The Evolution of Religion

[humphreyclarke]

A real hoot this one. He seems to be going for the 'unfortunate by-product' thesis. Unsurprisingly science and reason are the answer to fixing our archaic brains *sigh*.

richarddawkins.net/article,3534,The-Evolution-of-Religion,J-Anderson-Thomson-MD

Actually there have been some recent work on this regarding the inate beliefs of children which found evidence for some kind of religious sense. This wasn't mentioned, I suspect because it would have ruined his rabble rousing article (it would be a bit uncomfortable if religion was found to have a selective advantage). I'll blog on that later.

Religion needs to be taken seriously. Understanding its roots, how it can seize command of our psychology and take control of our culture, may well be one of the most important endeavors we pursue. For even with all our grand technology, modern medical advances, and volumes of knowledge, if we do not stop our archaic past from overriding our modern reason we are surely doomed.

Sometimes I'm convinced I have been teleported back to the 19th century.

[merkavah12]

Humphrey my friend,

In terms of fools making grandiose and unfounded statements simply for the sake of "being controversial" (whatever that means in our very thin-skinned 21st century mindset), the 19th century never ended!

[James Hannam]

What is disappointing about the article is I think they are 90% of the way there. All they have to do is realise that religion is part of our evolutionary heritage and yet another successful adaptation.

I think you could realise all this and still believe that religion was wrong. But what you can't do is believe that religion bad, which is the first article of faith for the new atheist.

Best wishes

James

[unkleE]

Jan 21, 2009 16:46:01 GMT humphreyclarke said:

Actually there have been some recent work on this regarding the inate beliefs of children which found evidence for some kind of religious sense. This wasn't mentioned, I suspect because it would have ruined his rabble rousing article (it would be a bit uncomfortable if religion was found to have a selective advantage).

David Sloan Wilson's main criticism of Richard Dawkins' book was that it ignored the scientific work on the evolutionary origins of religious belief, which can explain (he says) why it evolved (because it conferred survival advantages).

Makes you wonder. If that is so, it would be harmful for the human race for the Dawkinistas to forcibly argue us all out of our belief, whereupon we would lose that survival advantage. The only way out for them would be to argue that conditions have changed so rapidly that it no longer confers a survival advantage, whereas the data suggests that it still does, just as it tends to encourage people to be more caring and altruistic.

[krkey1]

As someone who is ultimately agnostic I will observe religion is both blessing and curse.....

Unity-good
loathing of those outside group-bad

charity-good
ridicule of nonbelievers-bad

happiness in personal life- good
refusing to accept reality ( ie creationism)-bad

altruism-good
human sacrifice-bad

Lets just remember religion is not just positive and those who are not religion are just as evolutionary healthy as those who have it. Remember now days, virtually all intellectuals are nonbelievers. We need them too.

[humphreyclarke]

Jan 22, 2009 23:13:55 GMT krkey1 said:

those who are not religion are just as evolutionary healthy as those who have it.

Not always the case. For example, one of the most 'evolutionary' successful groups in human history were the New England Puritans, whose religious zeal and large families have left an indelible mark on the United States. From a small population of just 30,000 odd, their descendants now number in the tens of millions.

[krkey1]

Strictly speaking from an evolutionary standpoint they were successful. The managed to kill the Indians in the area with European diseases ( though note I am not saying they did that deliberately) and through wars of aggression, which there religious beliefs certainly contributed to. While they might have done good in terms of evolution, what about the populations they destroyed. Remember just because something is right with evolution does not mean it is right morally.

Societies need nonbelievers. They tend to create new ideas. It should be noted that the vast majority of your brilliant scientist who were theist tended to believe in a different form of theism then the norm ( for example Newton). It should also be noted the vast vast majority of modern scientist tend to be irreligious at best.

[humphreyclarke]

Jan 23, 2009 15:52:21 GMT krkey1 said:

Remember just because something is right with evolution does not mean it is right morally.

That goes without saying

Jan 23, 2009 15:52:21 GMT krkey1 said:

It should be noted that the vast majority of your brilliant scientist who were theist tended to believe in a different form of theism then the norm ( for example Newton).

This is true, in fact they tended to be unusually religious by the standards of the time; Newton being a great example. He wrote more on the book of Revelation than he did on Optics

Jan 23, 2009 15:52:21 GMT krkey1 said:

It should also be noted the vast vast majority of modern scientist tend to be irreligious at best.

I think the stats in the U.S show 40 odd percent of scientists had some sort of religious belief, not that this is something to celebrate. The present day conflict between science and religion is troubling and will only increase the adversarial divide between working scientists and religious believers. It is therefore vital to demythologise and bring the two back together again. At the moment Atheism is piggy backing on scientific credibility while religion gets lumped in with the fundamentalists.

[krkey1]

Even if 40 percent of scientist have some sort of religious belief that still is a lot less then the regular population. Even the ones that do believe in something tend not to be religious conformist.

Religion conformity has things it is good for but unfortunately creating new ideas is not one of them. I am not saying Atheist alone create new ideas, but history does show those who create new ideas tend to be religious noncomformist.

[Al Moritz]

Jan 23, 2009 19:29:19 GMT krkey1 said:

Even if 40 percent of scientist have some sort of religious belief that still is a lot less then the regular population. Even the ones that do believe in something tend not to be religious conformist.

In that study, published in the prestigious journal Nature, scientists were asked if they believe in "a personal God that hears prayers and can be expected to answer them" (maybe not the exact words, but that meaning). This is the 40 %, i.e. does not include deists and such.

This is not that far off from the regular American population:

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article637202.ece?print=yes&randnum=1232744839524

(32 % belief in a distant God or no God.)

Religion conformity has things it is good for but unfortunately creating new ideas is not one of them. I am not saying Atheist alone create new ideas, but history does show those who create new ideas tend to be religious noncomformist.

An extraordinary claim that begs for references. References, please.

[krkey1]

I can live with minor correction on scientist metaphysical views. I do not think the truth or falseness of a view depends on how many scientist believe in it. They are people, with all their flaws just like the rest of us.

Well lets consider my views on religious conformity tends not to be a generator of new ideas. What is that so surprising? People who tend to confirm tend to make must ideas at face value, including religion. They do not question things as much. I am again saying this is a bad thing, if everyone was a nonconformist society would collapses.

Lets just look at a few areas though and it will be enough to show that new ideas tend to be generated by religious nonconformist ( though I suspect they were nonconformist in most things they did)

US Founding Fathers- Overwhelmingly Deist

Abolitionism- Founded by Quakers and Deist

Women Rights- Deist/Agnostics

Science- Einstein ( Pantheist) Darwin ( Agnostic) Newton ( Unitarian )

Inventors- Franklin, Edison both Deist

[humphreyclarke]

Jan 21, 2009 20:16:20 GMT James Hannam said:

What is disappointing about the article is I think they are 90% of the way there. All they have to do is realise that religion is part of our evolutionary heritage and yet another successful adaptation.

I think you could realise all this and still believe that religion was wrong. But what you can't do is believe that religion bad, which is the first article of faith for the new atheist.

Best wishes

James

Here we go James

www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126941.700-born-believers-how-your-brain-creates-god.html?page=1

You got your wish.

[unkleE]

That is an interesting, and somewhat amazing, article. It took to page 3 before it even mention the obvious logical fact that finding the origin of belief doesn't say anything about the truth of that belief, but the article as a whole assumed (on my reading), almost as an axiom, that no God actually exists.

I am interested in how all this bears on the theistic argument from rationality, as developed by CS Lewis, Alvin Plantinga (fully developed here and summarised here), and others. Basically the argument says that if the human mind evolved by natural selection alone (without God as designer), its thought processes thereby have survival value, but not necessarily truth. Thus, an atheistic argument about God can't be known to be true, and atheism is intellectually self-defeating.

The obvious counter is to say that only if human thought processes are truthful will they have survival value, but Plantinga argues that it is behaviour that is the basis of natural selection, not the truth or otherwise of beliefs or the reliability of our cognitive faculties. Again there is an obvious response from the materialist - that in fact cognitive faculties which lead to true conclusions and beliefs will confer survival advantage.

But, if this atheistic contention is correct, and if our belief in God is to some degree hard-wired in our brains, or otherwise developed via natural selection, then the logical conclusion, it seems to me, is that belief in God must also, most likely, be true. If it is not, then the materialist response to Plantinga's argument is in ruins.

I can't help feeling it is a case of heads the theist wins and tails the atheist naturalist loses.

[James Hannam]

I quite enjoyed the article, especially the mea culpa from Dawkins at the end that religion might be an adaptation after all. If it is, that's the end of the silly meme theory.

I suppose I just ignore all the implied smug atheism and take the useful stuff from the article. Of course, it misses a good few points but put me on to Robin Dunbar who seems an interesting character.

Best wishes

James

[humphreyclarke]

The funny thing about the whole memetic theory was that Dawkins was suggesting that irrational memes such as religion were extremely harmful to the infectees, yet rational memes (such as Evolution, General Relativity and Heliocentrism) are not harmful as they have been through a careful selection process. This sounds like a bit of a cop out. If you are going to go down the whole mind viruses route, how can you be sure that any of the various memes that infect the human mind are either harmful or beneficial to the host. Maybe the mind virus that is telling you that the rational memes are beneficial is actually a harmful mind virus.

With the adaptation dilemma we are faced with a similar situation. We have evolved faculties such as reason, a moral sense, the capacity to love and the capacity to lust. We tend to trust all of these. We trust that our moral sense is capable of obtaining moral 'facts' about the society around us. We trust our capacity to love and lust to find us a suitable mate and spend our lives with them. We trust that reason is capable of obtaining objective facts about the world. We even appear to have evolved a mathematical cognitive faculty in the brain which we trust in our day to day and intellectual lives to inform us of objective mathematical facts about reality.

Now the adaptive hypothesis seems to be coming to the fore, it is within the bounds of possibility that we also have a kind of religious sense, in fact it seems to be implied by the data; yet it seems we are being told that it is harmful and we should ignore it. We should trust all of our evolved senses...except for this one. If it is harmful to the organism, why did it evolve?. If we can't trust it to some degree, why should we trust any of our evolved senses?.

I think that the indoctrination hypothesis and the by-product hypothesis were proposed to avoid precisely these kind of difficult questions. Unfortunately the adaptive theory looks the most likely at the moment so these questions aren't going to go away.