If there was no religion how would have humans evolved ??

Great Debates
61

Again, I understand what you were asking (although I see that you’ve now substituted “quasi-scientific thought” in place of “religion” which is something of a goalpost shift.) What I don’t understand is why you chose to quote a post which had nothing whatsoever to do with it, rather than any one of the several others which did.

In any case, I don’t think I can posit such a sequence of events. As I’ve already stated, I understand the fact that religion came first, and even explained why that was the case. Hoewever, that does nothing to directly support the initial claim I was addressing, which was that religion is necessary to the development of science. In fact, I’ll quote it in full:

62

Not at all, at least not in the sense of arriving at answers to cosmological/philosophical inquiries before working out a scientific method, which is a sense in which “quasi-scientific thought” = “religion.”

Think of math: you wouldn’t expect the first person to grapple with the concept of 2+2 and 2x2 to also be able to do algebra correctly, later that afternoon, would you?. He’d (or his ancestor many generations later would) have to test out various incorrect equations to find out rules and laws and principles and axioms–that would be the equivalent of religious thinking leading towards science. It’s incorrect, it’s far short of complete, it’s frustratingly full of contradictions and holes, but eventually those difficulties keep people motivated to invent a system that does work smoothly.

63

I don’t thing that science came from religion, anymore than I think that man came from monkey-what they have in common is an ancestor. In the case of evolution, man and monkey came from a vicious little mammal. In the case of science and religion, the common ancestor was the question, “Why”. Religion took the tack of coming up with the best possible answer, then finding support for that position. Science gathered as much evidence as was possible then proposed an answer, ever ready to change as more evidence rolled in.

IMHO, of course.

64

Not it came from religion, but that religion necessarily preceded science, and filled the void that primitive humans would have felt in making sense of their universe. We could speak and think for thousands of years before stumbing on the first glimmers of scientific methods–don’t you think religion thrived in that vacuum?

65

No; because they wouldn’t have a rational alternative. Humans turned to religion because they are defective, not because religion provided meaningful answers or was some sort of interim solution.

Of course; religion is nothing but lies and delusions, so naturally it thrives in conditions of ignorance. That doesn’t make it the ancestor of science any more than filth is the ancestor of cleanliness.

66

See, this is where you lose me, Der Trihs: I may be the poster most in agreement with you (and your tone) regarding the usefulness of religion at this point in history, but now I think you’re just vomiting up hatred on an empty stomach. Religion= filth? Okay, let’s follow out your analogy. Filth IS the ancestor of cleanliness, in that we would never get to frame the concept of cleanliness if everything were always brand-new spanking clean somehow. The concept of “filth” leads directly to the concept of cleanliness, and cleanliness is difficult to achieve, requires sacrifice and effort and intelligence and discipline to maintain.

I guess I don’t hate religious people in 2009 the same way you do. I don’t hate them at all, except that I have very little use for them and sometimes they chafe my undershorts, but mostly I feel compassion for them. They’re kissing the ass (and sometimes the ring) of organized religion because it provides comfort for them, a comfort that made some sense for their grandparents to take, perhaps, and a lot more sense for THEIR grandparents to take, and so on, until we reach the point of the ancestors in loincloths, to whom religion was the first noble attempt to answer some basic questions raised by their burgeoning consciousness: what is this light in the sky and why does it disappear regularly? How come the stuff that grows out of the soil stops growing when it gets cold, and then starts growing again when it gets warm? Why DOES it get warm for months on end, and then cold, and then warm again? Why does water come out of the sky?

Do you really see such proto-humans asking themselves such questions as evil? Lying to themselves? Do you really see such people inventing proto-hypotheses in the forms of myth (which led after some point to organized religion) as deliberate self-deluders? I can see how such terms apply to people in 2009 who choose to stick with the total comfort chosen by their ancestors rather than the incomplete comfort that science provides–I fault my religious contemporaries for a lack of imagination and bravery and humility and intellectual rigor and honesty, just as you do, but going back enough generations, I can see the appeal of religious thought, and even admire those who came up with it, thousands and thousands of years ago. It was a mistake, as I see it, but a mistake that had to have been made. Now it’s a mistake that we might eradicate, given more time and a little luck.

Don’t you cut any of your ancestors a little slack for having much less available data to go on than we do? Do you castigate Washington and Jefferson as slave-holding brutes completely lacking in enlightenment? Maybe you do, but I think you’re over-simplifying if you do and allowing your rhetoric to phrase things in a way that’s just plain wrong. If Jefferson voiced some concepts that we have use for today, even if some of it was hypocritical for a slave-holder to opine, doesn’t that mean merely that he was working out internal contradictions? Would you rather Jefferson had said, “Nah, I can’t write this bit about ‘all men are created equal’ because I’m a slaveowning piece of shit” or that he wrote it and tried to figure out how it would apply to a slave-holding society? Don’t you have more and more compassion for people who are working in less and less enlightened times than ours?

67

Yes, since they had no evidence for any of those myths. They were intellectual cowards, unwilling to say “I don’t know”. And they weren’t “asking questions”; they were declaring the “facts” to be what they wanted them to be, and denying that the asking of questions was necessary. That’s religion; the death of thought and inquiry.

But I simply don’t regard it as something that had to be made, nor do I regard it as the ancestor of science in any way. It is and has always been the opposite of science, not it’s ancestor. In a religion free alternate humanity, I suspect science would have developed millennia ago.

Religion is based on the deliberate avoidance and distortion of data, as well as reason, so yes I blame them.

Owning slaves is an evil great enough to overwhelm everything else about them. I don’t care about their other achievements any more than I care about the Nazi’s enlightened forestry policy.

68

It seems to be a fairly unscientific approach to denounce initial incorrect answers, especially in the context of almost no technology, as “evil.” How are you supposed to get the right answers if you’re an evil piece of shit for coming up with loads of wrong ones first? If a human 30,000 years ago was evil for supposing that his environment was speaking to him in a way that we now understand environments are incapable of speaking, how would you compare that level of “evil” to say Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or any 20th Century boogeyman? The same? Less evil? More evil? Or just “I don’t give a shit–they can all suck my hairy nutsack”?

I would posit that you are saying that humans are inherently evil critters.

69

Religion was invented by man. God is the product of religion, packaged and sold to gullible people like you.

I would venture to say that without religion, the human race would be an awful lot happier than it is now.

70

If you’re so dismissive of God, why do you self-identify as an agnostic rather than an atheist?

71

Der Trihs, you are a mite confused if you think I’m an apologist for religion. My vehemence on the subject has led me to be quite a jackass several times recently. Though I don’t believe, as you seem to, that believers are ipso facto delusional and evil, I also think the religious impulse is, on balance, deleterious to our current society.

What I don’t believe is that the unfortunate effects of religion are unique to it. If humans didn’t believe in gods, they’d find something else to be cruel to one another over. Just as, if no woman in the world ever worse a miniskirt, halter top, or bikini, some men would still commit rape. It’s in our genes.

72

You got the order mixed up, in the beginning God created the heavens and earth…In the beginning was the Word. God and the Word (Who is God) came first, then man went astray and created religion.

I would agree.

73

I don’t agree with this. Religion is not the series of guesses and made up explanations, it’s the codification and enforcement of these guesses and made up explanations. You can have superstitious explanations without religion, I’m not sure you can have religion (as defined by the OP anyway) without superstitious explanations. I think it might have been possible for humanity to gone from superstition to careful observation without a ‘my explanation is right, kill the unbelievers’ stage.

74

Seconded - hypothesizing that the volcano god gets mad when not fed virgins is science. Testing that hypothesis by throwing virgins into the volcano periodically is science. Falling prey to selective memory and confirmation bias, and thus not noticing that the virgin sacrifice isn’t helping matters isn’t science…but it’s pretty unavoidable before the advent of common literacy and decent tracking and recording of events as they occur, so we can’t really hold it against them. All of the above is pretty much inevitable (well, not virgin sacrifice specifically, but some crazy theory. And none of the above is religion.

When people latch onto their pet unproven hypothesis so hard that they refuse to accept when evidence goes against it, that’s religion, and that’s when science ceases. And while humans have always gone down this route, probably because it’s easy to consolidate your power over others if you can convince them you are THE mouthpeice of correct and infallible information (which means you need to sell the hypothesis as correct and infallible), this step clearly isn’t necessary for the development of science. It’s the antithesis of development of science. Only when humans backtrack from religion, at least regarding the subject at hand, are they able to go down the alternate path of rational science.

75

I’m not sure exactly what you’re disagreeing with, because I agree with you, I think. Humans were able to frame pretty ambitious questions WAY before they had any tools to answer them properly, or really anything less than stupidly, foolishly, ineptly and incompetently. Some of these wrong answers had a superificial appeal–the earth is clearly staying perfectly still while the sun is moving around it on a daily basis. In the total absence of a competing scientific narrative, is it any wonder that some of these “truths” became codified, re-told, incorporated into tribal mythologies, etc.? Just asking questions is a gigantic advancement towards scientific knowledge, even thousands of years before the first correct answers appeared.

If you don’t believe this, trying asking your dog how the universe began. Even if you could translate the question into cocker spaniel, he wouldn’t have a clue what to do with the question, because he lacks the first element of a scientific mindset, the ability to privilege reason over emotion, instinct, etc. Just accepting the concept of “reason,” the idea of causation, is the beginning of science, however far it is from finding scientific answers.

76

Wait… so because religion came before science that means that there never would have been any science if it weren’t for religion?? That’s a little like saying milk is a gateway drug:

“Almost all heroin addicts used milk before they ever tried heroin therefore milk is a gateway drug that leads to heroin use.”
That’s not very sound logic–perhaps you need more religion so as to improve your scientific thinking.

77

Perhaps by early afternoon… everyone would be pretty tired and hungover from the massive “HEY! there’s no religion anymore, WOO-HOOOO!!!” parties and orgies.

78

Oh, I understand why it happened. Greed, desire to control, etc. But I don’t think it was necessary. Religion took unverified guesses and proclaimed them fact. No investigation or disagreement was allowed, sometimes on pain of death. Religion was a step back from human development toward science, not a step forward. I think it could have been possible for humanity to have reached scientific investigation without going through religion first. Not likely, given humanity’s propensity for easy comfort and simple answers, but possible.

79

Anything’s possible–we could developed a really stiff hair gel while we were still living in trees and eventually learned how to walk about upside-down supported by our really stiff hair–but I’m asking for a plausible alternate theory of how human would have gone from “Bright bright big light in sky–where come from?” to the scientific method without going through a religious phase and all I get is “It’s possible?”

80

Without meaning to offend, is it possible that the disconnect is because in this argument you are inaccurately using “religion” in place of “philosophy”?

This is a question:
“Bright bright big light in sky–where come from?” Yes?

Religion is not a question but an answer: “From God, and you must have faith in this.” No?