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

Great Debates
81

People have repeatedly told you how. Simply cut out the concept of faith. As I and others have said in various ways, religion was never some sort of stepping stone between ignorance and science; it’s never been anything but a different variety of ignorance. Religion is not a less developed version of science or some sort of precursor; religion is the negation of science.

Science is a means of discovering the nature of the world; it’s precursors are the less effective means of doing so. Religion is a means of ignoring the nature of the world, in the favor of fantasies.

82

Way too simple. I keep showing you how religion’s gaudy appeal would naturally attract proto-people to whom science is unavailable, and I keep asking to be shown the path that would lure them away from thinking of the sun as a God, for example, or thunder as His voice, or any of a number of stupid-shit explanations that appeal to unsophisticated people, which is what we were for many millennia. I agree with you about your appraisal of religion on the ignorance/enlightenment spectrum NOW (withstood considerable bashing here a few years ago for insisting on the phrase “A species of ignorance” in asking why its status on SDMB protects it from being discussed as harshly as other species of ignorance are) but its simple-mindedness also is part of its draw. Inventing narratives, even false ones, IS an improvement on not understanding squat, and it is necessary to developing better narratives.

Look, you’re imposing all sorts of modern concepts onto very primitive people–the most primitive people possible–concepts like “fiction,” “verifiabilty,” “evidence,” and so on when all they had was the glimmers of imagination going for them. It’s not only explicable how they came up with some of the absurd bullshit that some people still cling to today, but perfectly natural. If you want to argue that it wasn’t inevitable, then please, as I keep requesting, raise a possible path that they travelled from “unable to use language” to “capable of scientific hypotheses” without ever treading on a path we call religion. I don’t see how it’s possible, and repeating, “But it IS possible!!!” doesn’t begin to persuade me.

83

Philosophy is certainly something that both science and religion are rooted in. I’m sure the first dude who figured out how to make fire was widely considered a brilliant scientist, a wise philosopher, a man in touch with the fire-Gods, and a great magician. When you describe poeple who were millenia removed from being able to make such fine distinctions, things get muddy. The disconnect here, I think, is because some of us are insisting that the most primitive people possible share certain subtleties of mind with people in 2009.

84

Sorry, I don’t agree at all.

Religion is a statement without any evidence that this is how things are and any other explanation is heresy.
Religion says ‘that shiny thing in the sky’ is a God in a chariot. There is no other explanation and no need to look for one.
Religion says the ‘Earth is the centre of the Universe’ and persecutes anyone investigating otherwise.
Curiosity is great for science, but bad for religion. You may not question the priests. You may not say their interpretation of the Holy Book is wrong.

Science developed despite religion.

85

When religious people make scientific advances, the religious part of their lives play no part in the advancement. No valid scientific study reads, “I added 20cc of ingredient A to the beaker that contained ingredient B, heated it at 225 degrees for precisely 17 minutes, then prayed for exactly 4 minutes while kneeling on a 3x5 ft wool-cotton blend carpet, as opposed to 3 minutes on the last trial.”

86

But didn’t it require a few early experiments to determine that prayer played no part? Could people tell that was true without testing it?

87

All they would have to do is not insist they were right regardless of what reality showed. If the society valued investigation and questioning over dogma, then science would have been able to develop much easier. They don’t even need to get all the way to science in one go, they really just need to prevent the codification of superstition into law. If investigation proceeded along lines that didn’t step on any toes and benefited the society, it would be allowed and encouraged. Primitive societies do not need to get all the way to science in one go, they just need to avoid mistaking superstition for fact.

88

I presume you’re not speaking of “Please, o God, grant me enlightenment now that I’ve changed the temperature to 225 degrees.”
:smiley:
Sorry.
Which came first, the experiment or the prayer?

I’d hazard a guess that the first occurrence of fire was not preceded by prayer and in fact, I’d be willing to go as far as to say that the next occurrence didn’t either. Maybe a thank you afterward if the clan shaman got hold of him, but until Ogg failed to create fire for the first time, and the shaman bitched him out for failing his duty to the gods, how would he know he had to pray?

89

Suggested reading: http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_2.html#shermer

90

The “path” of not being wired to prefer fantasy over reality, of being unwilling to say “no one knows”, and of having a taste for faith. As I said, religion exists because humans are a defective species; a species without that particular set of defects wouldn’t ever have invented religion.

No, it’s not; religion is WORSE than ignorance. It was a step backwards when it was invented; they went from zero knowledge to negative knowledge. And it was well within the mental capacity of our ancestors to realize that; they just didn’t care.

Because they did that in our own history. Religion was never anything but a huge diversion into madness; religious thought has never led anywhere useful. Religion was something that scientific and pre-scientific thought had to work around, not a precursor of science.

91

Personally, I think it was a result of fear - fear of the unknown, fear of death, fear of scary unexplained phenomena from lightning to eclipses, fear of anything being unexplained from the turning of the seasons to the existence of stars to the movement of the sun through the sky. Fear of unfairness and of a lack of justice in the universe. Fear that they are alone and not protected by a force equa to the wilds of nature that threatened them. And worst of all, fear of uncertainty.

If our ancestors were not such craven cowards, they would likely not have latched on the first semivaguely plausible explanation so hard that it could not be pried from their cold, dead claws when a better explanation was proposed.

92

Are you saying your own man made religion would make for a happier world for you? You do have a belief system and that is your Religion.

You are also (as you always seem to do)quote a book from religion to try to make your point. such as your quote from Genesis.

93

If #2 is true, then of course #3 must be true, because if all civilizations have religion then all civilizations with science will also have religion. However, if #2 is
false, that there could be a civilization without religion, then there could be one with science but no religion.

94

I think that in their infancy, science and spiritual beliefs are the same thing. Spiritual beliefs were an attempt to theorize about and affect outcomes. Coming up with answers that couldn’t been seen or heard (i.e. for which there was no direct evidence) wasn’t evil; it was just as good as it had gotten at that point. Theoretical physicists do it every day - sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes we have to throw up our hands and say “we have no way of testing this, but it sounds plausible.” And often, we accept as ‘proof’ that which does not prove a theory, but can be worked into the theory. Adjusting theories to accomodate new data is part of good science.

These theories weren’t as easy to disprove as you seem to think, Der Trihs. If someone came up with the idea that, say, lying causes hail storms (maybe because the last hail storm came just after that someone told a real whopper), and tells everyone not to lie, and then it hails again, how do you know someone wasn’t lying and you just didn’t know about it? It’s not like people could go up in the sky and watch hail form for themselves. People weren’t just blatantly making up stories that controverted fact; they were coming up with the best ideas they had to explain and control the world around them.

Anthropomorphizing isn’t evil; it’s human. I’m an atheist, yet I’ll claim that certain fax machines hate me. We know that we do some things because we’re happy and others because we’re angry. We know that other things besides ourselves are alive - is it so absurd to believe that they might have intentions and motives as we do? The line between the living and the inorganic isn’t that easy, either. Movement is everywhere; the wind blows, the rain falls, there are earthquakes and volcanoes. Some things move very slowly, some things move very infrequently, but they’re still alive. It’s not terribly surprising that we would ascribe consciousness to things like weather; it’s not that bad a theory when all you know is that sometimes water falls from the sky and sometimes it doesn’t.

But what transformed spiritual beliefs into Religion was the will to control. The moment you postulate the idea that doing thus and so will affect the outcome positively, it is inevitable that a set of rules would evolve, and that individuals, whether sincerely or not, would claim to understand what was cause, and what was effect, and how to get from one to the other better than others. If such an individual could convince others that s/he was right, that would give him or her power. Religion is probably the best tool for acquiring and maintaining the power of one or some over the rest that there’s ever been.

And the result of that hasn’t been all bad. Religion is above all an organizing social force. Without organization, I don’t think we could have developed agriculture or much in the way of technology, and while some people may have romantic ideas about how great life was when we were hunter/gatherers, I’m not one of them. Unless you have social organization, people are limited to what they can discover and prove for themselves in their own lifetimes. And while I believe organization would have taken place eventually anyway, I suspect religion drove the process along faster than it would have otherwise. The fact that this was frequently motivated by less than honest altruism doesn’t change the fact that religion was effective as an organizing force.

I don’t think science developed because of religion per se, but I don’t see how you could develop science without also developing religion, because science isn’t just a matter of what is immediately in front of you, visible, palpable, and obvious. If you’re curious enough to want to know, you’re going to come up with your best guesses, and they’re not always going to be right. But the facts may well seem to support your theory for quite a while before you realize it’s not right. There are many things in the world that appear to be completely unrelated, and yet turn out to have an important relationship; it’s not surprising or evil that people would come up with ideas of relationships that turn out not to be there.

It’s very hard to know when someone is promoting certain behavior because they truly believe that it is best for the society as a whole (or the people they’re trying to affect) and when they are promoting a behavior because it gives them more power or wealth. People aren’t honest with themselves, and their motives may be mixed anyway. If I think thus and such an activity will benefit you if you do it, should I not recommend it because it also benefits me? That would be silly. Not all desire for power is due to evil or even minor selfishness, and I suspect that people who take power with no belief that they will improve things for their society as a whole are very rare. What is probably rare is the person who *doesn’t *occasionally think “Things would be OK if only I could be absolute dictator for a few days/weeks/months/years to get things straightened out!”

I guess what I’m driving at is that your beliefs, Der Trihs, appear to be as simplistic as those of the most fundamentalist religious believer, and things are very rarely that black and white. Religion didn’t appear out of thin air as an excuse to boss other people around or to block the efforts of honest scientists. Maybe you are so omniscient as to always know what is true fact and what is myth, or what is natural and what is super-natural. But most of us have to judge based on our evaluation of what we ourselves have experienced and what we are told and by whom. It’s hardly evil to believe that our parents, who taught most of us so many true and necessary things, were right about more than that, or that such-and-such a person, so apparently wise about one thing, should be wise about something else. You give religious leaders both too much blame and too much credit, in that you seem to assume that they really know that what they’re saying is bullshit, but they’re lying for nefarious purposes of their own. There probably are a few like that, but I suspect they’re the exception rather than the rule; most are like the rest of us, going along the best we can with what seems to be the most reasonable explanation of why things happen and how to make them better.

95

Just thought I’d add something to frame the discussion in a slightly different direction.

Along the lines of what Der Trihs is writing, religion may be (or as he would write, is) detrimental to the human conception of science.

But religious thinking is an inherent characteristic of the human species.

And to argue that religious thinking is objectively a flaw is to protest too much, I believe.

We can’t argue that without religion science would have taken its place because that’s arguing something with no example available. It’s just the way things happened for humanity-- religion dominated first, then science became dominant.

Obviously, the billions of people in this world who still pray to God do it for a reason, however. And they do it for reasons that have no relation to the fact that science has displaced many of the explanations for natural phenomena that religion once provided. While we higher internet-using beings like to proclaim our superiority over the great unwashed God-lovers, the fact is, the majority of religious people today don’t believe in God because they think their religion explains why the Sun moves across the sky, or that prayer cures disease. Some do-- and in some regions of the world, many do-- but by and large, the “God” instinct is there long after the God-- or Gods-- are no longer necessary.

Thus, my argument is that belief in God (and gods) was necessary for human beings to invent science, because without religious thinking, we would not have survived (and indeed, thrived) long enough to get to the point where we discovered the effectiveness of scientific thinking.

My support? We all conduct religious thinking every day, insofar as we take scientific claims on faith. Most of science, after all, isn’t supported by direct experential evidence-- I may know fire is hot, but I may not know why it’s hot. I may not even care why it’s hot, for what purpose does it do for me, all I need to know is “don’t touch fire.” Science has a method for discovering the greater answers, but in a practical setting, not only do I not need to know the information, I certainly don’t need to know HOW that information was acquired.

Ultimately, modern civilization, composed as it is of atomized experts distributed across the globe, does not require that every man, woman and child be a scientific irreligious skeptic. In fact, it appears to require precisely the opposite in order to function smoothly.

A society composed of creatures that exhibited no ability to rely on faith would probably be one that requires everyone to be universally skeptic of everything that is told to them. There’s healthy skepticism, to be sure, and everyone is served better by having their “BS detectors” working, but on a constant basis, this is impossible. I can’t replicate the knowledge contained in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Scientific American, or heck, even the science that goes into Better Homes & Gardens. I have to trust that the scientific method is used, and that something approximating truth has been discovered and applied.

Religion, insofar as the power of religious thinking has been used to enable other human beings to maximize power over others, sure seems to be a bad thing. But religion doesn’t require gods, because religious thinking doesn’t require gods-- communism and fascism are the two obvious anti-natural ideologies that each relied on religious thinking to guide their subjects faith in their superiority.

In fact, that’s one reason why those ideologies were so dangerous-- while no one can scientifically prove that God loves you, the Premier/Fuhrer/Duce loves you, and can provide you with heaven (utopia) on Earth in exchange for your loyalty. God-based religions may be ridiculous, but the most successful are rarely arbitrary-- they instead return to their dogma time and time again, because after all, how can man change God? But once you take God out of the picture, yet still exploit religious thinking, you can do anything you want. For after all, with no gods in the great beyond we’re ultimately just meat, and no angels will miss us when we’re gone.

The boogeyman isn’t religion-- the boogeyman is religious thinking carried to the radical extreme. Faith is useful, even necessary, as a human being surrounded by other human beings. Even if we wanted it all to go away, that’d be like wishing away our own humanity-- what distinguishes us from bees and trees and every other living thing.

Too much faith, however, and it breaks down the system-- whether that’s faith in Islam’s instructions to kill infidels, communism’s pseudo-scientific injunctions to smash capitalist freedoms, or-- especially– loyalty to unverified scientific dogmas too many people (scientists included) all unnavoidably accept on faith.