Hope you don’t mind my chiming in, but if anything the evidence we have points to the contrary. “Behavioral modernity,” which anthropologists (as I read it) associate with the capacity for abstract thought, didn’t kick in until ~50,000 years ago with Homo Sapiens specifically.
I do not believe that Homo Erectus had what one could reasonably call ‘beliefs’, any more than I believe that the root of 2 is rational. It’s not an absurd proposition, IMO, but I still don’t happen to consider it true.
I’m not ‘sure’ of anything. Nor did I ever say that said beliefs were more diverse than today’s even if they did have what one might reasonably call ‘beliefs’.
Are you talking to someone standing behind me, or something?
Yes, but oddly enough, they’re miserable because Geico is the insurer up there.
Well if we’re going down this route it needs to be pointed out that the best evidence indicates that erectus had an extremely limited capacity to speak. No greater than that of a chimp in all probability. Given their inability to speak it’s hard to imagine that they had beliefs at all in any manner that we would recognise.
If we accept that they did have religious beliefs they must have been innate, since a lack of sophisticated language precludes the transmission of sophisticated ideas such as religion.
If we accept that they had innate religious beliefs then such beliefs would have been monotonous, not diverse. Birds have sophisticated-yet-innate ideas about nest building and courtship for example, but they are monotonous within species, not diverse.
It is absurd to propose that the religious beliefs of a species that lacks sophisticated language could be anything but uniform.
OK Blake, so the ‘religious beliefs’ would be not much more sophisticated than, say, “you live somewhere else when you die, and can maybe see and affect the living”, and thus cannot be said to be diverse species-wide because the cognition required to produce such diversity was not yet available.
Sounds sensible. My proposal is sunk. See? This is debate.
I still propose that Homo Erectus getting into Heaven on the strength of such a ‘belief’ is pretty outlandish even for Heaven-believers, but hey, I still seek enlightenment.
I am posting to the person who made these assertions -
Why should I assume that this is correct?
What “belief” has been demonstrated? You haven’t produced a scrap of evidence that Homo erectus had any beliefs at all.
Assuming facts not in evidence, your client is guilty. Therefore, he should be convicted. :rolleyes:
“If A is true, and B is true, then C is absurd.”
“Why do you think that A is true?”
Your response has been “I don’t think A is true!” Fine. Then C is not absurd.
Regards,
Shodan
There seems to be some misunderstanding of what I’m doing here, so I thought I’d make it clear.
I don’t happen to believe in heaven myself. But if there is a heaven, some exploration of the options regarding entry or otherwise seems appropriate.
[ul][li]Either no Homo Erectus people got in, some got in, or all got in.[/li]
[li]Either no Homo Sapiens get in, some get in, or all get in.[/ul] [/li]
For Heaven-believers to believe that …
[ul][li]None of either get in seems contradictory – would an empty Heaven be worth calling such?[/li][li]All of both get in seems … profligate. We would have to delve futher back in time to find organisms which were barred for being, I dunno, too stupid (raising the question of cognition-impaired humans, note.)[/li][li]Only some Homo Sapiens get in seems … exclusive. This appears to be the most common view amongst Heaven-believers, who usually further believe that you enter or not based on your beliefs and/or acts while living (either at the moment of death or perhaps as a kind of ‘average’ throughout).[/ul][/li]
What I’ve been trying to explore here is what kind of criterion would see some Homo Erectus enter while leaving some Homo Sapiens barred. The more ‘primitive’ the beliefs become, the more arbitrary it seems to bar someone for their absence. And the more ‘sophisticated’ and ‘specific’ the beliefs become, the more unlikely it is that a person will ever have heard the “password”, let alone believed it enough to get to say it at the gate.
A Heaven that excludes based on arbitrary criteria seems absurd to me, given these considerations. Again, I invite anyone here to point out any flaws in my thinking.
Absurdities in the logical combinations of propositions are independent of whether those propositions are true or not. b>0 being even and odd is absurd regardless of whether I believe root 2 is rational or not. This is the very basis of reductio ad absurdans. If you don’t believe me, ask someone you trust.
You are becoming tedious and I doubt this will will do anything but go in one ear and out the other, but yes, your thinking is flawed not least because of your unfounded assumption (which you refuse to address) that Homo Erectus, or any species outside of Homo Sapiens, had the capacity for abstract thought. It’s not a matter of “beliefs” becoming more “primitive” as you go further down the evolutionary ladder; it’s that “beliefs” can’t be shown to exist in any species at all save humans. Perhaps that seems “exclusive”, but then you’re back to asking why fruit flies can’t get into heaven.
You’ve been at this for a while, hope there’s no chafing down there. You need some lube or something?
The question raised in the OP is a good one IMHO, and some here don’t seem to get the point. Where is the line between animals eligible for salvation, who have an eternal soul, and those who don’t? Did Neanderthals have souls? Lucy? Ardipithecus? Chimpanzees? Dogs? Lizards? Bacteria?
If someone thinks that humans have eternal souls but a lizard doesn’t, then where in the great tree of life is the divider between the soulful and the soulless?
Hmmm… is there free will in heaven? What about evil?
How about the point where a species demonstrates self-awareness plus the capacity for abstract thought? If a creature can think to itself, “this is me, an individual distinct from others” and then “where does this thing called “me” go after I die?”, then there you go.
Depends on whose heaven you’re talking about, of course. If you mean the Christian heaven, then my understanding is that “evil” is another way of saying “in a state of separation from God”, which would be a contradition in terms with the idea that heaven entails some sort of union with God. BTW, some Christians use the same concept to define hell: a state of utter separation from God.
So if the capacity for abstract thought is the separator, when did that happen? Homo Habilis? Homo Ergaster?
Surely you’ll agree that the capacity for abstract thought is a continuum - chimpanzees have it somewhat, even blue jays seem to have some notion of it. However you measure it, they don’t have as much as humans, but how much is enough and when in history did ensoulment happen?
So, apparently they have cars in heaven. Do you need health insurance up there? Do you get a Cobra option for 18 months if you’re “laid off” from heaven?
As to the OP… you tell me which religion is the correct one, and I’ll tell you if cavemen can go to heaven.
Ah, “surely it is so” again. Seems to be a popular argument these days. But just for funsies, why is it so surely the case that capacity for abstract thought is a continuum?
As for your last question, I linked to this earlier in the thread:
So, it would seem to be among anatomically modern humans some time between 250,000 and 50,000 years ago.
Of course cavemen and cavewomen get into heaven. The streets may be paved with gold, but someone’s got to mix the stuff up in a pelican’s mouth.
Then friend Blake is mistaken in his “assumptions” about the sophisticated-yet-innate ideas of birds and the like.
Look, if Homo Erectus didn’t have ‘beliefs’, then that’s a dead-end in terms of exploring belief-based criteria for entry into heaven. If he did, we can explore this line of reasoning further. If ‘beliefs’ didn;t appear until a quarter-or-so My ago, we can explore the logical consequences of that threshold too.
Deal?
He didn’t give it to Judas. Not when it counted, at least.
He didn’t give it to Judas. Not when it counted, at least.
Any way you slice it, at some point in time a creature without a soul gave birth to a creature with a soul. Unless all creatures that have ever existed have souls.
Catholic theology posits that souls who died before Christ went to a place referred to as “Limbo,” right? Dante conceived of Limbo as the First Circle of Hell, where the souls were not tormented and indeed were well-treated, but were nonetheless separated from God.
The Last Temptation of Christ posits that Judas chose to be the traitor, at Jesus’ request. Someone had to betray him to set events in motion, and Judas was the strongest of the disciples.
That’s a novel, right?
It was prophesied in the Old Testament that Jesus would be betrayed. Whoever fulfilled that prophecy had no choice in the matter.
Almost certainly more intelligent than a chimp, although measuring intelligence across species is problematic. There is no evidence that I’m aware of that H. erectus cared for infirm. Neanderthals, yes. Most anthropologists would dispute their having “complex language”, although it is a possibility. Fire, maybe, although that may not have happened for another 500,000 years.
Just trying to keep the facts straight here. I started a thread about this exact subject many years ago, and not really interested in re-debating the subject.