diana

To all:

Albert Cipriani posted the following rant in this thread. As he began using evolution to make his "design" argument, I thought I'd ask you guys to take a look at it.

(Background: he made the "faith in God is like faith in beauty" argument, which I exposed as the poor analogy it is, to which he replied as follows: )

What say you? Is that how evolution works?

How does evolution explain--or does it explain--awe?

Thanks,

d

lpetrich

Here's a quick speculation: awe is what one feels around one's social superiors -- it's the subjective sensation of feeling socially inferior.

And the feeling of it may simply be a part of being social.

pz

Also, nature is neither efficient, nor do its creations necessarily have any purpose. Nature is actually extremely sloppy and kludgy, and many of our features are nothing but historical accidents.

chrstphr

It will help to examine the definition of awe:

Awe = A mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread, and wonder inspired by authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity, or might: We felt awe when contemplating the works of Bach. The observers were in awe of the destructive power of the new weapon. 2. Archaic a. The power to inspire dread. b. Dread. (American Heritage Dictionary).

Cipriani jumps all too easily from "feeling" to "knowing". If ancients FELT awe looking at the heavens, it doesn't mean they KNEW anything about them, it only means they felt awe (some reverence, some dread as well -- the two fit together quite well). Why did ancients build things that related to the sky? Partly to connect with what they felt was there (note that I don't say "know was there"), and probably motivated by the fear of what might happen if they didn't make the effort to connect/communicate. We are still in the realm of feeling, not knowledge.

They knew there was a complexity in the arrangements of the stars and the revolution of the spheres, but that isn't knowledge that there is a god or gods. It apparently was grounds for coming up with astrology, a communication mechanism to alleviate fears. Cipriani just kind of threw "knowledge" in there suddenly: (to paraphrase) "I feel there is something more because the complexity makes me feel small, therefore I have knowledge of god "instinctively", and that instinct explains the inexplicable!" Good grief, that's not only bad psychology (which is a science and therefore requires experiment and verification), it's bad poetry too.

quote: "The irrational emotion of awe must not be genetic or learned but infused by God as a seed of potential faith. Awe's utter lack of survival value leads me to believe this fairy tale."

Emotions are demonstrably genetic as they occur identically among all cultures across the globe; even the expressions of the major emotions are identical, as described by Darwin, and his ideas on how emotional expressions evolved still hold weight in the behavioral sciences (e.g. disgust involves wrinkling the noise as at a bad smell while pursing the lips as at the need to expel something sickening). Awe's lack of survival value would have to be proven. It likely serves the need to respect the dangers of the inadequately understood. Everyone needs to feel they understand things, it's a fundamental tenet of social psychology ... it's why people go to such great lengths to arrange their cognitions to their expectations/mental schemas/self-estimations. This man seems to have quite an easy time believing whatever fairy tale appeals to him. That's bad psychology.

I'm lost to make sense of what he is babbling about when he talks about meteorites as sent by god, or that cavemen and dinosaurs coexisted when there are millions of years between. But I know I would feel awe in the presence of a T Rex, and would run for my life while feeling it too. I'm not equating awe with fear, but there are strong grounds for an interrelation of the two.

Back to T Rex, and the skies as well ... is there really no survival value in a mixture of reverence and dread for that which can squash you?

That he can't think of a purpose doesn't mean it has to have a spiritual purpose. I'm a grad student in psychology, and I think there are better ways to test his hypothesis of there being no survival value in awe than this lame, touchy-feely argument. There is, however, no way to test his "instinctive knowledge" of god ... that likely remains forever in the realm of feeling and not knowledge.

Albert Cipriani

Yuck Ipetrich:
I can only agree with one of your words, “subjective.” Guess that shows what a curmudgeon I am. No person has ever awed me. At most, I can work up a head of steam for certain categories of a person that I respect or even admire. But awe? No way.

Pz:
How do you equate our vestigial features with Nature’s inefficiency? My wedding album photos are the vestigial features of a day in my life that’s now history. Ergo, the photos, which bear only a historical resemblance to the real present-day me, are inefficient. This is a non sequitur. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

Jobar

Is it really proper to say that emotions evolve? If it is, I would make a tentative guess that awe is one of the many descendants of fear, just as love is related to the sexual impulse.

Vorkosigan

The fallacy here lies is attempting to explain everything as having some direct evolutionary purpose.

"Awe’s utter lack of survival value leads me to believe this fairy tale. "

First, Cirpriani would have to explain how this feeling which he labels "awe" does not in any way shape or form enhance the human organism's ability to get its genes into the next generation, or why, even if it does not, that is a particular black mark against evolution. "Awe" could even be detrimental, if it was part of a package of chances that enhanced, just as the shape of the larynx enables speech but creates more opportunities for choking.

After he demonstrates that, then maybe we could discuss the possiblity that there is some other reason for its existence. And look, I'm being so nice, I've even conceded that it is universal, although that is probably not the case.

Vorkosigan

Albion

I have never felt anything remotely approaching awe when looking at anything in nature. Far as I'm concerned, nature is just there, the stars are there, the mountains are there, the oceans are there. That's it. They're all just there. I don't see this "oh, it's so awesome, there must be a God" stuff. I remember saying to one of my teachers at school that the vast complexity and interconnectedness of nature struck me as a good reason to believe that thre wasn't a god because why would you need a god to do what natural processes have done so well.

I have read, though, that the awe that people (normal people, not me) feel when confronted with major aspects of nature like mountains is part of the survival instinct that tells people to take these things seriously because if you don't take them seriously when trying to interact with them, you might not live to tell the tale.

Albert Cipriani

Christphr,
Thanks for the memories. You reading to me from the dictionary brought back the times my mother read me Granny Goose.

But instead of practicing your reading skills on me, I suggest you improve upon your reading comprehension skills. Then you wouldn’t make silly statements like this:
Our ancestors knew plenty about the stars. We know plenty more. Neither point did I make. Let me try to spell it out for you again. It’s an uncontestable fact that the response of our ancestors to the heavens was one grade more than awe, it was worship. How illogical of them! That is my point.

As illogical as it was, our ancestor’s illogical reaction to the moon and the stars still demands a logical or psychological explanation. Mine is that awe (and its consequent actualization, worship) is an instinct. An irrational desire to feel and do that which is unproductive for our survival here on earth. (I.e., building Stonehenge, the pyramids, and cathedrals incurred gross deductions from the gross national product.) Ergo, I posit that instinct’s survival value may be for our otherworldly life in the afterlife.

If not, if awe and the worship it leads to only serves as a disservice to us here and now, why has it not gone the way of our appendix and other vestigial also-rans? If you agree that awe serves no logical or utilitarian purpose, why hasn’t natural selection deselected it? – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

P.S. And how dare you pretend to paraphrase me?! You claim that I meant to say the following:
Good grief is right! Get your nose out of the dictionary and develop some real reading skills. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for so blatantly misrepresenting my statement:
For example, how do infants know how to suck? They don’t; it’s an instinct. Ergo, instinct “explains” what cannot be rationally explained, i.e., the inexplicable. Likewise, how do we know we should feel awe or worship some things? We don’t; it’s an instinct. It “explains” the inexplicable, i.e., the illogic of theism.

pangloss

*snore*

An anti-evolutionist with a superiority complex...

How unique......:notworthy