Deacon Doubtmonger

Gotta chime in with a magnificent supporting quote for these. From Bob Potter's essay "Psychotherapy and Religion":

Religious organisations and communities have traditionally served a number of functions. From the point of view of individuals holding political power, religion has been an effective means of keeping the oppressed �in their place� by convincing them that it is to their advantage to remain where they are in the social pecking order:

"Jesus then said to his disciples: �It will be very hard, I tell you, for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I tell you something else: it is much harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle�."

Almost always, religious ideologies function as a means of mobilising their adherents to accept the status quo in both theory and practice. It is the same St Paul, the model for all evangelical Christians, who insisted so emphatically that:

"Everyone must obey the state authorities; for no authority exist without God�s permission and the existing authorities have been put there by God. Whoever opposes the existing authority opposes what God has ordered; and anyone who does so will bring judgement on himself."

and who in his final letter �To Philemon�, when joined by a runaway slave Onesimus sends the fugitive, now a changed character because he has become a Christian(!), back to his master, Philemon. The slave is now reconciled to the fact that as a disciple of Christ his duty is to serve his master.

Full text here:

http://www.adam.com.au/bstett/ReligP...AndRelig44.htm

The Helmetmaker

First, thank you Pyrrho. I work a lot of hours and don't have the time to post as often as I would like. I do like to post as thoughtfully as possible. It seems everyone here does. You hear some people say things like, "I know what I mean, but I just can't put it into words." I say, if you can't put it into words, you don't really know what you mean.

Now, I think I said religion doesn't have any real survival value, but reading the posts since mine shows me I was too limiting. I was thinking only in terms of the individual. I think we can all agree that religion is not a heritable trait, but the capacity to be religious is. Quantum Ninja and acronos point out that religion provides survival benefits to societies or cultures, and thus to the individual members. But is this really the case?

A behavior, a cultural idea, lore, or meme, will persist if it either provides survival advantages or does not provide survival disadvantages. Religion seems to fit both those criteria. But does it? What societies need in order to survive is information. Ancient spiritualism provided a lot of information for local tribes, and to the extent that it was mythological rather than informative, it was rather innocuous. When tribes clashed, the deciding factor was military might rather than religion. Often, the victors just absorbed the religion of the conquered people. It's hard to say if religion provided a survival benefit in these cases, as both winner and loser had religions.

In more modern times when religions sometimes propelled the use of military force, there is still the outcome that one religion prevails and one is defeated, and at times even wiped out. So, has religion provided survival advantages? I tend to think No. I suppose it could be argued that the defeated religion provided survival disadvantages, but the use of military force clouds the issue. At the same time, the religions were becoming less informative and more mythological. Science was becoming more the informer, and ideology was becoming more the purpose of mythologies. Since it's really information (and resources) that provides survival advantages, if this was becoming less the province of religion, I don't see where religion was providing survival advantages.

It's certainly a complicated issue. I'll be looking forward to other viewpoints.


The Helmetmaker

Pyrrho

"Faith" in oneself can equally be detrimental. If you have faith that you can do things that are impossible to do, you may try to do them and be killed in the process. The best approach is the most accurate and realistic self-assessment. That way, one does what one can, and avoids wasting effort on impossibilities. Of course, there will always be "gray" areas, where one does not know whether the thing is possible or not. But, one will also know that one is not likely to succeed without trying, so one may try in such cases, depending on the relative risks involved.



There can be many things detrimental to society which do not cause the society to die out. Think of all sorts of superstitious beliefs. They are not an advantage, but they do not generally cause people to die. So there is no need for foolish nonsense to be eliminated in order for a species to thrive. This does not in any way indicate that such nonsense is an advantage.

Pyrrho

First of all, the "explanations" do not actually explain anything. To simply say, "god did it" is to say nothing about how or why it was done. In fact, since people are often suckered into believing that they have an explanation when they have been given such pseudo-explanations, they tend to search for the truth less, and thus it impedes progress.

Second, people do not need to have answers to all of their questions in order to survive. Indeed, there has never been a time when all of everyone's questions have been answered.

Third, morality is not dependent upon religion. "Enlightened self-interest" will get pretty much all that is needed for a society to function. For more on this, see:

www.atomic-swerve.net/tpg

www.epicurus.net



Yes, it can be used as a support for governmental authority. But it generally is not effective alone, and the usual supports of authority are what really keep kings from being overthrown. That is, simply put, the power to subdue the masses. We see this in the United States today, for example. Religion without an army or police or something similar to support it does not keep anyone in power.



That is speculative on your part. It is far from clear whether religion was necessary for such things to happen. All that we can say for certain is that religion is compatible with these developments. There is no proof that religion was necessary, or even advantageous in this process.



True, it does unite groups of people. But it also divides them, and can cause them to engage in disastrous wars. If two tribes fight to the death over some religious matter, obviously the religion was detrimental to the survival of one of the groups. And the group that survives may be significantly damaged in the process, and may have survived without the conflict. So religion, in such a case, is absolutely known to be bad for one group, but whether it was good or bad or indifferent for the other group is far from certain.



I agree that religion impedes progress in knowledge. As for whether people in other ages were more or less religious is difficult to say. For example, everyone who was alive in a time and place where the Inquisition was in full swing, was highly motivated to pretend to be religious. So the fact that they did not write so many irreligious books as today proves absolutely nothing about what the people truly believed. However, you may be right about there being a higher percentage of irreligious people today than before.

Pyrrho

Sanitation has nothing to do with it; it is only a question of whether pork is completely cooked or not. After it is cooked, if the sanitation is poor, eating beef will be just as bad as eating pork.

As for Judaism in particular, circumcision undoubtedly caused many deaths from infections. And the more unsanitary the conditions, the more people will die from such barbarous practices. In fact, this is something that illustrates what I (and "The Helmetmaker") have already stated: A practice that continues does not have to be a survival advantage for the practice to continue. It can continue as long as it is not something that causes the society to fall apart. In the case of more babies dying from infections, humans can produce more than enough offspring to make up for many extra infant deaths. So there is no need for a society to stop practices that actually results in the deaths of some infants.



People don't need to live very long for a society to survive. If everyone died at 30, people would continue to survive.

spacer1

Pyrrho,
The point I was trying to make was that before the scientific era, religion was the only means of information for making the most accurate and realistic self-assessment. As to your example, you may very well be killed by trying to do the impossible, but you don't know whether it is impossible until after the fact (when it is too late). This has little to do with faith. Faith can cut both ways, as I tried to highlight in my last post, where I spoke of "fundamentalism and an unshakeable system of belief." However, apart from such an extreme, it also has its benefits. You have to have faith in what you currently believe to be "the best approach" and a "realistic self-assessment," otherwise what information is at your disposal in order to survive? You do not know that your information is true until you apply it to the world. This is the point of faith and was my point about religion before the scientific era.
It might seem like "nonsense" now, because we have the hindsight of science. However, before science came along, all we had was this "nonsense". You may well say that such nonsense offers no survival value, but without science or any other means of evaluating one's beliefs, to ignore such explanations of the world would be akin to you ignoring all scientific knowledge and explanations today.

one ryder

I think that given the innate social nature of human beings from their beginning, it is probable that behavior we would call "religious" had significant survival value in terms of community-building and maintenance, and thus for the species.

The evidence seems to indicate that "religious" behavior existed even in Neanderthal communities. Such behaviour could well have developed as a response to the inexplicable nature of phenomena experienced by prehistoric people on a daily basis: killer storms, floods, volcanic activity, drought -- natural calamities of all kinds. In addition, their dependence on the hunt for survival, would lend itself to the "supernaturalization" of their entire world -- a world they were at a complete loss to explain rationally. If, for example, an individual were to notice a coincidental correlation between a given act and a successful hunt, he may conclude a cause and effect relationship. A couple of more "hits," and he would become some sort of "seer," a man in touch with whatever controlled a successful as opposed to an unsuccessful hunt.

In other words, such early superstitions could easily have evolved into a system of beliefs that dealt with a primitive idea of an imagined transcendent. The more formalized the system became, the closer it would have begun to resemble what we might define as "religious."

As for survival value, it would have given the community a powerful central belief system -- its erroneous nature notwithstanding -- that created stronger ties among the group, thus enhancing the ability of individuals to more closely identify with the community. This would improve the group's cohesiveness. It would also allow a system that transferred a degree of respect and control to others besides physically dominant alpha males. The community would gradually begin to act in a more unified way based on a commonly-shared belief system, rather than reacting to brute strength alone. The resulting survival factors would likely be numerous, certainly including greater organizational skills and recognition of the value of such behavior.

At the very least, early superstitions and religious beliefs offered an explanation to an otherwise totally mysterious and terrifying world. Reading Genesis from this standpoint, for example, although late in human history, it seems clear to me that offering such a religious explanation to a preliterate, prescientific, nomadic society was exactly what the author was attempting to do. And, unfortunately, there are still hundreds of millions of people who cling to that particular ancient explanatory attempt in an effort to dispel the mystery and the fear that, for them, still exists. It is also true, however, that these same millions derive a sense of community and belonging, and enjoy what they consider to be the "truth" about the world in which they live. Is religious behavior still a positive survival factor for the species? Time will tell...

one ryder

Pyrrho

No, it would simply be ignoring unsubstantiated claims. With ignoring science today, one would be ignoring claims for which one can, if one wishes, have actual evidence.

R P McMurphy

The evidence seems to indicate that "religious" behavior existed even in Neanderthal communities.

This is exactly the sort of evidence that suggests to me that there was an inherent advantage to "religious" belief. I put the word religious in quotes because I want to distinguish between primitive superstition and the far more complex modern religions.

It seems clear to me that the survival value of early religion would have been primarily social in nature. However there is another aspect to the question.

Human beings (and our prehistoric near relatives) are different from other species in one crucial respect - our far more powerful intelligence. Most evolutionary explanations that I know of are based on physical characteristics - sexual traits, advantages in acquiring food, advantages in fighting for survival against competitive species, etc.

But what about the role of intelligence in evolution?

Psychological needs are, for humans, quite as compelling as physical ones - otherwise how do you explain suicide? Psychology is the result of intelligence. I theorize that as humans developed advanced intelligence - especially after about 50,000 years ago when there was an explosion of art and abstract reasoning - that psychological needs became more and more important. The need to *know* is, I think, far more powerful than is generally allowed. The desire to know definitely had survival value for early humans - perhaps as much as the desire to eat or to reproduce.

Primitive humans - and modern ones as well - feel insecure without a basis of "knowledge". So much so that without an obvious explanation for what thunder is (for example) a story is made up to explain it - and serves its purpose until a better explanation comes along. And what is the purpose of the made up story? Simply to relieve the inherent (psychological) stress of *not knowing* in a species whose success is dependant on knowledge.

So perhaps it isn't that religion itself has direct survival value but that religion is the by-product of something else that has survival value - intelligence. If this is correct then the answer to the question of why we don't know of primitive athesist human societies is that there aren't any due to the fact that people have intelligence that causes psychological pressures which are relieved through religion.

According to this way of thinking religion retreats as science advances - and as time and education advances religion will be less and less "useful" as a psychological stress reliever.

What do ya'll think?

R. P. McMurphy

Pyrrho

It is remarkable how many people in this thread engage in fallacious reasoning, with the following argument:

And what makes this all the more remarkable is that examples have been given that prove that the argument is fallacious, but people persist in promoting this bit of bad reasoning.

The existence of a thing does not prove that it has survival value. All that one can reasonably infer from the fact that something exists is that that thing is compatible with the survival of the species (so far), not that it is beneficial to it. If it were true that the existence of a thing proved that it is beneficial, this would prove that the appendix is beneficial, which it clearly is not.

The Helmetmaker explained the situation admirably:


But judging from the posts above, I expect it is likely that people will continue to "reason" according to the above fallacious argument, no matter how many times it is demonstrated to be fallacious.