Fiach

I definitely think that the soul hypothesis belongs here because as I will try to posit, it leads to the invention of god(s).

Primitive mankind as he/she began to think more and more, and observe the world around them, they had curiosity about how things worked. We still have that curiosity. They wanted to know how springs bubbled up, rivers flowed, volcanoes erupted, rain fell, and the Sun appeared to move across the sky. They wanted to know how we flexed and extended our hands, how we thought and talked.

Since they had no knowledge of chemistry, electricity, electrochemical circuits, they could not rely on a science thousands of years in the future.

They knew that "something" made the spring bubble, and the fingers flex. Something made us think, and when we dreamed, that something could even travel to other places and times. They felt that this something was independent in its action. You could not order it to do this or that. It did what "It wanted." They assumed it was conscious. They called these somethings, spirits (souls).

Spirits moved the springs to gush water. Spirits moved the clouds and made them rain. Obviously a spirit in our body made our arms move, our fingers flex, our legs walk. This spirit's consciousness must also be our consciousness. When we sleep, it can escape our bodies and go elsewhere. This spirit was responsible for all that we do, including thinking. When it permanently leaves our body that is death.

Now we know that all of the above can be explained on purely natural mechanisms. We know the pathways of consciousness in the brain. We know our on-off switch is the Ascending Reticular Activating System, which activates the diencephalon and the septal nuclei to make us alert and aware. Connections to the temporo-limbic lobe convey our emotions/affect, to primary sensory areas (visual, auditory, tactile) for perception, to association areas for identification and processing of those perceptions, to the pre-motor cortex to plan complex movements then to the motor cortex to activate the necessary muscles. Spect MRI has mapped though patterns, speech patterns, and even emotional and mystical experiences in the brain. There is no work left over for the soul.

How is this connected to god? Over time, mankind noted that spirits were in trees, rivers, springs, clouds, animals, and even rocks. But we are also lumpers more than splitters. Mankind began to merge the many spirits into groups of greater spirits or gods. Akenaten of Egypt who merged them all into one God, Aten the Sun God reached the apex of the trend. Moses likely was influenced by Akenaten's heresy. He merged all of the male and female Hebrew Gods into one JHWH (Yahweh, or Joe Hovah). Older Jewish manuscripts document the last stages of polytheism, with the plural Elohim.

So the soul, which has essentially lost all meaning in human behaviour, is essential for two reasons. It is part of the complex reasoning (using the term loosely) in creating God. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly is our delusional hope for immortality. We all want to live forever, but we know the body dies. So we can only be immortal if we have that ethereal something in us that outlasts the "mortal body."

This is why humans cling so tenaciously to the soul concept, immortality. And this leads to God and the Bible being defended so savagely from criticism. It contains all of the excuses for believing in spirits, souls, god, and immortality. Some Atheistic gomeral trying to destroy your immortality is the greatest possible threat.

Fiach

emotional

It all boils down to anthropocentrism, the view that mankind is at the central interest of the universe. If this is the case then mankind must be immortal, and there must be a controller of all things who listens to mankind's pleas.

The fact that humans perish in a volcanic eruption just as surely as livestock and bugs do ought to ring a bell in all those anthropocentrists. The fact that the Earth is one planet revolving around one star in an insignificant position in one galaxy ought to push the matter further. And the last straw is Darwin's Theory of Evolution: mankind is really no more special than livestock and bugs. Evolution explains not only the biological question of how the species originated, but also (though that wasn't the original intention) why humans perish in natural disasters with no-one any the more merciful and compassionate towards them.

Evolution, when consistently accepted and its ramifications pondered upon, makes it impossible to believe in a personal deity. But try going against the mental stability and happiness of those who need faith (I know this so well).

Rousseau_CHN

Nice, Fiach, except that I don't believe this part:

I don't believe they did. I believed that they were much more concerned with survival than muscle flexing. Probably after they have learned to live in group or have invented proper defenses--probably only then did they observe the world around them.

To think is a luxury--which is why you don't often see third world countries coming up with brilliant scientific discoveries. They, or should I say we, simply don't have time to bother with the workings of the universe.

emotional

Concern with survival cannot be separate from religious thinking. Ug the caveman wanted to know how to increase the yield of the hunt, how to stop the perishing blizzard, how to defend himself against diseases, and in short how to make the natural world work more to his favour. From this came religion. What is prayer, or a shamanic rain-dance for that matter, but a try to make the natural world work more to one's favour? That is the basis of all religion. And it is based on the anthropocentric fallacy: that someone out there really listens and cares. Aka God.

Fiach

Certainly, and that opposition is at its most virulent in the USA.
I am happy that I live where it is hard to find a good hearty religious argument, because nobody cares about it.

Fiach

Fiach

Exactly. Man did his dances and prayed his chants, and occasionally a good result happened. 50% of the time it didn't work. But like modern Christians they count only the successes that verify their beliefs and ignore the failed prophesis and absence of miracles for the child with a brain tumour but cured an old man's lumbago. Man is arrogant in many ways. He wanted to be important. And what better why to feel important is to think that the great Cosmic spirit creator made the entirity of the universe just for him. He wa not ready to face reality (your example of late evolving primates on a mediocre planet circling an average star on a remote arm of an ordinary spiral galaxy, among billions of other galaxies.)

Fiach

Fiach

I don't believe they did. I believed that they were much more concerned with survival than muscle flexing. Probably after they have learned to live in group or have invented proper defenses--probably only then did they observe the world around them.

We can only speculate on what came first. I postulate that at least as early as the onset of language, humans did live in groups. They had to scrape for survival. They prospered in rainy times with more edible plants, and more plentiful game to hunt. They sought every advantage they could get. If there were powers who controlled nature they surely would like to get on his or her good side. And in hunter gatherer groups they did have time to contemplate. While tracking a wounded Wildebeest for 3 days, they had ample time to think about many things. They passed a natural spring and wondered how that appeared in the dry ground of the semidesert savanah. They had time to think about why the earth tembled occasionally during the hunt. They may have assumed life and consciousness in any phenomena that involved movement. I move and I am conscious. The earth trembles and it must be conscious. The spring chose to bubble up in the dry canyon, so there must be consciousness. If these entities are conscious they are like brother Og and sister Ag, susceptible to sweet talking or appeals with gifts (a nice chipping stone for Og and pretty flowers for Ag.) It may be even possible that religious belief illdefined preceeded actual speech.

To think is a luxury--which is why you don't often see third world countries coming up with brilliant scientific discoveries.

Thinking is not a luxury but a survival necessity. Stone age tribespeople in Borneo might not know about nucleotides but they know what is safe to eat among the plants. They know the poisonous snakes, You would not and not last a week in a group of fellow scientists like me and you. The tribesmen do think. They plan elabourate traps for animals, they know to avoid rock strewn lake shores likely to harbour dangerous snakes. They think and make a different route around the rocks.

They, or should I say we, simply don't have time to bother with the workings of the universe.

Their universe is a world of a few thousand square kilometres, flat, and manipulated by all kinds of spirits. They don't think about the Crab Nebula because they don't know about it. What they know fairly well is their area of central Borneo. That is al they think about, and they do, IMO, think about it a large part of their time while tracking or looking for tubers.

Fiach

beastmaster

Fiach, I agree 100%. The soul and god are linked conceptually and in their historical development.

Anyone who can believe in a human soul should have no trouble believing in a disembodied spirit like god.

As an atheist, my firm disbelief in a human soul makes belief in any spirits, including God, impossible. If *I* am not "spiritual," why would I think that anything is?

Fiach

What I posted was not some brilliant analytical process. It was just simple rational thinking, and some awareness of human development. The more amazing thing is that so many people believe in the invisible, inaudible, and improbable that is lacking in any proof. It is internally contradictory, and requires a block in the rational circuits of the brain to believe in gods especially in modern times. Thanks for letting me know that you think without blinders. It is not that you agree. It is that you think.

Fiach

Amos

Not at all, Fiach and you are way off the mark here. I will argue that just the opposite is true.

The primitive man was God and if banned from Eden (when he became a rational agent) he was never far from Eden and not much was required to get back into Eden. Understand here that we are only distant from Eden by the size of our ego awareness and so little ego's do not have much to lose by sacrificing their ego to get back into heaven. The problem with this is that little ego's make for little heavens because we must 'color' our own heaven while we are on earth and we do this during the first half of our life (yang period) so we can enjoy this same during the second half (yin period). Since they, the primitives were always close to Eden, it was easier for them to "see spirits" which in turn is why educated people as less troubled by the spirit world (until they have a NDE, I guess).

If their ego was little their 'creations' were also small and so there was not much to be enjoyed in their heaven except peace of mind (which, of course, is good enough for anybody). The point here is that while in heaven we also benefit from the accumilated wisdom of our forefathers that is retained in our soul for up to one thousand years. Again, if their heaven was also small there was not much to be learned from that either . . . , nor was there a large amount of illumination to draw from during the yang period of life (understand here that we are omniscient in our subconscious mind and must get our inspirations from our own mind).

Primitive mythologies have primitive Gods because the Thousand Year Reign is part of our life in heaven during which time our soul is part of our conscious awareness (intuit memory is also rational memory in heaven due to the convergence of our twain mind).

The problem increases when our ego is big and when much more rational knowlegde is retained in the conscious mind. We then have 'much to lose' and are much more reluctant to let go of that which has made us the man we are [until this very day]. To overcome this "indulgences" were used as leverage to help strip humans of their ego identity. The were very successful and the proof of this is that they were popular during the heyday of Catholicism.

You should not lose sight of the fact that we, each one of us, can be God and if that is still true today it was also true then. With a singular mind 'dreaming' is not possible and if, as I hold that heaven is to be of a singular mind, dreaming should not be possible during the yen period. Therefore the OT passage "it is an evil age when old men have dreams" is true.