The Human Question

This post is a response to an interesting debate between Joanna Collicutt McGrath and Martyn Frame on Unbelievable? -- a debate regarding the claim that humans have evolved "agency detection" (AD) and that AD is responsible for our belief in God, so that belief in God is therefore without a rational basis: Before my criticism of the use of AD to defeat theism, first a criticism of a premise of that just sketched argument: the premise that use a "theory of mind (TOM) " to infer the existence of other agents in the world about us. TOM is integral to Frame's argument, as it characterizes reasoning that leads to God as something like a conjecture about a hidden cause of phenomena... a conjecture for which he finds no adequate warrant. Now my criticism of TOM: it is ultimately agnostic about the existence of other minds in the way a Popperian is agnostic about the truth of any scientific theory. TOM language strongly suggests that a human being first reaso...