Richard Dawkins has also acknowledged, if unintentionally, that survival value and true belief do not necessarily correlate given a naturalistic evolutionary account of our belief-forming faculties. For example, based on studies of the beneficial health effects of religion, Dawkins concedes that it’s “perfectly plausible” that religious belief “could indeed have highly beneficial effects upon health.”27 Yet he also argues that belief in God is false and delusional. Thus, he tacitly concedes that natural selection can preserve grotesquely false (from his point of view) beliefs.
