I think evolutionary psychology is pretty far from the crux of the theism/atheism debate.
On one hand, I don’t think evolutionary psych at the moment provides very strong evidence against god. It’s true that if god doesn’t exist, there is probably some evolutionary explanation for widespread cross-cultural religious belief, and if god does exist, there might not be. But evolutionary psychology so far only really has educated guesses for why religious belief might be so common, without knock-down proof that any of them are the true reason. The existence of such guesses seems to me pretty close to equally likely under either hypothesis. These guesses are a good argument however against the opposite claim that widespread belief in religion proves god exists.
As for the Keller argument you mentioned, it begs the question by suggesting that the evolutionary psychology argument is a last ditch effort to subvert a conclusion that would otherwise be nearly unavoidable for our god-believing brains. But if we do have some inherent tendency to give credence to the idea of god, it’s not all that strong, for instance the non-existence of god is much less surprising to our intuitions than the fact that color categories are perceptually constructed. The argument is better left at the object-level of directly giving reasons for and against god, instead of arguing for and against the reliability of certain weak human intuitions.
I think evolutionary psychology is pretty far from the crux of the theism/atheism debate.
On one hand, I don’t think evolutionary psych at the moment provides very strong evidence against god. It’s true that if god doesn’t exist, there is probably some evolutionary explanation for widespread cross-cultural religious belief, and if god does exist, there might not be. But evolutionary psychology so far only really has educated guesses for why religious belief might be so common, without knock-down proof that any of them are the true reason. The existence of such guesses seems to me pretty close to equally likely under either hypothesis. These guesses are a good argument however against the opposite claim that widespread belief in religion proves god exists.
As for the Keller argument you mentioned, it begs the question by suggesting that the evolutionary psychology argument is a last ditch effort to subvert a conclusion that would otherwise be nearly unavoidable for our god-believing brains. But if we do have some inherent tendency to give credence to the idea of god, it’s not all that strong, for instance the non-existence of god is much less surprising to our intuitions than the fact that color categories are perceptually constructed. The argument is better left at the object-level of directly giving reasons for and against god, instead of arguing for and against the reliability of certain weak human intuitions.