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There is a phrase I have heard in various forms over the years whenever conversations turn towards religion, morality or some of the stranger things we human beings do.
“It’s the result of evolution.”
Why do people believe in God? Evolution.
Why are human beings drawn towards ritual, spirituality and transcendence? Evolution.
Why do we experience love, moral obligation, beauty, wonder or a sense that life ought to mean something? You guessed it, evolution.
I should probably make something clear at the beginning. I have no interest in arguing against evolution. I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that human beings developed through evolutionary processes, and I am fascinated by what science continues to discover about how those processes shaped us.
What interests me is what sometimes happens after the evolutionary explanation has been offered.
There can be an assumption that because we have explained where something came from, we have also explained what it means.
I am not sure we have.
