[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
OK, that’s a good start: Let us explore whether religion as a phenomenon might be explained scientifically.
The universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old. Earth is around 5 billion. Life on Earth, in the form of simple bacteria, is around 4 billion. Complex multicellular life is less than a billion years old, mammals a couple of hundred million, primates a few tens of millions. The Last Common Ancestor between humans and apes lived around 8 million years ago, Australopithecus a few million, and other hominids appeared since then culminating in Homo sapiens a few hundred thousand years ago. If you question this, we’ll have to start a separate thread. I would hope that we can agree that modern humans required no divine interference to evolve from similar, earlier hominids, which in turn required nothing but small genetic mutations over millions of years to evolve from mammals, tetrapods, fish and so on.
Somewhere in that sequence, the first individual hypothesised gods and/or afterlives. If we agree that humans evolved naturally, we can explore whether two particular human hypotheses - namely, that there is a “person” who causes phenomena that cannot be explained, and that one somehow lives on after death - could, repeat could (not did, just could) have arisen naturally. We could then explore whether such hypotheses could fare well in the Darwinian battle of hypotheses (and the behaviours such beliefs might cause) such that “religion” eventually emerged naturally.
How’s that for a start? I’m not seeking to provide a perfectly convincing answer in one post (or indeed at all, since the perfect is the enemy of the good), I’m just seeking to establish the kind of exploration you’d be willing to undertake.
[/QUOTE]
Let’s establish two things right off the bat. First off, by loading up your paragraphs with “coulds” and “mights”, you’re definitely separating your argument from that of Dawkins. Second, as I understand it, no amount of further exploration along these lines could possibly give us anything other than a hypothetical scenario. Unless there’s some experiment to test whether this hypothetical scenario ever occurred in reality, it isn’t science (by the Feynman definition.)
With that said, I think the idea of a Darwinian battle of ideas is ridiculous. The entire reason why you folks like Darwinian processes so much is that they don’t involve an intelligent being choosing who survives and who reproduces. But in a supposed battle of ideas, there are intelligent human beings choosing. A human being decides (a) which ideas to keep in his or her mind and (b) which ideas to communicate to others. Hence there’s nothing Darwinian about the process by which ideas are selected.
Suppose I believe an idea: grass is green. In my worldview, I believe this idea because I see the grass and know it to be green. In the Dawkins worldview, as I understand it, I believe this idea only because the ‘green grass’ idea outcompeted rival ideas. To take the concept to it’s extreme, the grass could be orange or umber or blue with pink polka dots. All we know is that the ‘green grass’ idea has good survival value.
Of course one might retreat to a halfway position. Simple ideas are determined by what humans see and logically figure out, while the ‘Darwinian battle’ only involves complex ideas. But that would raise obvious questions: what is the mechanism that divides simple and complex ideas? Why are does competition occur only with complex ideas? And so forth.
(As a side note, I use “idea” rather than “hypothesis” or “meme” because I like to follow Orwell’s rule of using the simplest word that will do the job.)
That one’s obvious. But the point I’ve been making is that it’s a language barrier. You and I are having trouble understanding whether or not we agree because of a language barrier or sorts.