Is Religion Innate or a Cultural Construct?

[WaveJumper]

Re: will religion always be with us?

As long as we cannot explain what reality is, God will be a prime explanation for everything. Then, if we in 500 or 2000 years, somehow manage to explain most or all of it, one will start to wonder why everything is explainable by the "incidental" human mind. For me, hardcore atheism of the sorts that makes bold claims like "Folks, we are telling you, we are accidents", etc. seems like a dead-end, a prematurely shut door to other alleys, a sort of personal war on other ideas, and so i think there will always be different religions around.

 

[Tor Hershman]

Yes.

Here's a wee vid, moi did, on the origin of the One God concept.

 

[Huckleberry]

But as long as the rule of law is working, in secular society, it seems to reduce the importance of this "justice" function to the evolution of religion.

It's like religion has been filling these needs----but some can be met by secular society and some cannot be met, or not very effectively.

By what standard is justice measured that allows us to know if rule of law is working or not? It works when we think it does what is right and it is broken when it does what we think is wrong. We imbue principles such as justice with an a priori truth, yet from society to society, and individual to individual we measure them differently. We feel that our perception of justice is not an arbitrary judgement. It creates order out of chaos and allows the formation of civilizations.

I don't believe secular society reduces the importance of the justice function to the evolution of religion. Many religions began as a set of principles and practices to bring order to society. The evolution of religion is the search for an ideal order, and secular society is only one more form of this. It is a distinct animal in its adaptation, but it is not separate from principles and practices based on a priori truth. It also seeks an ideal order based on its belief. It just does it without the belief that an ideal order arbitrarily judges humanity.

This is from the author Terry Pratchett in his book 'Hogfather'. You might enjoy this.

Death: Humans need fantasy to *be* human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
Susan: With tooth fairies? Hogfathers?
Death: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Susan: They're not the same at all.
Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged.
Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what's the point?
Death: You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?

 

[Galteeth]

By what standard is justice measured that allows us to know if rule of law is working or not? It works when we think it does what is right and it is broken when it does what we think is wrong. We imbue principles such as justice with an a priori truth, yet from society to society, and individual to individual we measure them differently. We feel that our perception of justice is not an arbitrary judgement. It creates order out of chaos and allows the formation of civilizations.

I don't believe secular society reduces the importance of the justice function to the evolution of religion. Many religions began as a set of principles and practices to bring order to society. The evolution of religion is the search for an ideal order, and secular society is only one more form of this. It is a distinct animal in its adaptation, but it is not separate from principles and practices based on a priori truth. It also seeks an ideal order based on its belief. It just does it without the belief that an ideal order arbitrarily judges humanity.

This is from the author Terry Pratchett in his book 'Hogfather'. You might enjoy this.

I think the satire there really misses the point. Sure, justice doesn't "exist" in the same metaphysical sense as atoms. It's the person who thinks they need to who is confused.
I can have principles that I believe are absolute moral truths, (and personally I do.) I know they're not "true" in the same way thermodynamics is true, it's a different metaphysical category. One is an undeniable, externally confirmable, objective truth. The other is a moral truth. It is an external mapping of meaning onto neutral objective processes.

I think this an area where religous types get their metaphysics mixed up. They tend to only have one, indivisible, absolute truth, which has no other descriptive features other then being "the truth" (i.e., objective observation does not have to match up per ce!)

 

[croghan27]

Thanks for the links to Terry Pratchett. I have done some investigation into him and heard some good things ... a shame that now he has some severe health problems.

 

[brainstorm]

There is actually some literature on the evolutionary origins of religion by people like Boyer, Altran and Dennett, among others, that could be worth reading. In their view, evolution has primed our brains to be seekers of intentionality, even where none exist. Better to err on the side of caution and mistake non-intentional things for intentional things (and at most spend some extra energy) than do the opposite and risk dying, or so the general (slightly caricatured here) argument goes.

This is an interesting post. The assumption seems to be that humans are capable of thinking in terms of non-intentional actions. The question is if you would view actions as unintentional or subconscious, what possibility would their be for exercising creativity, choice, and freedom?

I doubt that religion will ever go away completely, but I do believe that the issues addressed by religion get usurped by other discourses at times, and that these new discourses rely on condemnation of religious language as antiquated in order not to have to compete directly with it.

At this point, my view of biblical theology is that it is a form of psychology mixed with philosophy. The fact that Freud called himself a "godless Jew" and regarded religion as infantile provides some support for the idea that Freud was competing with religion/theology as a means for people to feel better and happier.

From an economic perspective, I think that religion (or at least Christianity) will always be present because of how Christianity regards wealth and power. There is a reason that it is fairly easy to get copies of bible for free whereas the DSM or other psychology books can be quite expensive. Also, (some) Christians spread "the word" for no other reason than they believe that doing so will make the world better and improve their own spiritual well-being.

How many psychologists do you know that help people because they expect it to make the world better or just because it improves their own psychological health? If you do, I would call them "Christian" even if they don't personally subscribe to Christianity. By "Christian," I'm only referring to the missionary spirit and faith in spreading goodness by spreading knowledge.