Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Vorkosigan · 08-24-2002, 04:26 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by CFE Villa-Landa:
II would be interested in following this up with some research on why, if it is so useful from an evolutionary perspective to hold religious beliefs, are there atheists?
Does anyone know whether this has been looked at in any detail and what direction I might go in?

It is not useful from an evolutionary perspective to hold religious beliefs, although just-so stories can be invented to account for it. My personal opinion is that religious beliefs are secondary fallout from mind processes it is useful to hold, such as the belief that other minds exist and have intentions. These are necessary for individuals to have social interactions.

I have found Tim Ingold's article in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052148541X/internetinfidelsA/" target="_blank">Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution</a> to be extremely useful in this regard. Pretty much the whole of evolutionary psychology as a field should be studied, start with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195101073/internetinfidelsA/" target="_blank">The Adapted Mind : Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture</a>. Some other books in the II bookstore on the mind and religious belief should also be useful to you in this regard, including this month's <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/books.asp" target="_blank">Religion Explained</a>

Vorkosigan

Splat · 08-24-2002, 06:03 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Starboy:
When I say I am looking for what works, that is exactly what I mean. I suppose you could take comfort in something working but for me it is purely a matter of getting the job done.

Um. I agree with what you've said, but I think I misled you. For starters, I should've used the third person "one" instead of "you"--I didn't mean you personally. Second, I think we're using the word "comfort" in different ways.

In terms of what I was trying to get at, and using your example, "comfort" would come from being able to get the job done; not being able to get the job done would cause some degree of "discomfort." I don't mean to imply existential angst or anything, just the sort of cognitive dissonance that makes us want to solve problems, and get frustrated when we can't.

I was also referring to pretty low-level cognitive functions that have to be functioning before we can even make it to the point of problem solving. If we can't make sense of the world, we can't even get to the office, much less get our jobs done.

What I was bumbling towards was an extended version of Vorkosigan's suggestion that:

Quote:

religious beliefs are secondary fallout from mind processes it is useful to hold

.

Thanks for the reading suggestions Vork. I've gotten curious enough about cog./evol. psych to want to learn more about it, so I'll add Barkow and Gibson/Ingoll to Pinker's "How the Mind Works" on my what-to-read-when-my-leave-starts list.

crocodile deathroll · 08-24-2002, 06:21 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by lcb:
Communism evolved very successfully without religion.

All communism did achieve is that is replaced one dogma (the Bible) with another (Das Capital) it was still just dogma, and that was its downfall

Starboy · 08-24-2002, 10:59 PM

Splat,

I can�t help but think that you are trying to dignify the motives for possessing religious belief. IMO they are the motives of a small child, a child that at its core doesn�t care about fine sensibilities like understanding how things work. When a small child is frightened it doesn�t stop and think, this is scary but it will not hurt me so I will not run away, it runs to comfort. That is what happened after 911, all the scared little Christians ran for comfort. The prime motivator for religious belief is primitive superstitious fear. Life and death is scary stuff and it is the fabric of all religions.

Starboy

case · 08-25-2002, 01:28 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by lcb:
Communism evolved very successfully without religion.

Hurray for communism. What does this have to do with science?

CFE Villa-Landa · 08-25-2002, 02:43 AM

Thank you to everyone who replied, particularly Starboy and splat who are clearly thinking along the same lines as I am. The overall conclusion I have come to, which is a bit hard to put without causing offence, is that the most self-sufficient people - that is those who are not so much in need of comfort, reassurance and a purpose imposed from outside - and the most intelligent and well educated people are the most likely to be atheists. This is borne out by the 40% of believers among top scientists compared with the 90% of believers among ordinary American, though a lower percentage, I think, in Europe. Can this be all there is to it? How can so many very intelligent, apparently capable people go on sustaining religious beliefs? Are they separating different areas of their minds? If so, how do they do it?.

CFE Villa-Landa · 08-25-2002, 02:46 AM

Sorry! I forgot to thank Vortosigan for the reading suggestions. I will follow those up as soon as I can.

Splat · 08-25-2002, 08:53 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Starboy:
Splat,

I can�t help but think that you are trying to dignify the motives for possessing religious belief.

Then I misled you indeed. I'm trying to understand the motives, not excuse them.

I think that science and religion share a deep root in cognitive structures that have served us well evolutionarily.

I think that magical thinking is, in Vork's term, "fallout" from the capacity for causal logic. It was a step up from pure instinct, which was all that our ecological competitors had at their disposal. If magical thinking (including religion) itself deserves any dignity, it's only because it allowed some of us to muddle through for thousands of years. Same with stone axes and digging sticks (can't imagine anybody'd want to keep using those either).

In the last few centuries, we've broken free from the limitations of magical thinking. That has allowed our population to increase by three orders of magnitude. IMO, that's a good indication of the power of naturalistic explanation over the power of magical ones.

But for many people (especially in the US), secular and naturalistic explanations aren't sufficient to keep them cognitively comfy. Why?

Quote:

IMO they are the motives of a small child, a child that at its core doesn�t care about fine sensibilities like understanding how things work. When a small child is frightened it doesn�t stop and think, this is scary but it will not hurt me so I will not run away, it runs to comfort. That is what happened after 911, all the scared little Christians ran for comfort.

Again, I agree completely, but I'm not talking about purely rational or operational understanding here, I'm talking about maintaining a base-level sense that the world makes sense.

For the scared child, it's sufficient to understand that mommy will protect him. And yes, it's the same for theists when they're afraid of the dark/terrorists. (I can't help but notice that they also clamored for the cold hard reality of military hardware--they may run and hide behind daddy, but they don't expect him to be much help).

And finally:

Quote:

The prime motivator for religious belief is primitive superstitious fear. Life and death is scary stuff and it is the fabric of all religions.

Absolutely. And the premodern mismatch between rates of human fecundity and survival to reproductive age (which kept human populations low for most of our history) was maintained by starvation, accident, and disease. If 12 of my 14 kids died, I'd be scared all the time and religion might look good.

So why do overfed, overprotected, and overmedicated westerners continue to believe? Death is still inevitable, but I suspect that the most important factors are laziness and habit. Religion is easy, if you're able to be happy with "goddidit."

Whatever the case, I'm sure we agree in thinking we'd all be better off if humanity would just grow up.

Thanks for the discussion Starboy--this has really piqued my urge to do some reading. (I'll be gone for the next week and will only have sporadic web access, so this'll have to be my last post for awhile.)

CFE Villa-Landa, I know we strayed from your original question, but glad you found it helpful.

Ciao ya'll.

ohwilleke · 08-26-2002, 09:19 AM

I think you could make some progress by looking at the history of atheism as a considered worldview. In Western Europe and among its colonists, atheism is only about 200 years old, or more correctly, atheism has flourished for perhaps 200 years which were proceeded by perhaps a thousand or more years in which there were no famous atheists in Western Europe. Given what else was going on at the time there is a good argument that science, the commercial revolution, and the decline on absolutist monarchism were instrumental in making atheism a philosophically viable position for intellectuals. It is also worth considering that Western European atheism was preceeded by deism; evolution theory probably did provide intellectual cover for the leap from deism to atheism for many, even thought atheism and deism share essentially the same roots in the West.

In other words, evolution operates at too great a scale to explain in any meaningful way the presence of atheism or theism. This is a matter of history and cultural evolution, not physical evolution, which at most endowed us with the ability to hold such abstract concepts. Moreover, the intellectual history of modern atheism is in the hundreds and thousands of years (the Englightment resurgency of deism and atheism in part involves a resurgence of classical thought), the province of history, and not of pre-history. You don't have to do parol room hypotheizing, you can read the documents of the people who came up with these ideas and see when and why they came to their conclusions.

There is a fairly recent and short history of Atheism in America, I can't recall the title or author, that takes basically a biographical approach to the issue, and another book by E.O. Wilson that looks at the matter biographically from perspective of European thinkers. Both would provide a feel for how these ideas evolved and why, in a very concrete way that shows why things did in fact happen, rather than what might have happened.

A related mistake made by too many scholars of religion is to look at religion as primarily a matter of individual choice. Religious belief tends to flow from societal belief and from parental belief. India is full of Hindus, while pre-colonial Europe had almost none for a reason. Individual choice does not explain why Italy is Catholic while Finland is Lutheran. It does not explain why the Reformation was an event, rather than a gradual phenomena. Religion is as much a social and political phenomena as it is a matter of individual choice.

If your premise is that religion and science are necessarily exclusive and cannot co-exist, you are surely wrong. While atheism is certainly more common among scientists, there are certainly theists who are also scientists, and there have even been important scientists who were also scientists (Newton, for example, was basically a gnostic, unitarian Christian). A scientific mindset may be more open to abandoning religion, but this is neither a necessary conclusion of a scientific mindset (since there are theists who are scientists), nor a necessary precondition to atheism (certainly there are atheists who came to where they are through arugments such as the argument from evil and the diversity of religions, rather than through scientific contraditions). Concluding that science and religion are mutually exclusive also requires that prove this for all religion, which is very difficult indeed. Merely proving that science is inconsistent with rabid fundamentalist Christianity, does not imply that you have proved science is inconsistent with religion.

Indeed, defining religion at all is a slippery concept. Is religious humanism (a la the American Humanist Association) a religion? What about Pantheism (nature as God)? How about Buddhism (not God per se, but lots of supernatural elements)? Or Unitarian Universalist belief (agnostic about God and worldly in orientation)? Do you define religion as a social construct? A belief system based on the existence of one or more Gods? A rejection of a scientific worldview (which gives an easy but tautological answer)? Or what?

Defining science is also slippery. Does it involve simply use of the scientific method to solve selected problems (most people who do that would fairly be considered scientists)? Does it involve acceptance of all prevailing scientific theories subject to the caveat of the scientific method? Does it include engineering and applied science? Is it an idea or an anthropological group of beliefs, i.e. a culture?

If you try to take on the issue from a purely philosophical and theological approach, divorced from history, sociology, anthropology, and the history and culture of science, you end up with a bunch of useless blather that will convince no one and interest no one.

[ August 26, 2002: Message edited by: ohwilleke ]

doubtingt · 08-26-2002, 01:16 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by CFE Villa-Landa:
I shall shortly be finishing an MA thesis critiquing the serious scientists in the UK and USA who claim that their science supports their religious beliefs. I have read a lot of material on the rationality of holding religious beliefs (not, I would stress, that religious belief itself is rational, but that there are good reasons for holding such beliefs.) I would be interested in following this up with some research on why, if it is so useful from an evolutionary perspective to hold religious beliefs, are there atheists?
Does anyone know whether this has been looked at in any detail and what direction I might go in?

There are certainly some people who have made such a claim about religion being "adaptive".
A couple of things to keep in mind are:

1. Rape and murder can be considered "adaptive",
which stresses the point that something being
adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint is
entirely separate from whether it should be encouraged.

2. Whether a belief (theism included) can be contrued as serving some sociological or psychological function, has nothing to do with whether the belief is compatible with the priciples of reason or evidence-based theory evaluation.

3. Be wary of flakes who make unfounded assertions about "the god part of the brain"
or "religion is in our genes". If religion is the product of evolution it is highly unlikely that religious beliefs were specifically selected for.
Religious beliefs are associated with more general psychological tendencies, such as pattern seeking, egocentrism, intolerance for ambiguity,
etc. If the prevalence of religious belief is a product of evolution, it is most likely a "by-product" that happens to result from the adaptive function of these more general psychological tendencies.

08-26-2002, 09:19 AM	#19
ohwilleke Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Denver, Colorado, USA Posts: 4,834	I think you could make some progress by looking at the history of atheism as a considered worldview. In Western Europe and among its colonists, atheism is only about 200 years old, or more correctly, atheism has flourished for perhaps 200 years which were proceeded by perhaps a thousand or more years in which there were no famous atheists in Western Europe. Given what else was going on at the time there is a good argument that science, the commercial revolution, and the decline on absolutist monarchism were instrumental in making atheism a philosophically viable position for intellectuals. It is also worth considering that Western European atheism was preceeded by deism; evolution theory probably did provide intellectual cover for the leap from deism to atheism for many, even thought atheism and deism share essentially the same roots in the West. In other words, evolution operates at too great a scale to explain in any meaningful way the presence of atheism or theism. This is a matter of history and cultural evolution, not physical evolution, which at most endowed us with the ability to hold such abstract concepts. Moreover, the intellectual history of modern atheism is in the hundreds and thousands of years (the Englightment resurgency of deism and atheism in part involves a resurgence of classical thought), the province of history, and not of pre-history. You don't have to do parol room hypotheizing, you can read the documents of the people who came up with these ideas and see when and why they came to their conclusions. There is a fairly recent and short history of Atheism in America, I can't recall the title or author, that takes basically a biographical approach to the issue, and another book by E.O. Wilson that looks at the matter biographically from perspective of European thinkers. Both would provide a feel for how these ideas evolved and why, in a very concrete way that shows why things did in fact happen, rather than what might have happened. A related mistake made by too many scholars of religion is to look at religion as primarily a matter of individual choice. Religious belief tends to flow from societal belief and from parental belief. India is full of Hindus, while pre-colonial Europe had almost none for a reason. Individual choice does not explain why Italy is Catholic while Finland is Lutheran. It does not explain why the Reformation was an event, rather than a gradual phenomena. Religion is as much a social and political phenomena as it is a matter of individual choice. If your premise is that religion and science are necessarily exclusive and cannot co-exist, you are surely wrong. While atheism is certainly more common among scientists, there are certainly theists who are also scientists, and there have even been important scientists who were also scientists (Newton, for example, was basically a gnostic, unitarian Christian). A scientific mindset may be more open to abandoning religion, but this is neither a necessary conclusion of a scientific mindset (since there are theists who are scientists), nor a necessary precondition to atheism (certainly there are atheists who came to where they are through arugments such as the argument from evil and the diversity of religions, rather than through scientific contraditions). Concluding that science and religion are mutually exclusive also requires that prove this for all religion, which is very difficult indeed. Merely proving that science is inconsistent with rabid fundamentalist Christianity, does not imply that you have proved science is inconsistent with religion. Indeed, defining religion at all is a slippery concept. Is religious humanism (a la the American Humanist Association) a religion? What about Pantheism (nature as God)? How about Buddhism (not God per se, but lots of supernatural elements)? Or Unitarian Universalist belief (agnostic about God and worldly in orientation)? Do you define religion as a social construct? A belief system based on the existence of one or more Gods? A rejection of a scientific worldview (which gives an easy but tautological answer)? Or what? Defining science is also slippery. Does it involve simply use of the scientific method to solve selected problems (most people who do that would fairly be considered scientists)? Does it involve acceptance of all prevailing scientific theories subject to the caveat of the scientific method? Does it include engineering and applied science? Is it an idea or an anthropological group of beliefs, i.e. a culture? If you try to take on the issue from a purely philosophical and theological approach, divorced from history, sociology, anthropology, and the history and culture of science, you end up with a bunch of useless blather that will convince no one and interest no one. [ August 26, 2002: Message edited by: ohwilleke ]</p>

Thread Tools	Search this Thread
Show Printable Version	Search this Thread: Advanced Search

08-24-2002, 10:59 PM	#14
Starboy Banned Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Tallahassee, FL Reality Adventurer Posts: 5,276	Splat, I can�t help but think that you are trying to dignify the motives for possessing religious belief. IMO they are the motives of a small child, a child that at its core doesn�t care about fine sensibilities like understanding how things work. When a small child is frightened it doesn�t stop and think, this is scary but it will not hurt me so I will not run away, it runs to comfort. That is what happened after 911, all the scared little Christians ran for comfort. The prime motivator for religious belief is primitive superstitious fear. Life and death is scary stuff and it is the fabric of all religions. Starboy

08-25-2002, 02:43 AM	#16
CFE Villa-Landa Junior Member Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Toledo, Spain Posts: 7	Thank you to everyone who replied, particularly Starboy and splat who are clearly thinking along the same lines as I am. The overall conclusion I have come to, which is a bit hard to put without causing offence, is that the most self-sufficient people - that is those who are not so much in need of comfort, reassurance and a purpose imposed from outside - and the most intelligent and well educated people are the most likely to be atheists. This is borne out by the 40% of believers among top scientists compared with the 90% of believers among ordinary American, though a lower percentage, I think, in Europe. Can this be all there is to it? How can so many very intelligent, apparently capable people go on sustaining religious beliefs? Are they separating different areas of their minds? If so, how do they do it?.

08-25-2002, 02:46 AM	#17
CFE Villa-Landa Junior Member Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Toledo, Spain Posts: 7	Sorry! I forgot to thank Vortosigan for the reading suggestions. I will follow those up as soon as I can.

Freethought & Rationalism Archive

The archives are read only.