“Steven Pinker’s belief that religion is a by-product of certain cognitive mechanisms is summarized in the following statement from his book How the Mind Works: “… our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, sometimes it is not.”6 In other words, truth is not necessarily needed for survival or for reproduction within the Darwinian model. Thus we humans may believe and propagate untruths if they serve our survival instincts. He then uses this naturalistic philosophy to explain why humans have held to religious beliefs across time and cultures.
The irony of Steven Pinker’s atheistic explanation for the origin of religion is immediately striking. Within his worldview, confidence in our human capacity to objectively evaluate evidence is greatly undermined. Using Pinker’s logic, the search for truth within any academic discipline is uncertain to succeed. A person can never be sure if he is not just believing what benefits him in some evolutionary way rather than believing what the evidence points to as true.”
Read more here: https://creation.com/pinker-evolutionary-biology
