By contrived I mean the analogy to the selfish gene is contrived, not the conceptualization that ideas compete. I think that the analogy limits the ways in which we image the spread of ideas.
Ideas compete directly, within a society and between cultures. But ideas also influence each other and aretransformed in ways that organisms and genes cannot. Ideas are translated, rotated, transformed, enlarged, reduced, and cobbled together into new complex forms. The meme construct captures none of that.
SM, I’m no expert … Damn it Jim! I’m a doctor not a neuroscientist! But it is a strong interest with a paper in collaboration that I hope to someday see in print even if the whole readersip will be my coauthor and myself.
I do think that God-belief is a different kind of concept than other beliefs, but I suspect that they co-evolved. I see God-belief as more critical to Man’s evolution as a social entity than as an inductive entity, even though our inductive side used God-belief to come up with models of the world and how it works, etc… It has been said by someone, I can’t recall who, that sanity within a society is holding the same delusions as everyone else. God-belief allows the acceptance of the basic postulates for many societies. As such it is relatively immune to the reset that we have with most other beliefs.
There are a lot of studies showing people who believe in God live longer, happier, more stress free lives. Putting “religion and health” into a search engine will bring up many of them.
Your cite was equivocal. There is a difference between an explanatory agent and an objective metaphysic. It seems to me that your (and his) approach is basically to say that the real god is science. But in doing so, you are invoking the explanatory agent and not the objective metaphysic.
With respect to coming into the playing field, that has no bearing whatsoever on whether God, the objective metaphysic, is real. In fact, if anything, it corroborates His reality. Why would God reveal Himself to amoral beings? It only makes sense that He would wait for humanity to emerge.
Finally, with respect to the topic (which you didn’t really address), what gives humans an adaptive advantage, in my opinion, is that we are generalists. Generalists are naturally more adaptable to more circumstances than specialists. A belief in God, on that level, is at the very least an expansion of the generality. In other words, if the ability to invoke God to assist adaptation — in addition to other abilities — is present, then that is an advantage over an inability to do so.
I was willing to let go of it, but you had to drag me back in. (What action movie is that paraphrased from? I really can’t remember.) Oh well, I believe that the OP was asking if belief in gods was an evolutionary advantage, and that my post, back in number 5, was on topic. Liberal doesn’t seem to, and I don’t see why he doesn’t, however, I have some time before my laundry is done, so I will humor him.
What’s your point? That was not a scientific cite, but instated a summery of one person’s theory, which just so happens to echo my own. Is saying that a non-cite isn’t a cite now valid criticism?
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There is a difference between an explanatory agent and an objective metaphysic.
No. Saying, “My god created the earth”, and the winds are created by evil spirits is not science. Seeking out an explanation for why things are they way they are, but not accepting better explanations, but instead massacring a neighboring tribe who disagree with you is not science, but it’s distant ancestor no one speaks about.
I did a google search on these unfamiliar phrases, and found them not online (save one or two catholic theology etexts), but instead broken down into the separate words. What field do you get them from? Theology? If so, any discussion between us will come to no good end, for you are using concepts which have no meaning to me, and I would argue that they have no meaning at all. I mean really, Having actual existence or reality.+An underlying philosophical or theoretical principle=objective metaphysic, doesn’t make sense to me. I appreciate that you, by using such catholic terms, are treating me in this debate, as an equal, but since I am from a jewish background, I have to invoke the old cliché, "I understand the words you are using, but in that order, they make no sense.
Look again:
I pretty much said, no, it isn’t. It might be an advantage for the concept of abstract thought to exist, but the idea of an other is a psychological idea, which came onto the scene after evolution had already run much of it’s course. It may be an advantage, and but it came onto the scene after mankind had already wiped out it’s evolutionary also-runs. Any conception to the contrary, such as the existence of cave paintings, is highly open to interpretation. Some might believe they invoked gods for future good look, while others believed it was a kind of bragging of events already done, with no need to invoke such an abstract idea as gods.
And, for what it’s worth, the studies discrediting them. When actually done by folks who are double-blinded, religion falls out as non-causitive. As with many religiously-charged issues, many studies in this area are done by folks with an agenda and a belief that they are somehow immune from the biasing effects that a real double-blind study prevents.
In particular, religions whose adherents refrain from drinking, smoking, etc. are associated with longer lifespans…at statistically identical rates to non-religious folks who follow the same lifestyle.
Several religions are associated with statistically shorter lifespans: typically those which forbid some or all medical treatment. Here, the studies are weaker with respect to the non-religious. Religion is one of the few forces capable of causing one to forgo medical treatment, so finding control groups is difficult.
Interestingly, atheism is also correlated with a slightly longer lifespan. Again, control groups remove the effect: atheism is also correlated weakly with education and affluence, which are also associated with access to better health care.
Ignoring these cases, there are no proper studies I’m aware of that show a difference either way. More irritatingly to me, everything I’ve pointed out is freely, widely known information – and yet people choose to ignore it to make points. Depending on your audience to be ignorant of the counterarguments to your (known false) claims DOES NOT MAKE YOU MORE LIKELY TO BE RIGHT. It just makes people MORE LIKELY TO THINK YOU ARE RIGHT.
It seems like folks are often just as happy with the second outcome as the first. Which is sad. I care, and I think others should care, not just about validating their beliefs, but whether those beliefs are TRUE. You can’t evaluate the truth or falsehood of religious beliefs, but there’s a clear process for evaluating claims in the natural world (such as whether religious belief makes you live longer). All it takes is a desire to know the truth, REGARDLESS of whether it agrees with your desires or beliegs. Ignoring evidence, especially overwhelming evidence, doesn’t help. Nor does this attitude that if you can just get more people to believe something, it makes that thing more likely to be true. The world is round even if everyone believes it to be flat.
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After all, we don’t occasionally have episodes in which everything seems more colourfulSpeak for yourself, luv. There are well-known… ways to induce this effect. Some folks actively seek out such “episodes.”
Excellent argument. I’m very glad you expressed this so well.
My theory is that shamanism was the origin of religion, but that shamanism was DIY spiritual work. As you noted, the shamans of a community provided an extra dimension to community life. Other people around could draw upon her mental, intellectual, and healing power. Her, because in the early times, in the Neolithic, probably most shamans were women. The word udakan or udagan meaning ‘female shaman’ is widespread in Tugusic, Mongolic, Turkic, and even I think Chukchi-Kamchadal and Yeniseic languages throughout Siberia. Although the words for male shaman differed from one language to the next.
But religion didn’t arise until the decadance of the shamanic system left it mostly dead. In its place arose people who imitated something along the lines of what they or their ancestors had remembered shamans doing. But without understanding or going through the same experiences, without necessarily developing the mind the way real living shamanism had done. Some living traditions based in shamanism did survive the age of religions and were preserved in mystery schools. At some point, the mystery schools would have been liable to a similar decadence. The Eleusinian Mysteries, though did not die a natural death. Their temple at Eleusis was destroyed by fanatical Christian monks in 396. A similar fate befell the mysteries of Cybele in Rome a few years later. Who’s to say these mystery schools might not have carried on underground for an unknown duration afterward?
My answer to the OP is a resounding NO. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I once again take the sociological position: religion, and the belief in god along with it, arose out of communal rituals in early tribe-based societies. People participating in the rituals experienced powerful emotions, which, since they couldn’t conceptualize such arising from the ritual itself, attributed it to an agency outside of themselves. This concept, over tens of thousands of years, evolved into the concept of god that we now hold. John Mace hit the nail on the head:
Those primitive tribes had no concept of the rituals themselves being such an integral part of their society, so they filled in the blanks. By the time society had become sophisticated enough for people to gain the ability to have those concepts, religion was already in the hands of a select priesthood, and it was too late to stop it. Today, religion is a moral order. It provides those who follow it with social norms of good and bad, right and wrong. But what many people don’t realize is that we could have a moral order organized around just about anything else, and it would work just the same. In other words, a social structure revolving around religious belief in god is no better or worse than anything else, and therefore not an advantage (or a disadvantage either).