with our under-
standing of how the mind evolved” (Pinker 1997,
p174).

Just so. I argue that these questions can be an-
swered: not only how the mind works, but why. I
suggest that long before discovering grain and set-
tling in the fertile crescent to harvest it, humans had
reached an evolutionary stage where “not by bread
alone” was the modus operandi. A stage was reached
where, driven by the search for supernatural sup-
port, mental considerations began to play a role in
human survival, sometimes in opposition to physi-
cal considerations. Humans might, on occasion, de-
cide to go hungry, to do (or not do) something which
then resulted in hunger. They might, with the devel-
opment of magic or religious belief, decide to fast, to
ritualistically sacrifice food, to suffer hunger, for the
sake of their mental well-being, which had come to
be an important part of their total well-being and of
human survival.

Evolution and Cognition ∣ 14 ∣ 2002, Vol. 8, No. 1

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