Religion: a survival mechanism?

Fascinating!Now you've given me more to think about this weekend.I probably won't continue this line of discussion since I think we might be heading off topic from the survival mechanism. We are probably going deeper than the original topic was aiming.Thank you very much for talking with me.Have an excellent weekend.

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"The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which lasts forever." --Anatole France

I still don't see where you want to go with this, I think you are over-analyzing things. That's all I can say about it, because of what I'm going to say next.Although I think your style has improved slightly, DominionSeraph is probably right: you start writing when you are already halfway a long train of thought. You seem to assume all of us have read Kant, Russel, Carnap, Jammer and others to such an extent that your merely mentioning them in passing explains everything you don't say. Well, "I know nothing, I'm from Barcelona." Let that be your starting point with me. This is how I would have said that: I know you can write plain sentences, Brad. Indulge me, and the discussion would become much less one-sided for you.

Yes, but DominionSeraph had to ride that horse for quite a long thread didn't he. Maybe you Admins could just direct people like "Dom" to Brad's thread at All about Brad McFall

I wonder why no one has latched on to the idea of the brain evolving in such a way as to be "wired" for believing, the way it is suggested in the article. That way, the development of religion in man would have a solid, biological foundation, with the group-connected advantages as the selective element:

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One factor in the development of religious belief was the rapid expansion of our brains as we emerged as a species, says Todd Murphy, a behavioural neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada. As the frontal and temporal lobes grew larger, our ability to extrapolate into the future and form memories developed. "When this happened, we acquired some very new and dramatic cognitive skills. For example, we could see a dead body and see ourselves in that position one day. We could think 'That's going to be me,'" he says. That awareness of impending death prompted questions: why are we here? What happens when we die? Answers were needed.

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Some believe that religion was so successful in improving group survival that a tendency to believe was positively selected for in our evolutionary history.

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This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 04 March 2005 20:50 AM

I think if you "Ramseyfy" Carnap's "gene" you do not get the same thing as doing WHAT HE DID for the "electron". It matters not whether you or I know what Carnap did. To justify what he thought only leads to the narrowing of the discussion but I see no stoping one from metasizing with ordertypes his ability to Ramsify any "theory" no matter what lingos or memes the scientists of the theory USE. That is my personal view. Take it or leave it but this question mark remains as I remarked it from Chapter 27 precisely.
So the particular sentence you selected is immaterial. I assert that it is due to failure to notice the signficance of nonadaptive traits that modern science hasnt seen what I already have in nature, irregardless of how we might talk about, what it is the scientists are acutally doing. Just try to imagine you are the person who selects which bird pics to include in ONE PAGE. It's not a hard thing. My grandfather wouldnt do it with stamps. He gave that job to my Grandmother. Martin Gardner also writes for Scientific American and I made my "insight" by comparing that presentation of science with another human one from TV. I try to present visually all there is to it. That's all. What else can I say? See the complex as simple. I did not want to refer to a paricular chapter at that time. NOW I DO! It is not a trick or optical illusion. You must knock over the first domino if you want to get out of jail free and not be carded.You don't suppose Dominion Seraph hacked my photobucket password do you?The relevant paragraph for your thread actually was in Chapter 27 where you or I read,

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"Consider, for instance, the assertion, "All red-headed woodpeckers have red heads." Is it analytic or synthetic? At first you may answer that it is, of course, analytic. "Red-headed woodpeckers"means"wood-peckers that have red heads", so the sentence is equivalent to the assertion that all woodpeckers with red heads have red heads. Such a sentence is not only A-true but also L-true.
You are right if the meaning of "red-headed woodpecker" is such that "having a red head" is, in fact, an essential component of the meaning. Vut is it an essential component? An ornithologist may hve a different understanding of "red-headed woodpecker". For him the term may refer to a speices of bird defined by a certain type of body structure, shape of bill, and behavior habits. He may consider it quite possible that this species of bird, in some isolated region, may have undergone a mutation that changed the color of its head to, say, white. For sound taxanomic reasons, he would continue to call such birds red-headed woodpeckers even though their heads were not red. They would be a species variant. He might even refer to them as "white-headed red-headed woodpeckers". Therefore, if "red-headed woodpecker" is so interpreted that having a red head is not an essential component, the sentence becomes synthetic."

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I dont have any special system of thought I just know a little bit about shapes of herps that does not match anything but what is under the rock. It is wrong only to consider it mental when it is observational. That's all. Boy was I shocked to find Bishop's "white-headed" Desmognathus under a rock in South Carolina AND have Kraig Adler say my ability to notice that a large Plethodon from Virgina was distinct from all others described to 80s date WITHOUT DNA evidence. The herpetologist cared not for my ability to sort the form(although his grad student noticed and that is why I was asked to sort through fish in Africa) but only for the latest technology to sort what I already sorted mentally. What a blow it was to see how science really worked! Some day I should get paid for my ability which I carry over to the evc discussion, but not today.

I thought I kinda did in Message 7.Breeding the foxes for tameness.We might be wired to believe as a child, but are we truly wired to believe into adulthood or have we been conditioned?

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That awareness of impending death prompted questions: why are we here? What happens when we die? Answers were needed.

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I don't feel that answering these questions would automatically lead to religion. Stories maybe, but not necessarily religion or a supreme being.

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"The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which lasts forever." --Anatole France

The point is that, to be wired as a child, we necessarily have a brain that is capable of believing things. To be able to be conditioned to believe certain things, we need to have the hardware first. Well, the questions must lead to something, and it might just have happened to have been religion. Besides, stories may be very magical to a mind that has barely risen out of the swamp of animal instinctiveness, especially so if the stories are about what happens after death. We're not talking about people who are sophisticated, calling themselves Jews and everything, I'm thinking rather of people who have just overcome the grunting stage. I can imagine that, once a mind grasps the idea of its own existence, it's very hard for it to contemplate it's eventual non-existence.{edited to change "maybe" into "may be"}This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 07 March 2005 10:59 AM

"I wonder why no one has latched on to the idea of the brain evolving in such a way as to be "wired" for believing . . ."I suppose that the only thing that matters in regard to religion is whether it's true or not. If it's not true, it's totally pointless. If it is true, it's the only thing that matters.But I suppose one might speculate that if one is "wired" for religious belief, then one might be wired for other beliefs as well.What other things? Oh, all sorts of things. One might be wired, for example, to believe in the superiority of the group; others, the individual. Or one might be wired to believe in capitalism or socialism or the superiority of those who are tall or bald.I guess if we are wired, we can't help it, so we are not to be blamed for our delusions. I'm wired to believe in reincarnation, I think. I have recurrent dreams of past lives.I'm also wired to believe in the "tinniness" of all this talk about people being wired for this or that.No, no. That will not do.I am wired to believe that I am responsible for every action in my life, much of which is reprehensible, some of which is okay.No, the best explanation of religion is the following idea: I feel is if I am incorporeal (from an earlier post by Parasomnium).

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The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.---Milton

And this is why I don't read the works of philosophers.
Humans are good at pattern matching, and reading someone else's reasoning creates a rut along that line of reasoning leading to their conclusion.
You seem to have matched something in this discussion to something Kierkegaard said, and then skipped merrily along the rut, right to his conclusion.As for me, I don't have to deal with any creationist issues. My line of reasoning -- which is rigourously tested every step along the way -- doesn't lead in that direction. You can take as much time and space as needed. However, as I think there's at least one or two basic assumptions that we differ on, we need to find the point of divergence."You exist."I accept that, and I'm pretty sure you do too. (It's not axiomatic for me, though)
Take it from there. You qualified that nicely. Didn't define how you think Gould might have been thinking, but nice nonetheless. Why was it a mistake?
You didn't posit a goal, which is necessary for a determination of 'mistake' to be made. I am free. In fact, I don't think it's even possible to get a pragmatist stuck.
As a last resort, we can always flip a coin. That breaks all stalemates. Understanding wouldn't be a problem if you'd explain what your nouns refer to. I mean, it might be simpler for me to enter a debate with, "You are wrong as per DominionSeraph's reasoning," but that doesn't tell anybody what that reasoning is. Logic will be sufficient. That page is in the middle of an argument. What's there to discuss?Post the entire argument, and I'll be happy to point out any and all flaws. It may boil down to something as simple as, "He got lost in the abstract." Southwest.
If you're south of Providence, you better know how to swim.

Thanks for the link.
That thread does have more posts than I like to enter into, though. I don't much like getting lost in the crowd.

I don't think anyone denies the idea.
I'd say we're hardwired for the type of reasoning, but it's basically the same thing.Snap judgments are undeniably useful.

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we necessarily have a brain that is capable of believing things.

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So then my question is what is believing?A child tends to "believe" someone they have learned to trust, someone in authority, and possibly someone they haven't yet learned to mistrust?Even a child will not "believe" or trust a parent who lies or causes them harm.So our simple speaking ancestors are sitting around the fire after dinner discussing death and where we go. This group had witnessed a man dying and watched closely. They noticed that after his last exhale he didn't move anymore. So one man postulates that his breath is now among us. Seemed like a reasonable answer to the rest of them.Is that believing or just accepting what seems reasonable given the evidence in front of them?So are we wired to believe or reason?Or are we wired to reason and conditioned to believe?

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"The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which lasts forever." --Anatole France

'Trust' is the default state. If someone never received any contradictory information, they'd never leave that state. However, as there are liars and people who don't know what they're talking about, contradictory information abounds.
But that's a separate issue entirely. Anything dealing with death is likely to have only come about long after things dealing with nature. Death, being so common, would likely have not garnered even a second thought.

Hi Robin,It’s good to see you’re back. Maybe I shouldn’t have said wired to believe things. It sounds too much as if we are wired to believe some specific things. I think now that I should have phrased it more carefully, something like wired to be able to entertain beliefs of any kind.And perhaps the same kind of wiring would also allow us to find out if our beliefs are justified. After all, a belief is nothing but a speculation about something. Why then don’t we take this one step further and speculate about the truth of our belief? Not only do we have the mental capacity to have a belief about something, we also have the capacity to question that belief.Thus, if we entertain a delusion in spite of the fact that there is no justification for it, we could, in the end, be rightfully blamed for not using our capacity to the full. The feeling of incorporeality may have been a most magical thought for primitive people, akin to the incorporeal world where stories seem to reside. The combination of the two might be irresistible for a mind that has just climbed out of the abyss of non-consciousness.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 07 March 2005 11:49 AM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

How is this likely? Isn’t it also plausible that a creature that has only just begun to have thoughts at all, let alone second thoughts, would find it difficult to grasp the idea of death, especially its own death?You didn’t address what I think is Purpledawn’s main point, which is

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Is that {what the primitive people in her example are doing, P.} believing or just accepting what seems reasonable given the evidence in front of them?
So are we wired to believe or reason?
Or are we wired to reason and conditioned to believe?

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So, are we wired to believe or reason? Meaning, I think, are we wired to believe, or are we wired to reason? My take on this is: a bit of both. I think the wiring for believing and the wiring for reasoning aren’t that far apart, or perhaps even the same. Believing things requires a certain amount of reasoning, and vice versa. Believing and reasoning are two sides of the same coin.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins