u/DeltaBlues82

Thesis: If the brain generates a thought milliseconds before you’re aware of it, “free will” is more plausibly attributed to narrator effect, instead of an objective fact human minds have intuited.

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We don’t choose our thoughts. We become aware of decisions that our unconscious brain has already produced.

To be aware of a thought, neural networks must first generate, process, and propagate that signal into conscious working memory. Because by the time our biology transforms raw sensory input into a conscious, meaningful reality, milliseconds pass. Then your brain generates a thought even a few more more milliseconds later, and you become aware of it.

So conscious perception needs to act like a delayed read-out of memory. Reconfiguring experience to project a model onto reality we can use to predict future action.

Because our biology can’t wait for us to become aware of everything we need to, and decide on how to act.

Let’s be honest. You can’t even decide on what to watch. Your body definitely can’t trust your awareness to decide whether or not stepping off the curb is safe or not.

So if we don’t “choose” our actions, we just become aware of them, it is reasonable to conclude that we rely on an internal narrator effect to understand them in an ad hoc manner.

I’ve seen it explained in some places that Pilate didn’t have Jesus’s followers arrested and executed alongside him because the Romans didn’t consider the movement a real threat, and only wanted to make an example of Jesus.

But if they wanted to make an example of Jesus, why did they allow Joseph, a follower of the movement, to retrieve his body for burial?

Sin would not exist without free will.

Free will causes sin.

God gave us free will.

No human accepts free will or agrees to it.

No human can avoid free will.

No human is infallible and can choose not to sin.

Sin is a conflict with God.

God’s justice is administered to deal with the sins we have committed.

Justice is the fair resolution of conflict.

A fair resolution to the conflict sin creates is to choose to reject free will.

God has not given us the option to reject free will.

God is not just if he denies us a fair resolution to the conflict sin produces.

Conclusion: Having free will means we are denied justice. God has given us the source of the conflict, and denies us justice when we use it. Free will isn’t free, we pay for it by accepting God’s injustices.

Thesis: There’s no reason to believe God has any role in human morality.

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Different types of creatures participate in different behavioral systems, and maintain different types of social order.

Morality is the system that humans participate in, that developed to maintain order in human societies.

God is not a human.

God does not participate in human’s moral or social systems and has no presence in human’s social order. God is not a moral agent in human moral systems.

No point where God had any type of moral interaction or moral influence on humans can reasonably be identified.

Morals developed in a way that requires humans to use their own judgement to navigate moral dilemmas. Humans share moral beliefs and values because we interact with each other, and use morals to regulate certain behaviors and interactions.

So there’s no reason to believe God created anything specifically for humans beings, as nothing about humans is extraordinary.

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Moral agency is defined as an individual's ability to make moral choices based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions.

P1: Logic and mathematics provide reliable formal systems for reasoning.

P2: Science uses logic, mathematics, and experimental methodology to produce reliable models of the natural world.

P3: Religious claims lack objective, publicly reproducible methods of verification.

P4: No religious/supernatural claim has achieved the same level of independent confirmation as well-established scientific theories.

P5: Evolutionary evidence strongly suggests religion evolved to provide biological and social advantages.

Conclusion: Logic, mathematics, and science are reliable methods for understanding the natural world, whereas religion is better explained as a biological & social phenomenon than as a reliable method for discovering truth or making accurate insights.

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Religion is defined as a system of personal or institutionalized beliefs and practices that organizes communities around shared frameworks, rituals, and/or cosmological explanations.

P1: Color vision is subjective understanding.

P2: The claim "The Coke can is red" is based on color vision and is accurate.

C1: Therefore, at least one accurate claim is based on subjective understanding.

P3: Objective facts are distinct from understanding of those facts.

C2: There exists at least one accurate claim or item of knowledge that is not produced solely by an objective understanding.

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Potential objections: It’s an objective fact that the properties of specific electromagnetic wavelengths produce color.

Response: Those qualities do not produce color. Color is only produced when hue-selective neurons process comparative firing rates of cone photoreceptors in an eye, which sends an electrochemical signal to a brain, which blends these relative signals to produce the actual, internal, subjective sensation of color.

Thesis: It is more plausible that God is a byproduct of human brain function than an all-powerful, moralizing creator.

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We can say with a high level of confidence that humans first developed the cognitive capacity for religion ~100k years ago. And that it likely emerged as a nonadaptive byproduct of natural cognitive heuristics, biases, and social-rituals. But it endured because it eventually gained certain forms of adaptive value.

Particularly its capacity to help humans transcend what appears to be a natural cap on our community sizes and sustain cooperation within increasingly large and complex societies.

Our first religions, animism and shamanism, centered on ritual, sacrifice, and symbolic engagement with the natural world. These traditions were typically non-theistic and lacked the strongly moralizing frameworks that characterize modern doctrinal religions.

Over time, animistic traditions developed into forms of ancestor worship, which gradually evolved into polytheism, and then monotheism.

With this final transition emerged the concept of a singular high-God. One who enforced religious beliefs and practices with moralizing supernatural punishment, a defining feature of modern doctrinal religions.

Moralizing high-gods succeeded in their roles because they effectively address profound psychological tensions inherent to human consciousness: the struggle to reconcile good and evil, life and death, free will and determinism, existence and nonexistence, self and non-self. Their ability to aid us in modeling these dynamics aligns with many of our biases and cognitive heuristics, making them readily acceptable to the majority of humankind.

So in this sense, God functions as a cognitive and cultural model. An organizing framework through which humans interpret and navigate these enduring existential polarities. An explanation more plausible than anything offered by any form of theism.

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Support: Evolution of the Parietal Lobe in the Formation of an Enhanced “Sense of Self”

Optimizing Human Community Sizes

Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion

Religion, the Social Brain and the Mystical Stance

The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions

The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions

The most common objection to whether or not naturalistic accounts of morality are valid is that the type of behaviors that morals generally describe (ie altruism, selflessness, etc) don’t reflect the “survival of the fittest” nature of evolution. And that it’s more beneficial to be selfish, deceptive, and greedy.

This is a strawman of naturalistic accounts for two reasons. The first is that “survival of the fittest” is an antiquated trope of evolutionary theory, used erroneously to claim that the strongest or most physically imposing of us are best suited for survival.

Which is a misrepresentation, as it’s truly the most well adapted organisms that are best suited for survival.

The second reason is that it misrepresents evolutionary theory, and claims that selfish behavior is better suited to help us survive the natural world.

Which may be the case for some types of animals, but not for humans.

Human morality is unique from many other species’ social behaviors because our social order underwent a reversal in dominance hierarchy millions of years ago. When our hominin ancestors transitioned from the typical primate bully-dominated hierarchies to hierarchies in which bullies were actively suppressed. And the interest of the group was not only prioritized, but the group became the dominant force that held free riders in check and shaped social behavior.

Which is not only a defining, naturally-occurring trait of human moral behavior, but something that we see reflected in the behavior of other species as well. Specifically species with spindle and mirror neurons, like several different types of cetaceans as well as marmoset monkeys.

The second most common objection to these frameworks is that naturalistic accounts of morality are subjective, and that subjective adaptations have no functional validity and are entirely arbitrary. Which is a strawman of the nature of these types of adaptations, as many subjective experiences are not arbitrary. Rather, they evolved because they serve important adaptive purposes.

An example of a subjective system with extreme functional validity is our vision. Some of the things we perceive with our visual sense don’t objectively exist as discrete properties in the external world, but arise exclusively from how our biology subjectively interpret sensory inputs.

If one demands that legitimacy, understanding, or even knowledge requires objective grounding, then for consistency sake, one should also reject the functional validity of other subjective systems (like taste, hearing, and vision) that nevertheless provide reliable and adaptive guidance for human behavior.

Ultimately, any rejection of naturalistic & evolutionary moral frameworks rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be "fit" for survival. By transitioning from a dominance-based hierarchy to a cooperative one, our ancestors transformed altruism and group-interest into the most "fit" strategy available, effectively turning collective moral enforcement into a biological necessity rather than a mere social preference. To dismiss these moral insights as "subjective" or "selfish" is to ignore the same evolutionary progress that governs our most trusted senses. Just as vision translates raw data into a functional internal reality, morality translates social dynamics into an essential framework for survival.

Acknowledging morality as an evolved adaptation does not strip it of its value. It recognizes it as a sophisticated, time-tested tool that has allowed the human species to thrive through the power of the group rather than the greed of the individual.

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Support: Early hominins and the reversal of dominance hierarchy

Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality

Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Insights From Non-human Primates

Thesis: Eternal life is a nonsensical concept that has no credible basis in reality.

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The claim that holding certain religious beliefs or following certain religious traditions & practices will result in “eternal life” is untethered from our basic understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, and even reality itself.

Life is defined by the animated processes of organic chemistry. Claiming that the process of life continues after its processes end is incoherent and nonsensical. And the claim that a conscious state of existence can be maintained eternally is unsustainable, as every credible cosmological model strongly suggests that both time and the energy needed to sustain the basic functions of life will ultimately terminate in the heat-death.

It’s far more plausible that any belief in an eternal afterlife is driven by a multitude of ingrained biases inherent to our brain function. Opposed to being a gift bestowed upon humans, who are uniquely ensouled and given the gift of eternal life, by an all powerful, moralizing high-god.

Thesis: Personal spiritual, mystical, and “transcendent” experiences are the result of normal biological function and aren’t sufficient evidence of any claims that are religious or spiritual in nature.

When these experiences are used to support some claim to spiritual knowledge or insight, they’re misrepresented, and appeals to supernatural or spiritual explanations are not only never explained or established, they’re also incoherent in a religious context.

These experiences have a completely natural function, which spiritual or transcendent claims never accurately account for.

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Shortly after (in an evolutionary sense) the brains of modern humans became more spherical, and our parietal lobe greatly expanded, ~100-80k years ago, we evolved religion.

The parietal lobe is a region of the brain involved in regulating our sense of self. When humans use rituals like prayer, meditation, et al, to alter activity in this lobe, the distinction between our personal space and peri-personal space breaks down. (Source 1, Source 2). In addition to other intense emotions including an enhanced feeling of unity, change in the sense of self-agency and ownership, alterations in spatiotemporal perception, and modification in body sensation. This blurs the borders between the self and non-self, which results in feeling like a part of something greater than self.

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When an appeal is made to a spiritual or supernatural source to explain these experiences, or when they’re claimed to be good evidence to support specific spiritual or supernatural claims, that’s a blatant misinterpretation of what we know of their nature. Which we can say with a high degree of confidence is entirely rooted in neuroscience and our biological function.

Thesis: The existence of human life, morality, religion, and belief in gods are most plausibly explained without invoking any divine or supernatural influence.

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The leading scientific accounts of abiogenesis describe the origin of life as a natural consequence of physical and chemical processes consistent with the second law of thermodynamics.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0895717794901880

Living systems generate localized order while simultaneously increasing entropy in their surrounding environment through heat production and metabolic waste. Within this framework, the emergence of life can be understood as a thermodynamically permissible process in which ordered biological systems arise through energy dissipation in open systems.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26530021/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9961546/

Contemporary research has demonstrated that many of the complex organic compounds and chemical interactions necessary for life arise naturally under a variety of environmental conditions. Experimental and theoretical models have reproduced numerous intermediary steps involved in abiogenesis. These findings indicate critical stages in the transition from chemistry to biology can occur through natural mechanisms.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-60359-3

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.11.617851v1.full.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26876/

https://elifesciences.org/articles/32330

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378619164_Experimentally_modeling_the_emergence_of_prebiotically_plausible_phospholipid_vesicles

Evidence from astrochemistry further suggests that the molecular precursors of life are widespread in the universe. Many of the fundamental building blocks of life have been identified in extraterrestrial materials and are estimated to have formed billions of years before the existence of Earth. Some of the oldest known amino acids are approximately seven billion years old and originated in interstellar environments. Consequently, life may have originated when these compounds accumulated and reacted under favorable conditions, such as hydrothermal vent systems or chemically active shallow-water tidal environments subjected to microlightning and ultraviolet radiation.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37107-6

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-complex-blocks-life-spontaneously-space.html#google_vignette

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02676-w

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.accounts.4c00423

Once life takes hold on earth, we fast forward several hundred million years, and we see Homo sapiens evolving advanced intelligence, which resulted in certain mental and social abilities, useful for survival and reproduction, that predisposed them to religious beliefs.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22723358/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19575315/

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0811717106

https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/BIOT_a_00018.pdf

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/s/sOEDYlrk4D

Research in evolutionary psychology and anthropology suggests that religious beliefs emerged from the interaction of several cognitive adaptations and social mechanisms. These mutually energizing adaptations contributed to the emergence of structured rituals and cooperative social systems that later evolved into more formalized moral frameworks and religious traditions. All of which evolved to help humans navigate increasingly complex environments and demanding social behaviors.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2079630-what-do-chimp-temples-tell-us-about-the-evolution-of-religion/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-origins-of-human-morality/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4958132/

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/s/vcj0awMqLI

Around 80-100k years ago, the first of the two stages of man’s belief in gods began. This initial, informal stage in the evolution of man’s belief in gods emerged from increasingly complex social-ritual behaviors (ie ancestor worship and trance-states) and the continued development of our cognitive ecology. During this stage, religious cognition was expressed through relatively informal practices such as ancestor veneration, trance states, animistic beliefs, and communal rituals. These practices strengthened social bonds within groups, increased cooperative behavior, and fostered shared symbolic frameworks.

Evolution of the Parietal Lobe in the Formation of an Enhanced “Sense of Self”

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:259dc012-8806-4ca6-92f2-2eaf1ff6c002/files/mf2d525839e4bbb706e4b6570b95ba456

The second and more formal stage occurred around the beginning of the Early Bronze Age. This stage was characterized by societies adopting beliefs in morally concerned or “high” gods who monitored human behavior and imposed supernatural punishment for moral transgressions. Such beliefs appear to have functioned as mechanisms for enforcing social norms within increasingly large and stratified populations. As human societies expanded and developed a need to address emerging patterns, religious systems that emphasized moralizing supernatural oversight facilitated coordination, compliance with social norms, and stability in large-scale communities. In this sense, religion and theistic belief systems can be understood as cultural adaptations that helped sustain cooperation and social cohesion within expanding human societies. Empirical research suggests that moralizing religious systems were particularly effective in reinforcing prosocial behavior and collective identity, thereby contributing to the success and persistence of large, complex civilizations.

https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/020763d4-5e3f-4526-a53b-b203683976be/1/MSP_article_SocArxiv_15sep21.pdf

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29333060/

Taken together, evidence from thermodynamics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and cognitive science provides a coherent naturalistic account of the emergence of life, morality, belief in gods, and religion. These interdisciplinary explanations offer a parsimonious framework that does not require the introduction of supernatural or divine causal agents. Consequently, naturalistic explanations remain more plausible than hypotheses that attribute these phenomena to supernatural origins.

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Definitions:

Supernatural: Phenomena attributed to divine or transcendent forces beyond natural physical processes.

Natural: Phenomena that arise from physical, chemical, biological, or social processes without reference to supernatural causation.

Religion: A system of personal or institutionalized beliefs and practices that organizes communities around shared frameworks, rituals, and/or cosmological explanations.

Life: A self-sustaining system capable of metabolism, growth, and reproduction through biological processes.

Morality: Values and behaviors and that social creatures evolved to help hold free riders accountable for the types of conduct that erodes the health and longevity of their societies.

Demanding the need for objective morality demonstrates a lack of understanding for how subjective systems function. Subjective systems are not arbitrary, they evolved because they serve important adaptive purposes, allowing us to interpret and navigate reality.

An example of this would be our vision, which is inherently subjective. Some of the things we see don’t objectively exist as discrete properties in the external world, but arise from the brain’s interpretation of sensory input.

If one demands that legitimacy, understanding, or even knowledge requires objective grounding, then for consistency sake, one should also reject the functional validity of other subjective systems (like taste, hearing, or vision) that nevertheless provide reliable and adaptive guidance for human behavior and decision making.

A rejection which would probably kill you.

So scratch that I guess, and continue to rely on subjective systems to navigate and survive in the everyday world.