THEOLOGY AFTER THE BIRTH of God is a political book about religion. F. LeRon Shults brings the insights of cognitive science of religion to bear directly on theology, to fashion an iconoclastic theology. The findings of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology allow us to understand how religion is formed, as the selective adaption of the kind of minds we have. Our minds possess two basic mechanisms that enable us to construct supernatural agents, who are the objects of religion. The first is a Theory of Mind Mechanism, that posits other people and sometimes non-humans as possessing a mind, and the second is a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, that drives us to ascribe agency to events even when they are absent. Taken together, these two devices explain why humans are so quick to give birth to supernatural agents, and why they persist to this day. Shults’s atheistic, iconoclastic theology recognizes the birth of God and gods—recognizes that we have borne them and asks us to take responsibility for them. What can or should we do with our gods? Let them go.

But it’s not quite that simple. In his magisterial book Religion Explained, Pascal Boyer, one of the cognitive scientists of religion on whom Shults draws, introduces us to “the tragedy of the theologian.” The theologian is a religious specialist who participates in a kind of guild, and desires to constrain peoples’ natural supernatural intuitions into a theologically correct form. Boyer says that the real tragedy of the theologian is “not just that people, because they have minds rather than literal memories, will always be theologically incorrect, will always add to the message and distort it, but also that the only way to make the message immune to such adulteration renders it tedious, thereby fueling imagistic dissent and threatening the position of the theologian’s guild” (285).

The guild theologian, who Shults calls a sacerdotal theologian, tries to discipline the natural intuitions people have about supernatural agents. To this tragedy of the theologian, however, can be contrasted the irony of the cognitive scientist of religion. The confessional theologian is forced to shape people’s natural conceptions to fit the mold of orthodox traditions. The sacerdotal theologian works with peoples’ instincts about religion, but cannot completely eliminate the gap between folk religious intuitions and the orthodox religious doctrines. The cognitive scientist is forced to swim against the tide of people’s natural intuitions, and this situation, which also applies to the iconoclastic theologian, creates a different problem.

According to Shults, a contemporary science of religion that acknowledges the results of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology distinguishes between anthropomorphic and sociographic prudery and promiscuity. We are shaped by our natural tendencies acquired through evolution to be exclusive in social terms and expansive in anthropomorphic terms—to see supernatural agents like spirits and gods everywhere, and to want to restrict them to one’s own tribe or group. The evolution of reason and science gives us tools to value anthropomorphic prudery, to diminish or eliminate supernatural agents, along with a more sociographic promiscuity. Sociographic promiscuity means something like multiculturalism or cosmopolitanism, the ability to tolerate and to affirm most human cultural and ethnic groupings. What Shults calls the iconoclastic trajectory in theology combines sociographic promiscuity with anthropomorphic prudery, whereas the sacerdotal trajectory does the opposite, pairing anthropomorphic promiscuity with sociographic prudery (56).

What the cognitive scientist of religion and the iconoclastic theologian tell us, repeating in a neurological way insights of the European Enlightenment, is that people are hardwired to believe in religion as defined in terms of supernatural agents. Rationalists, scientists, and iconoclastic theologians do not believe. They know better. They can explain religious belief but they cannot get rid of it. So the question is what is to be done? The naivete of the so-called new atheists like Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens is the assumption that we can simply dispense with irrational supernatural beliefs. Many people engaged in the academic study of religion, whether they think of themselves as scientists or not, want to affirm their emancipation from belief in religion by jettisoning the term theology. The theologian believes in her religious ideas, whereas the scholar of religion remains at most agnostic.

Shults takes a riskier path, holding onto the term theology and redefining it. This move can be seen broadly as in the tradition of radical theology, even though Shults criticizes many contemporary forms of radical theology as not being atheistic enough (4). A radicalization of radical theology is an iconoclastic theology, a theology that openly affirms its atheism and naturalism. Atheism and naturalism are not simply methodological commitments, but even more strongly operate in metaphysical terms. Shults is clear: “gods do not exist,” and atheism designates “the affirmation of metaphysical naturalism and metaphysical secularism” (162, emphasis in original).

This is hard. It’s hard in two ways: first, because it’s difficult to counteract our natural tendencies towards taking supernatural agents as credible; and second, it’s hard in a more positive and heroic sense. Boyer does not lament the tragedy of the theologian; he is amused by this discomfort. Boyer also recognizes the fact that many people resist his and others’ explanations of religion for religious reasons, but he doesn’t care because he is a scientist. He is committed to explaining religion, and the fact is that it is not true. Gods don’t exist. There is something powerful and hard about science. It’s hard core. Atheism is hard core, and there exists in atheism what Ward Blanton calls a certain kind of outbidding in reference to one’s claims to be hard, to be tough, to be strong-minded in one’s resistance to the siren song of religion. Iconoclastic theology is hard, and so is atheism. It’s difficult to be atheist, and one can never be atheistic enough, as Christopher Watkins shows us in his impressive book Difficult Atheism.

Fundamentalism and certain kinds of theism are also hard. They require intellectual, social, and personal sacrifices, and they are not for the weak. Literalist theology is tremendously difficult to affirm in our complex and multifaceted world, and it’s only the certainty that it is right that allows one to maintain it in the face of so much opposition. This certainty is experienced by non-believers as arrogance, and the certainty expressed by cognitive scientists can also be taken as arrogant condescension. Christianity is hard. So is Islam. So is cognitive science. I am not equating Shults’s atheism with fundamentalism. What I worry about is not so much whether Shults is right, although I am very sympathetic to his project, but how the hardness of atheism can resemble the hardness of fundamentalism. And how the rejection of warm and fuzzy humanism or liberal theology is necessary because it is soft. Nobody wants to be lukewarm. Symbolic interpretation can be a squishy thing, and who wants to celebrate squishiness? The issue here with regard to the struggle between iconoclastic and sacerdotal types of theology concerns the ways that it links up with the academic struggle between scientific (hard) and non-scientific (soft) kinds of knowledge. Here scientific explanations carry along with them an implicit form of prudery, while non-scientific interpretations can seem more promiscuous. I appreciate the engagement with the natural sciences by many contemporary philosophers and theologians, and think this is important and necessary. But I don’t want it to become an either/or situation, where the rejection of fluffy beliefs becomes the prudish rejection of non-scientific modes of inquiry.

In claiming that Theology After the Birth of God is a political book, I am arguing that the primary practical concern for Shults is this sociographic prudery, which may or may not presuppose anthromorphic promiscuity. My question is to what extent the trajectory of iconoclastic theology necessarily stresses anthropomorphic prudery, and to what extent iconoclastic theologies may or may not make alliances with theologies of anthropomorphic promiscuity in their efforts to promote sociographic promiscuity. This question concerns the status of the prodigal trajectory of Shults’s quadrant graph (180). Shults contrasts a prodigal with a penurious trajectory via a reading of the film Avatar. He explains that the Na’vi in the film are “extremely anthropomorphically promiscuous” as well as sociographically promiscuous in opposition to the human corporatists and soldiers who are penurious in their prudery and devastate the planet. Back on Earth, Shults argues that there are no tree-goddesses to save us, which is true, but it raises the same problem Shults points out in his conclusion.

At the end of the book Shults confronts the difficulty of raising cries of catastrophe and ecological destruction due to the resistances such discourses face. For Shults, any atheistic theology, including his own, has to confront the fact that “announcing the ‘death of God’ or the probable imminent death of (some or all) humans raises mortality salience and automatically strengthens the evolved dispositions toward over-protecting kith and kin and over-detecting ambiguous agents who might help or hinder their survival” (201). Why refrain from announcing a coming ecological catastrophe (there is nothing that can save us) if it is in fact true, just because people are not disposed to believe it? It is paradoxically similar to the argument to refrain from promoting atheism because cognitive scientists have shown us that humans are not naturally atheistic.

Shults wants to acknowledge this tension and affirm atheism at the same time. In his conclusion he cautions theoretical discourses that contribute to sociographic prudery even if they may well be true, whereas earlier he insists on arguments against prodigality based on their invalidity even if they appeal to sociographic promiscuity. This paradox implicates the entire book. Shults continues to talk about religion (even though it is not true) and continues to use the term theology (even though there is no God) because as humans we continually generate ideas about supernatural agents and then find them plausible. Shults hopes that his analysis has therapeutic value, to help secularists understand why religion is so resistant to reason, and to help reflective, intelligent believers come to terms with how their ideas stem from their own minds. This is an admirable goal, even if it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to accomplish. Atheism is not hard for certain individuals, but it has proved extremely hard for larger groups of people, which makes Shults’s goal incredibly difficult even as he is to be commended for taking up this challenge.

THEOLOGY AFTER THE BIRTH OF GOD is born of the claim that, while radical theologians and philosophers of religion might still be talking about the death of God, religious practitioners are bored to death with the death of God proclaimed by Nietzsche’s madman. According to Shults, a different strategy—talking instead about the birth of God—will achieve the madman’s goal of disrupting “people’s reliance on supernatural agents to make sense of the world and act sensibly in society” (3).

In this response piece, I invite reflection on how theology reconceived as a discipline that seeks to responsibly “engage the existential intensity encountered at the limits of our natural agency” might do so without the escapism of appeals to supernatural agency when such reflection on “this being-limited of thought—or this being-thought of limitation” (77)—threatens to activate the salience of mortality and, thus, our evolved tendencies to detect gods and to protect our religious coalitions with these gods when faced with our own and others’ finitude. In raising questions about the relationship between Shults’ reconceptualisation of theology and religion’s alleged transcendence of death, I work towards a brief consideration of the theological projects of two contemporary figures in light of Shults’ work. My choice of these figures—Kester Brewin and Peter Rollins—might in turn invite Shults to also reflect on the potential of certain trajectories within what he calls his own religious family of origin (evangelical Christianity), which might be seen as attempting to engender atheist conceptions at the more radical margins of the (largely post-evangelical) Emerging Church Movement (ECM) and to transform the actually existing churches into death-of-God collectives (Rollins) that gather around a God who doesn’t exist (Brewin).1

The ECM is a contemporary Western religious movement that is characterised by sociologists of religion Gerardo Martí and Gladys Ganiel as a distinct religious orientation built around the (not necessarily philosophical) deconstruction of inherited forms of Christianity.2 Participants are emerging from a variety of Christian traditions, but the most prominent protest of emerging Christianity as it initially developed during the late 1990s and early 2000s reflected what Mathew Guest identified in his study of English evangelicalism as the “frustration with the rigidity of mainstream evangelical churches and their reluctance to engage with significant cultural change,” which was a motivating factor in the connected emergence of alternative worship and post-evangelicalism in the 1980s and 1990s.3 Shults has his own relationship with emerging Christianity, having written (in 2006) a piece to aid the U.S. emerging church organisation Emergent in resisting critics’ calls for a doctrinal statement of faith regarding the propositional beliefs to which it assents.4 As part of my ongoing study of the more radical trajectories within the ECM, I’m able to offer here only the briefest of reflections on the ability of Brewin and Rollins to engender potentially atheist conceptions from within emerging Christian discourse and practice, engaging their work both critically and constructively in light of Shults’ Theology After the Birth of God, and I welcome his thoughts.

Hypotheses from the interdisciplinary field of what Shults calls the biocultural study of religion suggest that first-order intuitive religious ideas of a finite supernatural agent with limited knowledge and power are more easily intellectually comprehensible and more relevant to everyday “processes of evaluating and being evaluated” (9) than second-order theological reflections about an infinite intelligent intentionality that is incommensurable with human thought. Religion’s “theological incorrectness” explains the empirically observable disjunction between theological and doctrinal formulations, on the one hand, and the god-conceptions of religious practitioners, on the other. In other words, it explains why religious people believe what they shouldn’t.5 But Shults proposes that the biocultural sciences further explain that the Death of God movement (which he claims revolved around the mortality and moribundity of an infinite intentional force) failed to either adequately reflect or significantly impact the trajectory of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Christianity not because Christians remain wedded to the idea of an immortal God transcending the limits of space and time, but precisely because, in their lived religious practices, Christians regularly conceive of and ritually interact with finite god-conceptions that conform to the evolved tendencies of human beings to detect humanlike intentionality or agency amidst the ambiguity of the world around us (184). A finite God who suffers with humanity or who must wait and see how things turn out is much easier for most Christians to bear than the maximally counterintuitive proclamation (meaning that it violates too many of the default expectations we have) that their transcendent God has somehow died (4). The churches ignore or immunise themselves against the theological hypothesis that God is dead and go about their business.

Shults suggests that talking about the birth of God can achieve what talking about the death of God cannot by exposing the cognitive and cultural mechanisms through which we tend to detect supernatural rather than natural agency in the world—to make the guess (or abductive inference) “god”—and to protect the cohesion of our in-groups or coalitions with such gods through out-group antagonism (3). While these theogonic (god-bearing) mechanisms were vital to our historical evolutionary development, they are now psychologically and politically damaging within our contemporary pluralistic contexts. If religion involves imaginative engagement with those supernatural agents that are detected by a coalition when faced with ambiguous phenomena and that are deemed to be axiologically relevant for them (that is, relevant for that coalition’s determinations of intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical values), then a theology that lets go of both supernatural agents and supernatural coalitions would involve criticism of the plausibility of those theoretical explanations of the world and normative inscriptions for the world that appeal to such agents and coalitions (52). But it would also involve the construction of hypotheses about “the conditions for axiological engagement” (12) and about alternative ways of “conceptualizing that which originates, orders, and orients” our “value-laden practices” (181) without recourse to supernatural agents or coalitions. Both of these theological tasks together could complement the theolytic (god-dissolving) effects of the efforts of those working in the biocultural study of religion (78).

However, it is possible to discern in Shults’ presentation of research within this field a potential obstacle to the efficacy of theolytic theology; namely, mortality salience, which “automatically strengthens the evolved dispositions towards over-protecting kith and kin and over-detecting ambiguous agents who might help or hinder their survival” (201). Shults references studies that suggest that thinking about mortality accentuates anxieties and stresses and that religion provides “causal resolution to the existential fear of death by evoking possible worlds of avoidance.”6 Our evolved theogonic mechanisms are activated by reflecting on the finitude of our existence and religions offer a variety of ways to escape these limitations, including “an alleged transcendent Reality after death” (142). But Shults proposes that theolytic theological hypotheses revolve around precisely just such a reflection on our being-limited-ness and, in particular, on “the empirical experience of axiological limitation”: “theology theorizes ‘about’ the intense experience of being-conditioned, the being-limited of human knowing, acting, and feeling” (77). So how might theolytic theological reflection on limitation forestall the activation of powerful evolved theogonic tendencies that tempt us to try to transcend our being-limited-ness through religious engagement with supernatural agents and coalitions? Shults suggests that this will require resisting the “iconic vision” according to which religion points to a supernatural reality beyond the natural world (142). Might this mean that this newly conceived theology after the birth of God radically reconceives religion after the birth of God? If so, it might primarily redress religion’s alleged transcendence of death, in order to reduce the salience of mortality for the activation of theogonic mechanisms (176).

Elsewhere, I have framed the theological projects of both Kester Brewin and Peter Rollins as attempting to constitute subjectivity in relation to the death and decay of God and to create transformative collective practices that can reconcile participants to their own death, decay, and fundamental nothingness.7 Brewin’s current work examines our obsession with transcendence and he characterises our quest for physical, intellectual, and spiritual altitude as a quest for the transcendence that would overcome death. What Julian Barnes refers to as “the sin of height” and what Brewin further describes as “our fascination with transcending our limited finitude” translates into a quest for altitude through technology, pharmacology, and theology: “The hope of flight is the hope of overcoming death.”8 But, for Rollins and Brewin, Christianity can refuse to take flight; it has the potential to reconcile us to our finitude and, thereby, decrease the salience of mortality and the efficacy of the theogonic mechanisms.

I locate both Brewin and Rollins in the tradition of radical theology, understood as a broad trajectory of loosely associated theologies whose philosophical heritage can be traced back to the death of God attested to in the work of great atheist critics of religion like Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud and, in particular, in a range of readings of Hegel and/or Nietzsche.9 This strand of theology therefore includes not only 1960s Death of God theologians such as Thomas J. J. Altizer, but figures like Mark C. Taylor, Gianni Vattimo, John D. Caputo, and Slavoj Žižek, among others. Conceived of in this way, therefore, the extent to which any radical theology might be characterised as methodologically naturalist and secularist (excluding appeals to supernatural agency in theoretical descriptions and normative prescriptions) and metaphysically atheist differs according to different conceptualisations of the death of God.10

In their most recent publications, After Magic and The Divine Magician, both Brewin and Rollins reference Žižek’s portrayal of the death of God using the dialectical structure of a magic trick. This threefold structure—depicted in Christopher Nolan’s (2006) film The Prestige—is the pledge (the thesis), the turn (the negation of the thesis), and the prestige (the negation of the negation). The example that Žižek gives occurs early in the film, where a bird (the pledge) is made to disappear from within a cage on a table (the turn) and to reappear in the magician’s hand (the prestige). We see, however, that the apparently reappeared bird is not the bird that disappeared, which was squashed inside the collapsible cage. Just as the dead bird remains dead, God has really died (or never existed); crucifixion is final. That is the bad news of Christianity. But the trick is that this is a form of bad news/good news—when it is understood that there is another bird; God is resurrected as another subject, another agent, the “Holy Spirit,” the community of believers. “When the believers gather, mourning Christ’s death,” Žižek writes, “their shared spirit is the resurrected Christ.”11 This is why Brewin often says that we are the prestige: “The prestige is presented not as a supernatural return of the body, but as the material return of it as bodies working sacrificially, lovingly as a distributed material community.”12 In a magic trick, that which has the appearance of having reappeared is not precisely that which disappeared; what is revealed to us is something that is similar but different. What we get back after the death of God is not a supernatural agent but the natural agency of a social body. As Žižek says, “God is nothing but the Holy Spirit of the community of believers.”13 After the disappearance/death of God (or of what Rollins calls the virtual or fictitious sacred-object that we imagine promises wholeness and satisfaction but that never really existed in the first place since it is created precisely by our sense of loss and lack), there is not strictly a return of the sacred as this “fictional thing we can never touch,” but, rather, a revelation that the sacred is “a depth within things we can touch.” It is “the experience of depth and density operating in things” and “of care and concern for the world.”14 Where religion has pointed to a fictional reality beyond the world, it can now be understood as an icon onto the world. It is realist and materialist, rather than illusionary and escapist.

Where Brewin states his disbelief in a personal god and in divine salvation, Rollins maintains in his writings a distinction between disbelief in God’s existence and the felt absence of God’s presence, conceiving of the crucifixion as a moment of existential rather than intellectual atheism. Brewin is therefore more explicitly metaphysically atheist than Rollins. But findings within the biocultural study of religion about the mutually reinforcing nature of supernatural agency detection and religious in-group protection challenge the efficacy of even atheist theological conceptions that are tied to the symbolic world of a specific religious coalition (42). For Žižek, the community of believers in which the death of God (or, rather, the negative moment in which we experience the non-existence of the big Other) continues to resonate or reverberate is not the church but the revolutionary emancipatory collective. But attempts by both Brewin and Rollins to engender materialist rather than escapist conceptions remain more closely tied to the potential of the Christian family (from which they are emerging and to whom they write) to give material existence to this subversive negativity. This means that, while Žižek, Brewin, and Rollins all challenge inherited supernatural god-concepts, their theologies nonetheless inhabit the Christian symbolic world, and the inherently Christian shape of the death of God narrative within which these theologies are articulated can extend a measure of immunity to this supernatural coalition. I have noted elsewhere how Rollins’ work in particular risks being (mis)read as a way of discovering the God beyond the idol “God” and a richer faith beyond the ideology of “religion,” especially when his later more potentially radical work is read through the lens of his earlier more apophatic theology, in which, for example, God’s absence is an icon to God’s presence.15 Such ambiguous references to the orthodox Christian symbolic world in the midst of an ostensibly radical theology mean that, in turn, these theologies risk reactivating the supernatural agent detections that they are intended to overcome.

In order to avoid the reactivation of evolved tendencies to detect supernatural agency and to protect supernatural coalitions, we might suggest that theology must be liberated from religion and that figures like Brewin and Rollins should begin to construct conceptions that emerge beyond the Christian symbolic world. This would, then, be a theological but not religious atheism (162) that advances without reference to God (however reconceptualised). Talk of either the birth or the death of God can be colonised by religious coalitions who continue to detect supernatural providential agency within both and who can thereby immunise themselves against both projection and detection/protection critiques of religion (5).

If postmortem theologies are met with a bored disinterest, postpartum theologies are likely to be met with defensive inductive and deductive arguments about the supernatural conditions for axiological engagement that are grounded in the abductive inferences of religious coalitions that guess “god.” So Shults suggests that the theolytic theologian should not confront religious practitioners by trying to press their adoption of metaphysical atheism. “The goal should not be to force people to adopt atheism into their families of origin,” he writes, “but to invite them to adapt by nurturing the reflective and innovative capacities they have had all along” (164). Following Murray Bowen’s family systems theory, such an adaption to atheist conceptions might be engendered through differentiation of self, which is aided by identifying and resisting the automatic methods of dealing with anxiety within one’s religious family of origin, maintaining emotional contact with this family whilst resisting the “togetherness forces” that operate within it, and intentional encounters with people from other families of origin (129–30).16

I want to end this engagement with Theology after the Birth of God by suggesting that both Brewin and Rollins operate strategically within the Christian symbolic world precisely because they recognise the efficacy of indirect intervention over direct confrontation, or, to use Shults’ language, of engendering adaption over enforcing adoption.

According to Scott Atran, religious language is only quasi-propositional, having the characteristics of an ordinary logical proposition but supernatural referents that prevent its empirical evaluation and that, therefore, permit the multiple interpretations and reinterpretations that sustain supernatural coalitions over time: the open-endedness of religious symbolic worlds “allows their learning, their teaching and their exegesis to go on forever.”17 This insight from the biocultural study of religion enables Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley to argue that the Death of God movement dissipated so quickly because, while it tied itself to the Christian symbolic world, it linked those symbols to the specific context of 1960s America, thus preventing the endless interpretation, application, and manipulation of flexible symbolic worlds that the imaginative engagement of religious coalitions requires.18 This theological movement could therefore not hold the interest of Christian coalitions or sustain their ritual interactions (70).

I have previously understood the ambiguity of Rollins’ use of religious language to be a negative thing, since it provides the space for Christian supernatural coalitions to (mis)interpret references to God and, especially, God’s death on the cross as pointing to Christianity as the religious symbolic world that best exposes our need and our ability to let the gods go, thereby enabling them to ultimately immunise themselves against his potentially theolytic theological project. However, engaging the biocultural study of religion through Shults’ work has enabled me to see this very ambiguity as having a more positive function. While Rollins’ equivocal use of Christian words and symbols risks the activation of coalition-favouring god-conceptions, the very openness of this religious language to interpretation (and what might very well be misinterpretation) enables him to strategically remain within the wider emerging church conversation as he sets about indirectly engendering potentially atheist conceptions. His work provides enough room for (mis)interpretation to keep his audience engaged in a way that (Lawson and McCauley’s characterisation of 1960s’) Death of God theology could not.

If their theological strategy is to encourage atheist adaptations within inherited forms of Western Christianity, Brewin and Rollins must surely remain in what Shults describes as emotionally neutral but intellectually active contact with this religious family (130). But their theological projects will always run the risk of allowing Christian coalitions to think that their religious family best embodies a mode of living in which we recognise that gods are born and borne, that they do not exist, and that we have (or at least can) kill them, thus activating the very theogonic tendencies that their theological hypotheses seek to dissolve: the detection of supernatural agents who can aid in the protection of in-group cohesion and the promotion of out-group antagonism and scapegoating.

REMINISCENT OF NINETEENTH- AND early twentieth-century anthropological and sociological theories and contemporary scientific theories, Shults defines religion as “shared imaginative engagement with axiologically relevant supernatural agents.”1 Although Shults makes it clear that religion can be and often is conceived in other ways, it is a common element of all religions: engagement with supernatural agents, in other words, entails religion and vice versa. For Shults and the biocultural study of religion more generally, of which Shults provides a critical yet accessible overview, religion so understood is deeply rooted in the biological and sociocultural history of human beings.

Belief in supernatural agents, that is, is an evolutionary trait and tendency, meaning that gods and the like are byproducts of adaptive and survival strategies. Specifically, Shults argues that supernatural agents emerged as useful fictions from highly evolved cognitive mechanisms designed to detect intentionality in and behind ambiguous phenomena. Such detection has an obvious advantage at a material level, since it allowed our ancestors to protect themselves from external and internal threats; when combined with the need to maintain in-group cohesion, it amounts to a good recipe for selective advantage. Religion, Shults argues, emerges from these cognitive mechanisms that modulate adaptive and survival impulses with the environment when intentionality is abstracted and transposed onto a supernatural realm. Although it is not clear to me that Shults provides an adequate explanation for exactly how natural detection morphs into the positing of supernatural agents, nevertheless the point is that belief in the latter is a felicitous mistake, one that enabled survival and, once established and overlain with complex moral and ritual structures, enforced group cohesion. Religion at its root, in this sense, coincides with “anthropomorphic promiscuity” (i.e., the tendency to posit intentional, agential causes to and behind otherwise natural phenomena) and “sociographic prudery” (i.e., the commitment to in-group norms and parochial forms of social cohesion) (18-19).

Shults’s more constructive move on top of this basic biocultural understanding of religion is to argue that religion’s utility has run out. Although it certainly used to be useful, perhaps even essential, to group survival and internal cohesion, for both smaller, underdeveloped coalitions and larger theopolitcal ones grounded in monotheism, Shults argues that that is no longer the case. Indeed, continued belief in supernatural agents, that is, in religion, may actually be counterproductive, intellectually but also socially and politically. The goal, in other words, is to move from the anthropomorphic promiscuity and sociographic prudery that is at the root of religious belief to “anthropomorphic prudery” to “sociographic promiscuity” (18–19, 149–82). The move ultimately involves “letting the gods go,” as Shults puts it, the upshot of which is the assertion and construction of an unapologetic, atheistic secularism. Shults secularism, of course, does not involve the forced dissolution of religious beliefs, but he is clear that, all things considered, religion should now and in the future have no real place in knowledge construction and sociopolitical arrangements, at least in any substantial sense.

Before offering my critique of Shults’s position, let me say that I am sympathetic to what I take to be some of the motivating factors behind it. Like Shults, I do not have much time for the anthropomorphic promiscuity and sociographic prudery that often goes hand in hand with certain types of religious belief, and I find Shults’s discussion of how these trajectories shape religious dispositions helpful. To put it bluntly, if that is what constitutes religion, then we would be better off with out. I also share Shults’s palpable frustration with much theology, understood as critical reflection on the presupposed content of religious belief. Even the most forward-thinking confessional theologies, including some heterodox “radical” theologies, ultimately limit themselves to the purview of revelation, which usually results in selective appropriations of non-theological discourses and more or less veiled claims to self-sufficiency. So if the choice is between a supernatural parochialism and its theology and an atheistic secularism, then I am more inclined to side with Shults and go with the latter. However, I do not think that we are limited to only these options, and so, onto the critique.

As already mentioned, bioculturally speaking religion tends to foster anthropomorphic promiscuity and sociographic prudery, two tendencies that help explain the utility of religion for adaptation and survival. Although religion for the most part no longer serves that role, as selected-for behavior it is deeply ingrained at a basic level in the biocultural history of humanity—and so too, it seems, is its tendency toward supernaturalism and insularity, with all the deleterious effects that go along with these. Shults does acknowledge that religious belief itself is diverse, and especially in some modern and postmodern guises, may lean in the direction of the anthropomorphic prudery and sociographic promiscuity that he posits as desirable. Nevertheless, Shults suggests that such tendencies still remain limited to the extent that they ground themselves in a religious conceptuality and that, moreover, they could be had without religion.

For instance, when discussing religiously motivated peacebuilding practitioners, that is, religious individuals who seem to embody the sociographic promiscuity that he desires, Shults notes that “makes good sense,” but he then asks rhetorically, “But in what sense is it ‘religious?’” (178). Even the best of intentions ultimately remain conditioned and, frankly, stained, by appeals to supernatural origination and motivation and the out-group antagonisms the latter foster. Shults thus asks, rhetorically again, “How can we ever hope to facilitate peaceful interaction within and across religious families of origin if we continue to ignore the anxiety-generating triangulation of gods that binds their emotional systems together precisely by activating the sociographically prudish hostility that alienates them from other groups” (178, original emphasis).

That is an extremely limited view of religion, but it also rests on a rather simplistic dichotomy between belief and unbelief. For Shults, one either believes in supernatural agents—in God, gods, or whatever else—or one does not, and any activity explicitly or implicitly based on the former necessarily carries with it pernicious psychological, social, and political tendencies, even if these are expressed in muted form. On the one hand, such a distinction plays in a very basic way into the “factish” certainty that Bruno Latour has recognized and criticized as endemic to modern rationality. As Latour points out, the notion of “belief” itself, especially when it is correlated with so-called religious or fetishistic behaviors, functions as a marker of identity, specifically modern identity. That is, the belief in the belief of the other and, conversely, belief in one’s own non-belief, functions as a means to reinforce modern identity, dividing the world into believers (religious) and non-believers (secular). Belief in belief, in other words, allows “the Moderns to see all other peoples as naïve believers, skillful manipulators, or self-deluding cynics.”2 Ironically, then, Shults’s own emphasis on belief as the marker of religion vis-à-vis non-belief repeats the “religious” gesture that creates out-group others according to a constructed in-group identity.

But, as Latour says, “No one believes.”3 Shults, I imagine, would charge me with trying to sneak in an “insider,” theological perspective at this point, but the whole point is that the sharp division between “insider” and “outsider,” between “belief” and “non-belief,” between a “scientific” study of religion and a “theological” one—and, I would add, between subject and object, on which the whole representative apparatus hinges—is the problem.

Nevertheless, despite Shults’s criticism of religious belief, he does not want to jettison theology, as reflection on religion, entirely. Rather, he wants to forge an “iconoclastic” trajectory in and for theology. Shults’s theological iconoclasm, however, limits itself to uncovering, tracing, and constructing secular hypotheses about how religion, that is, engagement with supernatural agents, emerges and maintains itself. Theology, in other words, should reconceptualize itself in terms of the biocultural study of religion as conderned with the conditions for axiological engagement.

There is nothing wrong with that per se, and I agree with Shults that the theological disciplines and the philosophy of religion would benefit greatly from critical engagement with the biocultural study of religion, so understood. However, it is again an extremely limited view, in that it fails to recognize any critical potential in theological concepts as such, precisely because these find their ultimate reason in a suspect religious conceptuality. This is clear, for instance, when Shults criticizes so-called radical and secular theologies and recent non-religious appropriations of theology in continental philosophy. Although Shults is clearly more sympathetic to these trajectories than traditional confessional ones, in that they appropriate in part the iconoclasm that he wants to unleash, their value as contributing to the weakening and dissolving of religious belief remains questionable, at best.

This is clear, for instance, when Shults discusses recent non-religious appropriations of Paul in continental philosophy and secular, death of God theologies. Although such appropriations (and Shults mentions Clayton Crockett’s specifically), read Paul from within an explicit materialist framework, they flounder in that they fail to pay adequate attention “to the apostle’s overriding concerns in his epistles: to convince his readers that a punitive supernatural agent (Christ) is returning soon and to urge them to maintain the purity of their in-groups” (195). Indeed, it is just “this sort of ‘fairy tale’ that has motivated the vast majority or ‘religious’ people in human history, including St. Paul” (195). Without attending to that basic, fabulous element, religion and its pernicious effects persist and extend themselves in even the most “radical” of thinkers.

I think that is an unsubtle, too hasty take on Paul and contemporary appropriations of his thought, but more seriously it would seem to rule out any creative use of theological texts and materials because they are religious. Shults’s criticism seems to assume an all or nothing approach, one that desires non-religious purity and uses the latter as the primary or even sole indicator of discursive value. To be fair, Shults does say that it is necessary to engage with theological hypotheses and notions, but he can only imagine such engagement in the form of negation: it is important, he says, “not to become so distracted by abstract philosophical, psychological, and political analysis that we forget to have a concrete conversation about where the gods come from and why we keep them around” (195).

I find this an odd position to take for an acolyte of Deleuze,4 That is, Shults’s division between belief and non-belief, the religious and the secular, the immaterial and the material, sets up the former as off-limits, unavailable for any type of use. Although Shults does this for oppositional reasons, at a formal level it is the same, ostensibly religious operation, and, I think gives a so-called religious conceptuality what it wants, though by way of critique. Otherwise put, the way that Shults conceives religion and positions his discourse strikes me as still operating from within a “theological” orbit, his claims to construct otherwise notwithstanding.

When it comes to religion and theology, I would prefer, instead, to ignore such divisions entirely. Charting a constructive, iconoclastic trajectory within religious and theological thought, that is, does not occur primarily through criticism, although that may be a first step. It occurs, rather, through the creative appropriation and use of religious and theological notions, without regard to provenance or proper sense. We should, that is, play with religious and theological concepts, the way that a child plays with a disused object, without regard to where it came from and for what it was/is originally for.5 Indeed, if, as Agamben says, the sacred (God, the gods, etc.) maintains itself through attention, an attention that can also take the form of critique, then a more radical thinking with respect to religion would take the form of ignorance and neglect.6 That would allow us, in turn, to put religious and theological notions, themes, and conceptualities to new, immanent uses, uses that are just as theolytic, perhaps even more so.

LERON SHULTS IS CONVINCED that he has broken the DNA code of theology. We now know that humans construct their gods . . . and how they do it. Given this knowledge, he is convinced, it’s no longer rationally acceptable to hold religious beliefs.

Of course, humans are not ideally rational, so Shults knows that most will not heed his call. He himself has overcome the strange drive to create and worship these false divinities, God and gods. Unfortunately, most will fail to rise to this level of insight. Still, once the book has been digested, intelligent readers should at least acknowledge that theological beliefs of all kinds are irrational—whether or not they then have the courage to eschew their former ways and become atheists.

In what follows I will be rejecting this argument almost in its entirety. For a book that is so deeply mistaken at its core, I should note that it’s unusually witty and frequently a pleasure to read. You know a book is gutsy when it begins by drawing a parallel between having “the talk” with your children—telling them how babies are really made—and having “the talk” with your friends to tell them how gods are really made. It turns out that sexual intercourse is the closest analog to “the imaginative intercourse of human groups” that produces gods (14). As we conceive our babies in sexual ecstasy, so also we conceive our gods in ecstatic states.

For a funeral dirge to the demise of deity, the tone of these analogies is surprisingly jolly. Instead of proclaiming the death of God, Shults joyfully explores the birth of gods—though I guess he is insisting that all are born stillborn. His book offers a kind of sex manual on how (and why) humans go about (pro)creating all the myriad, non-existent supernatural beings that they continually call into life. Instead of throwing an Irish wake for the deceased god(s), he concentrates on the pleasures of our profligate religiosity. The impression is that we should revel in our religious libido. Most atheists come to bury God, not to praise him, but Shults comes to celebrate god-making with a sort of Dionysian abandon. Or so it seems.

And yet the book as a whole does not really exude pleasure in the process. The sexual analogies aside, it’s not really a Nietzschean or Dionysian book at all. The reader senses in these pages a bit too much pain, mixed with what seems to be an undertone of anger. The section titles in the chapter that treats theology are just too revealing: “commodified parasitic knowledge of airy nothing . . . half-baked representations of logically impossible worlds . . . factitious enigmas of complaisant religious pundits . . . management of ritual failure through excess conceptual control . . . reactionary immunization of foundational sacred texts” (chapter 3). However surgical the prose and technical the language, it thinly disguises a certain disappointment that religion turned out to be this way.

It’s perhaps revealing when Shults insists that “we may sometimes feel like screaming and shining lanterns in people’s faces” or “marching into a church and crooning an atheist hymn” (199). The first-person plural here, one assumes, is the “royal we,” which generally stands in for “I.” In the same context he writes about “trying to pressure religious families to kick their supernatural agents out of the house and stop ritually reproducing them” (202). One fears he speaks from personal experience.

Of course, Shults’s point here is to convince readers not to try such violent approaches. Still, one does get the impression of an author who is tempted to take the “complaisant religious pundits” by the shoulder and shake the “half-baked representations” out of them.

In many cases, Shults leaves the harshest words to other authors. The three most quoted authors in the text are Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, and Wesley Wildman—an impression confirmed by the index. Of today’s cognitive scientists of religion, the first two are probably among the most uncompromising in their claims that theistic language can be explained away without a remnant remaining. Wildman, to whom the book is dedicated, represents a more enigmatic voice, though certainly the main thrust of his work also cuts in the same direction. Shults appears to feel that these three authors, and others who defend similar conclusions, have now settled the question of whether or not theistic language has a non-empirical referent: it doesn’t.

It may strike readers as strange that a person who wrote or edited almost a dozen sophisticated books as a theologian would now insist that religion is nothing but infantile regression. How could one who authored so many complex theological arguments be certain that “validation [of religious claims] occurs only by satisfying the very emotions that motivate religious beliefs and experiences” (93, quoting Scott Atran)?

I recognize that it may break a cardinal rule of academia to allude to an author’s Sitz im Leben, as I have done above. Certainly my allusions are not meant ad hominem, against the man. Instead, I wish to surface a crucial asymmetry in Shults’s argument. The how and what of belief-formation are fully explained by psychology, the cognitive science of religion, and the biocultural study of religion, he tells us, whereas non- and anti-religious persons are merely recognizing the way that reality is. I am not convinced that one can explain (away) metaphysical beliefs by appeals to the personal and social functions that they serve; we return to this point in a moment. But if one wishes to employ functionalist arguments, then must they not cut both ways? What is good for the goose is good for the gander. The psychological reasons for being anti-metaphysical are surely as complex, as interesting, and as efficacious as are the motivations that incline others of us toward metaphysical affirmations.

But do the functions of religious belief settle (or replace) the question of their truth?

The core question for our debate, I suggest, is this: do Shults and his allies offer a new, more virile argument for atheism? Their argument, as we have seen, is a particular species within the genus functionalism. The key question boils down to this: is functionalism, with its appeal to “research in the cognitive sciences and other disciplines that contribute to the biocultural study of religion” (109), able to succeed where other functionalist arguments have failed? Or—since Shults presumably believes that previous functionalist arguments have not been wholly without merit—let’s put it this way: is the cognitive and biocultural study of religion the final nail in the coffin for (as Dawkins puts it) “God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented”?1

In order to see why one should be skeptical of this genre in general, consider what constitutes a functionalist argument. Imagine that you are a passionate Democrat. I then show you that you hold very similar political beliefs to the ones your parents hold, and that most people with your sort of upbringing also mirror their parents’ liberal beliefs to a high degree. It seems that I have explained why you would hold your political beliefs apart from any appeal to their actual truth. In this sense, it appears, I’ve explained them away. I’ve shown that what’s primary are the social causes for your beliefs and not the reasons that you like to list on their behalf. Or, more harshly, I’ve shown that you are self-deceived when you think that you believe based on the force of the better argument.

Functionalist analyses of religion work in the same way. If social scientific explanations are able to account for where the religious beliefs came from, and why a person might tend to think they are true whether or not they really are, then that person’s reasons for maintaining that her beliefs are true have been undercut. This is why functionalist analyses count as skeptical arguments against religious belief: the existence of religious beliefs—so it is claimed—is better explained by their function than by their truth.

Any why would we think this claim is true? I don’t think that either of the first two phases in the modern history of functionalism succeeded. The first and earliest functionalist accounts were basically philosophical claims. Many of the so-called philosophers of suspicion brought highly theoretical arguments for their conclusions, including Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim, Nietzsche, and Freud. In a second phase, functionalists introduced quantitative arguments from psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology, developing statistical methods (factor analysis, measures of reliability and statistical significance) to mine the data. In this phase they did establish statistically significant correlations. But it’s not clear to me that the data establish the primary of causes over reasons in the required sense.

It appears that Shults believes that the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and the biocultural study of religion (BSR) represent a third phase in the functionalist deconstruction of religious beliefs. At the end of the book, I remain unconvinced. CSR and BSR bring new collections of correlations, and connections of this type always add to our understanding of a field. But the normative claims about religion that Shults makes in these pages require more than the functionalist deflations of religious belief that Boyer, Atran, and Wildman have offered to this point.

At this stage of the discussion one can see the case for both sides. It could be that humans form theistic beliefs because of inbuilt cognitive and biocultural mechanisms, such as hyperactive agency detection. Or it could be that human reflection and/or experience lead us to recognize religious dimensions of reality that underlie our empirical experience. If in the end personal experience and social conditioning determine which of these two possibilities you find more plausible, then arguments do not decide the question—neither Shults’s arguments nor those of his opponents.

I FOUND IT DIFFICULT to respond to F. LeRon Shults’ Theology after the Birth of God for two reasons. First, his views differ significantly from my own regarding the results and interpretation of the results of the biocultural study of religion. Second, Shults’ claims and arguments are difficult to understand. It is difficult to respond to arguments that are neither explicitly made nor clearly formulated. In such a short response, I can address only a limited number of issues. So I will restrict myself to providing a few critical comments on chapters 4 and 6, the sections of the book in which Shults engages with the analytic literature on the alleged implausibility of theism in the light of the biocultural study of religion.

I am among the “Christian theists (philosophers, theologians, and even scientists) [who] are acknowledging the theolytic pressure produced by research in the cognitive sciences and other disciplines that contribute to the biocultural study of religion and [who are] exploring strategies for responding to these new challenges” (109). Our view is that “the theolytic pressures” are mostly illusory or misleading, at least in the case of the plausibility of Christian theism.1 Analytic philosophers (religious or not) have been debating evolutionary debunking arguments concerning these and related issues (morality, say, or knowledge). The responses of Christian theists to challenges arising from the biocultural study of religion mirror those of non-theistic analytic philosophers discussing, for instance, moral realism or the trustworthiness of our metaphysical intuitions.

Shults claims that such analytic discussions of the challenges of the biocultural study of religion to the plausibility of theism are somehow problematic as they are “myopically focused on inductive and deductive inferences” (165). Shults regards this as a smokescreen to avoid questioning the “religious abductions” themselves, namely, avoiding the “basic question of the plausibility of religious hypothesizing itself” (109). Shults is mistaken about this. The “plausibility of religious hypothesizing” is exactly what is at stake in these debates.

Consider Shults’ engagements with the essays in Believing Primate.2 Most of these discussions are conducted within the context of a reliabilist epistemology. Very roughly, reliabilism is an account of what justifies our beliefs. The basic idea is that the deliverances of our (reliable) cognitive faculties are prima facie justified. In other words, we take our ordinary belief-forming faculties, including perception, memory, and inference, as reliable (that is, truth-conducive) sources of beliefs in ordinary contexts, if we have no reason to doubt them. Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga developed a version of reliabilism, proper functionalism, to defend the prima facie warrant of Christian theism; he argued that belief in God is comparable to other basic outputs of our cognitive systems. Like all other prima facie rational outputs of our cognitive systems, belief in God would then be “innocent until proven guilty.”

Michael Murray and others in the Believing Primate ask if the results of the biocultural study of religion provide “defeaters” for the reliability of the faculties that produce belief in God. On Shults’ view (110), Murray and others dodge the issue of the plausibility of the “God hypothesis” by focusing on the genetic fallacy and such. But they are not dodging “the” bullet (whatever the bullet actually is); they explicitly address the plausibility of religious thinking and the reliability of the faculties that produce such thinking.

The basic schema of evolutionary debunking arguments that Murray and others are responding to is as follows. Here is Guy Kahane’s sketch:

Causal premise. S’s belief that p is explained by intuition p that is a product of evolution (understood as including our evolved cognition, tendencies, etc.).
Epistemic premise. Evolution is a process that does not track truth.
Therefore
 S’s belief that p is unjustified.3

Kahane and others use this schema to discuss evolutionary explanations of morality, commonsense beliefs, science and metaphysics.

Richard Joyce, Sharon Street, and Paul Griffiths and John Wilkins have presented the most discussed evolutionary debunking arguments.4 Whereas Joyce and Street focus on debunking ethics and morality, Griffiths and Wilkins provide a general debunking strategy for moral and religious beliefs (while attempting to salvage commonsense and scientific beliefs).5

As Helen De Cruz and Johann De Smedt argue in their The Natural History of Natural Theology, evolutionary debunking arguments are in a precarious position.6 If the biocultural study of religion is correct, religious beliefs are products of the same mechanisms that produce our commonsense beliefs and, with the help of reflective cognition, are also involved in the production of scientific beliefs. For instance, I take Theory of Mind to be a reliable source of beliefs in ordinary contexts. But if god-beliefs show Theory of Mind to be unreliable, how does Shults avoid skepticism about all the outputs of Theory of Mind?7

Even if it turned out that our basic religious belief-forming faculties were unreliable, this would not undermine everyone’s rational belief in God. Even the most ardent debunkers, Paul Griffiths and John Wilkins, admit that “[D]ebunking is not disproving. If there are independent reasons for religious belief, their cogency is not removed by the fact that religious beliefs have evolutionary explanations.”8 In other words, a successful debunking argument would not undermine evidence one might have for theism.9

Shults accuses theistic reliabilists of committing the petitio principii fallacy (110). Shults claims, for example, that Plantinga’s defense of warranted theism assumes the existence of God. This betrays a subtle yet deep misunderstanding of Plantinga’s argument. While Plantinga argues that theistic belief could be warranted only if God exists (how could it be otherwise?), he has not argued that theistic belief is warranted because God exists (which would commit the petitio principii fallacy). If there is a God who is reliably accessed by our cognitive faculties, then our belief in God may be warranted. If there is no such god, then it would not be warranted. Plantinga has not argued that belief in God is warranted, but that it could be and then specifies the conditions under which it could be. In order for Shults and others to show that belief in God is not warranted, then, they would have to show that God does not exist (which they have not done). If one were a metaphysical naturalist, one would believe that God does not exist (and hence, think theistic belief unwarranted). But such biographical information is irrelevant to the logic of this case.

Plantinga is not arguing that belief in God could not be challenged by evidence. Instead, he argues that, in many cases, there is no metaphysically neutral way to sort out reliable mechanisms from unreliable mechanisms. Assessing whether a belief-forming mechanism is reliable or not, is not a metaphysically neutral enterprise. If Shults wants to reject Plantinga’s strategy, he would have to: (a) refute reliabilism, (b) show that Plantinga’s account of warranted theistic belief is implausible without assuming metaphysical naturalism, or (c) give reasons for metaphysical naturalism and against theism. As far as I can see, Shults has not even attempted, not to mention succeeded, in any of these.

Since the mid-60s, Plantinga has argued that belief in God is epistemologically on par with the belief in other minds. However, Shults contends that belief in other minds comes about through interactions with physical bodies and other such experiences, whereas belief in God does not. Recent work in cognitive science, however, seems to oppose this. Studies on mind-body dualism and afterlife beliefs, suggest that belief in other minds extends to such disembodied spirits as deceased relatives (ancestors). We communicate with the spirits of deceased relatives as though they were present with us. Moreover, while Shults may be correct that the theory of mind was evolutionarily instigated through interactions with physical bodies, this historical contingency seems of little metaphysical or even scientific interest. A great many of our cognitive faculties, which developed in response to various physical circumstances, have been applied in completely different, non-physical circumstances. High-level mathematics may have resulted from counting digits (fingers) but certainly exceeds it. Theoretical physics goes vastly beyond simple interactions with physical bodies. Our ability to project possible futures is no doubt rooted in present and past actual experiences but the ability to think thusly undergirds metaphysical thinking (of possibility and necessity). In restricting cognitive access to the physical, then, Shults begs the question against the theist by smuggling metaphysical naturalism among his premises.

Shults seems to offer an argument for metaphysical naturalism from religious diversity. Theological views like theism, he claims, “fail as inter-subjective and trans-communal interpretations of religious phenomena because they uncritically rely on fallacious—albeit phylogenetically ‘natural’—abductive inferences about the gods of particular groups” (112). In the next paragraph, Shults claims that it is more plausible to adopt naturalism than any one of many theistic religions.

But diversity is not a problem merely for religious belief. We all engage in politics, science, moral reasoning, and aesthetic evaluation in spite of the disagreement and diversity of opinion in these domains of life. And we think that there is truth to be had in these domains. If Shults is right, though, parity suggests that we should, for example, be moral skeptics as well as religious skeptics. Due to moral diversity, moral realism would fail as intersubjective and transcommunal interpretations of moral phenomena. Most humans believe that there are moral truths and that those who disagree with them are wrong (for various sociocultural reasons, perhaps). Our moral faculties are reliable but not infallible. The same may be true of the faculties that produce god-beliefs.

Of course, we have no belief-independent ways of telling if our god-beliefs or are moral beliefs (or aesthetic or political) are true. That is just the human believing condition. The fact that there is now a scientific account of the biocultural mechanisms that have influenced the development of these faculties that produce such beliefs adds little in principle to the problem of diversity. If we want to avoid wholesale skepticism, we should resist Shults’ debunking arguments against rational religious belief.