Science Quote by George C. Williams

A scientist calling out religion is rarely just a swipe at belief; it is a territorial claim about what kind of explanation gets to feel authoritative. George C. Williams, one of the architects of modern evolutionary thinking, isn’t arguing that science has disproved God in some courtroom sense. He’s arguing that certain inherited reflexes of mind should have been rendered obsolete by a century of biology: teleology (the itch to see purpose everywhere), essentialism (the fantasy of fixed “kinds”), and moralized narratives about nature that treat the world as a lesson plan.

The verb “foster” is doing quiet work. It frames religion less as a set of propositions than as a training regimen for habits of interpretation. You don’t just believe; you rehearse ways of making sense of suffering, sex, hierarchy, and death. Williams’s evolutionary lens implies that these habits are themselves adaptive artifacts - psychologically sticky, socially useful, and therefore hard to dislodge even when their explanatory payoffs collapse.

The phrase “ought to have disappeared” is the provocation and the tell. It carries the Enlightenment-era confidence that better information naturally updates culture, as if humans were rational software patches. Williams is also registering disappointment: biology didn’t merely add facts; it changed the plot. Natural selection undercuts comforting stories about design, human exceptionalism, and a universe arranged for our benefit. His subtext is a critique of institutions that keep those stories emotionally attractive and politically functional, long after the scientific ground beneath them shifted.

Context matters: post-Darwin, post-genetics, after a century where evolution moved from scandal to infrastructure. Williams is staking out a boundary: biology doesn’t just explain life; it should also retire certain old ways of thinking about it.