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Evolutionary origin of idea of god.

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  • Evolutionary origin of idea of god.



    Even though long, quite good read.

    In short: two researchers are exploring if evolution can be attributed to our idea about afterlife. So far they see that apparently tendency for this idea is hardwired into us, and not merely a meme - the younger the children, the more they take afterlife seriously (should be opposite if mostly culture influenced this). (The only weak point which I see in their experimant is that possibly younger children are more prone to anthropomorphisation. ) So evolution made us at least more open to the idea of afterlife/gods/spirits.
    Interestingly, no outrage has taken place...perhaps because ID folks dismiss evolution altogether, so no biggie for them. And they can always say that god made us that way...

    Inreresting/fun quotes:
    The mouse strolled across a small puppet theater made up with a plastic tree and artificial grass, where the alligator hid. The mouse explained his woes: He was lost, sick, sleepy, hungry, and thirsty. After the mouse's brief soliloquy, Mr. Alligator emerged perfunctorily and ate the mouse. The end.

    After making sure that the child understood the concept that the mouse was no longer alive, he or she was asked a series of questions.
    (many other questions) Can he still smell the flowers?
    children come into the world with a strong tendency to believe in a soul that survives death. The children responded, in other words, exactly the way they would if there were systems already in their brains that prevented them from thinking that intentions, thoughts, and feelings ceased after death.
    Bering thinks that a belief in the supernatural might have helped proto-humans survive on the savanna. "If you think you're being monitored, your behavior will be enhanced in a fitness-enhancing fashion," Bering says. In other words, believing that a God was watching might have made our ancestors more likely to survive.
    "Humans have evolved this tendency to look for explanations, to look for causes," he says in a characteristically dispassionate way. "This ends up giving meaning to life. It forms how we think about the world. Religion and spirituality emanate from it."
    "My meaning in life is to illustrate that there really is no meaning,"
    "We've got God by the throat, and I'm not going to stop until one of us is dead."
    At the center of the highly coordinated, PR-driven ID agenda: to make biology sound as if it were in disarray, as if science itself were in high retreat.

    That's proved a brilliant tactic, resonating with millions of Americans who seem to relish the idea of scientists' having second thoughts about Charles Darwin's historic insight. The thing is, it isn't true. Biological evolution is as strongly held, and experimentally and observationally supported, as ever. There is no retreat from evolution, despite what ID adherents desperately want school boards around the country to believe.
    These anthropologists and psychologists wonder if the nearly universal human tendency to believe in gods is a kind of programming that resulted from natural selection. Until recently, the field had an unwritten rule: Focus your work on the beliefs and spirits of little-known "primitive" societies in far-off lands.

    But hands off Jehovah.
    "You can never get around God designing our mind to believe these things," Bering says. Just as some creationists believe that God purposely buried dinosaur fossils so that we would find them, so too it's easy for such a mind to think that God would bury a fossil representing himself in our brains.
    You gotta love these things near the end:
    But that concept can also be turned on its head. Just as some creationists believe that scientists are deluding themselves about the bones they dig up that seemingly confirm evolution, Bjorklund and Bering believe that their work shows that creationists are operating under their own delusions.
    They can't help believing in creationism. After all, evolution made them that way.
    Bjorklund calls creationism the "species default." "The notion of creationism is intellectually easier to understand," he says. "It's been only very recently that we get to understand how things emerge without a creator, and it's hard to really live that way. Our minds did not evolve for this."
    As famous biologist Richard Dawkins suggests, "It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism and to find it hard to believe."
    Bering agrees. "It is clear that when it comes to the big questions in life, our brains have evolved so that science eludes us but religion comes naturally," he writes in American Scientist.

    ...

    The irony is, Bjorklund and Bering know that even if they are right, we are all hardwired to disbelieve their results. "There will never be a day when God does not speak for the majority," Bering wrote recently. "As scientists, we must toil and labor and toil again to silence God, but ultimately this is like cutting off our ears to hear more clearly. God too is a biological appendage."

  • #2
    Actually, there are many early faiths that had no concept of an afterlife, or not much of one. The Judaeo-Christian tradition had no concept of an afterlife until the exiled Jews in Persia adopted the tenets of Zoroastrianism into their own faith.
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    I'm the least you could do
    If only life were as easy as you
    I'm the least you could do, oh yeah
    If only life were as easy as you
    I would still get screwed

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    • #3
      I'm wondering how one can factor out the influence of the parents in such a study. Even atheists live in a society of mostly christian values and many proverbs influenced by christianity. It is near-impossible to keep even very small children away from the idea of an afterlife.
      There's an Opera in my macbook.

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      • #4
        Hmm...they wrote about performing the experiment with children in both secular and very religiuos places. They didn't mention the results differed in significant way.

        Gurm, hmm, I didn't know that about Judaizm (BTW...don't you feel that's somehow "dangerous" to your faith (not the whole, yours)...that it was clearly influenced in very important issue by beliefs not cosidered "the true ones" and so on?...). But this is mostly about spiritualism, I believe...of course:
        1) This tends to change into full fledged religion over time (especially in connection with feudalism/etc. - spiritualism really can't be used to controll people)
        2) One of the researchers tries to be very provokative

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        • #5
          Hmmmm...they're correct, it doesn't provoke any reactions/controversy!!!

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          • #6
            I do remember reading an article in the science section of my paper on how they could measure religious experiences with EEG type instruments AND could trigger such experiences with certain substances. They went on to say that these substances can be present in the brain naturally and that that could well be an explanation for what some people call religious experiences.
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            • #7
              Seems like a determined movement to reduce the human being to some dumb machine.. no more than the chemicals thrown together to make one. Sucks to be them. Looks like myopic concentration on science really does atrophy one's emotions.

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              • #8
                Like organised religion? Also, one might say: (sorry, I tried to write thing below in 3rd person, but was confused in few parts, so settled with 2nd...)
                And...sucks to not have appreciation to the thing that your are everything that makes you... The molecules, components you're made of change all the time, some become part of you, other cease...but you're the unique way in which everything that makes you is combined. Sucks to not have distinction between what you are and what makes you. That what makes you you, will die, but that what you are made from, will continue to exist. Sucks one has to be believe in things which might as well not exist to appreciate ourselfes, life itself.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by KvHagedorn
                  Seems like a determined movement to reduce the human being to some dumb machine.
                  Then what kind of machine are we, KvH?
                  Gigabyte P35-DS3L with a Q6600, 2GB Kingston HyperX (after *3* bad pairs of Crucial Ballistix 1066), Galaxy 8800GT 512MB, SB X-Fi, some drives, and a Dell 2005fpw. Running WinXP.

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                  • #10
                    It's all in the software, I tell ya!
                    There's an Opera in my macbook.

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                    • #11
                      Since nobody laughed at "Can he still smell the flowers?"...I suppose only here "smelling flowers from below" means, well...that you're dead?

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                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Nowhere
                        Since nobody laughed at "Can he still smell the flowers?"...I suppose only here "smelling flowers from below" means, well...that you're dead?
                        Yes, sorry. Here in the USA euphemisms for "dead" include "pushing up daisies" (daisies are a type of flower) and "six feet under".
                        The Internet - where men are men, women are men, and teenage girls are FBI agents!

                        I'm the least you could do
                        If only life were as easy as you
                        I'm the least you could do, oh yeah
                        If only life were as easy as you
                        I would still get screwed

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                        • #13
                          Daisies are close enough...

                          BTW, what about the question about Judaism?

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