So the guy has studied thousands of tribes, in other words at least 2,000. Now supposing that his career was fifty years long and that he never took a day off for anything, that’s still forty tribes per year, or one tribe every nine days on average. Now it’s plentifully obvious that no one could gain an understanding about a society in nine days. Doing it in nine years would be difficult. But the more important question is, how well Pascal Boyer know himself? Obviously a human being can only understand other human beings as far as he knows himself. Unless Boyer has engaged in rigorous investigation of his own consciousness and behavior he can’t produce trustworthy analysis of anyone else’s.
Obviously there’s many ways that someone could go wrong while recording beliefs. Just because someone says they believe something doesn’t mean it’s true. We all say tons of things that we don’t believe. But more importantly, it’s easy to get confused about motivations. begbert asked about certain sports and socks. I’d say that if athletes or fans go through some ritual before or during a game, they probably do so because it’s fun. And if the Yanomamo do a certain dance at a certain time, they probably do it for the same reason that people all over the world dance, namely that it’s fun. Such reasoning is self-evident, but only to those who have fun.
It appears that the discussion has moved from the blithe and mindless dismissal of certain disciplines within science to the entirety of science. At least, the entirety of science practiced in august venues.
Well…
I can say that in my experience in academia, it is not the case that I’ve encountered more hysterical people than elsewhere. Less, in fact. (Except, of course, as part of my profession as a psychologist. I’m assuming that we are talking about the scientists.) If I expand to considering what I’ve known and read about academia versus what I’ve known and read about religious groups, I’d have to say that vastly greater amounts of hysteria seem to arise from regious groups than academics. For example, the only “cult leader” status I’ve ever heard ascribed to academics has been purely hyperbolic.
The idea of religions emerging naturally does not look as ludicrous as I first thought. It looks a great deal more ludicrous than I first thought. A few of the details you’ve presented are new, but if I take your basic explanation for the origins of religion and remove the fancy language it looks quite familiar. It’s the same theory I believed when I was about 16, and the same theory that I rejected when I grew up. I’d reckon that most teenagers devise and then reject the theory on roughly the same schedule. Given the attitude that you’ve displayed throughout this thread, I’d assumed you had something more sophisticated up your sleeve.
Let me try to explain the hole in your theory again. Every human being encounters two worlds. There is the interior world of his or her own self and the exterior world containing other people, as well as purely physical things. Now all religions agree on the relative importance and complexity of the two worlds. For any human being, it is both more difficult and more important to thoroughly know the interior world. As Chesterton says, “The self is more distant than any star.” Gaining self-knowledge is therefore both the hardest task and the most vital task that a human being can do. Religion is a systematic approach to gaining self-knowledge, to learning about the interior world.
Increased self knowledge also increases the possibilities for understanding the exterior world. Hence some religions teach things about the exterior world as well, while others do not. In all cases the focus is on the interior world. Hence a “religion” that consists only of beliefs about the exterior world is not a religion at all. Endlessly repeating that you’ve found some tribe who believe that spirits cause some natural phenomenon, even if it’s accurate, means nothing. Their religion may still be focused on the interior world. Now if you have proof of a genuine religion where this is not the case, I’d be interested to hear about it.
But hopefully you now understand why I’m not impressed by a long chain of improbable coincidences leading up to a teenager’s misconception of religion.
For the record, I think that the idea that superstitions are generally manufactured by people for fun, is patently absurd and contradicted by all available evidence. You don’t worry if your lucky charm is missing if you know you made it up. I also think the “fun” explanation for ritualistic dance is similarly absurd and obviously false. If it were just for fun, they’d be happy to change the patterns and steps periodically, like the line-dancing western-types do.
If you have to resort to these kind of unfounded leaps to unlikely and incorrect conclusions, there’s probably something wrong with your arguments.
ITR, clearly I was mistaken in how much headway I thought we were making here – apologies for misreading you.
Which is why I specifically asked you if you were posting from an institution with access to more than abstracts. In any case, now that you have set out your minimum threshold for what you will even entertain (while paradoxically expressing no little contempt for neurobiology and cognitive science in general), it seems like we’ll have to go back to basics, so I’ll address this in a moment.
No I am not. You gave your word that you would not mischaracterise me, and this is a grave breach of your promise. I have repeatedly told you that I entertain the possibility that gods exist, that religion began with divine inspiration and have not labelled anything in your worldview “ludicrous”. I seek only to convince you that my solely natural worldview isn’t ludicrous either. Please, do not think that this suggestion of mine that religions emerged naturally threatens your worldview, since I explicitly accept that your particular religion could have been divinely inspired even if these first tribal religions weren’t.
I respect your opinions, even if I disagree with them. I expect you to respect mine in the same way. And for you to say you do not respect vast swathes of scientific research which you are nevertheless demanding suggests you are not engaging this debate with an open mind.
Correct me , but are you not admitting to intellectual dishonesty here – writing something you know to be nonsense? Again, this does not bode well for honest debate. And I’d be interested in reading them if they made it through the peer review of a respected journal! What were the titles (of paper and journal) and years?
Who said anything about decisions? That’s a whole different branch of cognitive neuroscience. I said that two specific human abilities – language and agent detection – evolved over the last 10 million years since they were absent in Sahelanthropus Tchadensis, whose genes are very different to Homo Sapiens (of whom very few ever lived in caves, by the way).
OK. The most obvious example of a change in behaviour associated with a gene (due in fact to the simplicity of the genetic sequence) is Huntington’s Disease: If you have fewer than 40 CAG triplets at a particular place on the chromosome, you will not develop the behaviour symptomatic of Huntington’s. 40 or more, and the probability of you doing so before you die increases for every additional CAG triplet. This is why a genetic treatment for a psychological disorder is so promising and exciting, no matter what you think of the academic institutions pursuing such a goal.
Of course, other psychological features of a given species’ brain are harder to pin down due to their greater complexity. We know that language is strongly correlated with de Broca’s area (which doesn’t grow anywhere near as big in apes or developmentally disabled humans who can’t speak, both of whom differ from talking humans genetically to a greater or lesser extent). But do we know precisely which genes are instrumental in the growth of dB’s area, or those areas correlated with agent detection? No, any more than we know exactly which genes grow the stomach or immune system. This still does not constitute evidence that the stomach or immune system did not evolve naturally.
You said yourself that “genes cause us to be able to think”. I don’t see how you can accept this without accepting that differences in those genes cause differences to those thinking abilities. Must we really wait for science to tell us the exact genes for growing the de Broca’s area before you accept that the evolution of language and the evolution of this neurophysical structure are effectively the same story? How else do you explain damage to this structure causing the loss of linguistic ability?
And if Pascal Boyer were the only anthropologist in the world, such scepticism might be well founded. Luckily, there are literally thousands of others, such that every tribe he studied was also studied by at least one (and probably tens or, some cases, hundreds) of other anthropologists who could check that he was reporting honestly and rigorously, as required by the strict criteria of respected scientific journals. At least, those respected by scientists.
So you don’t even entertain the notion that these people believe what they say they believe? Should an anthropologist entering your church assume that when you pray, speak in unison or affirm your beliefs you don’t actually mean it – that you’re just saying that Jesus Christ, Son of God, died for your sins and rose again, because it’s fun?
ITR, I’ve already apologised for misplacing where you are here, but I cannot deny I’m a little disappointed in the tone of your last posts. You seem to be seeking a way to wash your hands of the whole debate without losing face, when I assure you I’m genuinely trying to address your points as carefully and as helpfully as I can (and I apologise for anything in my tone you find disappointing). So please keep engaging with me here unless you really think I’m wasting my time.
You asked for reading matter, so I think Dennett himself would be the best reading at this point – we can delve into deeper articles he references later (although it might be tricky without full access – I’ll do my best). In any case, you seem to be mistrustful of any scientific source regarding tribal peoples’ tendency to ascribe agents to natural phenomena, and have pointedly ignored my questions regarding what such people might reasonably do if they believed in such agents. If you could spare the hour to read those 50 or so pages from p.108 of Breaking the Spell and tell me how you find it (compared to Dawkins, say) I’d be very grateful. If you don’t think you’ll have that time, let me know and I’ll suggest a shorter article or paper.
Ah. I think I’m detecting the end of useful dialogue here. Am I really being so unreasonable?
OK, so you don’t consider the thousands of tribal religions in the world today, or their prehistoric counterparts, to constitute true religions? I asked you this explicitly at least twice, so forgive me for not realising that their emergence wasn’t actually the step you consider ludicrous. What do you suggest was the first “non-teenage” religion, a la Chesterton? Again, we can examine the steps immediately prior to its emergence.
Thanks DS. I realise it’s probably onlyITR who considers natural emergence ludicrous, even amongst the theists here, but our audience might still get something from my responses so I’m happy to continue unless it becomes clear that there’s nothing I could say to convince him.
Re-reading his last post, it seems I might have misread it first time: He is not suggesting that tribal religions aren’t religions, merely that believing in supernatural agents isn’t relevant to what consititutes a religion (which begs the question of why he spent so much effort arguing with me about whether tribal peoples ascribe agency to natural phenomena in the first place).
ITR appears to suggest that this “introspection” feature is what distinguishes a religion from a non-religion, so we can once more explore how it might have developed naturally, assuming that it was once more absent in Sahelanthropus Tchadensis. And again, I will argue that the natural emergence of language is a key development in this regard.
Actually, ITR, since it seems that you consider those chapters of Dennett irrelevant to the “introspection” aspect of religion you wish to focus on, you might be better reading this instead.
SentientMeat, I suspect that SDMB selection will start working against this thread, so before it dies out, I just wanted to thank you for your efforts here. Although ultimately it was mostly fits and starts in terms of getting a dialog going, I was very interested in the topic.
I also want to commend you on having the patience of Job throughout ordeals more trying than those Job ever had to face.
Nonsense is relative. Proofs in math and theoretical physics are hard to verify, since one minor mistake can wreck the whole result. Generally you put the proof out there and assume it’s valid until someone finds a mistake. I merely theorize that most (if not all) of what I wrote contained mistakes because in my experience almost all lengthy proofs do. Like most papers, mine were barely read by anyone, so who knows if they’re nonsense or not. Is this one nonsense? You tell me.
I could write much more about my personal experiences, but the last time I did so you accused me of “avoiding the real meat of the philosophies of science and/or materialism and concentrating only on trivia”. Now you’re asking me about the things that you formerly rejected.
I any case, let me tackle the thread more broadly. I think the chances of progress are slim until we’re able to get on the same page. You are obviously working under certain assumptions concerning peer-reviewed papers and other topics. I do not share many of your assumptions. This results in us talking past each other.
You clearly want to talk about books and journal articles. Ten years ago that was what I wanted to talk about as well. Ten years ago I would have adored The God Delusion and the two of us would probably have gotten along famously. Then I was a materialist; now I am not. The reason for the change is quite simple. I pulled my nose out of the books and articles and started to look at the world around me instead. Soon I realized that much of what I’d been taught was not true. That was the beginning of the process that lead to me converting to Christianity.
So if you assume that I’ll see more plausability in your philosophy after I read certain books and articles, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Obviously if I had the same attitude towards august institutions and journal article I’d agree with you at least on the main points. But I don’t, and that’s why you’re not going to succeed by tossing out more and more links to journal articles.
Let me take you up on this offer, in hopes that it will explain why I disrespect evolutionary psychology generally. For simplicity’s sake I’ll take the top paper on the list, “Cross-national variation in the motivation for uncommitted sex: The role of disease and social risks.”
This paper looks at “sociosexuality”, a fancy term for how much people sleep around. The authors propose that it results from: prevalence of AIDS, negative social consequences, and gender ratios. Using some old survey data at the national level they find low correlations and cite them as evidence that their explanation are correct. They also note that women are more likely to sleep around in countries with high rates of AIDS, and suggest this is because women in those countries want to provide their children access to a wide variety of immunity genes.
I view all this as being pretty much nuts. I don’t know anyone who guides their own sexuality based on any of those things. The people I know choose not to sleep around because of the teachings of Jesus Christ and their love for their spouse. Of course my surroundings are not indicative of the entire country. I’ve been in more enlightened and places with more rational inhabitants, many of whom rut like monkeys. But even there, I never met anyone who does so for any of the reasons listed in the article. Those who slept around generally did so to appear ‘cool’. I’m baffled by the suggestions in the article. Could the authors name a single woman who sleeps around so that the her children will have a variety of immunity genes?
Any teenage skeptic could tell us that “correlation does not imply causation”. For this particular paper a much more logical explanation for the result seems obvious. First-world countries are generally more secular and people their sleep around more. The authors don’t rule out the possibility of other factors, but their failure to mention the obvious ones does stand out.
What? That’s it? Out of my entire output since your last post in which you said that almost everything you had been arguing for 3 weeks was actually irrelevant anyway, leading me to look around for an accessible paper on introspection, this is all you feel like engaging me on? Sheesh, so be it …
In other words, this paper explores a prediction of evolutionary psychology. And finding that predictions are actually incorrect (falsifiability) is the most important part of science. So even if the prediction is unsupported by the data, that does not by any means make the paper unscientific.
The specific predicitons which the paper set out to test are listed at the bottom of p.236. Having demonstrated important deviations from the predictions among females in high-HIV countries, the paper suggests a hypothesis as to why this might be so.
The data comes from a 2005 paper – not so old considering the long peer-review time lag in many respected journals. And your analysis of their methodology is way off: the purpose of the paper is to find where the predictions are supported and where they are not. Only later to they even offer hypotheses as to why this might be so.
But precisely nowhere do they say that women want this – you’re breaking your promise yet again. Psychology is not just, or indeed mainly, about what one is conscious of. If you respected scientific research, I could show you a whole lot of it in which people’s decisions were manipulated unconsciously, with the post-hoc reasoning they provided afterwards bearing no relation to the data itself. Here, the prediction of evolutionary psychology is that a higher incidence of HIV might unconsciously influence people’s promiscuity rate. The prediction was held to be supported by the data for males but not for females.
Again, you seriously misrepresent the authors here. Some people sleep around, some don’t. The prediction the authors seek to test is, do the people who do sleep around do it more or less often in high HIV areas? Your church wouldn’t provide many data points, so they chose a data sample which might be more helpful in answering the specific question posed at the bottom of p.236.
What? Did you read the Dependent, Independent and Control Variables section? The paper does not seek to explore why one country is more promiscuous than another, but whether a given country’s data supports or conflicts with the predictions on p.236 – that’s why the data for each country is normalised and correlation with the different variables analysed.
In short, I don’t see how anything you say impugns the scientific rigour of the research. It just supports the contention that you don’t understand psychology anywhere near well enough to dismiss the tens of thousands of papers like this one.
But if you knew what you submitted was nonsense, you would be an academic fraud. Relatively speaking.
Well, thanks for your honesty. At least now I know that there’s pretty much nothing I could say to convince you that my worldview is not ludicrous.
I do not reject your personal experiences. And now that you’re clearly unwilling to even entertain a natural emergence of religion, or indeed to listen to what science has to say on any subject, it’s clearly all we’ve got left. So let’s talk about personal experience, especially since bullet #2 of my OP relates to it directly.
Obviously ,we could trade personal experiences – yours of how you converted from atheism to Christianity, mine of the opposite as a teenager, yours of how sensible your churchpeople seem to you, mine of how brainswashed mine seemed to me. But I’d like to focus on what you have said about religion so far here. You suggest that the stories which the Fang, Yanomamo and Fore believe aren’t key to religion, only the “introspection” required to “know onelself”. I’d like to ask you, is this also the case for the stories of a 1st Century Judean you came to believe as well? When I was a teenager, I increasingly sought to know myself and focus on the internal world you consider important – I just stopped believing that the stories about gods, their sons and the life after death they promise were actually true.
So, with regards to bullet point #2, I’d ask you this: How much are you basing your judgement of what is actually true about your religion on what you wish to be true, and are you any different in this regard from the Fang, Yanomamo and Fore?
