Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously — at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos — even to a non-philosopher.
In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition.
De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality.
A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion
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Arguments in natural theology rely to an important extent on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us. (p. xiii)
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…we have identified two puzzling features of natural theological arguments: they rest on intuitions that are untutored and, to some, appear obvious and self-evident. At the same time, there has been and continues to be disagreement about the validity of these intuitions. (p. xiv)
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The main aim of this book is to examine the cognitive origins of these and other natural theological intuitions. We will see that many seemingly arcane natural theological intuitions are psychologically akin to more universally held, early developed, commonsense intuitions. (p. xv)
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In recent years, cognitive scientists … have convincingly argued that religion relies on normal human cognitive functions. Religious beliefs arise early and spontaneously in development, without explicit instruction. (p. xvi)
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The received opinion on the unnaturalness of theology does not sit well with the observation that intuitions that underlie natural theological arguments are obvious, self-evident, and compelling. (p. xvi)
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Using evidence and theories from the cognitive science of religion and cognate disciplines … we aim to show that natural theological arguments and inferences rely to an important extent on intuitions that arise spontaneously and early in development and that are a stable part of human cognition.
See also: Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not
That religious belief comes naturally is no surprise given a theistic outlook. The findings seem to indicate that one has to be re-educated to reject religious beliefs. Could it be that it is atheism that is unnatural? Is it the denial of religious instruction to children that is the real child abuse?
Only if you concur that the “modern ID argument” is
A. I think it looks designed.
B. Therefore, it is/was designed.
There is no other coherent argument for ID, and there’s nothing understandable about their terms which they have press-ganged into service to obfuscate the religious aspect. (Thats a feature, not a bug, for the IDists because keeping things ambiguous means they can endlessly derail attempts to probe whether there’s any substance to their arguments, by deflecting criticism with yet another round of “that’s not what we mean by ‘Designer’ ” … or “that’s not what we mean by ‘specified’ ” … or whatever. ) I’ve been studying ID – for, well, more decades than I want to admit – and every ID argument either boils down to that basic one, which I do disagree with, or peters out into non-understandable incoherence.
If you object to the “looks designed therefore is designed” version of ID argument, then no, not everyone present “can understand” ID.
But I’m pretty sure the IDists want it that way. And it doesn’t hurt my feelings at all to admit I can’t understand idiocy.
Posted the contents of the Second Way and the Third Way.
The Second Way
The Third Way
I’d modify that a bit.
A: Everyone thinks it looks designed. This is an objective fact.
Define “everyone”.
Prove it.
Hint: you CAN’T prove it, Mung. It only takes one black swan to disprove a claim that “every swan is white”.
Sorry, kiddo, I’m at least one black swan, whom you know personally (for an internet value of “personally”).
I only think the natural world looks “designed” when I’m tripping balls.
I do think that acid tells a kind of truth, but when acid tells me that every leaf is an individually designed jewel of green perfection … I can pretty much be sure that’s the opposite of reality.
In reality, I think that the natural world is messy, ad hoc, ill-fitting, scabrous, greedy, exploitative, and evolved. Sure, I also think it’s beautiful and wonderful (we do have hummingbirds, after all) but that’s orthogonal to thinking it’s “designed”. Never, as a little kid chasing dragonflies, did I ever think that it was “designed” — or “planned” or any other synonym for “designed”. And as soon as I was old enough to understand the basic biology, I knew that the theory of evolution was correct in the overall picture of how the magnificent oak grows the way it does while the wild roses grow the way they do.
Getting into college level inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, and molecular biology, there has never been any need to postulate a designing agent that said to itself “I’ll just stick these two things together; they’ll work better that way”. I see molecules. I don’t see “design”.
Sorry, your “objective fact” is neither.
hotshoe_,
Do you think acid causes the brain to be re-wired and when the trip is over the brain re-wires itself again back like it was before? What sections of the brain does acid affect and how does it affect natural intuitions?
I am guessing if anyone knows the answers you do. 🙂
No, I’m not the one to ask. I haven’t studied brain chemistry any more than any curious, average person might. And you may be aware that almost all scientific research on these drugs has been prohibited for decades, so there isn’t a consensus scientific answer yet. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin and MDMA are all serotonin 2A/2B receptor agonists, and these receptors are active in many places in the brain, obviously including the visual cortex, and perhaps not so obviously the thalamus regulating overall level of awareness.
I have experience with a few of our entheogenic drugs including LSD. The book The Doors of Perception was written before I was born and I had a copy when I was young. I knew that would be a good path for me as soon as I was old enough. It’s my experience that the spiritual/emotional effects of an intended entheogenic trip are (usually? for most people?) much longer lasting than the specific physical/chemical effects of the drug. But not permanent.
Whether we should call that “re-wiring” I’m not qualified to guess. And as the after-benefits of the experience drift back to “normal”, do we say the brain has wired itself back as it was before? Dunno.
Likewise, in my experience, the emotional and physical effects of an intended “party” trip last about exactly as long as the chemical itself, that is, no after effects at all.
This difference, if really measurable, should say something interesting about “intention” in relation to brain/behavior changes, but I don’t know what it actually says.
hotshoe_,
Consider that use of such drugs has historically been precisely in order to get in touch with natural intuitions.
Perhaps one needs to be a modern atheist in order to ingest such drugs in order to experience their effects and then deny the effects
On that level, the thing and its properties are ontologically the same thing. And on monism it’s singular, not plural. There’s no “thing” on this side and “properties” on the other side. Ontologically it’s the same thing, indivisible.
The divide between continental and analytic schools of philosophy is steep. Note that the names are asymmetric – “continental” means continental Europe, but analytic implies that its opposite is unanalytic. In reality, methodical analysis is central to all rational philosophy. So, to denote the divide, I say “Anglo-Saxon” as opposed to “contintental”.
Cavell and Brandom are philosophers of language, but I’m sorry to say that I cannot take anybody seriously who thinks that Wittgenstein’s “meaning is use” is a meaningful statement. For Wittgenstein’s credit, the statement was a marginal note, he didn’t derive anything further from it himself. Those who do are attributing too much importance to something unimportant. Whatever meaning is, it’s not use. Meaning is rather discernment or perception of distinctions.
I prefer to keep this a discussion between ideas rather than between authoritative names. Unless you bring up more unauthoritative names. But to be fair, my school of thought is Saussurean structuralism (a little different from post-structuralism).
Pure mathematics as opposed to dirty mathematics? 🙂
Mathematical objects are its constructs (concepts). Some say they are like Platonic forms. Some say they are like mental objects, ideas. Some say they are “abstractions”. I say that whatever they are, they have real implications. They are constructed out of reality and into reality. Mental reality is also reality. Subjective reality is also reality. Imagination is real, even though it may make no sense. Internally consistent and logically coherent imagination is the way imagination should be applied, as it makes sense of the world. Mathematics is non-different from internally consistent and logically coherent imagination.
As a starting point, it’s a good idea to acknowledge that your discussion partner may already be operating with a complete consistent system. Let’s take the first two statements of the Thomist argument from design,
“All things have an order or arrangement, and work for an end. The order of the universe cannot be explained by chance, but only by design and purpose.”
What, in your opinion, are the ambiguities and incompatibilities here so that the terms or their meanings should be revised?
If concepts are absolutely not objects and have nothing to do with objects, then why should anyone of us take them seriously? For practical purposes, concepts are mental objects, so some considerations that are applicable to objects apply to concepts.
The precision and determinacy is acquired by rigorous analysis of the concepts in question – just the analysis, nothing else. Given this perspective, the result, a so-called formal language, is an updated natural language.
Hmm, not denying the effects, not denying the significance of the effects.
Denying that you and I have a mutually-comprehensible vocabulary to discuss them, perhaps.
Supposedly Buddhists say “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
I say, “When god talks to me, it doesn’t matter. I’ve still got to live with reality, still got to wash hands and serve dinner.” I’ve still got to figure out which side of the key must face up to open the front door, and god consciousness isn’t going to help with that. It’s actually a hindrance. This is an objective fact, as objective a fact as any that exist.
And the arabesques of every single leaf vein and stem in precisely the place it’s supposed to be for maximum effect, that undeserved and unasked-for beauty? Well, yes, I’m grateful for that experience, but in reality the leaves grow there naturally, their only guide the unquenchable hunger of DNA helices for untwisting and twisting up more copies in a universe of gravity and sun.
To see anything beyond that, to project gratitude to an external entity that “created” them, to imagine they were made for me as part of “god’s plan” … well, it would be sad if it weren’t so funny. Accepting that as reality would be no different than accepting the cartoon entities, the machine elves which people suddenly see in a specific drug high — which might really really exist in some hyperspace dimension and only manifest to humans on a certain level of consciousness — but, no, no thanks. Some can choose to have faith (in hallucinations, visions, and miracles). Not me.
(No disrespect to Terrence McKenna. Namaste.)
So, you are interested to ‘compel’ TSZ atheists, agnostics & skeptics (the vast majority of ‘TSZers’) to accept natural theology?
That reveals a significant different between us, Mung, because I’m not here at TSZ to ‘compel’ people as a type of IDist apologetics. I reject IDism because it is a corrosive ideology, that frankly, would likely not have arisen outside of the USA’s right-wing, evangelical Christian tradition because of its low-levels of education and cultural insularity. Discovery Institute trying to make it ‘think tank’ worthy ideology is really not fooling most people, even most (catholic) Christians like yourself, Mung.
Elizabeth has by far demonstrated the most sensitivity to natural theology and at least is not an angry anti-theist, though still an apostate in her own way. KN apparently enjoys having been dipped in the disenchanting acid of atheist Judaism, cum naturalist-empiricism, peddling his Sellarsian fluff to non-philosophers, with vertical transcendence only something he could humour (but not actually [try to] think or feel) about. But there’s few others here who even care that you are trying to ‘compel’ them. They will not be ‘compelled’ by IDism.
A compelling reason? It wasn’t framed as a question. And you still avoid the most poignant criticisms about IDism by Gingerich, Davis & BioLogos, Lamoureux, Barr, Feser and most recently, surprisingly and devastatingly for the IDM, WL Craig. Try that on for a ‘compelling reason.’
Is religious belief spiritual?
A quick note:
A comment by Erik, in this thread, went into moderation while I was asleep. It’s now released. I mention this so that you won’t miss it.
And a note to Erik: When you are quoting multiple excerpts from another post, maybe just use <blockquote> … quoted text …</blockquote> for all but the first excerpt.
Otherwise you get multiple links back to the comment you are quoting. And too many links is a trigger that causes posts to go into moderation.
I’ve been taking that as a slogan, rather than as a definition. I see it as a way of saying that theories of meaning don’t work.
What a pretty post. Thanks, hotshoe.
It’s a very pretty post.
The problem is that the powerful intuitions attained by one individual may differ from, and even contradict, the intuitions of another. For some the these substances are “entheogens,” for others (including me) they yield indescribable “neuroepiphanies” with very different implications.
My last word on this particular topic is that two of the monists I’m well-acquainted with, Berkeley and Spinoza, both thought it made sense to attribute different properties to the single substance. For Berkeley, those are intellect and will. Spinoza thought that the single infinite substance has infinitely many properties (“attributes”), among which are thought and extension.
I see. That seems reasonable. (Historically speaking, much of analytic philosophy comes out of Austria — it might as well be called “Anglo-Austrian” philosophy, if one wanted to, but not much turns on that particular point.)
I’m not allergic to “meaning is the discernment of distinctions”, though I would of course want to add that the distinctions in question are distinctions that make a difference in actual or possible conduct. I wouldn’t endorse “meaning is use” as a theory of meaning, but that meaning and use are inseparable. Or, as Brandom puts it, that we can’t do semantics without pragmatics (and conversely). But I certainly didn’t intend to say that we can collapse the very distinction between semantics and pragmatics.
I agree that tossing around names is unlikely to be productive, but I do appreciate your sharing some of your intellectual background.
I agree that any adequate philosophy must acknowledge and give an account of subjectivity. I would certainly say that phenomenology is the starting-point for philosophical reflection, though my own take on phenomenology is indebted to Merleau-Ponty.
I’m not terribly happy with treating mathematics as an par with internally consistent and logically coherent imaginings, because they seems to rob mathematics of its normative force for all rational beings. But philosophy of mathematics is not my strong suit.
The first sentence would need to be revised somewhat in order for it be acceptable. It is true that all finite, contingent things have complex causal relations with other finite contingent things. And it is true that some of those finite, contingent things are purposive. But it is not true, so far as I can tell, that the purposiveness distinctive to organisms is also be found in physical or chemical systems.
The second sentence looks like a mere assertion and has no logical connection to the first, though I will grant that it has an intuitive appeal.
What we seem to need is something like this:
(1) a system has complex order just in case there are slightly more elements to the system than there are possible relations between the elements [definition borrowed from complexity theory]
(2) all contingent, finite things either have complex order or are part of complex order;
(3) if each contingent, finite thing is complexly ordered or part of an complexly ordered system, then the set of all contingent finite things is complexly ordered;
(4) the universe is the totality of all contingent, finite things;
(5) therefore, the universe is complexly ordered;
(6) if the conjunction of chance and necessity is insufficient to explain some phenomenon, then intelligence is the only other explanation;
(7) it is impossible that the conjunction of chance and necessity could explain complex order;
(8) therefore, the complex order of the universe must be explained in terms of intelligence.
I think that’s a bit more explicit and more precise.
Almost, but not quite. I have no objections to make against anyone who thinks and feels in terms of vertical transcendence. I simply do not see it as necessary for a life of purpose, value, and dignity. Hence I resent being treated as if I reject purpose, value, and dignity on account of my having no place for vertical transcendence in my worldview.
Well KN, it seemed “dipped in the acid of atheist Judaism” as you accepted would have been enough. But don’t bring your horizontalist anti-religious stuff into the picture too without explaining it.
Did flat-hearted analytic philosophy, after you’d already embraced secular atheism, and then scientistic, empiricist Sellars seize your imagination?
Does your ex-rabbi condone your anti-Judaism philosophistry?
I find much of the natural world to be complex, highly ordered, awe-inspiring, comforting, beautiful, uplifting, calming, edifying, fascinating, wonderful, and terrifying.
I don’t see it as designed.
In the “Does Purple Exist?” thread I mentioned neuroplasticity (in that context, the fact that cultural upbringing affects whether one perceives the lines in the Muller-Lyer illusion as being of different lengths). I think neuroplasticity apples here as well, in shaping our “intuitions” about natural teleology.
If one lives in a culture when intuitive “folk biology” has been systematized and augmented and articulated in terms of design, then one will probably be disposed to spontaneously, non-inferentially judge that nature (or some part of it) is designed. (And if one is highly self-aware, then one will be aware that the spontaneous, non-inferential judgment indicates more about one’s concepts than about the available evidence; we see this in Kant, Darwin, and Jefferson.) But if one’s cultural background is different, then one will not see nature as designed.
Then there is the matter of “intuitions” themselves. There are some philosophers who consider intuitions to be a kind of data against which philosophical theories are tested. If some theory is counter-intuitive, they reason, it is more likely to be wrong. However, I myself do not think that intuitions are like this. I treat intuitions as effects of how our more-or-less innate cognitive structures have been shaped by culture, language, and technology. They are not unrevisable, and they are not sacrosanct. Most importantly, if our intuitions are themselves the result of innate cognition (itself the result of evolution) and the contingencies of culture, language, and technology, then we have no reason to treat them as analogous to data or evidence.
The fact that we have something like an innate “teleology detector” is an important fact about primate cognitive architecture, and the fact that our teleology detector can be sculpted into a “design detector” is an important fact about human neuroplasticity in response to cultural institutions. But neither fact should bolster our confidence in the teleological argument as being true.
See Gregory, I don’t want to compel them. I want to sculpt their design detector. 🙂
Gregory;
Gregory,
I get the impression that you are quite insecure in your own theism. Hence your inability to defend it, along with your intense need to attack others who have abandoned theism in favor of more rational beliefs.
Will you ever summon the courage to actually defend your beliefs?
KN, you have already willfully committed yourself to ideologically conclude that ‘teleological arguments’ by definition *cannot* be true. What’s with all the rest of this philosophistry and deflection? We understand you are trying to justify your Jewish atheism ‘philosophically’. It’s just a poor reflection of religious and ethnic emptiness and despair, imo.
Mung,
Well, help them sculpt for themselves might prefer. Obviously IDism isn’t going to suffice or satisfy (or even be credible). And your monotheist apologetics is apparent. So, is this just a natural theology thread aimed at atheists?
As Captain Reynolds once said, “Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle.”
Moved one post to guano.
Yep, definitely coming to a middle.
“Normative force”? Consistency and coherence leads different people to same conclusions about reality. Do you need something more normative than this?
For Aristotle, the teleology of unintelligent things consists in trivial regularities – ice melts in warmer temperatures, iron glows in fire, a la “dormitive virtues”. So, how is it not true that there is purposiveness in physical and chemical systems? Their purposiveness means the tendency to have a certain appearance given certain environment. When the environment is changed, they change their appearance accordingly. Purposeless?
“Order” is the common term in both sentences.
Complexity is an ID thing. I will have nothing to do with it. And the classical argument from design has no relation to complexity either. Only to order, intelligibility.
Don’t you see design, i.e. structure, either?
You are saying that we have a “teleology detector” inbuilt – and it’s wrong. Why is it wrong and how do you know?
You could just as easily say, “We have a ‘truth detector’ inbuilt – and it’s wrong. Wherever we see truth, there’s actually no such thing.” What is this statement supposed to mean? Is it saying something true? Something real?
I see you refuting yourself like this in approximately every second post, if not more often.
I’d like to return to a point Erik made earlier, about the ontological status of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR):
I treat the principle of sufficient reason as a methodological rule of inquiry: “look for the explanation!” rather than an ontological doctrine, “there is an explanation!”. To this one might reasonably ask, “what’s the point of looking for something if you don’t know if it’s there?”
But I think this is not quite correct. We inquire out of expectation or hope that there is an explanation. We’ve constructed good explanations in the past that have allowed to figure stuff out, and we assume that the future will be like past, but at the end of day, there’s just no getting past Hume’s worries about induction. (This is particularly so if one favors a “growing block theory of time“, according to which the future cannot be known because it does not actually exist.)
All we can do is push our boundaries of inquiry as far as they can, knowing that we might fail at any moment, but also with some reasoned hope of success. Since there is no guarantee of success, there is an ineliminable air of tragedy to pragmatism.
What I meant, in that context, is that if mathematical concepts are merely mental constructs (as I thought you said), and if all mental constructs have merely subjective validity (as seems reasonable), then mathematics has only subjective validity. Then there’s no normative constraint; “2+4=9” can be ‘true for me’.
If you’re willing to treat the teleology of non-living systems as just the sum of their dispositional properties, then that’s OK with me. Myself, I think there are distinctions between dispositions and purposes worth making that are in danger of being glossed over if we use “teleology” for both.
I introduced the term “complexity” here as a way of explicating the concept of “order” more carefully. In complexity theory, systems can fall anyone on a continuum from being highly ordered (very few possible relations between the elements, so the system has very few possible configurations) to being highly chaotic (many possible relations between the elements, so the system has many possible configurations).
It seems to me that a highly ordered system can be explained easily enough in terms of laws of physics, and a highly chaotic system can be explained in term of randomness. I introduced complexity into this in order to carve out an explanatory role for intelligence.
I see structure, but I do not see structure as design.
I never said it’s wrong. I don’t think it is wrong. I think it is usually right. I’m a realist about teleology, insofar as I think that concepts like “teleology”, “purposiveness,” “intent”, “goal-oriented” are generally speaking reliable ways of detecting, tracking, and describing complex systems that exhibit both organizational closure and thermodynamic openness.
But like much of our cognitive architecture, it can be tricked or hacked; it’s generally reliable but not infallible. Specifically, I said that it can’t be relied upon to give us a non-question-begging premise for the Teleological Argument.
walto,
I certainly do not think that Erik intentionally misrepresented my position!
At the same time, I don’t know how he got from “our intuitions about teleology shouldn’t be relied upon for securing premises for the Teleological Argument” (which is what I said) to “our intuitions about teleology are always wrong” (which is what I think he thinks I said).
To get from the first to the second would require a pretty elaborate argument, and I don’t see how to construct that argument without some premises that I would reject. (For example, there might be a hidden premise in there to the effect that if one’s cognitive architecture contains a representation of X, then one cannot also be a realist about X. That seems quite obviously wrong!)
I’d like to elaborate on this thought a bit.
We were talking about the reliability of our intuitions. I don’t think our intuitions are infallible, and I also don’t think that they are always mistaken. What I do think is that we need an explanation about what our intuitions are in order to understand under what conditions they are reliable and under what conditions they are not.
Building that explanation will require taking into account multiple lines of evidence, such as neuroscience, phenomenology, cognitive psychology, primatology, anthropology, conceptual analysis, and — if we want to tell a genetic or developmental account of how we acquired our cognitive intuitions — also comparative psychology, comparative neuroscience, paleontology, and archeology.
It’s sometimes thought that the growth of scientific knowledge has put, or will put, philosophy out of a job. I see that as profoundly mistaken. The speculative dimension of philosophy — the philosophical investigation of meta-paradigms or meta-frameworks, as Michael Friedman puts it — is an indispensable and ineliminable intellectual project.
And as our scientific knowledge grows, the philosophical project of figuring out “how everything hangs together”, as Sellars puts it, becomes more cognitively demanding. For myself, a passing familiarity with the sciences mentioned here is all I can handle in order to grapple with the philosophical question I’m interested in. There are countless other philosophical questions that are just as interesting (if not more so), and most of them require a passing familiarity with other branches of science that I know nothing about.
Mods, please accept this as my formal requst to move my back-and-forth with Grgory to Noyau.
I’ll do that. Please hold off for a short time, while I make those moves.
If Gregory objects, then I’m willing to consider guano as an alternative.
I’ll probably also move one post by KN which is part of the sequence.
Neil,
Lizzie already ruled on this issue.
Noyau is strictly voluntary, so unless Gregory agrees, his comments cannot be moved to Noyau.
Granted that whatever the atheists at TSZ request (in this recent case: Neil Rickert, keiths, walto and KN – who are all free to say otherwise if that is true), even if the comments are within the ‘good faith’ rule, discursive expulsion will be consented. That’s the prerogative of atheist-only TSZ moderators. (& KN will chime in with fragile, delicate ‘support’ that his nearest and secular-dearest USAmerican atheists believe his sophistry with intentional ‘lack of faith’.)
There are no theists posting here that support TSZ, not even Stephen Sch. at MIT, except as an anti-IDist soapbox.
What atheist-skeptic TSZers won’t do is sincerely face the OP. Mung has crushed you folks. (cough on the moronic DI!) Why? Despite his IDism, you’ve been contradicted by psychological, anthropological and sociological studies. Religion is widely regarded as ‘natural’ for human beings. ‘walto’ calls bullshit on this offended by shadows in his shallow philosophistry. But atheist moderators at TSZ don’t seem to care, to tolerate or to think even possibly why that view might be wrong.
Not everyone– just you, darling. And that’s because you get personal in a way that no one else here does. Erik freely and openly disagrees with everything that I say, but he doesn’t insinuate that my institution should have investigated whether my privately held values align with theirs before hiring me. You’re in a class all by yourself, Gregory.
You have a vivid fantasy life. For your information, Walto and I have never met in person. Though we have corresponded privately, we met on TSZ. I joined TSZ when Lizzie was banned at UD. I don’t know how Walto discovered us.
It surprises you that I don’t share my deepest desires and passionate longings with a group of total strangers? It surprises you that someone whose livelihood involves writing for academic journals would take comfort in that style of writing, especially when dealing with the anonymity of the Internet? Next you’ll be telling us that you find it surprising that shy, socially-awkward introverts prefer the anonymity of the Internet.
Firstly, so much the worse for your tastes. No one is forcing you to participate here. (Right? God, I hope so!)
Secondly, most of the United States rejects atheism. As an atheist and as a social democrat, I’d be far more comfortable in the UK or EU than in the US — as you well know.
Thirdly, my rejection of vertical transcendence is neither more nor less than a matter of temperament. It was not a choice (let alone a rational choice) but a discovery I made about myself. I discovered, in the course of self-reflection about the kind of person I am, that I simply lack the temperament at work in a sensitivity to vertical transcendence. I am simply “religiously unmusical”. I don’t “get” religion the same way that some people don’t “get” music or gourmet cooking.
The fact that you think nothing of openly accusing me, on the Internet, of being evil, pathetic, shallow, nihilistic, etc. simply because of this difference in our respective personalities says a great deal about the kind of person you are, and none of it is good.
Neil,
Noyau is strictly voluntary, so you are breaking the rules by moving comments there without the prior permission of the commenters.
Commenters should not be required to object to your rule violations. As a moderator, you should simply stop violating the rules.
I’ve known walto from his participation in some yahoo groups, particularly analytic. At some time in the past, I mentioned that I had a blog, and walto appears to watch that. It was after I posted a link to a TSZ thread on my blog, that walto showed up here.
At least, I think that’s the connection.
I’m pretty sure I acknowledged the basic point at the very outset of this discussion — that “religion” in some sense is “natural” (and also that “science” is “unnatural”). Perhaps my acknowledgement of this rather obvious truth was ignored by those committed to polarizing the discussion.
That said, it is of course quite true that there is something “natural” about “religion”. But what does that mean?
Here’s a preliminary argument to consider.
The suite of behaviors that anthropologists call “behaviorial modernity“, which includes abstract thinking, planning depth, and symbolic behavior, is probably between 40,000 and 80,000 years old. (There’s a lot of debate here, depending on what evidence one is looking at and how one explains the lack of evidence where it is expected.) Human beings of the Upper Paleolithic were almost certainly hunter-gatherers.
And if the hunter-gatherers studied over the past few hundred years are a reliable indication (granted, a questionable assumption), then the human beings of the Upper Paleolithic were animists. Their rituals, myths, spiritual practices were not centered around “vertical transcendence ” — rather, their spiritual experiences, practices, and institutions were almost certainly symbolic maps of their ecological interdependence with animals, plants, and inorganic nature. That is not a “vertical” transcendence but rather a “horizontal” transcendence. (Granted, not a Rortyian horizontal transcendence!)
It was probably not until the rise of agriculture and permanent settlement that we see the rise of hierarchy and the associated “Big Gods”, as Norenzayan calls them. And that changes everything. This can be dated to around 12,000 years ago.
This means that human beings have been animists for between 85% to 70% of our existence on this planet. And that has massive repercussions of what we must be talking about when we talk about whether “religion” is “natural”. Yes, a certain kind of religiosity — animism is deeply interwoven with human nature — but Big Gods and vertical transcendence is not.
Yay Gregory! Yay Mung! Yay, Yay, Gregory Mung!!
Hey, Gregory, I’m curious. When did I do that? (Again, not that you care about whether anything you post is true.)
ETA: Oh I figured it out–you probably meant when I was calling bullshit on some of YOUR posts, and you got all confused.
Those aren’t really the same thing, Gregory. You must have forgotten that all of your posts ARE bullshit.
“You must have forgotten that all of your posts ARE bullshit.”
You must have forgotten the TSZ rules with your bullshit.
OK, so, let’s let that stand for itself amongst your atheist brothers and sisters (TSZ ‘comrades’) who are outspokenly anti-religion.
Are you nevertheless saying that your self-confessed Jewish atheism is ‘unnatural’?
The name/category ‘Jew’ comes from the Aramaic ‘Jehudhai’, the Hebrew ‘Y’hudi’ and the Latin ‘Iudaeum’. Are you suggesting those are ‘natural’ categories/names or not?
I’m still confused by whether or not you think you are ‘naturally’ Jewish, KN.
Gregory:
Jesus Christ, Gregory. (And he was ‘naturally’ Jewish, by the way.)
It all depends on what counts as “natural,” obviously.
If we settle on “being part of the cognitive and behavioral configuration of Upper Pleistocene human beings” as what counts as “human nature”, then that’s going to be push us in one direction.
Likewise, if we push our inquiry past the domain of W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) human beings and inquire into genuine human universals, that too will push our inquiry in a different but related direction.
Depending on how much weight one gives to animism, and how one understands it, a philosophy of horizontal transcendence or transcendence-in-immanence is perhaps more “natural” than any religion of “vertical transcendence”.
The fact is that it is “human nature” to have an exceptionally high degree of neuroplasticity and a prolonged childhood (compensated for by an adolescent growth spurt), both of which are biological adaptations for culture. The maturation of our cognitive and affective capacities always unfolds within a highly structured milieu of institutions and practices built by hundred of previous generations, and that a human being is dependent on culture in ways no other animal is. Although it is arguable whether chimpanzees have cultures, they certainly do not constantly innovate and transform their cultures as we do.
Our dependence on culture, language, technology, and so is our “nature” — it is built into hominid phylogeny and ontogeny. We became human by creating culture and becoming dependent on it; there is no “human nature” lying underneath culture. (This is one of the many things deeply wrong with Golding’s Lord of the Flies.)
Considered this way, the development of agriculture, permanent cities, and the co-option of “innate” animism to belief in Big Gods is also perfectly “natural”.
Sorry, Gregory. Though it would be a good thing for you if there were, there are no rules here prohibiting pointing out bullshit wherever it arises. And, patently, every one of your posts is full of it.
And again, where did I call bullshit on Erik’s claim that religion is natural? Remember how you said I did that?–or is that too far back for your limited working memory and executive function?
Well, no one is “naturally” Jewish, just as no one is “naturally” Muslim.
Although the boy Jesus Christ was definitely born in the “natural” way. And he was definitely raised and confirmed in the Jewish culture of his time and place.
That ordinary family, then a little sleight-of-hand with the wine, and a little faith healing, and some anti-clerical rabble-rousing, naturally entitles him to followers for two millennia plus 72 virgins when he dies. Right? Oh, no, wrong “natural” religious promise.
Hey, hotshoe, did you read the piece (I can’t remember where it appeared) by the moil with Parkinson’s?