God and Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

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In a recent paper ‘Explaining Away and the Cognitive Science of Religion’ (a freely available version is available here) in the journal Theology and Science, David Glass looks at whether developments in the cognitive science of religion which attempt to provide an evolutionary explanation of the origins of theistic belief can be used to undermine theism. Looking at this from the perspective of ‘explaining away’, he considers different models of the relationship between science and theism to argue that these sorts of evolutionary debunking arguments are very unlikely to succeed.

This article is part of a collection of papers in the journal on the subject of ‘explaining and explaining away in science and religion’ with other contributions by Rodney Holder (Explaining and Explaining Away in Cosmology and Theology), Jonah Schupbach (Competing Explanations and Explaining-Away Arguments) and Matthew Braddock (Debunking Arguments and the Cognitive Science of Religion). An editorial giving an overview of the papers can be found here.

Some other published papers on explaining away can be found in Saints, Sceptics and Scholars section.

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