I would agree with that, and have stated it as science is worship and study of creation not the creator, religion is a bunch of man made rules and rituals that have nothing to do with faith in God.
Science isn’t worship, though. Just wanted to point that out.
And there is no way to study the creator except by his works, which includes his creations. Undoubtedly, if there is a creator-god, then the universe he created is the most direct connection we have to that creator. Any book you may have is muddied by the handprints of man and at best a secondhand reference.
POE = Problem of Evil.
This is not true, actually each sentence is not true. Paul’s Damascus road encounter with the Lord Jesus blows it all out of the water.
No, that was Satan.
No, really. You believe Satan could have done that, right? What reason have you to believe that wasn’t Satan, who interacted with Paul on the road to Damascus?
Any vision or experience you have could be satan. The only thing that you can be certain is God’s handiwork is the universe itself - If not that, then nothing.
I dunno, whenever I overflowed in the past, something had to get cleaned real fast.
God will arrange the cleanup, perhaps that’s the reason demons were created and why some of them rebelled and wants us to clean it up ourselves.
Trying to one again keep it at a very basic level. God created us in his image, so much so that men are gods according to God. As gods we have a tendency to try to do things our own way, but the only way that does not lead to death is God’s way. God wanting us to be ourselves allows us to be our own gods, which we quickly screw that up, but it takes a while for us to realize that. Once we do we realize that we need God to save us and we don’t want to run our own life. At this point we willingly surrender to God and realize it is in our best interest and is the best possible life for us.
On God’s side, Him willing to accept our punishment is because He had to because of His Love for us.
Satan provided the temptation for Eve, but it was Adam that actually stepped out of the will of God onto his own path (as Eve followed Satan’s path).
But that’s a legend, not a fact. Even if some of us believe it’s a true story, you build an argument based on facts, not beliefs, i.e. opinions.
The fact that you, kanicbird, habitually misrepresent your opinions as facts is tantamount to bearing false witness.
I do have some comments on the topic of the original OP. Personally I feel that innate brain functions are at a much lower and general purpose level than people usually assume. The incredible flexibility of the mind – the ability to deal effectively with problems evolution could never anticipate – comes from thought being the result of huge numbers of primitive but flexible operations. I expect that concepts like God, religion, the supernatural, and even irrationality, are at too high a level to be produced at all directly by genetic mechanisms, but are emergent properties of years of thought, experiences, and cultural interactions.
If there are genetic traits that make religion more likely, I would think the main advantage would be that warriors from a religious tribe might be more willing to fight to the death than those from non-religious tribes, perhaps providing a survival boost for the religious ones. I would expect things like social cohesiveness could be produced by mechanisms simpler than religion, like a desire for peer approval.
While (in my opinion) religion is irrational, it’s very reasonable that it could be the accidental outcome of useful brain mechanisms. We observe that animals and people behave purposefully and therefore come to recognize “purpose” as a property that some things have. Having evolved without any clue as to how a brain might work, there’s no logical reason to assume that purpose is restricted to things with brains or even material things. Forming hypotheses and checking them against experience is obviously useful, but unfortunately we’re not quite subtle enough (without education) to notice that there’s no way to disprove certain types of vague hypotheses. As a result these things get passed from generation to generation without being falsified. When a combination of hypotheses includes the idea that we are morally bad (disapproved of by the community) if we don’t believe the doctrine, that doctrine can be very hard to get rid of.
So I don’t think religion is inevitable given our genetics. It is an understandable cultural development, but it’s also possible that cultural advancement could lead to its demise.
Isn’t biology, specifically genetics, irrelevant to religion?
How is it possible make moral decisions based upon genetic theory?
Religion is a attempt to dominate and control others, sometimes using access to the supernatural as a basis of getting others to submit to another. As such it is a very human trait.
Much appreciated – my expertise in the supernatural runs precisely contrary to my experience with reality.
In order for me to act as a god, I’d first need to know what a god (yours in this case) does and/or is capable of doing. It is for that very reason I asked you to define the deity you believe in a couple of posts back – you apparently refuse to do so. However picking and choosing your responses to my queries is not helpful in furthering our discussion.
Thus, once more, describe your god as clearly as you are capable of doing. Please avoid generalizations and use common language. “God is love” means as much as “God is a hamburger” to me.
Yet another criticism coming from you against your own version of god. For your God wants us to be something he knows we are going to fail at.
By my count, your God is now an insecure, cruel liar, who likes to see people fail. If you’ll excuse me, so far, I find your deity to be worthy of nothing but scorn – if I could deceive myself into believing such claptrap. Which I can’t.
Who signs your checks at work and takes care of your bills after you’ve surrendered your life to this illusion?
If it’s your god, please do scan a few of his checks for me to see. Promise I won’t attempt to forge his signature.
Tell you what, ask someone close to you to flagellate themselves till there’s hardly any skin left and tell them you ask only because you love them so much.
Your God would certainly be a hit amongst some patrons at Hellfire, NYC, but outside of those circles…not so much.
Beyond the fact that there never was a Paradise or an Eve or an Adam and much less a Satan other than in the Bible fables, how do I make any sense out of this? Read it upside down, close my left eye squint with my right one and let all the blood rush to the top of my head? Besides who cares, even as a believer, if it was Adam’s or Eve’s “fault”? The end-result is the same, innit?
Guess you need to get even more basic if there is any hope we might have a rational conversation. Which as I imagine you already know is factually impossible when faith is involved.
Oh well…appreciate the effort.
Well, shifting focus somewhat from the focus on neuroscience, I agree that theists who think theism and evolution are compatible often have a poor understanding of evolution. The standard claim is that God allowed evolution to happen, but guided it to produce humans. For one thing, there is little evidence that evolution is a guided process. There is much jury rigging (or ‘evolutionary opportunism’ as biologists like to call it) of the kind you would not expect if the process were guided by a God who didn’t evolve things into evolutionary blind alleys. Gould’s The Panda’s Thumbis a well-known source for a discussion of evolution’s ad hoc solutions. These are often sub-optimal solutions that could have been improved upon if some planning had been involved–something that evolution, of course, cannot do, but God presumably could do *if *He were guiding the process.
Thus, it seems we must acknowledge that evolution is unguided (which itself may present problems for theism). And so we must acknowledge your point about evolution: evolution has no particular goals in mind–it doesn’t aim to produce intelligent creatures, or religious creatures, or anything. None of these are inevitable outcomes of evolution; and so the theist must grapple with the difficulties this presents for theism.
This would be a correct statement if the “in part” aspect at the end had been left off. It is true that the development of Homo sapiens sapiens, like all other living things, is an interaction of genes and the environment and is not determined genetically.
Regarding behavior
Motor cortex has a somatotopic organization of behaviors. Many people are aware of the motor cortex topographic homonculus (image) which has areas dedicated specifically to each body part. Neurons are dedicated to each area in proportion to that area’s survival utility. The mouth/hands get a lot of cortex. The pecker is pretty big too. Less well known is that overlayed on this map is behavioral homunculus that follows the same rule. Putting an electrode in monkey motor cortex forces the monkey to perform activities based on the site of stimulation. The longer the stimulation, the more sophisticated the behavior. For example, its trivial to get the monkey to get out of his chair and try to climb, eat or have sex with nothing. This rule obviously follows for humans as well. The development of such representations is of course a gene/environment interaction, but there is no doubt that these behaviors are encoded in your genome. Your genome encodes for your limbs, and the “environment” for motor cortex is the body, which is encoded for by your genome. It only takes movement of the relevant body parts in order for the appropriate representations to develop. This has been demonstrated in research on kittens. They tape the front two legs back for a significant period of time after birth. That area of motor cortex does not develop. They then remove the tape and allow the kitten to learn to walk. Motor cortex develops identically.
[ul]
[li] Graziano (2006). The organization of behavioral repertoire in motor cortex. Anual Review of Neuroscience (msg me for pdf)[/li][/ul]
Regarding attitudes and preferences
These are largely conflated terms that fall in the domain of personality psychology. Are our personalities determined genetically, at least in part? Perhaps you’ve heard of the field of behavioral genetics, or the Big 5 personality questionnaire. The striking thing about personality psychology is that, generally speaking, our personalities are stable. This means that if you take a personality assessment at 20, you’ll very probably get the same result at 50. How does that imply a partial genetic component? Personality psychology has identified a number of continuums, such as introversion<->extraversion, and all human beings who take them fall somewhere on it. And all human beings tend to maintain the same “preferences”, in personality psychology lingo, over their entire lifetime.
And here is the most striking genetic finding that I know of to date. It presumably needs no explaining:
[ul]
[li]Friedman, N. P., Miyake, A., Young, S. E., DeFries, J. C., Corley, R. P., & Hewitt, J. K. (2009). Individual differences in executive functions are almost entirely genetic in origin. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.[/li][/ul]
From what I get from scriptures a ‘god’ has the following characteristics:
Ability to create life
Ability to create reality
Ability to be worshiped
As such God, (most/all?) demons and men have such characteristics.
God is the only entity who wants you to life a blessed life and has the power to do that and has made a way for you to be with Him and live the best possible life that a Loving God could possibly create for you.
He hates to see us go our own way, He knows the pain it will cause, but will use every tear that falls to help guide us to what we are searching for,to have us realize what we so long for is Him.
Yet another criticism coming from you against your own version of god. For your God wants us to be something he knows we are going to fail at.
Please check your world view at the door, it is less then useless here: Beyond the illusion of the world view of work is God’s view of work. In my physical work I am in the technical field, I travel to many places. My work for the Lord involves who I meet there. Now I was never one to push Jesus on someone as we commonly view it, but to talk to people, sometimes just talking about a aspect of God’s view of life without mentioning God (or any of His names) at all. Others are believers who are going through a struggle, God will clue me in to if this person is a believer, normally they will bring it up, which opens the door to talk about deeper issues of faith. This is the most satisfying work I have ever done and totally transformed my job and my life, normally the actual physical work now goes very easy, I run into far less frustrating complications, my work has been better quality, as I’m sure God is assisting that part because that is not my real purpose there.
Here is the best part about it, it’s not just for kanicbird, but anyone who seeks Him.
Well, we had a long thread on this issue not too long ago: It is impossible to be a Christian that accepts the theory of evolution
In what sense are they not inevitable?
If the universe is completely deterministic, the whatever is, is inevitable; it couldn’t have turned out any other way without someone or something setting things up differently.
If, at any point, things could have gone a different way than the way they actually went, this would involve either true randomness or an Agent that can make free, undetermined choices. Which may be the case, but scientific theories don’t get to invoke either “God did it” or “it just happened that way for no reason” and still be science.
I just mean that evolution isn’t teleological; it isn’t goal-oriented. It doesn’t plan (as evolutionary opportunism illustrates) in the way that an intelligent designer or guider of evolution would plan. There is a sense, assuming determinism, in which certain evolutionary outcomes were inevitable given the initial conditions and laws of nature. Indeed, some evolutionary outcomes probably are inevitable regardless of initial conditions–I remember reading in Dawkins’ *Climbing Mount Improbable *that the eye has evolved independently perhaps as many as 60 times in the history of life. That makes it fairly inevitable, from an evolutionary standpoint.
Not sure how I missed that other thread, but I’m sure all of these points were endlessly hashed out there.
As someone who is studying evolutionary biology I can tell you that there are arguments for religion being selected for because of the benefit it proves the group members. We had a whole section on this in one of my classes where my professor made a very strong argument for it.
First of all, group selection is very weak, except in certain circumstances. The problem is, most animals which form large groups tend to be highly related. Humans are the only species with huge groups of non-kin all working together that are unrelated.
Because of this, there have been many arguments for the development of religion as a way to force non-kin members to work together in groups. There has actually been some strong research what supports this. If you think about it, getting people to behave is absolutely the best when you have a religion backed up the social norms. That’s why communes which are based on religion last much longer than communes that are secular. The closest we get to true communism (like in the Hutterites) the more religion and the more confining the religion needs to be.
We can see examples of this in what happened between Christians and Romans after some periods of plagues. The Christians had tenets in their religion which required many members to care for the sick while the Romans were more likely to abandon them. More Christians survived, more people converted once they saw the differences, and the Christians spread more.
Most of these articles I have access to through my college, but I’ll also post some that everyone can read:
Sosis. 2004. The adaptive value of religious ritual.
This argues that religion helps overcome collective action problems and shows a positive relationship between length of commune and costly requirements, showing that religious communes laster longer and, among religious communes, those with more requirements lasted longer too. He even had evidence which suggests that within a commune, those who are required to show more outward sign of devotion to faith are more devoted to the commune in general.
Wilson. 2004. Testing major evolutionary hypotheses about religion with a random sample.
Abstract Theories of religion that are supported with selected examples can be criticized for selection bias. This paper evaluates major evolutionary hypotheses about religion with a random sample of 35 religions drawn from a 16-volume encyclopedia of world religions. The results are supportive of the group-level adaptation hypothesis developed in Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Wilson 2002). Most religions in the sample have what Durkheim called secular utility. Their otherworldly elements can be largely understood as proximate mechanisms that motivate adaptive behaviors. Jainism, the religion in the sample that initially appeared most challenging to the group-level adaptation hypothesis, is highly supportive upon close examination. The results of the survey are preliminary and should be built upon by a multidisciplinary community as part of a field of evolutionary religious studies.
Free papers that argue for the evolution of religion:
Sosis: religions behaviors, badges, and bas: signaling theory and the evolution of religion.
Dow. 2008. Is religion an evolutionary adaptation?
There’s a lot more if you just go to scholar.google.com and type in the keywords.
A free bit of a book
Where God and Sience Meet
Now, as for how religion and evolution aren’t incompatible:
It depends how much you give to God. If you think that God started the spark of life or that God just watches creation, occasionally nudging it (punctuated equilibrium?) how are they in conflict.
That evolution has no goal in mind seems to be a non-sequitur. Furthermore it’s not exactly true. As an optimization process evolution certainly is maximizing a function. That function is the goal of evolution. It is generally considered to be fitness, specifically reproductive fitness. This goal is very much implicit and tied up in the nature of the universe. Stating correctly that evolution has a goal is not problematic. It is a huge generalization to jump from evolution having a goal to evolution being a sentient process. Most, if not all, natural processes have goals! The universe itself has the goal of maximizing entropy. All of its behaviors are consistent with this fact (except that we do not yet fully understand how entropy and complexity are increasing at the same time). The same goes for evolution.
I consider the argument that individual and group belief in a higher power is a consequence of evolution to be a considerably more powerful argument than simply pointing out that evolution has no “goal.”