Are You There God? It's Me, Brain.

[turoldus]

Science
Are You There God? It's Me, Brain.
How our innate theory of mind gives rise to the divine creator.
By Jesse Bering
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011, at 12:15 PM ET

The scientific jury is still out on whether our species is unique among social mammals in being able to conceptualize mental states—other species, such as chimps, dogs, scrub jays and dolphins, may have some modest capacity in this regard. But there's absolutely no question that we're much better at it than the rest of the animal kingdom. We are natural psychologists, exquisitely attuned to the unseen psychological world. Reasoning about abstract mental states is as much a trademark of our species as walking upright on two legs, learning a language, and raising our offspring into their teens.

There is a scientific term for this way of thinking—"theory of mind." It's perhaps easiest to grasp the concept when considering how we struggle to make sense of someone else's bizarre or unexpected behavior. If you've ever seen an unfortunate woman at the grocery store wearing a midriff-revealing top and packed into a pair of lavender tights like meat in a sausage wrapper, or a follicularly challenged man with a hairpiece two shades off and three centimeters adrift, and asked yourself what on Earth those people were thinking when they looked in the mirror before leaving the house, this is a good sign that your theory of mind (not to mention your fashion sense) is in working order. When others violate our expectations for normalcy or stump us with surprising behaviors, our tendency to mind-read goes into overdrive. We literally "theorize" about the minds that are causing ostensible behavior.

The evolutionary significance of this mind-reading system hinges on one gigantic question: Is this psychological capacity—this theory of mind, this seeing souls glimmering beneath the skin, spirits twinkling behind orbiting eyes, thoughts in the flurry of movement—is this the "one big thing" that could help us finally understand what it means to be human? Could it tell us something about how we find meaning in the universe?

As a human being, you're prone to overextending your theory of mind to categories for which it doesn't properly belong. Many people remember fondly the classic film Le Ballon Rouge ("The Red Balloon," 1956) by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, in which a sensitive schoolboy—in reality Lamorisse's own 5-year-old son, Pascal—is befriended by a good-natured, cherry-red helium balloon. Absent dialogue, the camera follows the joyful two, boy and balloon, through the somber, working-class streets of the Ménilmontant neighborhood of Paris, the glossy red balloon contrasting sharply with the bleak old-Europe atmosphere while adults, oblivious to the presence of an inanimate object that has apparently been ensouled by an intelligent gas, are largely indifferent, even hostile, to the pair. Eventually, a mob of cruel children corners the boy and begins pelting the "kindhearted" balloon with stones, ultimately popping it.

The plot of Le Ballon Rouge exemplifies how our evolved brains have become hypersocial filters, such that our theory of mind is applied not only to the mental innards of other people and animals, but also, in error, to categories that haven't any mental innards at all, such as ebullient skins of elastic stretched by an inert gas. If it weren't for our theory of mind, we couldn't follow the premise of the movie, let alone enjoy Lamorisse's particular oeuvre of magical realism. When the balloon hovers outside Pascal's flat after his grandmother tries to get rid of it, we perceive a charismatic personality that "wants" to be with the boy and is "trying" to leverage itself against the window panes; it "sees" Pascal and "knows" he's inside. Our theory of mind is so effortlessly applied under such conditions that it's impossible to see the scene any other way. In fact, part of what makes the movie so effective is that the young boy in the lead role genuinely believed that the balloon was alive. "The Red Balloon was my friend," recalled a much older Pascal Lamorisse in a 2007 interview. "When you were filming it, did you really feel that way?" asked the reporter. "Yes, yes, he was a real character with a spirit of his own."

As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the importance of our theory-of-mind skills in that process, we sometimes can't help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven't even a smidgeon of a neural system. In particular, when inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving—or misbehaving—people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down vehicles in the sides and verbally abused our incompetent computers. Most of us stop short of actually believing these objects possess mental states—indeed, we would likely be hauled away to an asylum if we genuinely believed that they held malicious intent—but our emotions and behaviors toward such objects seem to betray our primitive, unconscious thinking: we act as though they're morally culpable for their actions.

Some developmental psychologists even believe that this cognitive bias to see intentions in inanimate objects—and thus formulate a very basic theory of mind—can be found in babies just a few months out of the womb. For example, Hungarian psychologists György Gergely and Gergely Csibra from the Central European University in Budapest have shown that babies, on the basis of their staring response, act surprised when a dot on a computer screen continues to butt up against an empty space on the screen after a computerized barrier blocking its path has been deleted. It's as if the baby is trying to figure out why the dot is acting as though it "thinks" the barrier is still there. By contrast, the infants are not especially interested—that is, they don't stare in surprise—when the dot stops in front of the block, or when the dot continues along its path in the absence of the barrier.

The most famous example of this cognitive phenomenon of seeing minds in nonliving objects, however, is a 1944 American Journal of Psychology study by Austrian researchers Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel. The scientists put together a simplistic animated film depicting three moving, black-and-white figures: a large triangle, a small triangle, and a small circle. Participants watched the figures moving about on the screen for a while and then were asked to describe what they had just seen. Most fell back on a human social behavioral narrative—for example, seeing the large triangle as "bullying" the "timid" smaller triangle, both of "whom" were "seeking" the "affections" of the "female" circle.

So it would appear that having a theory of mind was so useful for our ancestors in explaining and predicting other people's behaviors that it has completely flooded our evolved social brains. As a result, today we overshoot our mental-state attributions to things that are, in reality, completely mindless. And all of this leads us, rather inevitably, to a very important question: What if I were to tell you that God's mental states, too, were all in your mind? That God, like a tiny speck floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, was in fact a psychological illusion, a sort of evolved blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? It may feel as if there is something grander out there . . . watching, knowing, caring. Perhaps even judging. But, in fact, that's just your overactive theory of mind. In reality, there is only the air you breathe.

After all, once we scrub away all the theological bric-a-brac and pluck the exotic cross-cultural plumage of religious beliefs from all over the world, once we get under God's skin, isn't He really just another mind—one with emotions, beliefs, knowledge, understanding, and, perhaps above all else, intentions? Aren't theologians really just playing the role of God's translators, and isn't every holy book ever written a detailed psychoanalysis of God? That strangely sticky sense that God "willfully" created us as individuals, "wants" us to behave in particular ways, "observes" and "knows" about our otherwise private actions, "communicates" messages to us in code through natural events, and "intends" to meet us after we die would have also been felt, in some form, by our Pleistocene ancestors.

Consider, briefly, the implications of seeing God this way, as a sort of scratch on our psychological lenses rather than the enigmatic figure out there in the heavenly world that most people believe Him to be. Subjectively, God would still be present in our lives. (For some people, rather annoyingly so.) He would continue to suffuse our experiences with an elusive meaning and give the sense that the universe is communicating with us in various ways. But this notion of God as an illusion is a radical and, some would say, even dangerous idea because it raises important questions about whether God is an autonomous, independent agent that lives outside human brain cells, or instead a phantom cast out upon the world by our species' own peculiarly evolved theory of mind. Since the human brain, like any physical organ, is a product of evolution, and since natural selection works without recourse to intelligent forethought, this mental apparatus of ours evolved to think about God quite without need of the latter's consultation, let alone His being real.

Then again, one can never rule out the possibility that God microengineered the evolution of the human brain so that we've come to see Him more clearly, a sort of divine LASIK procedure, or scraping off the bestial glare that clouds the minds of other animals.

Either way, this cognitive capacity, this theory of mind, has baked itself into our heads when it comes to our pondering of life's big questions. Unlike any science-literate generation that has come before, we now possess the intellectual tools to observe our own minds at work and to understand how God came to be there. And we alone are poised to ask, "Has our species' unique cognitive evolution duped us into believing in this, the grandest mind of all?"

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Jesse Bering is an evolutionary psychologist and director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at the Queen's University, Belfast. His new book, The Belief Instinct, will be published in February (available as The God Instinct in the United Kingdom). He also writes the column "Bering in Mind" for Scientific American and is currently working on a book about human sexuality. His Web site is www.jessebering.com.

Article URL: www.slate.com/id/2283372/

Copyright 2011 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

A theistic (favorable) review by Michael Blume

[turoldus]

Bering replies to Damon Linker's negative review of his book:


Jesse Bering
March 1, 2011 | 12:00 am

Print




DAMON LINKER HAS WRITTEN one of the best and most accurate reviews to date regarding my book’s principle thesis, which is that we have a tendency to be seduced psychologically by the feeling that some supernatural agent (God, or whatever ethereal moralistic watchdogs you please) cares about our social behaviors; this is an “adaptive illusion.” It’s important here to realize, and by all accounts Linker does so, that “adaptive” in this sense does not mean “good” or “subjectively beneficial,” but instead it translates only to “functional” in evolutionary terms. In effect, I argue that our species’ uniquely evolved social cognition, especially our theory of mind, which is the capacity to reason about unobservable mental states, was co-opted by natural selection to help address the unprecedented evolutionary problem of human gossip, churning out a morally concerned, reactive mind that isn’t there.

For a political philosopher without a science background, Linker articulates many subtle details in a remarkably clear fashion. But never before have I seen a writer’s emotional bipolarity on such clear display. This is especially the case when he begins reflecting on what he believes to be the inevitably sinister, nihilistic implications of my ideas. (“Bering … clearly implies that we would be better off if we were to follow the lead of our evolutionary cousins and begin shamelessly nutsting on ourselves in public.”) I will leave it to readers to decide whether that is the book’s take-away message.

Make no mistake about it: Linker’s irritation over his perception that I scientifically “dehumanized" our species is precisely what fueled his jaundiced critique of The Belief Instinct. His was not, in any way, a review of my arguments, but a reactionary call-to-arms, an hysterical cry for concerned, well-meaning, Judeo-Christian citizens to put a muzzle on cognitive scientists who, post-Darwin, with each new study, are pulling back the great curtain ever further to reveal—to Linker’s great consternation—only our own minds busily at work. “If Bering is right,” foams Linker, “then human beings, interminably shadowboxing with self-generated delusions, deserve to be considered the laughingstock of the natural world.” Considered by whom, Mr. Linker? That is the whole point, after all. The only one here to laugh at human beings for the folly of succumbing to nature’s greatest ruse is human beings. And the ability to laugh at oneself, and at our absurd condition, is our saving grace.

“What makes Bering’s book so insufferable,” writes Linker, “is his utter indifference to the likely psychological and social consequences of the truths that he understands himself to be revealing.” This is an important point, in fact, because in writing the book, I deliberately sought to avoid making those types of sanctimonious, “beauty can be found in nature,” quasi-spiritualistic suggestions for how to handle an inherently meaningless life that are so often found in my colleague’s books. As a scientist author, rather than a therapist, theologian, or even a philosopher, my job is not to prescribe a comforting psychological worldview to readers, but rather to present as clear a picture of this world as I possibly can. I leave the audience perfectly free at the end to hold fast to their convictions that God deliberately guided our cognitive evolution so that we, of all the billions of species that have ever manifested on this planet, could specially perceive His mind. Personally, I find such natural theological views to be less than convincing, especially in light of what we now know about the evolution of human cognition, but by all means, like Russell’s teapot, it remains forever a philosophical possibility.

“What is the properly human response,” Linker muses about my thesis, “to our inability to exorcise our groundless moral and religious intuitions?” Again, it is not my role, as a scientist, to prescribe for readers a “proper human response” to this dilemma, and even the construct of what is “proper” is grounded in the illusion of some inherent moral truth. I do offer the following suggestion in the book, however:

We can live for each other—here and now, before it’s too late, sympathetically sharing snapshots from inside our still-conscious heads, all 6.7 billion heads containing just as many hypothetical universes, most of them, unfortunately, spinning feverishly with the illusions we’ve just shattered. But what you choose to do with your brief subjective existence is entirely up to you. If you choose to ignore this precautionary tale of a fleeting life without supernatural consequences, there will be no hell to pay. Only missed opportunities. And then you die.

At the conclusion of Linker’s review, he laments, “[all] this does not make Bering wrong about who we are. But it does make him wrong about how we should react to the prospect of him being right … The Belief Instinct… makes an uncommonly compelling case for the self-loathing of humanity.” It is unfortunate that Linker sees it this way. Scientific existentialism is the opposite of misanthropy; it is a labor of a love for our species, with its warts and all. We do not, as Linker would have you believe, need to rally against reality to be good.

www.tnr.com/book/review/the-belief-instinct-response

[turoldus]

On the same subject:

Born Believers: How Your Brain Creates God


By Michael Brooks/ Source: New Scientist

While many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. "There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired," says Bloom.

Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a "default state" of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. "Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.

So how does the brain conjure up gods? One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things - things with minds, or at least volition - and inanimate objects.

This separation happens very early in life. Bloom and colleagues have shown that babies as young as five months make a distinction between inanimate objects and people. Shown a box moving in a stop-start way, babies show surprise. But a person moving in the same way elicits no surprise. To babies, objects ought to obey the laws of physics and move in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, have their own intentions and goals, and move however they choose.
Mind and matter

Bloom says the two systems are autonomous, leaving us with two viewpoints on the world: one that deals with minds, and one that handles physical aspects of the world. He calls this innate assumption that mind and matter are distinct "common-sense dualism". The body is for physical processes, like eating and moving, while the mind carries our consciousness in a separate - and separable - package. "We very naturally accept you can leave your body in a dream, or in astral projection or some sort of magic," Bloom says. "These are universal views."


There is plenty of evidence that thinking about disembodied minds comes naturally. People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters and fantasy partners. As Barrett points out, this is an evolutionarily useful skill. Without it we would be unable to maintain large social hierarchies and alliances or anticipate what an unseen enemy might be planning. "Requiring a body around to think about its mind would be a great liability," he says.

Useful as it is, common-sense dualism also appears to prime the brain for supernatural concepts such as life after death. In 2004, Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast, UK, put on a puppet show for a group of pre-school children. During the show, an alligator ate a mouse. The researchers then asked the children questions about the physical existence of the mouse, such as: "Can the mouse still be sick? Does it need to eat or drink?" The children said no. But when asked more "spiritual" questions, such as "does the mouse think and know things?", the children answered yes.

Default to god

Based on these and other experiments, Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain. Education and experience teach us to override it, but it never truly leaves us, he says. From there it is only a short step to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and, of course, gods, says Pascal Boyer, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Boyer points out that people expect their gods' minds to work very much like human minds, suggesting they spring from the same brain system that enables us to think about absent or non-existent people.

The ability to conceive of gods, however, is not sufficient to give rise to religion. The mind has another essential attribute: an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none. "You see bushes rustle, you assume there's somebody or something there," Bloom says.

This over-attribution of cause and effect probably evolved for survival. If there are predators around, it is no good spotting them 9 times out of 10. Running away when you don't have to is a small price to pay for avoiding danger when the threat is real.

Again, experiments on young children reveal this default state of the mind. Children as young as three readily attribute design and purpose to inanimate objects. When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist "to make nice music", while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. "It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were 'for' a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion," says Kelemen.

In similar experiments, Olivera Petrovich of the University of Oxford asked pre-school children about the origins of natural things such as plants and animals. She found they were seven times as likely to answer that they were made by god than made by people.

These cognitive biases are so strong, says Petrovich, that children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention: "They rely on their everyday experience of the physical world and construct the concept of god on the basis of this experience." Because of this, when children hear the claims of religion they seem to make perfect sense.

Our predisposition to believe in a supernatural world stays with us as we get older. Kelemen has found that adults are just as inclined to see design and intention where there is none. Put under pressure to explain natural phenomena, adults often fall back on teleological arguments, such as "trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe" or "the sun is hot because warmth nurtures life". Though she doesn't yet have evidence that this tendency is linked to belief in god, Kelemen does have results showing that most adults tacitly believe they have souls.

Boyer is keen to point out that religious adults are not childish or weak-minded. Studies reveal that religious adults have very different mindsets from children, concentrating more on the moral dimensions of their faith and less on its supernatural attributes.

Even so, religion is an inescapable artefact of the wiring in our brain, says Bloom. "All humans possess the brain circuitry and that never goes away." Petrovich adds that even adults who describe themselves as atheists and agnostics are prone to supernatural thinking. Bering has seen this too. When one of his students carried out interviews with atheists, it became clear that they often tacitly attribute purpose to significant or traumatic moments in their lives, as if some agency were intervening to make it happen. "They don't completely exorcise the ghost of god - they just muzzle it," Bering says.

The fact that trauma is so often responsible for these slips gives a clue as to why adults find it so difficult to jettison their innate belief in gods, Atran says. The problem is something he calls "the tragedy of cognition". Humans can anticipate future events, remember the past and conceive of how things could go wrong - including their own death, which is hard to deal with. "You've got to figure out a solution, otherwise you're overwhelmed," Atran says. When natural brain processes give us a get-out-of-jail card, we take it.

That view is backed up by an experiment published late last year. Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas in Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, asked people what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking, Whitson and Galinsky made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation.


The results were striking. The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. "We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is," Whitson says. What's going on, she suggests, is that when we feel a lack of control we fall back on superstitious ways of thinking. That would explain why religions enjoy a revival during hard times.

So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.

It does, however, suggests that god isn't going away, and that atheism will always be a hard sell. Religious belief is the "path of least resistance", says Boyer, while disbelief requires effort.

These findings also challenge the idea that religion is an adaptation. "Yes, religion helps create large societies - and once you have large societies you can outcompete groups that don't," Atran says. "But it arises as an artefact of the ability to build fictive worlds. I don't think there's an adaptation for religion any more than there's an adaptation to make airplanes."

Supporters of the adaptation hypothesis, however, say that the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. As David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in New York state points out, elements of religious belief could have arisen as a by-product of brain evolution, but religion per se was selected for because it promotes group survival. "Most adaptations are built from previous structures," he says. "Boyer's basic thesis and my basic thesis could both be correct."

Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford - the researcher most strongly identified with the religion-as-adaptation argument - also has no problem with the idea that religion co-opts brain circuits that evolved for something else. Richard Dawkins, too, sees the two camps as compatible. "Why shouldn't both be correct?" he says. "I actually think they are."

Ultimately, discovering the true origins of something as complex as religion will be difficult. There is one experiment, however, that could go a long way to proving whether Boyer, Bloom and the rest are onto something profound. Ethical issues mean it won't be done any time soon, but that hasn't stopped people speculating about the outcome.

It goes something like this. Left to their own devices, children create their own "creole" languages using hard-wired linguistic brain circuits. A similar experiment would provide our best test of the innate religious inclinations of humans. Would a group of children raised in isolation spontaneously create their own religious beliefs? "I think the answer is yes," says Bloom.

God of the gullibile

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues that religion is propagated through indoctrination, especially of children. Evolution predisposes children to swallow whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them, he argues, as trusting obedience is valuable for survival. This also leads to what Dawkins calls "slavish gullibility" in the face of religious claims.

If children have an innate belief in god, however, where does that leave the indoctrination hypothesis? "I am thoroughly happy with believing that children are predisposed to believe in invisible gods - I always was," says Dawkins. "But I also find the indoctrination hypothesis plausible. The two influences could, and I suspect do, reinforce one another." He suggests that evolved gullibility converts a child's general predisposition to believe in god into a specific belief in the god (or gods) their parents worship.

[rainmac]

The discussion about evolution and religion is frequently about whether religion is adaptive or a by-product, but I've yet to see anybody clarify what a biological by-product is. I believe it started with Gould and Lewontin's Spandrels of San Marcos article, but in all the research I've done, I've never found anybody that elaborates on their frankly lame presentation of by-product theory. Most scholars just assume the legitimacy of by-product theory without actually asking what constitutes a biological by-product or what criteria are used to establish a trait as a by-product. There's so much information out there, perhaps I've missed it. Can anyone point to any such documentation? Thanks in advance!

[eckadimmock]

Interesting, but what conclusions you might draw about God depend rather on the apriori assumptions you begin with. The adaptive illusion argument might work the other way around for nonbelievers, too, that people have a capacity to ignore data that doesn't fit the desired narrative. Doctors who decide that a patient has disease A may disregard symptoms of disease B, police who have an obvious suspect might ignore evidence that points to someone else.

Sometimes we see a pattern because there really is a pattern.

[elephantchang51]

Fascinating stuff,but where do our apriori assumptions come from?What truth and objectivity can exist if people ignore data that doesn't fit the desired narrative?Confirmation bias may exist in us all,so I what I get from this is that we should make only make modest claims about what we can 'know'.Since 'disbelief',in God or anything else,makes no positive claims,I would contend it is the only prudent course to take.

[unkleE]

Mar 6, 2011 6:43:42 GMT elephantchang51 said:

Confirmation bias may exist in us all,so I what I get from this is that we should make only make modest claims about what we can 'know'.Since 'disbelief',in God or anything else,makes no positive claims,I would contend it is the only prudent course to take.

1. Is the statement "'disbelief',in God or anything else,makes no positive claims" itself a positive claim?? I'm not being pedantic, but I doubt we can avoid making positive claims of one sort or another. If so, your 'prudent course' is an illusion, I suspect.

2. In the end, what we think we 'know' is not as important as what we actually do. If I am in a crisis (say in a burning building) I may not 'know' the way out, but the choices I make will decide my fate regardless of the state of my 'knowledge'. Likewise, I may not 'know' whether I am making the 'right' choice in asking a girl to marry me, but the choices she and I make will determine the shape of our lives regardless of the state of my 'knowledge'.

I suggest it is the same with God. I don't claim to 'know' God exists, but I believe he does on the basis of the evidence. But the strength of my belief, or the state of my knowledge, don't make much difference, it is my choice to follow Jesus that matters. None of us is exempt from choice, even if it is the choice to do nothing.

So you, equally, have made choices. If the logic you express here was your only justification for your disbelief (I don't suppose it is, but if it were) I can't help feeling your disbelief would be on a very shaky foundation.

[eckadimmock]

Mar 6, 2011 6:43:42 GMT elephantchang51 said:

Fascinating stuff,but where do our apriori assumptions come from?What truth and objectivity can exist if people ignore data that doesn't fit the desired narrative?Confirmation bias may exist in us all,so I what I get from this is that we should make only make modest claims about what we can 'know'.Since 'disbelief',in God or anything else,makes no positive claims,I would contend it is the only prudent course to take.

I don't think anyone is ignoring data, but the data can be interpreted different ways. Truth and objectivity might be noble goals, but I would argue that they would never be found if everyone took the line of least resistance. Evolution (or creative choice of your choice) seems to have equipped us with a sense of the numinous, so the most parsimonious explanation to me is that there is something to sense.

As for prudence, be a believer and you'll live longer and be happier!
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7302609.stm
www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=18114

and also more generous

www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6577

(Just avoid the Church of Ireland news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7223569.stm )

[elephantchang51]

Unklee,I would contend that disbelief in,for example God(s),compared to belief in them is a very modest claim indeed,after all it is only one of an enormous list of things I see as providing insufficient evidence for their existence.I am tentative about the evidence for phenomena that appear much more tangible than the supernatural.I cannot grasp your point about choice and the state of your knowledge not making much difference,in fact I'm not even sure about 'choosing' what to believe at all.I cannot equate this choosing with being tentatively persauded by the propenderance of evidence,perhaps this is mere semantics,but if there exists an absolute truth anywhere it is independent of our choices IMHO.

[elephantchang51]

Eckadimmock,just curious why haven't we all been equipped with a sense of the numinous?It could be seen as a particularly cruel act to create sentient beings deficient in this aspect in order to punish them through eternal seperation from Him,although eternal life alone would be sufficiently cruel for me.

[unkleE]

Mar 6, 2011 11:38:16 GMT elephantchang51 said:

Unklee,I would contend that disbelief in,for example God(s),compared to belief in them is a very modest claim indeed,after all it is only one of an enormous list of things I see as providing insufficient evidence for their existence.I am tentative about the evidence for phenomena that appear much more tangible than the supernatural.

Yes, I agree that is a modest claim, I was merely suggesting that we cannot easily avoid making positive claims of one sort or another. If that is your aim, then you would have to be (IMO) sceptical and agnostic about almost everything, including many things that you would probably never think to be agnostic about (the reality of the external world and other minds, the rationality of your mind and its ability to make choices, etc). I think it would be a terrible and fearful way to live, but I don't think you actually live that way. Which makes it somewhat less of a worthwhile reason to not believe in God(s).

I cannot grasp your point about choice and the state of your knowledge not making much difference,in fact I'm not even sure about 'choosing' what to believe at all.I cannot equate this choosing with being tentatively persauded by the propenderance of evidence,perhaps this is mere semantics,but if there exists an absolute truth anywhere it is independent of our choices IMHO.

Clearly there is some sense in which we cannot choose what we honestly conclude to be true - we just see the evidence pointing that way. But I think in other senses we do indeed choose what we believe, because we choose our assumptions and attitudes and degree of scepticism, etc. But in the end, whether I have great certainty about something or am only tentative about it, if both beliefs lead to the same response, it didn't matter very much how strongly I believed did it?

So in the end you choose not to believe in God and I choose to believe, and those choices are the important thing that determine the course of our lives and our afterlives if there is such a thing, and the uncertainty or certainty we each felt are ultimately irrelevant.

I actually think that God intended things to be the way they are regarding evidence. I believe there is enough evidence to justify belief but not enough to compel belief. In the end, it is our attitudes and assumptions that determine the result. Jesus told parables to separate those who wanted to look more deeply from those who didn't, and I think life itself is like a parable in that sense.

[eckadimmock]

Mar 6, 2011 11:59:04 GMT elephantchang51 said:

Eckadimmock,just curious why haven't we all been equipped with a sense of the numinous?It could be seen as a particularly cruel act to create sentient beings deficient in this aspect in order to punish them through eternal seperation from Him,although eternal life alone would be sufficiently cruel for me.

That seems to be a problem for both views, actually. I guess like any other characteristic it follows a normal 'bell curve' distribution.

Your second point takes quite a theological tack: I'm not convinced that a sense of the numinous is a prerequisite for eternal life, or that anyone will get punished for lacking it.

[unkleE]

Mar 6, 2011 21:16:23 GMT eckadimmock said:

Mar 6, 2011 11:59:04 GMT elephantchang51 said:

Eckadimmock,just curious why haven't we all been equipped with a sense of the numinous?It could be seen as a particularly cruel act to create sentient beings deficient in this aspect in order to punish them through eternal seperation from Him,although eternal life alone would be sufficiently cruel for me.

I'm not convinced that a sense of the numinous is a prerequisite for eternal life, or that anyone will get punished for lacking it.

Yes, I agree. I would be just about the most unspiritual person I know (seriously). I dislike most forms of church, I have very little awareness of God, about as much scepticism as faith, prayer is mostly a chore, and I seem to have no impulse to worship. I believe because it seems true to me. I think that truth is open to everyone who wants to find it (that's what Jesus said was the case).

[eckadimmock]

Mar 6, 2011 22:25:01 GMT unkleE said:

Yes, I agree. I would be just about the most unspiritual person I know (seriously). I dislike most forms of church, I have very little awareness of God, about as much scepticism as faith, prayer is mostly a chore, and I seem to have no impulse to worship. I believe because it seems true to me. I think that truth is open to everyone who wants to find it (that's what Jesus said was the case).

It's not a common feeling for me either, I've only felt a 'presence' a few times. Maybe some people feel it all the time: I don't know if I envy them - that would impose its own kind of burden.

[Al Moritz]

Mar 6, 2011 22:25:01 GMT unkleE said:

I would be just about the most unspiritual person I know (seriously).

Perhaps I am close to that, too.

I dislike most forms of church,

I do like the Catholic church, but:

I have very little awareness of God, about as much scepticism as faith, prayer is mostly a chore,

Same holds for me, I guess.

and I seem to have no impulse to worship.

I like to kneel in front of the Holy Eucharist and adore, but much further it does not go for me either, alas.

I believe because it seems true to me.

Yes, that is why I believe too, not because of religious experiences, which I don't have.

I guess we are pretty similar then, when it comes to faith.