yes, but people also made up stories about the sun and moon and stars for example. i guess i am just saying it is more a function of an evolved brain than it has any metaphysical significance.
Of course I am no expert but I feel People were frightened of, Thunder, lighting etc so believed there was a super being or beings. Perhaps they saw someone come out of a Coma and believed that the person came back to life, so there must have been another life somewhere. So it could be an evolution Of thought?
Why? If anything it’s evidence against such an instinctive belief. If we really on a deep instinctive level believed in an afterlife why would we care all that much about a discarded husk? In such a case I’d expect us to treat a loved one’s discarded body with about as much reverence as we’d treat one of their discarded shirts. Instead we treat them like they are gone forever and the body is all that’s left.
Faith/religion has its own memetic evolution - you could compare it to headlice; I don’t like that comparison a whole lot, but it’s certainly true that the human race supports things that do not necessarily benefit it at all - but are only looking out for themselves.
I’m not sure. I know writers/thinkers like David Sloan Wilson, Daniel Dennett and others have tried to understand the evolutionary history and purpose of religion. However I only glanced at their work years ago, I can’t really remember their findings.
Look up books like ‘Darwin’s cathedral’ or ‘breaking the spell’ on amazon and either look into those books, plus look into the books listed under the ‘customers who bought this item also bought’ list of books.
Maybe. Such burials were the exception rather than the rule, which makes one wonder why. And we don’t really know that they were buried with flowers. That is one interpretation.
Now, If I had to bet my life on it, I’d say that Neanderthals were more like us than not, and probably had some belief system. But the fossil record is not conclusive about that, and the Shanidar burial cite has entered the public consciousness more from a pop-science standpoint than a scientific one. The “Neanderthal as Flower Child” image of the 1960s was about as scientific as the “Neanderthal as Brute” image of the early 20th century was.
Perhaps the proper burial of the dead improved the success of the population by reducing the possibility of catching something from a decaying corpse. I know, Neanderthals were for the most part nomadic but that doesn’t mean they never stopped in one place for a few days or weeks.
Do we know that Neanderthals were nomadic? It though one hypothesis about how they ended up in the dustbin of history is that they were too tied to certain locations and weren’t nomadic enough.
Despite being someone who endorses sociobiology, I think it’s a mistake to ascribe every behavior or idea to genetic evolution (I say “genetic” to avoid confusion with the evolution of memes).
Some ideas might be typical responses to rational thought, rather than having some evolutionary benefit in themselves.
Possibly, the evolution of intelligence causes us to want to find a cause for everything. Faith is a way to deal with that yearning in cases where the actual cause is beyond us. So, it could arise without an evolutionary benefit.
However, in “The God Gene”, Dean Hamer posits that there is a genetic component and that it was selected for. It’s been too long since I read the book to go deeper; I just remember being favorably impressed by some of his points. That doesn’t contradict my point above, but it does moderate it.
True, but the requirements for “group inheritance” are very specific and remarkably narrow. If anyone wants, I’ll dig out my textbook and quote them, but it’s probably as easy to google them. I’m not criticizing the point here, just pointing out what I’m sure Blake knows, which is that group inheritance is a very tricky subject, but it’s been pretty thoroughly worked out mathematically.
Yeah, that’s a clearer way of putting what I said above.
That’s a good point, and doesn’t require the conditions for group inheritance.
Sufficient? heck no. But indicative? Yes. It’s often used as a proxy for religion, but researchers are careful to note that it’s a proxy.
Is the emergence of the Mother Goddess sufficient to establish religious thought? No, not conclusively. Maybe people just liked them! But it’s pretty universally held to be a good proxy.
People’s desires don’t necessarily make sense, so this is hardly an objection.
If your point is that ritual burial isn’t sufficient to prove religious thought, I agree. If your point is that burial (with valuable assets) isn’t a good clue, I think you’re missing a pretty good clue. Unfortunately, in paleontology, scientists often have to go with good clues and rarely get incontrovertible fact, especially regarding what people were thinking or saying, since those things don’t leave fossils.
Homework: is there any correlation between Mother Earth and ritual burial? I don’t know, but if there is, that would tend to support the hypothesis that ritual burial (and Mother Earth) are related to religious thought. But even if they correlated perfectly, it wouldn’t be “sufficient”.
I have not yet read the thread but quickly searched it for Abram and Abraham and did not see that.
For Christians, one data point for early faith is God’s call to Abram (later Abraham) from his land of Harran to Canaan. This was around 2091 BC. So there’s some evidence for early faith. Abraham’s son Isaac was born around 2066 BC, and then he was going to sacrifice Isaac until God stopped him, and that was around 2050 BC. Another evidence for not necessarily when when faith began, but an early demonstration of faith in action.
The history (for western civilization, at least) from the earliest days of civilization and writing show that religion wasn’t a “kill all the outsiders” in origination. The very early faiths were all interconnected.
It took several thousand years to go from “Eh, they like Goddess A instead of Goddess B” to go to “Those outsiders like Goddess A. Can you believe it.” to “KILL THE OUTSIDERS AND THEIR FALSE RELIGION!”
For instance, back in the day, the Caananites, Israelites, Edomites, and Moabites all worshipped one religion. The Caananites worshipped Baal, the Edomites worshipped El, the Moabites worshipped Astor-Chemosh (originally a sect of Baal), and the Israelites worshipped Yahweh.
But, in the oldest texts, Yahweh was known as El Shaddai (El the Almighty) and his bride was Asherah. He was the creator god. He rendered other gods, among them Baal along with the rest of the Levantine pantheon. As worship of Baal rose, Israelite and Edomites split culturally with Canaanites. Israelites developed the Mosaic religion over time (precisely how is another long set of paragraphs) and El became Yahweh. It is interesting to note that we have evidence that Yahweh was still wedded to Asherah for some time.
The Israelite culture co-existed with Caananites until there was enough population pressure that they overtook the Caananite lands. It wasn’t as violent as the Bible lays it out, it was mostly higher populations in a more rural area that overgrew and slowly took over Caanan. They also eventually dominated the Edomite culture during the Monarchy, where their continued worship of El was seen as an affront to Yahweh. The Moabites were a secluded kingdom that still worshipped a version of Baal and were absorbed culturally into the Israelite Monarchy over several generations.
But, as super powers became a thing (Egypt, Babylon, etc), they would conquer a territory and move on. They didn’t decimate or co-opt the religion of those areas in most cases - the decimation they meted out was usually for disobedience and wasn’t about religion. Egyptians, Assyrians/Hittites, and Babylonians variously conquered the area and made vassal states of area powers. They never interfered with the internal religions unless they had to.
Most religions of the Mediterranean co-existed fine. It wasn’t until, really, the Sea Peoples (Phillistines were an example) spread out that people started fearing for their religious integrity at the hands of outsiders. Jews were agitants about this for quite a while, even as a subservient state of Rome. Out of this agitation, grew Christianity that was still primarily fine with coexisting at the beginning, even while seeking conversions.
Once Christianity was adopted by and absorbed into the Roman empire and started using violence, the Western world became a “my way or die” affair with religion.
A lot of the Biblical sins assigned religiously to their neighbors were done as a form of later propaganda. Moabites, as an example, were written as born of the incestuous relationship between Abraham’s Son Lot and Lot’s Daughter on the way out of Sodom.
But they were always murderously hostile to anyone who failed to be pious enough. They might not have cared much which god you worshiped; but failing to worship some god would get you the death sentence for “impiety”. Even today you still see the attitude that it’s better to worship a “false god” than to worship nothing at all.
There’s zero historical proof that Abraham even existed, let alone that his biblical narrative is contemporary. Going by Wiki, it seems accepted as very likely the story itself dates to the Iron Age, around a millenium BC.
As for whether the Biblical story can be trusted to be factual, considering the narrative kicks off with a genealogy of Abraham that includes people who lived to the sprightly age of 205 and himself is supposed to have seen his 175th birthday… yeah.
This I agree with whole heartedly for today. But, outside of Athens (which I think is up for debate in terms of whether it was actually real or just Plutarch making points via story), I have no evidence this was wide spread.
Also, the “impiety” in Athens was more complex than religious matters. It was for not showing respect towards the city god (“Athena is a whore!” seems to be the aim, despite Plutarch’s later ponderings of a complete rejection of religious ferver), not showing respect towards the dead, not showing respect to your mother/father, and not showing respect towards the city/state itself.
I will confess that I haven’t studied Greek history intensively as of late. I could be underinformed.
Interestingly and amusingly enough, it’s possible this mechanism doesn’t even require much in the way of higher brain function.
Notorious behaviourist B.F. Skinner apparently managed to induce “superstitious” behaviour in pigeons. He put pigeons in a cage with a food dispenser that would dole out treats at regular intervals, regardless of what the pigeons were doing. Over time, the pigeons started repeating whatever they’d been doing when the food pellets dropped, possibly in a sort of cargo cult/rainmaking mentality coupled with confirmation bias - “I was doing this when the food pellet came, let’s try this again. Crap, nothing. Again ? Nothing. Again and ag… food pellet ! It works !”
Possible sloppy parallels between this experiment and the power of prayer are left as an exercise to the reader.
That’s a good point too (including the rest, omitted for brevity). In The Source, Michener makes the point that prior to monotheism, there were no religious wars. Anyone waging a war or battle would rally the troops to their God, but it wasn’t about their God being “right” as much as their God being more powerful. It was a nice point, but I can’t take Michener as a serious source.
Well, I haven’t changed my socks since I got that touchdown.
But I’ve never heard of any “war on atheists” in history. It’s always been one theist group versus another. So even as you further ague that was the more pious versus the less pious, an objective observer can see it was really just a wars between differently pious. Thus, it doesn’t say anything about faith being an evolutionary factor.
I agree wholeheartedly with Kobal2. Faith/religion is just an outgrowth of an obviously useful human trait. Pattern recognition and a need to “understand”.
Since this is a discussion involving faith, well… yeah.
But, events of faith cannot always be definitively debated to a factual conclusion. The two concepts, faith and fact, are not equivalent, until (or, if) an event believed through faith to be true is also corroborated by evidence acceptable to others.
I don’t accept your assertion that there’s zero historical proof that Abraham even existed, but I have nothing other than the Genesis account, and my faith, to rely on.