Why Paleoanthropology Leads to Atheism

Why Paleoanthropology Leads to Atheism

Interest in human origins should be more widespread regardless of which worldview it entails, because it is the study of where we came from. Especially for anyone who was once religious and entranced by the story of God creating Adam and Eve, your curiosity about our origins should increase, not decrease, significantly, when you leave the religion and discover that only science can answer your questions.

It probably seems obvious as to why paleoanthropology conflicts with religion at a surface level. It’s pretty clear that scientists have determined that our apelike ancestors first began showing human-like characteristics and making the trek up to two feet around seven million years ago. On the other hand, Genesis claims that God created Adam from dirt and Eve from his rib at what many creationists believe was six thousand years ago. Of course, there are a lot of Christians who take issue with the doctrine of a young Earth, who believe in evolution, and who interpret the creation accounts as poetry or metaphor. This makes room for the lives of our beloved hominid ancestors, who at the very least deserve to have their existences acknowledged.

The schism between paleoanthopology and religion goes deeper yet. Even if you reconcile the timelines between evolution and the bible, I think that these two ideologies are fundamentally irreconcilable. The problem, though, is that paleoanthropology itself isn’t an ideology. There are dozens of conflicting opinions within the field, but the field itself is just a matter of the things that people discover. Those things are real, tangible fossils that people pick up and hold in their hands and see with their own eyes, that they can date using dozens of methods, and that they can place anatomically into a skeletal structure. (Meanwhile, you can’t touch creationism.)

Most of what paleoanthropologists disagree on seems to usually deal with the names of species, but they all know that the fossils exist. That is undeniable. It’s set in stone, if you will. Those fossils tell you how their owners were built, how they moved, what they ate, and how they lived. The areas and objects surrounding where they were found can often tell you when they lived and what tools they used. What these scientists have found is that evolution didn’t have any end goal in mind.

To what extent evolution is random is difficult to explain, because it depends on what you mean by random. The mutations are random, but the traits that they give a creature and whether that creature survives as a result of them are not random. Survival is determined by the creature’s environment. Likewise, ancient human species evolved as a result of their environments, their predators, and their own food sources, but they weren’t intending consciously (or even genetically mutating purposely) to walk or talk or think. Those traits were literally all side effects of the hominids’ environments. Each change built upon the last and what was already there.

At the end of The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, Ian Tattersall wrote,

So, despite what we might have been taught, we are the pinnacle of nothing. Instead, we are simply one more twig on what was until very recently a luxuriant evolutionary tree. The recent pruning of this tree—a product of our accidental uniqueness—has given us an entirely false view of our place in Nature. To keep our self-image in proper proportion, we should never forget that what succeeds in evolution is usually not optimization in the engineering sense, but simply whatever it is that happens to work in the current environmental marketplace. Special as we Homo sapiens like to think ourselves, no impartial observer would dispute that, after many millions of years of evolution, we are notably imperfected—and will almost certainly remain that way. This, above all, is why we should always remember that we are no exception to Nature’s rules. Odd we may be; but we are nonetheless an odd primate.

Ian Tattersall, The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, p. 222

It might sound like Tattersall is refuting a creationist principle, but he’s not—at least not explicitly. He fought throughout the book against the old paleoanthropological idea of humans being feats of engineering crafted by nature over millions of years, with each form getting closer to perfection. And I think that this week, more than most, we know for a fact that humans are not perfect: in reality, we are probably closer to the opposite.

Paleoanthropology has been fighting for decades to get away from this linear progression and discover that human evolution more closely resembles a lush tree (where all the branches eventually fell off except one). We resulted from millions of years of natural trial and error.

Even though paleoanthropologists obviously believe in evolution, that linear progression of improving forms is as close as they get to creationism, and it’s not a far stretch to get there. All theistic religions believe in a creator god. They don’t all believe that humans are perfect, but they believe that they were created with and for a purpose, by someone with a plan and an end goal of what they wanted to make. Religion teaches that we were engineered.

Paleoanthropology literally undermines all of that.

It hasn’t always been that way (because, you know, science changes as new information is uncovered), but the more that we discover about our origins, the more clear it becomes that we didn’t have anything in mind as we evolved. No one did: not us, or God, the universe, or even nature itself. Versatile hominid species just kept branching off and filling different ecological niches, and either dying out or continuing to change. To us, it would look like whichever one ended up becoming Homo sapiens did so because it progressed toward us, but truly, it was just luck.

8 thoughts on “Why Paleoanthropology Leads to Atheism

  • May 31, 2020 at 8:40 am
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    If you’re interested in anthropology, I’ve finished reading two books you may like: Origin of the Family by Frederick Engels, and Against the Grain by James Scott.

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  • May 31, 2020 at 12:35 pm
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    “Atheism colors” our views, but it’s neither religion nor philosophy. It contributes to how we see the world and vice-versa, just as any belief or religion would. However, unlike religion, which shadows or blinds our views, atheism allows for clarity and discovery (biblically ironic to me).
    You and I have very different religious and familial background experiences, both of which effect each of us differently. I have always seen evolution as reasonable and the bible as a ‘book of religion’ (neither science nor history), from Geneses to Revelation. Good post. Thanks for writing it.

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  • May 31, 2020 at 1:43 pm
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    “Nowadays, it may not seem like this blog is entirely about atheism anymore, and maybe it’s not.”

    That’s okay. It doesn’t have to be exclusively about atheism. And paleoanthropology can be interesting. So just keep the blog about what you find interesting.

    In any case, I enjoyed this post. I thought your perspective of where we humans fit was about right. Thanks for another good read.

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  • June 1, 2020 at 2:33 am
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    In answer to ‘Intelligent Design,’ there are only two problems – Intelligent</ em>, and Design! Flat feet, balding, enlarged prostate, cancer, vestigial appendix and tail – those would have got a first-year design student kicked out of college. 😳

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  • June 1, 2020 at 5:35 pm
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    Cosmology, paleontology, biology, geology etc. all lead to atheism in my view…but unless a person wants to know about life and all the fascinating stuff we can learn from science, they will be stuck in fantasy and baseless belief for all their lives. It’s truly their loss, but they will never see it.
    I thought this post was great, BTW.😊

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  • November 30, 2024 at 1:20 pm
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    I guess I don’t see the contradiction? The paleoanthropology view is that evolution is based on reactions to one’s environment, not a linear push towards an end goal. But for the former view to make atheism the only sensible worldview, it would have to assume that environmental changes, the way living species react to them, and the existence of these things at all, can be described as entirely material and by chance. Not originating with a creator, and not planned out to occur in the way they did. Frankly one has no less trouble arguing for atheism or theism if they accept the older view of evolution. The “why” questions of the purpose for existence simply goes beyond the realm of scientific observation, regardless of whether evolution appears to have an end goal in mind.

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What do you think?