I did when I was a believer. Now that I’m an atheist (and I was never a very good believer), I don’t.
And I’m sure I’m in the minority, since atheism is the minority.
I’ve speculated that religion (not necessarily just a belief in god) is a “thinking time-saver”, which sound like an insult, but is not necessarily so. Having an existing framework of explanations and moral decisions already made saves the time of having to think out this stuff yourself. And although a lot of that framework might be counter-productive, in a lot of cases it will be less so than everybody figuring out their own moral decisions.
It could just be a by-product of our hardwired need to see cause and effect and our ability to think symbolically. When there is an effect, but seemingly no cause, we invent a cause.
Darwin’s Finch: When you say “social development” vs “biological evolution”, you seem to exclude genetically predisposed behavior patterns. Can you elaborate on that? Maybe I’m misinterpreting your terminology.
But the question that the subject of the story was trying to answer is, why is religion (or some kind of supernatural belief system) universal across human cultures back to the caveman days? Does it (or did it) bestow some kind of advantage to emergent human societies over non-religious groups?
It seems to me that humans have a general psychological rule, “Don’t cheat other people in your group when they can see you cheating them”. So whenever people are about the cheat, they look around to see if anyone is watching them cheat. There’s this feeling that someone may be looking at you who might catch you cheating, so you better be sure no one is.
This feeling of “watch out, someone may catch you even if you can’t see them” is the source of the feeling that the gods or spirits are watching you. The worry that unseen entities might catch you cheating is not a quality that is beneficial in itself, it’s a byproduct of the need to avoid being caught cheating by other real human beings. It’s a kind of mistake, just like how people ascribe emotional states to inanimate objects. We have to spend a lot of effort imaging the emotional state of other human beings, and so it’s natural for us to mistakenly believe other things have emotions too.
Here endeth the Just-So story.
I don’t see any evidence that religious proclivity is a genetically predisposed behavior.
In general, the mechanisms for social evolution differ from those of biological evolution. For example, societies make ample use of group selection (indeed, they practically require it…), whereas such has long since been decried as a mechanism for biological evolution. Social evolution can also proceed at much faster rates than biological evolution because ideas (which are the currency, so to speak, of social evolution) spread through a population faster than alleles.
The two are certainly linked, but are by no means one and the same.
Well yeah: Imagination
Of course that bestows an advantage. It lets us envision possibilities that we haven’t actually observed, allowing us to go and then actually test those possibilities. Of course, that’s assuming that we can test them. If someone sees a volcano that erupts randomly and imagines that the eruptions might be a signal from a bigger chieftain who is happy or upset with them, there’s no real way to tell whether that is true or not.
If he then suggests that they place food on the lip of the volcano and the volcano quiets down over the next few days, the people may well consider this proof. They’ll imagine that the man knew something – not imagined something – and ask him to keep on as their advisor to the volcano chieftain. In return for this position, he’ll have a bias towards perceiving that anything he does is proof of the existence of the volcano chieftan. The people will feel safer if he can control the volcano, so they’ll be biased towards buying into his explanations as well. When they raise their children, those children will be taught to perceive the volcano as a humanistic spirit, which becomes how their minds are wired to think from that point forward. They don’t think, “Is the volcano erupting?” Instead they think in terms of, “Would the volcano be unhappy with what I am doing?” They’ll feel like the volcano is watching them.
This is universal across humanity because this process is fairly easy to start when you’re living in a state of fear. At any moment of any day you could be attacked by a wild animal, a storm could destroy your farm and hut and force you into starvation. An illness could wreak havoc on the village and steal away all the young. In a position like this, anything which gives you the slightest advantage would be very dear – even if the advantage is only imagined.
So it’s their assumption that the reason people don’t do bad things is because they think someone is watching and that they’ll face consequences?
Really?
To me that’s a scary thought.
That the only reason people don’t cheat, steal, lie, etc. is for fear of consequences.
Is it that hard to believe some people don’t cheat, lie, steal simply because it’s the right thing to do and is beneficial for the common good?
Believing in higher powers (of which God would be a subset) could serve several advantages.
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It would give people a sense that there is a guiding force behind what appears to be random circumstances and the inevitability of death and therefore would help them avoid be crippled by despair.
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It would unite society and allow a group of people to achieve greater things than they could do as individuals.
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It would act as a constant source of ethical guidance and help deter people from acting in harmful ways and support them acting in beneficial ways towards others.
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It is possible that higher powers do objectively exist and if so it’s a good idea to have them working in your favor.
I think for some people believing in God probably makes them more emotionally resilient. That is, it’s easier to deal with life’s ups-and-downs without giving in to despair if you’re able to tell yourself “It’s all part of God’s plan.” For other people, I think that only makes things more frustrating; better to believe your bad luck is just random than some cosmic entity trying to teach you a lesson.
So I would speculate that there might be some evolutionary pressure for people who have the sorts of personalities that benefit from belief in God to also be more predisposed to belief, and vice versa.
Except he didn;t say that. He said many of us have had the feeling or sensation of being watched from time to time. However, atheists discount an actual watcher as the source of the feeling. In fact, they specifically reject the concept of a watcher as the source of the feeling. They may regard the sensation of emerging from inside themselves (conscience) or as a fleeting and irrelevant impulse of the brain.
Yes, he did.
And even if he would exempt atheists from this, which he clearly does not do, then is the argument that the first room is populated solely by atheists? Because otherwise, how is it different than room two?
What part of this contains a statement about belief? In particular, that atheists believe in supernatural beings or watchers?
I did hear the program on the radio yesterday, and I am agnostic in the sense that I don’t believe the idea of “god” can be disproven, but by all practical measures, I am an atheist. I have always been an atheist.
The program did not make an assertion that atheists “believe” that a Watcher is the source of the sensation of being watched.
I’ve never felt it. I’ve always been an atheist, internally.
If Bering claims, as he does, that we all think, at least at time, that a supernatural being might be watching us, then how can he populate room 1 with people who don’t think a supernatural being might be watching them? And if “a supernatural being” has to be “a supernatural being who is not God yet is something you actually believe in” how did he find people to populate room 2?
He’s using room 1 as the control group but by his own definition there is no such thing as a person who is untouched by the idea of being watched.
I’ve never felt this sensation of “being watched.” That doesn’t even make sense to me. How can being watched be a sensation?
I’ve certainly never thought that anything supernatural was watching me. I would be incapable of believing that.
My opinion? Probably systematic rape and murder. The standard method that believers use to deal with unbelievers, at least in places and times they can get away with it. The believers murdered the male unbelievers and their children, then raped and impregnated the unbeliever-women. That’s behavior straight out the Bible. The unbelievers didn’t have that extra motive to attack and destroy their neighbors, so over time were wiped out. Religion is very good at co-opting the human impulse towards genocide.
I notice that people are assuming that “evolutionarily successful” means “good for the species”; it doesn’t. It just means that the gene is good at spreading itself, regardless of the damage done to the species much less individuals within that species.
As for Bering, given his claim that he doesn’t believe in atheists and that all atheists feel something supernatural watches them (which is simply wrong), I seriously doubt he’s really an atheist in the first place. He sounds like one of those disgruntled theists who is just looking for an excuse to believe. I expect that eventually he’ll “find God” again and switch to making speeches about how horrible atheism is and the Obvious Truth of whatever religious sect sucks him in.
Intellectually, you would be incapable of believing it. But are you saying you never in your life had the impulse, quickly dismissed, that karma would get you, or a deceased loved one was still with you, or that there was another presence besides you in an otherwise empty room?
I’m not asking if you ever seriously thought any of that was happening – just if it crossed your mind and you rejected it.
Yes, that’s it. These prehistoric societies were inspired by fundamental literalist interpretations of the Bible. :rolleyes: Teach your pony a new trick.
I still do not understand your reasoning. Also, do you have any cites supporting the actual occurence of the scenario described in post 27?
Cite, please.
This is note true. Such is not a “standard” way for believers to deal with unbelievers, nor a non-standard way. Perhaps you got confused by the fact that rape and murder are how atheists generally deal with believers when they can get away with it. (For instance in the Soviet Union, Germany under Hitler, China under Mao, Yugolsavia under Tito and Milosevic, communist Cuba, etc…)