Assuming, for a moment, that evolution (or Naturalism/Materialism) is true, then how could purely physical creatures, such as ourselves, ever even begin to develop the belief in non-physical things such as angels, God, demons, and the afterlife or an existence beyond the physical world? It is sort of like saying that there are non-physical parts on a physical vehicle that help the contraption to function, but you cannot see those parts! A car is not meant (in fact, cannot!) carry non-physical parts because it functions in the physical world. We drive the vehicle on physical roads through physical stop-lights, and physical people use the physical parts of that car to maneuver and travel to various physical destinations. As the children’s song says, “A putt-putt car won’t get you to heaven!” because a putt-putt car “won’t go that far”! A putt-putt car is a physical object, and heaven, as best we can tell, is a non-physical place. So, how is it that we could possibly develop the conception of a non-physical existence given that evolutionary naturalism is true?
I also see here a connection between our imagination (our ability, for example, to conceive of other worlds and write about them in books or draw them on canvases, etc.) and our belief in the afterlife. The worlds we imagine are non-physical places, and the afterlife is, at least from this side of life, a non-physical place as well. Some want to critique our religious beliefs and ground them in our imagination which we know can create quite fanciful worlds, but what if our belief in an afterlife (as well as the capacity to imagine) is rooted in reality somehow? What if, instead of dismissing the afterlife as a part of our “creative imagination,” is instead “feeding,” in some way, our imaginative creations in some way? What if the far-away lands that we write about or imagine are, instead, “echoes” (Hello, C.S. Lewis!) of a truer, even more real “far-away land” in a non-physical existence in “another time and another place”?
Again, what is quite bewildering to me is that (assuming for the sake of argument that naturalistic evolution is true) we have the capacity to imagine the lands of fairy tales, Middle Earth, Narnia, as well as the capacity to believe in the non-physical (religious beliefs such as God, angels, demons, and the afterlife). How is it that these objects/faculties could arise in a world that is, supposedly, only physical and purely materialistic? What evolutionary or naturalistic uses could these non-physical realities have in a physical world? This should cause the believer in evolutionary or atheistic naturalism to pause and consider how it is that physical beings apparently have a capacity to develop and think of that which is non-physical.
Recommendations:
“Dipping into Myth” from the C.S. Lewis website https://www.cslewis.com/dipping-into-myth/
“In Defense of the Fairy Tale” by C.S. Lewis https://pillars.taylor.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1096&context=inklings_forever
Note: I do not believe that heaven and God are a myth or is a fairy story; I believe in them both and am a committed Christian. I do think there is something profound in the thought of Lewis where he is detected a bit of the “eternity” that God has set into our hearts through stories, myth, and the imagination. They act as “pointers” to the “True and Real Fairy World.” Tolkein (see here) and G.K. Chesterton (here) also had some similar thoughts.