All good points. I would add a need for a simple explanation of the universe and our purpose in it.
I think it’s probably much more complex than that. Even if one doesn’t subscribe to any claims about the existence of anything supernatural, there is a huge range of psychological reactions that would naturally conduce to belief in supernatural beings. Not just fear and social bonding, but a variety of spontaneous feelings like gratitude, compassion, acceptance, joy, awe and so on can reinforce a mental conviction of the existence of a deity. Positive feedback loops based on individual happiness and social bonds likewise reinforce positive perceptions of religion, which thus becomes more strongly entwined in psychological and social responses, and so on.
My personal speculation is that you’re probably right that a general human propensity to believe in the supernatural was advantageous for our evolution as a social species, and consequently I don’t think humans as a species are ever actually going to abandon or get rid of religion.
Nor do I think it’s necessary or even important that we should. As long as we agree to tolerate religious differences and maintain religiously neutral systems for addressing common goals and problems, why should we care what anybody’s unprovable, unfalsifiable personal convictions about the ultimate nature of reality are?
Well, I said “find comfort in rituals”. If you want to explore and list every possible form this comfort could take, fine. That just means my answer is generalized, not simplistic.
In any case, religion spreads and religion persists because to a lot of people, religion is useful.. To some segment of the population, even if raised in a religion, it will not prove useful and be discarded or replaced.
I can point to a virus or bacteria and say “Gee it wasn’t the curses after all, its these tiny little things called germs” Point me to the irrefutable evidence that God doesn’t exist. Point me to the irrefutable evidence that can explain how the universe sprang out of nothing without the intervention of a divine being.
You’ve got two different types of question there. There will never be irrefutable evidence that God doesn’t exist, because God is by definition a supernatural being and thus not subject to rational-materialism rules of evidence. No matter how unnecessary or superfluous the concept of God may be in devising a rational-materialist scientific explanation of reality, no such explanation will ever be able to disprove the hypothesis of God’s existence.
But that’s not the same thing as saying that science can’t explain the beginnings of space and time and matter etc. without hypothesizing God’s existence. At the moment, cosmological theories are nowhere near complete enough to answer all the unresolved questions about the origins of the universe. But there’s no reason to assume that science won’t or can’t answer those questions at some point in the future.
In any case, scientific theories are not allowed to use the concept of “intervention of a divine being” in explaining the natural world, because it doesn’t actually explain anything. Science is committed to playing by the rules of rational materialism in which only non-supernatural explanations of phenomena are permitted.
Point me to a damn good reason why the words “We don’t know yet, but we’re still looking” should be replaced by the word “God”.
Flying Spaghetti Monster
http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster
I suggest you also read up on the Appeal to Ignorance logical fallacy.
Your understanding of the terms “drop in the bucket” and “tiny” is evidently quite different than mine. You yourself have already linked to a study which says that half of Americans change religious identification from that they were raised with. Is half the population a tiny percentage?
So in other words you insist it’s true that " the vast majority of current Christians were raised to be Christians" but you’re not able to provide a citation to back it up? (The Pew Forum survey you linked to above would support the conclusion for people in the USA, but you’ve provided no citation for the conclusion worldwide. Why not?)
Says you. I’ve already linked to one person who disputes the conclusion that bananas are yellow. There could be plenty of others. What makes your statement more reliable than any of theirs?
While many atheists have told me that something like this is true “by definition”, none ever tell me which dictionary contains the definition. I’ve looked in Webster’s and the OED and their definitions of religion don’t match yours.
Which proves what? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you managed to successfully prove your claims that religion would be spread through parenting. (This would contradict your claim that they spread at the tip of a sword, by the way.) Parents are largely responsible for toilet-training their kids, yet I’ve never seen anyone cite this as proof that people who use toilets are denying logic, motivated by fear, insane, determined by evolutionary psychology, manipulated due to their desperate poverty, &c…
Seconded.
Read the rest of the thread that link came from.
This link might work better(Wiki is case sensitive)
“Pizarro’s chaplain greeted the king with the announcement that King Charles V of Spain was the only true king and that the Christian god was the only true god. Atahuallpa was handed a copy of the Christian Bible. The Inca king was not about to take instruction, believing as the Inca did that their gods had put them on the world to teach others and that their great god of the sky, Virechocha, controlled all things. Atahuallpa looked at the Bible and threw it to the ground. A prearranged signal by the Spanish was given and Spaniards who had been hiding from the view of the Incas fired their harquebusiers (predecessor of the musket) and two light cannon into the Inca crowd, the weapons giving the Spanish the advantage of range and shock. Then Pizarro’s cavalry charged.”
From Spain Expands to Guadalajara in Mexico and follows disease in conquering the Inca in South America
You need to re-read my post. The vast majority of those “conversions” were Christians moving from one denomination to another. That hardly qualifies as a conversion for the purpose of this debate. The fairly obvious statment that most people, by a huge margin, practice the same religion they were raised to. Are you actually going to continue to suggest that’s not true? Is it also a stretch to say that the vast majority of people speak primarily the same language they were raised to speak?
Says me? Says science. Light with a wavelength of 570–590 nm is yellow (do you need a citation for that?), which is how the human eye perceives the color of a ripe banana. It’s even defined that way in the dictionary.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/banana?s=t
I even put your silly argument up for the group:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=656636
Drop the banana argument. It’s a loser.
Please don’t suggest that the primary tenet of religion is not faith. The “faithful”, “the mystery of faith”… ring a bell? Do you really need a definition of faith?
“Belief that is not based on proof.” Here’s your cite if you’re unfamiliar with the definition of the word.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/faith?s=t
Religion absolutely, undeniably requires a “belief not based on proof.”
Seriously, man? Learning to use a toilet has a practical and logical benefit virtually ubiquitous to all people regardless of their religious status. People not raised with religion or or toilet will figure out not to defecate in the immediate presence of others long before they develop a creation myth complete with a complicated set of rituals. (It’s interesting, though, you chose a metaphor that equates religion with flushing crap down the toilet.)
Throughout history (I’ve already given plenty of examples and you know I’m right), religion has first been introduced through violence and subjugation. From there it has spread from parent to child, aided by threats of persecution from those in charge.
It’s not arbitrary at all. Its basic common sense. All the various denominations of Christianity follow the teachings of the EXACT SAME BOOK, with the exception of Mormons. They’re ALL Christians. To suggest that switching from Methodist to Baptist (most Methodists and Baptists probably don’t even know the difference) is similar to switching from Islam to Buddhism is ridiculous, and I think you know that. The difference between Shiites and Sunni Muslims doesn’t even have anything to do with the actual faith. It’s a difference of opinion in the leadership succession plan during the foundation of the faith.
Exactly.
Clearly demonstrated to be relatively a very small number
Throughout history, religions have been first introduced to regions through conquest and persecution. You personally may have not been forced into a religion, but somewhere up the line your ancestor almost assuredly was.
Would South America be overwhelmingly Catholic if they’d been conquered by Genghis Khan?
If you want to deny the critical role military conquest has played in the spread of the major world religions, so be it. You pretty much remove yourself from rational discussion by sticking with that argument.
Throughout history, human characteristics and practices ranging from languages to systems of government to eating particular foods have been first introduced to regions through conquest and persecution. You personally may have not been forced into vowing allegiance to a foreign ruler, but somewhere up the line your ancestor almost assuredly was.
Once again, Victor Charlie, the evils you’re ascribing solely to religion are actually endemic in many other aspects of human society as well: you’re just too obsessed with your religion-is-bad evangelism to notice it.
Religion is not automatically bad just because its spread inevitably included episodes of war and conquest, any more than government is automatically bad just because its spread inevitably included episodes of war and conquest. Your argument that generations of religious adherents are somehow intrinsically “tainted” because their ancestors first encountered that religion in the presence of a conquering army is simply silly.
Okay, so you’re suggesting that language and food preferences are, like religion, largely attributable to ancestry and were originally established through conquest. Agreed. Most English-speakers speak English primarily because their parents did. Most Italians eat Italian food primarily because their parents did. And, most Catholics are Catholics because their parents are. That’s exactly the supposition I made in the OP.
I’ve nowhere said that religion is evil. I think evil people have exploited it to evil ends, but there are many ways different religions have advanced the cause of humanity. But it does, by it’s very nature, require the suspension of logic and critical thinking. That becomes a real problem when people invoke it to disavow evolution or to treat concepts like intelligent design as if they have any basis in rational thought.
That isn’t my argument at all. My argument is that otherwise rational people will, in MASSIVE numbers, deny logical reasoning in favor of a creation story dreamed up by superstitious men 3,000 years ago because they had not the faintest concept of disease pathogens, geology, meteorology or the basic workings of the universe. This belief is impressed upon people at the earliest age who are told they risk damnation if they don’t buy in.
So, my original question stands: If you were taught throughout your entire uprbinging that the center of the earth is creamy nougat, would you believe it today? If not, why not?
Yeah fine, whatever. But that not the question the OP is asking. the OP is comparing belief in God to believing that illness is caused by curses when we KNOW that its not.
So until you do resolve those questions about the origins of the universe to a degree that approaches our understanding of germs, believing in God in the absence of proof to the contrary is NOT like believing that curses cause illness after the discovery of germs.
Why not, why should we replace the word God with the words “we don’t know yet (but we are absolutely sure its not God) and that one day science will explain it all”? Why is your faith that quantum physics will one day explain it all better than a Christian’s faith that divine intervention started it all?
This is not an appeal to ignorance. The OP posits an example where conclusive proof (germs) exists that curses do not cause something (illness) and then asks why people still believe in God when similar proof does not exist wrt God’s existence.
I’m not saying that the fact that you cannot disprove his existence means he must exist. I don’t have a problem with science, I have a problem with people mis-using science to claim certitude where none exists.
Any suggestion at all that a claim has merit because it hasn’t yet been disproven IS an appeal to ignorance. Scientists don’t actively make the claim that God doesn’t exist just like they don’t work to prove that flying toasters don’t live on Jupiter. If I were to make the claim that I am God, that I created the world last week and that all memory you have from before then was implanted by me, would you say “well, it hasn’t been disproven so it just might explain everything”?
Before you answer, remember that I am a vengeful god.
No, it does not. I’m not denying that many individual religions at many points in human history have required the suspension of logic and critical thinking (as indeed have many other ideologies, including vague and ill-defined aspirations like “advancing the cause of humanity”). But religion doesn’t by its nature require that people abstain from thinking logically and critically.
Religion by its nature addresses questions that logic and critical thinking don’t provide objective answers to, such as “What is the meaning of life?” and “Is there a shared ‘cause’ among the human species, and if so, what is the best way of advancing it?” and “Are there aspects of reality that can’t be known through logic and critical thinking?”
Many religions also address questions that logic and critical thinking do provide objective answers to, such as “How and when was the earth formed?” and “Why do human beings look more like chimps than like rabbits?” And I completely agree with you that when religious dogma requires that the logic-and-critical-thinking answers to such questions be ignored in favor of faith-based dogmatic answers, that’s a very bad thing.
However, “religion” in the abstract does not by its nature require any such rejection of logic and critical thinking, as evidenced by the many religious people who do think logically and critically about scientific issues.
Whatever floats your boat. Personally, if I believed that the existence of a supernatural deity was crucial not just to answering certain cosmological questions but also to understanding the very nature of reality and the meaningfulness of existence, I wouldn’t want to pin that belief on the temporary incompleteness of current scientific theories. Even as an atheist, I think that the idea of God ought to be something more than a momentary epistemological stopgap.
Two different things (unless you’re postulating that these flying toasters are supernatural beings).
The hypothesis of flying toasters on Jupiter is a rational-materialist, i.e., scientific, hypothesis: it may be false but it is not un-disprovable. Scientists don’t bother trying to disprove it simply because it’s so implausible as to be a waste of time.
However, the hypothesis of the existence of God is not a scientific hypothesis at all, whether it’s false or true, because a supernatural being is not amenable to the laws of the natural world. There is no way scientists ever could disprove the existence of a supernatural being even if they all spent every waking moment attempting to.