"Science is finding stuff out about the material world"
and, a longer one:
"Art and religion -- and particularly narrative -- are wired in. Evolved adaptations," she says. "So our ability to tell stories, our ability to picture things, all evolved during very, very many generations. It would have had an evolutionary edge. Invention is part of that package.
"We seem to be hard-wired to have a belief system of some kind," she adds. "Even atheism. I understand that in Britain recently some people paid to put atheistic slogans on buses -- someone paid? That's religious! Once you're paying money to put slogans on things, well, it's either a product you're selling, a political party or religion.
"Very few people don't have some belief system that includes something other than themselves. That juet seems to be part of the tool kit that we have as human beings."
The slant I see in this is thus:
Some time ago one of the teachers at my parish church remarked, with some disparagement, that some of those who extol the direct reading of Genesis 1 hold that syncretic readings with mainstream (evolutionary) belief will lead to an undoing of faith, and by implication, hobble evangelism.
Atwood seems to have solved the problem: if we accept evolutionary explanations, then we admit the view that 'religion' is an evolved thing. That is, 'god' in this conception is within the creation, and the creation (cosmos) stands independently on its own feet.
Naturally, if this is 'in the air', in the popular conception of the world, evangelism will have to fail, because it will be heard as offering a type of salvation within the world as we know it, not over against the world as we know it. And there is no final hope! Faith will soon follow and crumble as people read it as something that is merely an evolved response to sentient life, and not the connection between our creator and us, through Christ; who, of course, is just a man within the same cosmos we inhabit.
