Is Religion a Natural Phenomenon?

Thank you. Some of Freud's ideas were farfetched. Freud thought of psychoanalysis as "scientific", but most of his insights were intuitive--which are still useful in generating hypotheses that can be (and have been) falsified.

But many of his contributions are still respected: the idea that human behavior is influenced by unconscious wants and needs, that humans are not guided mainly by reason, that the human mind is an unruly committee of competing unconscious submodules, the notion of repression, and the ego defense mechanisms (denial, projection, passive aggression, intellectualization, sublimation, etc.) Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker notes that human behavior "comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with different agendas and goals" (think about the last time your struggled over whether or not to eat that luscious piece of pie that you'll spend the rest of the week trying to work off). Pinker credits both Freud's psychnoanalytic theory and (ironically)the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature with giving a better account of this than behaviorism, social constructionism, and other popular theories. Neuroscientist David Eagleman expands on this view that we are made of many neuro-subpopulations, and that this has an evolutionary advantage over robots in leading to better decisions, informed by a variety of competing perspectives. "Id", "ego", and "superego" are at best crude metaphors, but they do call attention analytically to these unconscious interactions. I have no doubt at all that similar influences play a huge role in religion, but like you I think Freud's reductionism prevents him from seeing there could be more to it than that.

 

This is absolutely true. I guess one thing I can say in Freud's defense is that he came up with many intuitive ideas that turned out to be true even though he was basing his beliefs about the mind on discredited science. Also he said that we are 'merely vessels for our germ plasm', which hints at the logic of evolutionary psychology (of which I am a huge proponent).

I believe in a version of the 'subcommittee' in the mind. I believe that the brain consists of a collection of highly specialized mechanisms or circuits, each potentially evolved to meet different or even conflicting demands: hence the epic struggles from day to day between alternative routes of action.

An interesting note about Freud: He based his Oedipus complex concept in part on the fact that as a young boy he recalled seeing his mother changing and felt sexual arousal. However, Freud was raised mostly by a maid, and as a result it is likely that he failed to form the bond with his biological mother that would have triggered our innate incest avoidance mechanisms. Also he based the idea on the fact that most people have a strong conscious desire not to engage in sexual activity with a biological parent, claiming that the strong conscious desire must have been there to combat a conflicting sub-conscious desire. By this logic people must also have a sub-conscious desire to jam sharp objects in their eyes and to eat feces.

Okiefreak, have you read any of the psychologist Steven Pinker's work? In his book How the Mind Works he dedicates a small section to discussing religion. You are probably already aware of everything he says therein, Dawkins for example quotes Pinker extensively on the subject, however you may find the rest of the book useful in exploring religion from the standpoint of the brain and evolution.

 

I have read Pinker's book. The statement of his that I quoted came from The Blank Slate, which I'd also recommend. Now I understand why you, like Pinker, are puzzled that people can take comfort in something that is not "real". Like Dawkins, Pinker has a jauniced view of religion, which he seems to identify with Abrahmic fundamentalism. Like Dawkins, Pinker seems to view religion as a primitive effort to explain natural phenomenon, but one which has been refuted. Pinker, like Dawkins,thinks his ideas about evolutionary psychology are true and "real". Although I think they're both brilliant, I suspect that a couple of decades from now they'll seem as quaint as Freud. I'm thinking, in particular, of the "selfish gene", which is Dawkins' major contribution to the world of science before he became a career atheist. He characterizes humans as "survival machines--robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." He also apparently "knows" people can think of themselves as "nothing but " that and continue to find meaning in their lives. After all he does, and he, unlike the rest of us, is purely rational and knows that people don't need religion for meaning and morals, even though there's no foundation in science for human ethics. Why would anyone believe that when other students of evolution agree with Gould and West-Eberhard that it is the organism, not just the genes, that evolves and that "genes are followers, not leaders, in adaptive evolution." Dawkins (and Freud) might ultimately be proven right, but I submit that most people believe in them for reasons quite unrelated to the evidence and not too different from the motives of religious believers. They think it gives them something they can rely on in orienting themselves to the world--something that rests on the "firm" foundation of science. As for Pinker, his psychobiology tends to view males as driven by the biological imperative to spread our genes as widely as possible. (Admittedly, there's some evidence for that). Beliefs have consequences. People who think like Pinker might easily regard men like me as anomalies because we values such thinks as marital fidelity. I'd like to see a little more attention to the positive aspects of religion and ethics in helping people resist having their lives dictated by extremely selfish and irrational genes. Both Dawkins and Pinker are notorious for making claims that go beyond their data and that are heatedly disputed by other scientists. That's okay. It sells books and floats interesting hyptotheses which might prove fruitful. I'm reluctant to bet my life on "nothing but".

 

It's just that the "selfish genes" must also be responsible for attributes of the species that promote group identity and social cohesion, cuz that's one of our most important ways of surviving as a species.

 

good point. But might that not also include religion? For something that is supposedly so useless, it's odd from an evolutionary perspective, that it's so persistent and pervasive. Some parts of Western Europe seem to have gone pretty far in embracing secular humanism. They might be a test case for how well humans can do without a deity. But I'd argue that secular humanism could be the functional equivalent of theistic religion, if it takes the humanist part seriously.

 

Absorutery. Everything you said. As you touched on in your previous post, there are all kinds of belief systems and life missions that could look a lot like religions, if you scrutinize them closely.

 

Actually Okie I think you might be misunderstanding Pinker. Firstly, he would find no problem with men and women who value fidelity, and he does not at all claim that people in general, or men in particular, run around trying to spread their genes. He typically, in several of his books and talks, goes to great lengths to point out that he absolutely does not view organisms as fitness maximizers, and neither does Dawkins for that matter.

Also, there is a world of difference between Freud and Pinker, not just in the content of their ideas, but in the way they went about doing there work. Freud dealt in armchair speculation, and proximate answers. Pinker is no stranger to the laboratory and deals mainly in ultimate answers.

Further I expect the opposite of your prediction regarding how Pinker's work will be viewed in decades to come. Personally, because I am convinced that it is true, I believe that evolutionary psychology will come to dominate the field. I have been studying Pinker's work for six years now and I find it to be impeccable. Given that the computational theory of mind is true, and given that evolution is true, it is hard to see how Pinker's central claim (that the mind is a collection of computational devices which evolved to meet the specific demands of the ancestral environment) could possibly be wrong. I am aware that most psychologist reject this claim, but in my experience psychologists understand very little about computation and even less about evolution.

Just to clarify, neither Pinker nor Dawkins views people as fitness maximizers and neither claims that figuratively selfish genetic elements result in organisms that exhibit selfish behavior.

 

Folks,
Obsessing over, and filling your head with biased obscure information will prevent monsters from spawning in your mind!

Now back to flooding and filling for your sanity....

 

Monsters from the id.

 

You tell em okie, you are amazing. God loves you dude, such an ispiration, so knowledgable. Bring em down to their common denomenator...or demonomenator......

 

No such thing as monsters but there is hydrocephalis.

 

It does include religion if you want religion to represent humans passing knowledge to our succeeding generation. But there is nothing particularly interesting about a collection of stone age philosophies when the wheel is still so prevalent today.....

If the prevalence of an institution which more or less demands its constituents to multiply is odd then, well, its a big, big, big o'l strange world out there.

this isn't the Hitler, pol pot bit again is it.....lol

 

I've lost the context of the post I was replying to. Stone agers weren't much into philosophy, but I think we inherited a taste for ritual and group togetherness from them. I think my point is that if something is so pervasive and persistent, possibly we might consider that it's still functional--quite apart from the truth or falseness of its content. And if it could be functional and important, we might be cautious about messing with it too hastily. We've had some unfortunate repercussions from technologies or products introduces as "safe" from the perspectives of scientists only to find that,whoops, they upset the ecological applecart. That's why we have environmental impact statements. People like Dawkins and Harris strike me as very bright, but perhaps a little narrow in their outlook and just a tad more confident of their judgments than is warranted. Might it be possible that those cave men were on to something and sensed an emotional, intuitive dimension to the human psyche that Dawkins and Harris have been trained to ignore?

Yes it is. Evolution in action!

Not quite sure what you mean there, but what I meant was that there are dimensions of morality and meaning that secular humanism must address if it's to be competitive with religion.

 

Of course religion is a natural phenomenon. There is no supernatural phenomenon.

Even if we suppose there is a god, we cannot suppose that he, she or it lies outside of nature. Outside of our perception, perhaps, but many natural phenomena lie outside of our perception. Radioactivity. We cannot hear any frequency below 20 or above 20, 000 hertz. We need microscopes-- instruments that extend our perception-- to view bacteria. It seems from your reading that these concepts will probably be familiar to you, so I won't belabor the point.

Now, in the particular context in which you are asking this question, it would seem to me that what you mean is "Can religion be explained as a falsehood which can really be attributed to some impulse or hiccup in the brain?" Or maybe "Is religion, taken literally, a falsehood which serves some ulterior evolutionary purpose?"

The answer to these questions, in my opinion, is no. Religion is an arbitrary accretion of cultural beliefs that are supposed to be accepted on faith, and every specific religion, and every specific subset of every religion, can be traced to the beliefs of the locals who express to have faith in it. "Religion", in the general sense, is just a word we use to describe all these particular cases under one heading.

Further, your Christianity is not in fact your neighbor's Christianity. Even if you agree on every fundamental point of doctrine, you are incapable of sharing your subjective experience of it with that other person. This is the salient point that makes fanatical ideological beliefs-- secular ones included-- so fucking dangerous. When people assume for one second that they are having the same subjective experience as other people, they tend to leap from that assumption to the assumption that this false solidarity allows them to hurt those they don't suppose to share it. It is not a given that this will happen in every case, but herd mentality assures that it will happen in cases where the belief becomes widespread.

We can be sure that we do not in fact share our subjective experiences. Likewise, we can be sure that anything we perceive can only at best be relatively objective, as total objectivity is literally impossible. If you or I were capable of total objectivity, we would be God, or the Universe, or whatever, and this discussion would not be happening.

I have read Mr. Dennet's book. His call for an objective analysis of religion should be more well-received by the religious than anything, if they are so confident in the authenticity of their claims. Of course, they are not. Faith is the resort of those who cannot face the cognitive dissonance which results from the easy demonstration that, whether or not there is a god, their subjective experience of god is neither evidence of said god's existence nor is it evidence that their subjective experience is shared; nor-- and this is most important-- is it evidence of the authenticity of the dogma which they purport led them to the knowledge of said god's existence.

Why is this last the most important point? Because everywhere in the world on everyday some point of any given dogma is demonstrably refuted by the lack of a specific god's intervention on the behalf of his faithful. How is this explained away? By appeal to theories about the afterlife, which is conspicuously convenient, or appeals to the idea that god's plan is too mysterious to decipher, which is a grotesque and unresolvable contradiction, supposing that said plan was inherent in the very dogma that has been refuted.

 

The only way I've seen anyone argue that humanism and religion are functional equivalents was to reference Hitler's holocaust, pol pot and Mao's state religion, etc....

Anyways, these "dimensions" that have not been addressed by humanism sound a lot like burying your first born in your homes foundations or stoning a non virgin bride on her fathers doorstep.....What 'morality' are you talking about?

I also don't understand the need to include "theistic" in "theistic religion" if your discussing functions.....

 

You mean like Sam Harris? His response to people who say followers of Pol Pot, Kim Jong il, and other atheist leaders did bad things is that--well, they were really religions, even though they were officially atheist and persecuted the officially religious.

What an odd allusion. I'm talking about any morality. Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and other leading atheists assure us that atheists are moral people, and I know they're right--because I know plenty of moral atheists whom I'd trust with my life savings over some Christians I know. What's the basis for their morality? (I know, there are a number of secular philosophies that address that topic. Is there anything the ordinary person could latch onto, or do we just say we're programmed by evolution to be good. Because some of us obviously aren't, and some, like the ones you mentioned--Pol Pot & co. have dones some pretty horrendous things in the name of faulty secular ideologies). Also, the "Four Horsemen" of atheism, on a panel discussion featured on a video that appeared on this forum some time ago ago, acknowledged the importance of the "numinous" in our lives, and how atheists would need to come up with a way of satisfying that need that religions have been satisfying since they began. So that's what I'm talking about. I agree with them on the need.

I'm afraid I've lost the context. I don't know why I'd single out theistic religion as opposed to any other kind for special attention. There are, however, other kinds of religion: deistic, pantheistic, panentheistic, etc, in which camps I tend to fall, along with lots of other Progressive Christians.

 

The idea of charismatic leaders as sort of humanistic gods is intriguing - I had never considered it before this discussion.

It isn't only monsters like Hitler, Pol Pot, etc that fall into this category. A charismatic leader can inspire masses of people to accomplish great and good things - consider Gandhi, for example. Consider Martin Luther King, Jr.

The tendency of people to idolize certain people and follow them is obviously an ingrained part of human nature. The adaptive advantage of this tendency is also obvious, I think - a person who can inspire and organize people to accomplish tasks turns a group of separate people into an unstoppable force.

We don't need to depart far at all from this phenomenon to arrive at the following of a god. It seems like the next logical step. Isn't a god like a charismatic leader whose power is supernatural? Just as we call on leaders to use their power over people to accomplish great feats, we can call on gods to use their power to benefit ourselves. If God is on our side, who can stand against us?

 

And unfortunately people have a hard time telling the "gds" from the "devils".

 

That's an article of faith for naturalists, but the Abrahamic god, the creator of nature, is supposed to be outside nature and time, therefore "supernatural".

We can't "suppose" that (S)he lies outside nature, and I happen to agree that it's an artificial distinction, because in practice what we call "supernatural" is just something that we can't explain with our current models of reality. But culturally the distinction is still useful because a majority of people think it is. I'm trying to deal with the question whether or not our religious beliefs come from gods or from the natural course of evolution. If you go over to the Christian Sanctuary on these forums, you'll find people who'll say we believe in gods because they're real (or at least One is) and revealed Himself or Herself to humans.

Good enough. I'm asking whether the evidence is sufficient to reject that hypothesis, or how much about religion could be explained by assuming that it's a product of evolution and resulting human behavior.

It's certainly true that there are wide variations in human religious belief. But the word "religion" is useful precisely because it provides a common label for underlying patterns that are common to all. Any name for a category or phylum is obviously a word, but "just a word' is just an opinion.

I agree that our individual perceptions may differ in some respects, but I think there's enough commonality for us to empathize with each other. Do other people have minds? Do their thoughts resemble ours? We have only inference to go on, but I have the impression that when I ask somebody if they like vanilla ice cream, they understand what I'm saying and don't think I'm asking them if they want to eat cow shit. That's just my opinion. But I betcha others agree.

I agree with you about total objectivity, but disagree that "we can be sure that we do not in fact share our subjective experiences." I don't think we can be "sure" of anything. But I think we can be reasonably confident that some of us actually do share our subjective experiences. Nothing is certain, not even that. But I think we can can have more than a reasonable suspicion that we know what others are thinking. This is often regarded as a major milestone in human evolution. Some of us, however, are not able to do that. We call them autistic. Have you considered the possibility of Asperger's syndrome?

Of course faith isn't "evidence" of the truth of dogma, nor even of the existence of god. The circumstances that inspire faith might be sufficient evidence for a reasonable suspicion that a belief is true. Psychological tests might show enough correspondence in the reactions of subjects to common stimuli that we can reasonably infer similarities in their perceptions. These studies have been done often enough with apes and humans. If enough humans saw the waters of the Red Sea part to let the Israelites pass through, and then close again to drown the Egyptian army, and if that even were sufficiently documented--say by CNN with live photo coverage, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that it happened. Of course, we don't have that kind of documentation,and everyday experience might make us skeptical that such and event occurred. But I think that if people express the same sentiments to each other about and event or belief, it's pretty extreme to say it's impossible that they could really actually be feeling anything similar.

"Demonstrably refuted" is a tad strong. You'd have to assume first that said god was interested in intervening on behalf of his faithful; that (S) he has the capability to do so; and that god's plan is not "so mysterious to decipher" by mortals of limited intelligence; and that lots of people regarded as great intellects are really fools. All of those are just assumptions, made to persuade the assumer that (s)he has a level of certainty that is really illusory. To use a cliche, its such assumptions that "make an ass of u and me".

 

That would be my response also, because its true. Atheism does not function like religion, and secular humanism, despite what you'd have people believe is diametrically opposed to the definitive functions religions consist of.

We're definitely programmed by evolution, but to be "good" I'm not so sure. Good can mean anything, and if history has taught us anything, its that good has meant anything all through history.

If I'm not mistaken, they also talked about the need to distinguish the numinous from the supernatural. I agree with the need for the profound experience, but its not something naturalism is without....I actually think a lot of the insult and reluctance from religious folks come from their unwillingness to let go of what they believe to be the only source of "numinous experience". They think to themselves "Something that could give me such profound feelings of elevation couldn't possibly be bad" and they're absolutely right....They just don't know why.

I still think pantheism is another word for atheism.....