The source of something is not the same as its effect.
Yes, evolution is responsible for human psychology, which has concepts such as love and morality. But this doesn’t mean that evolution has concepts such as love or morality within it.
Do concepts such as “love” and “don’t murder” help with human fitness? Yes. Would murder be right if it helped fitness? No.
Imagine somewhere in the universe, there is a species that murders its own members as a matter of course and they evolved to do so. They call murder something that vaguely translates to “good” if you had a translation program that translated one of their languages to English.
But murder-alien!good is not the same concept as human!good, and it is human!good that we are concerned with. It doesn’t matter that murder is not written against in the rocks, it is written in us as a bad thing. And that’s because of evolution, even though evolution does not contain some generalized moral principle within it.
As far as “truth” being “100% certainty” the obvious problem is most easily (without math) stated as “If you are 100% certain, that means that you cannot change your mind. There is nothing that could change it. So if you are even the slightest bit wrong when you are 100% certain, you can’t fix it. So you wouldn’t want that form of certainty, even if you could get it.”
Finally, God makes sense to us not because this belief directly helps our survival. Rather, the ability to attribute events to Agents and understand Agents was really useful for early humans, far more so than the ability to attribute events to non-Agents. Because if Ulk stole your food, it was better to think in terms of “who stole my food?” than “my food vanished.” We are social animals, and as such, Agent-based answers are highly useful to us. So when we started to explain the world, we typically attributed Agency to things, rather than non-Agents. But that doesn’t mean that our Agent-thinking was good for figuring out about nature, it just means that we used a useful faculty in the wrong way. Moreover, Keller’s comment doesn’t distinguish between different religious interpretations. Ask your dad if he believes Thor causes lightning: it made sense to a lot of people once upon a time.
One thing that can help:
The source of something is not the same as its effect.
Yes, evolution is responsible for human psychology, which has concepts such as love and morality. But this doesn’t mean that evolution has concepts such as love or morality within it.
Do concepts such as “love” and “don’t murder” help with human fitness? Yes. Would murder be right if it helped fitness? No.
Imagine somewhere in the universe, there is a species that murders its own members as a matter of course and they evolved to do so. They call murder something that vaguely translates to “good” if you had a translation program that translated one of their languages to English.
But murder-alien!good is not the same concept as human!good, and it is human!good that we are concerned with. It doesn’t matter that murder is not written against in the rocks, it is written in us as a bad thing. And that’s because of evolution, even though evolution does not contain some generalized moral principle within it.
As far as “truth” being “100% certainty” the obvious problem is most easily (without math) stated as “If you are 100% certain, that means that you cannot change your mind. There is nothing that could change it. So if you are even the slightest bit wrong when you are 100% certain, you can’t fix it. So you wouldn’t want that form of certainty, even if you could get it.”
Finally, God makes sense to us not because this belief directly helps our survival. Rather, the ability to attribute events to Agents and understand Agents was really useful for early humans, far more so than the ability to attribute events to non-Agents. Because if Ulk stole your food, it was better to think in terms of “who stole my food?” than “my food vanished.” We are social animals, and as such, Agent-based answers are highly useful to us. So when we started to explain the world, we typically attributed Agency to things, rather than non-Agents. But that doesn’t mean that our Agent-thinking was good for figuring out about nature, it just means that we used a useful faculty in the wrong way. Moreover, Keller’s comment doesn’t distinguish between different religious interpretations. Ask your dad if he believes Thor causes lightning: it made sense to a lot of people once upon a time.