La grande illusion.. Comment la sélection naturelle a créé l'idée de Dieu

Daniel Baril's "The Great Illusion: How Natural Selection Created the Idea of God" presents a comprehensive naturalistic account of religious belief through the lens of evolutionary biology. The work argues that the human propensity for god-belief represents not a response to any divine reality, but rather an adaptive byproduct of cognitive mechanisms shaped by natural selection. Baril contends that religious ideas persist not because they correspond to truth, but because they exploit evolved features of human psychology that originally served survival functions unrelated to theology.

The monograph employs a descriptive-analytical methodology, synthesizing research from evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology to construct its debunking narrative. Baril traces how mental faculties that evolved for practical purposes—such as agency detection, pattern recognition, and social cognition—generate religious concepts as unintended consequences. He argues that the human tendency to perceive intentionality in natural phenomena, originally adaptive for avoiding predators and navigating social hierarchies, misfires to produce beliefs in supernatural agents. The work particularly emphasizes how natural selection favored cognitive biases that, while enhancing survival in ancestral environments, systematically lead to false positive identifications of purposeful agents behind random events.

Writing within the atheist-modern tradition of the late twentieth century, Baril positions his argument against both traditional theological claims and more sophisticated philosophical defenses of theism. His naturalistic explanation directly challenges arguments from religious experience and the sensus divinitatis, suggesting these phenomena require no supernatural hypothesis. The work engages critically with scholars who interpret the universality of religious belief as evidence for its truth, inverting this argument by proposing that ubiquity merely reflects shared evolutionary heritage rather than shared perception of divine reality.

The monograph's significance lies in its systematic application of evolutionary theory to religious phenomena during a period when such approaches were gaining scholarly momentum. Baril's contribution helped establish the naturalistic explanation of religion as a serious research program, providing a framework that subsequent scholars would both build upon and critique. His work exemplifies the broader intellectual movement toward explaining human culture, including its most cherished beliefs, through the mechanisms of biological evolution. By framing god-belief as a "great illusion" produced by natural processes, Baril advances a thoroughgoing naturalism that leaves no explanatory role for the supernatural in accounting for humanity's religious tendencies.