From the "Where are We Going and Why are We in This Handbasket? Department

ITEM:
"University of Oxford researchers will spend nearly $4 million to study why mankind embraces God. The grant to the Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion will bring anthropologists, theologians, philosophers and other academics together for three years to study whether belief in a divine being is a basic part of mankind's makeup." Here is the link: Link

Let's see...any chance they'll come back with an answer like Augustine's--that there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart? No, that's so...Medieval; or St Paul, that since in the creation of the world God's attributes are clearly seen by all, that no excuse remains? Ha....resort to the Bible? you're kidding, right?

No, Science and its first principle, materialism, is the foreground and the background here; despite the postmodernist critique of science as a "totalizing discourse", i.e., an account that claims for itself exclusive access to truth--excuse me, "truth", in the discourse of the po-mos--science and materialism is the only frame that any study group like this is going to tolerate.

This is money spent to buttress the materialist world view and push theism to the margins, and if possible off the stage. It's hard to imagine a more than token presence in the study group of anyone even neutral on the question, let alone sympathetic to, the reality of immaterial reality.

Evolutionary psychology, the hottest intellectual ticket going these days, and not theology, nor anthropology, nor philosophy, will offer the only acceptable explanation for why so many people--in the twenty-first century!--still cling to such a puzzling, antiquated "meme" (Dawkins' idiotic word). The only explanation available to evolutionary psychology goes something like this: The idea of God had survival value--everything must have survival value!--for our primitive, benighted ancestors, whose use of it quelled their fear of death so well that they surpassed their atheist numskull neighbors and competitors-for survival in the ability to pass on their theistic genes.

Oh wait, that would make today's atheists kind of like the Cavemen in the Geico ads wouldn't it?..evolutionary deadends...the appendix of human 'isms. Maybe they should be studying why mankind persists in atheism instead...