ITR, we’re bifurcating once more, this time into memetics and what does or does not constitute an “environment”. If I address this point, will you promise to address my timeline of the origin of religion and explore what science has to say about it?
To me this seems to merely justify my point. Sure, analysis of the environment can explain why you have a pet rabbit rather than a cow. (Though I can’t shake a nagging feeling that common sense would explain it in fewer words.) But why do you have a rabbit as opposed to a gerbil, guinea pig, hamster, rat, canary, parrot, goldfish, snake, African pygmy hedgehog, or any of the many other options? In the final analysis, the only answer is that you chose the rabbit from among available options. To understand the choice, we need to focus on the chooser. Circumstances may have played some role in the choice, but they matter only inasmuch as they affected the chooser.
This debate is similar to the clash between active and passive voice. We prefer active voice because it directs attention to the person who does something rather than the thing that gets done to. Asking “Why did Jim eat a cheeseburger?” sets us on the right path, while asking “Why was the cheeseburger eaten?” does not, because it leaves out the most important factor: Jim.
Actually, I guess I’ll just address ITR’s points anyway, absent the assurance I requested, if only for the audience.
But I’m telling you that “prevalence of ideas” and “survivors in the mental environment” are simply alternative descriptions for the same phenomena. What Dawkins addresses in chapter 5, and what I am increasingly desperately trying to get you to explore, is why some ideas might be prevalent. If you don’t like the terminology of memetics, fine, we can dispense with it in favour of your simple language – it’s just terminology.
Quite so, but there is a continuum between matter and humans: the timeline of evolution which I wish to discuss with you if you’ll stop avoiding me for a moment.
No, environments can and do act. The physical environment acted to wipe out the dinosaurs 65 Myr ago. An analogue here would be the cultural environment acting to wipe out the Cathar religion six centuries ago. To generalise: Agents form the environment, too.
A single human mind is a poor fit for the word “environment”, agreed. But no mind is an island. It is immersed in a sea of different, often mutually exclusive ideas, some of which are reinforced daily from childhood, others of which are but fleeting exposures from a Wikipedia page, and many which a mind will not happen to be exposed to at all. And these beliefs also have very different consequences for the holder at different historical periods or in different countries today. This simple common sense is the basis of memetics, and the “idea environment” is surely not an unforgivable catchphrase. But yet again, I’m happy to dispense with such terminology if it will lead you to engage with my OP a bit more.
But this is not the Dawkins approach but a strange philosophy of your own devising. Really, I understand how, when you’re about to read a book you know you might disagree with, you pre-emptively form arguments which you’d like to be in the book because you can argue with them easily. Then, when you actually read it, you end up seeing those arguments even though they’re not there. (I recently felt myself guilty of this when rereading David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind.) I implore you, stop arguing with your possibly biased or mistaken memory of what Dawkins writes and start quoting him verbatim.
Me neither. So it’s good that nobody here, or Dawkins himself, has done anything of the kind.
Again, reread that quote from p.219, which I think it would be very useful to take on board and think about:
“There doesn’t have to be natural selection. Biologists acknowledge that a gene may spread through a population not because it is a good gene but because it is a lucky one. We call this genetic drift … The cultural equivalent of genetic drift is a persuasive option, one that we cannot neglect when thinking about the evolution of religion.”
The everyday choices we make, such as which particular pet to buy, are much like “memetic drift”, if you like – “mutations” which are either random or so complex in their determinism from past experiences, memories and feedbacks that they are as random as a wild guess for all “we” know. Such choices are not selected for naturally. But the question of why humans keep pets at all – that is so common a choice as to require an explanation, perhaps to do with the fact that humans are social animals. Agreed?
I will certainly agree to address a timeline of the origin of religion. However, I retain the right to question the premises if I’m not convinced by them.
As for exploring what science has to say about the topic, I’m welcome to it if someone can demonstrate that science says anything about it. I would first note the fact that a bunch of experts talking and writing about a topic doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything there. For example, we may recall that in the 80’s fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic were all the rage among mathematicians and many scientists. But after several years and many millions of dollars in grants, the community gradually woke up to the fact that those things were just a rewording of parts of probability theory. Now fuzzy sets have gone into the dustbin of history. I’m sure all the scientists in this thread could give us many other examples of fads that swept into their field and then swept out just as quickly.
I think that memetics is likely to go the same way. In fact, it may be happening already. It seems that the word “meme” was everywhere three or four years ago, but I haven’t heard much of it lately.
There is a concept in psycholgy called imaginability, which involves computing the likelihood of a class by constructing instances of things in the class, and then counting them. (Ref:
[10] Tversky, Amos, and D. Kahneman, “Judgment Under Certainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science, Vol. 185, No. 4157 (Sept. 27, 1974_, pp. 1124-1131. That’s a ref from a psychology paper that my daughter and I wrote together.) The example we used is a bit complicated for here, but a good one is that people from warm climates often get in trouble on mountains by not taking warm enough clothes since they don’t imagine the need for them when packing.
Sorry for responding to you but he’s stopped answering me.
Gone from the popular press, perhaps. But I’m in the process of reviewing a book on Data Mining from maybe two years ago which has a large chapter on the use of fuzzy sets in data mining. They are of course not about probability, but about the difficulty in strictly defining concepts without strict delineations, like short and tall.
Please go right ahead and present your ideas using whatever terminology you choose. I’m not try to be snarky, but as it happens I just finished rereading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, which has a fine chapter on the use of fancy language to disguise lazy thinking. (And which neatly refutes everything in Dawkins’ book.)
I will, however, make one thing clear from the start. Anyone who says that “The cultural equivalent of genetic drift” causes religion is really admitting that they can’t offer any cause for religion, so I’m not going to be impressed by that.
Wow, seriously? I remember reading a bunch of your papers in this really amazing philosophy class I took in college. They and that class were instrumental in my becoming a skeptic, and, ultimately, an atheist. This was just the motivation I needed to join the boards, too!
Could you please explain why? I think you are misunderstanding the analogy.
OK.
[ul][li]Premise 1: The universe is around 13.7 billion yeas old, while life is less than 5 billion.[/li][li]Premise 2: From those first bacteria, genetic mutations over billions of years caused new organisms to appear which were different from their ancestors.[/li][li]Premise 3: This continuous process of evolution caused the appearance of first mammals, then primates, then hominids.[/li][li]Premise 4: Some time in the last 10 million years in that continuous ancestral line, there was an individual or group who first had the idea of gods.[/ul]Do you question any of these premises? (Given your habit of leaving whole swathes of my posts without comment on your part, an explicit yes or no would be very helpful, thanks.)[/li]
I assure you, science has plenty to say about the timeline, just hear me out. I would also note that your predisposition towards misunderstanding what experts write leads me to ask to ask you to hold off on judging whether there’s anything there until you actually hear what it is.
Heh heh, and you accuse Dawkins of writing in absolutes?
Lucky, then, that I said absolutely nothing of the kind. Please, please stop building strawmen and listen to what is being said rather than pre-emptively arguing with what isn’t. This is very important: Do you understand that quote of Dawkins about not everything being naturally selected? I’ll be happy to explain it further since its misapprehension seems to form the foundation of many of your mischaracterisations.
If you don’t mind my saying so, Sentient, your fourth premise is vague on two accounts: (1) it is unclear whether the idea of “gods” was a synthesis of experience or actual experience, and (2) whether the modern [from Jesus] idea of God as Love is related in any way to gods of gaps, much less evolved from them. As you know, regarding number 2, whatever relation there may be with respect to etymologies does not imply any conceptual relation. And regarding number 1, we have the Ramachandran problem: namely, that we don’t know whether man conceived God or God revealed Himself to man. I apologize if I’ve butted in unwelcomed.
I wish that I was either of these guys! We just referenced their paper. I’m applying behavioral economics to my particular area of engineering, with help from my daughter who has degrees in economics and psychology. This is an example of how you can learn from your kids.
Are they teaching this stuff in philosophy? How exactly? I took a bunch of philosophy in college, so I’m interested. I suspect no philosophy professor would ever stumble across the places our papers are published.
I’ve got a third quibble - the statement implies that the concept of god arose in one place, but I can see that it could arise independently in many tribal groups. That says nothing about whether the concept is due to revelation or genetics.
I don’t see how this damages the argument; didn’t vision evolve at several separate points as well?
It’s great t see you here, friend, but I ask you to be a little more lenient with my language since I think you understand what I’m trying to say: Imagine Toumai, then Orroin, Lucy, then a line of Homos (titter ye not). I am positing that somewhere along this line, the idea of an invisible, causative, intelligent agent (ie. an entity having an intentional stance in Dennett-speak) emerged and became widespread. I would hope that we agree that this is unlikely to have occurred in Toumai’s time, but that Homo Sapiens might be a little late.
As for the Ramachandran “problem” (which I suspect he might greatly regret ever bringing up if such a phrase ever gains currency, since it is rather like Newton suggesting that the planets might still be pushed by angels, but that they do it in such a way that it would be perfectly reasonable of us to slice them away with Ockham’s Razor and call universal gravitation a solely natural phenomenon), then fear not – I’m getting to that. I just need ITR’s explicit agreement first, given his habit of jumping to all kinds of strange conclusions like a randomly shocked pigeon (scroll to p.118 or just Search “pigeon”).
Voyager, yes, but I’m just saying that there must have been a first, somewhere. I’m not yet saying it was the sole source.
Ok, then, well that’s fine. I have no problem with how you phrased it. I just wanted to point out that if there is a God, He may have no relation whatsoever with the invisible, causative, intelligent agent that might have arisen in the minds of early Homo Sapiens. In my opinion, there is a danger of equivocation in speaking interchangeably of the gods of Olympus (or Memphis or Rome or what-have-you) and the God Who facilitates goodness. The obvious similarity in spelling does not imply a relation between them any more than a Romance language has something to do with dating and smooching. And also I wanted to point out that cause and effect cannot be determined if one element is natural and the other is not. I wanted to point out those things no matter how number four is phrased.
I think I missed the edit window, but as I think of it, I want to stress that my problem was not with the language you used for number 4, but with the premise itself. It implies directly that that God as an entity evolved from god as a concept (I guess by means of natural selection), attempting to establish a tautology. I think it would be a distraction if we tried to tinker with the wording because I will reject any premise that forces a conclusion that does nothing more than restate the premise. I’ll grant its validity, but nothing more.
Why? The obvious similarity in spelling is there for a reason: they are all gods. What reason is there to arbitrarily separate a god of thunder and god of good?
Even if the gods you are attempting to distance your god from have origins in explaining natural phenomenon, your god is still no different. As natural phenomenon have become explainable and the need for different gods to explain them has diminished, you still hold up your god as the explanation for creation, for life, for everything good, or whatever. It’s the exact same non-explanation: god dit it.
That’s very interesting. Certainly the concepts of these gods are very different. Could the God (your definition) revealed himself to the ancients and was misunderstood in some way, causing them to create the concept of their gods? Could the concept of god have arisen independently of God? In that case you agree with us atheists at least until we get to the point where you think your God made himself known. In that case, why did God hide himself for so long? If the first case is true, why was the concept so difficult for some very clever civilizations to grasp?
But you’ve brought up a fascinating question.
Giving another counterexample besides “Romance” would obviously be useless in your case, though there are thousands of examples in which words are spelled and pronounced the same way but mean different things — we call them “homonyms”.
The same reason we “arbitrarily” separate the force of law from the force of an accelerating mass, what with the latter carrying no jurisprudential weight.
Setting aside the shallow and myopic understanding of theological history that you have expressed, I’m afraid that you suffer as well from a miscomprehension of what I am saying since I haven’t offered God as an explanation for anything whatsoever. I really don’t know how to continue a discussion with you since you apparently cannot distinguish even a proper name from an ordinary noun. And so, with all the respect that you’re due, I’m afraid I’ll have to turn my attention back to Sentient and Voyager at this time.
I definitely think we do agree up until the point you describe, but I don’t think the ancients were any more clueless than the moderns. Witness the post of hotflungwok, who as a 21st century man, is unable to tell the difference. I think that God hid Himself from some and revealed Himself to others. I think He still does. I think He does pretty much exactly what we do ourselves — we hide ourselves form those who deem us to have no value and would sooner kill us as speak to us, while we reveal ourselves to those who value us highly and express their love for us.