| Are you saying the specific hypothesis is problematic, or that the whole logical structure is?
Both the hypothesis and the logical structure are appropriate. What is not appropriate is presenting weak hypotheses as explanations without identifying them as weak and without giving alternative hypotheses.
To exaggerate just slightly, you might compare the use of these explanations to the use of government conspiracies as explanations for major political events. It is easy to come up with explanations that assume conspiracy, and it is obviously true that the government is hiding information from us in some cases, but without strong evidence that we do not currently have, tales of the Illuminati are only amusing, not productive. Likewise, explanations based on human evolution are very easy to construct, and it is obvious that we evolved…
| To prove the second statement, we just need to find gene variants that are strongly correlated with religious beliefs.
This is a bit off topic, but interesting! So… That’s not quite true. We might, for example, find that genes that are correlated with imagination, creativity, or schizophrenia are also correlated with religious beliefs. But that doesn’t mean that either these genes or these traits evolved ‘for religion’ in any meaningful sense… any more than we would use that sort of rhetoric to prove that ‘humans evolved specifically for the purpose of experiencing schizophrenia’. We are muddying teleology here just a bit, but in many cases that is exactly the purpose of these arguments.
| Are you saying the specific hypothesis is problematic, or that the whole logical structure is?
Both the hypothesis and the logical structure are appropriate. What is not appropriate is presenting weak hypotheses as explanations without identifying them as weak and without giving alternative hypotheses.
To exaggerate just slightly, you might compare the use of these explanations to the use of government conspiracies as explanations for major political events. It is easy to come up with explanations that assume conspiracy, and it is obviously true that the government is hiding information from us in some cases, but without strong evidence that we do not currently have, tales of the Illuminati are only amusing, not productive. Likewise, explanations based on human evolution are very easy to construct, and it is obvious that we evolved…
| To prove the second statement, we just need to find gene variants that are strongly correlated with religious beliefs.
This is a bit off topic, but interesting! So… That’s not quite true. We might, for example, find that genes that are correlated with imagination, creativity, or schizophrenia are also correlated with religious beliefs. But that doesn’t mean that either these genes or these traits evolved ‘for religion’ in any meaningful sense… any more than we would use that sort of rhetoric to prove that ‘humans evolved specifically for the purpose of experiencing schizophrenia’. We are muddying teleology here just a bit, but in many cases that is exactly the purpose of these arguments.