The way that I have defeated myself is where I've been forced to deal with the fact that the brain doesn't operate on atomic beliefs. It isn't like a juke box that functions on the basis of a single belief at one time, in a queue.

Higher consciousness is something that works on theories, where it isn't even as simple as a bunch of atomic beliefs coherently forming a group. Within a theory you get these strange non-linear effects of compound beliefs.

There is also the issue of dissonance. There is too much evidence for this to deny. Basically, we can have beliefs that conflict and challenge an overall theory, even within the same theory (hence, the gender issues you mentioned).

It boils down to any mind's ability to tolerate dissonance, and perhaps we'd think that some dissonance is tolerable if the overall theory that results does some extraordinary things in terms of behaviors.

For now, I just can't get my argument through. I won't stop thinking about it. But as it stands, I don't see any way to swat down this possibility for evolution to result in false beliefs.

For example, maybe it is possible we get to a primitive supernatural belief first by considering an afterlife. Once you arrive at a tradition of dead ancestor worship, after life belief (which is only perhaps moderately supernatural), with some early moral beliefs...getting to the authentically supernatural is probably not a tremendous leap.

Of course, none of this rules out that these beliefs do in fact point to real facts about reality. They just make it currently unfeasible to go the route I wanted to.

@PS

Perhaps there is a creator that has designed us this way to understand another aspect of reality that is not otherwise detectable to us? That is possible. But there is no evidence of that IMO. And then of course you have to deal with another question, i.e. where does the creator come from?

If there possibly exists another aspect of reality that you admit could be "not otherwise detectable to us", and if there possibly exists a Creator Who designed us to be able to grasp this alternative aspect in ways possibly beyond our nature, then - with those as premises - does it not follow that it could also possibly be the case that the principal means of detecting this Creator is by the same means we are enabled to detect that "other aspect of reality", which is to say, "beyond our nature"? And if this is the case, is it really fair to hold belief in God to the same standard applied to empirical matters?

What I am saying is that science - and I use this as a placeholder for empirical investigation generally - is necessarily epistemically closed. There are questions that fall within its scope, and there are matters that are beyond its scope. In fact, as @Chiro has noted elsewhere recently, the very premises that enable the scientific enterprise in the first place are themselves not provable on scientific grounds. There must be certain principles upon which science is based, the truth of which are not and cannot be established scientifically.

If principles such as the law of noncontradiction are not scientific, but rather logical or even self-evident, then should we be surprised if the existence of such a possible Creator, per se, cannot be evidenced empirically? In other words, if there are principles that can only be evidenced / proven by logical argument, and if there are first principles that cannot even be demonstrated by virtue of their self-evidence, then is it not reasonable to suppose that this possible Creator is likewise either self-evident, or only demonstrable logically - or by some other non-empirical means?

I will point out that I do not think the existence of the Creator is self-evident, precisely because His existence can be demonstrated.

You were raised Catholic. I don't think I need to go through the cosmological arguments for you. Does this mean you believe they do not prove what they purport to prove? And on what grounds / by what counter-arguments do you reject them?

I don't see how the necessity of a necessary being, given contingent being, can be avoided.

I don't see how the necessity of a first cause, given intermediary causes, can be avoided.

I don't see how the necessity of a being without any unactualized potential, given imperfect beings with some unactualized potential, can be avoided.

I don't see how the necessity of a supreme intelligence, given the existence of non-supreme intelligences, can be avoided.

I don't see how these apparent necessities fail to constitute logical evidence for the existence of God. Whether I want to argue for other Divine attributes, or that this God also Incarnated Himself, and then died for our sake, is a separate matter.

As for your question about where the Creator comes from, the point is that God is necessary precisely because of the problem of infinite regression. An infinite regression of an actually infinite series is logically impossible. Yet there are obviously a variety of existing series. Therefore there must be a beginning for each. Where God came from is not an issue, precisely because our positing of Him is the solution to that question - God is, by definition, that Being that does not require a cause.

How did the theory of a sky father arise? Accidentally probably through the same neurological structures that help us understand an idea like “Father”. So accidentally, but not entirely randomly.

It arose because, as grounded creatures, things above us are typically more commonly out of our reach than things below us. We see clouds, birds, stars, the moon and the sun, and know that we cannot reach them, whereas the grass or dirt or stones beneath us are more readily accessible. Thus mankind comes to associate "up" or "higher" with "superior" (a Latin word which literally means above, but whose connotation for us today transcends spatial relation). That which is above is better, that which is below is lesser. Given the reasonableness for this association to be made, the "sky" aspect of sky father is readily explainable.

As for father, for most of human history and especially during our critical "infancy" as a species, our fathers were the strongest member of the families; they naturally were leaders of households, and held supreme authority over the family; their very physiology suggested activity, giving, whereas the female suggested passivity and receiving. The father was the "superior" member in the intimate context of the family.

Taking these two associations together, it can readily be seen how basically all peoples throughout the world would come to believe that there was a sky father - just as each family has a head, so too does all creation have a Head, and He lives not in the earth, which is beneath man, but in the sky, which is beyond man's reach.

Thus solves the riddle of why man would associate God with a sky father. The real question is why man should posit a God in the first place.

The answer to this is likewise straightforward, though you may not like it. Primitive man was smarter than modern man. I don't mean mathematically, or technologically, or literarily, or even artistically. I mean philosophically and logically. Whereas today, people who are untrained in philosophy or logic will readily assert that infinite regression is possible, or that what I see as blue you see as (what I see as) red, or that moral oughts are merely utilitarian conveniences drawn up at will, and are therefore relativizeable to some extent, or even that effects do not require causes. These are the kinds of absurdities that lead to the very perversions modernity engages in daily that both you and @Chiro have been discussing. My point here is that such absurd beliefs are only possible through bad education. People do not naturally believe in such nonsense; an education establishment, a gaslighting media, and already-fooled masses of people offering daily negative feedback to the loop are required to sustain such a farce. In ancient times, when all the separate cultures were coming up with their notions of sky fathers, these corrupt and malicious institutions did not exist. And so people took it for granted that effects have causes, that there are no actually existing infinite series, and that whatever "ought" is, it applies to you as well as me.

Taking such truths as granted, and seeing the world as consisting of contingent being, effects of causes, and degrees of perfection - even if they lacked the language or sophistication to express such ideas in these ways - and it follows naturally that people would envision a God. They recognize as unavoidable the same thing I said I see as unavoidable above - that there must have been a First Cause, a Most Perfect being, etc. And I'm not saying that the primitives of old were walking around with Aquinas' cosmological arguments flowing through their heads - I'm saying that these arguments, when just recognized rather than expressed, are so intuitive, and so simple, that they were indeed taken for granted. It did not require a Thomistic formulation - it was sufficient for a man to see that he was the son of his father, and that his father was the son of his grandfather, to recognize that this must not have been going on forever, but must have had a beginning - and that whatever this beginning was, it would not apply just to his family, but to all families. And since I've already pointed out that the family was the most intimate association with which ancient man was familiar, and that the father was the obvious head of this union, that it easily followed, universally, that people decided that there was (or is) a God-Creator, Who was (or is) a sky father. This didn't require a long process of reasoning; it was practically obvious to everyone. And whether a culture decided that God was, or still is, might follow from an equally intuitive notion that whatever could have been the cause of everything they knew of must be so powerful as to still exist; or it might have arisen from a perception of lighting, and a sense that obviously He still exists based on that. As I've already noted, whether these particular "mythologizing" elements led to true beliefs or false beliefs about God, whether they emerged due to lack of scientific knowledge, is irrelevant to the utter truth of the original recognition that God in fact exists, and that this recognition is a true belief.

There is something important to say here, which is that I want it to be clear where I agreed to draw the starting line.

The logic of the term 'supernatural' is something I set out not to question a priori. In reality, this would have been one of my initial points of attack. To see what I mean, consider Hume's fork. This is an oft-cited principle of the empiricist, the metaphysical status of which is rarely appreciated.

Basically, it states that there are only two possible categories of human reasoning: relations of ideas and matters of fact. The former would be conceptual analysis. The latter would be the facts of natural science.

The interesting question is, does the fork apply to itself? The only answer can be that it does not. It is neither a conceptual truth, nor is it a truth of science. Likewise, the logic of the term supernatural presupposes the truth of the fork, i.e. that if something is not a member of the theories of natural science, then it wins the prefix super.

But this begs the question, and is fundamentally self-refuting.

The method of science is presupposing the boundary on existential claims, by way of an epistemic closure on only what is discoverable by its own method. Again, this is circular.

You cannot put epistemology before metaphysics. If I reject the classification of a belief as supernatural on these grounds, then the original argument of these researchers never gets off the ground. We are left asking the question about what justifies the definition of inclusion under 'natural'.

But, putting the epistemology before the metaphysics is exactly what I agreed to do by trying to argue within this framework. This was probably being overly generous to my own abilities, because in the context of arguing the positive case for God (and keeping in mind the history of all arguments for God), I basically agreed to a fight with my legs broken before round one.

I can simply reject the supernatural distinction and say that there is no reason to suspect that belief in God is a false belief, on the back of any metaphysical case I wanted to choose. Then, the so-called problem of the evolutionary case for religion is a wash. Belief in God didn't evolve any more than our belief that we are thinking things evolved. We believe it simply because they are true beliefs.

The absence of higher reasoning and rigorous logical arguments to justify the belief in God by these ancient peoples is not better evidence that their beliefs were unjustified, than their lack of understanding the nature of consciousness was evidence that their belief in selfhood was unjustified.

For myriad reasons, one can have a true belief without the commensurate ability to justify their reasons for the belief.

I'll hang my hat here for the moment. Let me stress I am not saying this to avoid the failure. I love the failure of my other approach. I consider it temporary! I just thought the glaring problem of this term supernatural needed to be pointed out. I have been using it all along without ever specifying that I ultimately think it is bogus.

@PS