In Darwinian terms, it was clear that ‘innate’ ideas are simply variations that have arisen and been naturally selected. ‘Minds that possessed them were preferred over minds that did not.’ But this wasn’t because those ideas were more ‘true’ in an abstract or theological sense; instead, it was because they helped organisms to adapt.65 The reason that we believed in God (when we did believe in God) was because experience showed that it paid to believe in God. When people stopped believing in God (as they did in large numbers in the nineteenth century–see next chapter), it was because such
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