@Barnabas62 - you said ‘for some reason’ we don’t live up to the image of God.
To me, the reason is very simple.
We are animals. Our animal instincts are useful a lot of the time, we wouldn’t survive without them. But they get in the way of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and faithfulness some of the time.
So we live with a balancing act - looking after ourselves and caring for others. We can’t care for others without caring for ourselves but taking self care too far tips into selfishness, so another type of balance is needed.
Of course different parts of the Bible offer different views - everyone sees life through their own lens, how could we do otherwise?
There are many answers to our moral dilemmas and failing, Boogie, hence my use of "somehow". I was watching a natural world programme about a wolf family today and pondered on the social cohesiveness and co-operation of the pack in protecting the youngest, accepting leadership from the experienced alpha male and alpha females, and their total ruthlessness in hunting down prey. All of the behaviour is I suppose to some extent instinctive yet there were remarkable signs of intelligent assessment going on. But I don't think the sentience of wolves demonstrates moral awareness.
How real is our sense of moral awareness? Is it unique to human beings, or is what we call moral awareness simply an extension of the kind of intelligent assessment we can see in social behaviour in the animal kingdom. And indeed is it possible to even talk about sin, missing the mark, without some kind of moral awareness? They are all good questions, I think, and Christians have come up with varying answers to them. Human behaviour is full of conundrums.
@Barnabas62 - you said ‘for some reason’ we don’t live up to the image of God.
To me, the reason is very simple.
We are animals. Our animal instincts are useful a lot of the time, we wouldn’t survive without them. But they get in the way of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and faithfulness some of the time.
So we live with a balancing act - looking after ourselves and caring for others. We can’t care for others without caring for ourselves but taking self care too far tips into selfishness, so another type of balance is needed.
Of course different parts of the Bible offer different views - everyone sees life through their own lens, how could we do otherwise?
There are many answers to our moral dilemmas and failing, Boogie, hence my use of "somehow". I was watching a natural world programme about a wolf family today and pondered on the social cohesiveness and co-operation of the pack in protecting the youngest, accepting leadership from the experienced alpha male and alpha females, and their total ruthless in hunting down prey. All of the behaviour is I suppose to some extent instinctive yet there were remarkable signs of intelligent assessment going on. But I don't think the sentience of wolves demonstrates moral awareness.
How real is our sense of moral awareness? Is it unique to human beings, or is what we call moral awareness simply an extension of the kind of intelligent assessment we can see in social behaviour in the animal kingdom. And indeed is it possible to even talk about sin, missing the mark, without some kind of moral awareness? They are all good questions, I think, and Christians have come up with varying answers to them. Human behaviour is full of conundrums.
We vastly if not completely overstate human qualities, especially morality, which is a consequence of the emergence of rhetorical, three legged consciousness.
It makes no claims, it's rational and fits with autonomous evolving creation. And like all of human experience, individual and collective, is actually weightless. Worth nothing at all. At best it is mere conception to pupation. Maggot life to metamorphose from.
That's still a preference. Why should we be kind? I heard the late A J Ayer argue in favour of scrupulous behaviour years ago, but it still seems like a choice to me. And once you admit the category of choice in the operation of evolved sentience, I think you let the genie of morality out of the bottle.
That's still a preference. Why should we be kind? I heard the late A J Ayer argue in favour of scrupulous behaviour years ago, but it still seems like a choice to me. And once you admit the category of choice in the operation of evolved sentience, I think you let the genie of morality out of the bottle.
First, behaviour isn't perfectly a "choice", but neither is it an immutable or objective thing either.
First, one needs to define morality. That it does, and always has, varied between cultures should be telling that much of it is culturally defined. So much of what a particular culture or sub-culture defines as MORAL is no more than prejudice. Stepping into the shared, such as murder, we go into predilection which evolved for our particular evolution and development. We are not the only species that regulates when killing of another of our own is OK and when it is not.
What we call moral is subjective to both how we evolved and how we live. The second shapes morality well more than some would like to admit. Including myself.
That's still a preference. Why should we be kind? I heard the late A J Ayer argue in favour of scrupulous behaviour years ago, but it still seems like a choice to me. And once you admit the category of choice in the operation of evolved sentience, I think you let the genie of morality out of the bottle.
We should be kind because that's what we're partially wired - the better angels of our nature - to be and in our new emergent social structures (cyberspace) it's got to be in there. I don't see choice as meaningful in this or any other significant situation. Being kind, even sacrificially, rarely makes us feel worse. Where's the choice? Impulse control at best. Kindness is enlightened self interest - something I'm severely limited in as I demonstrate here; I tend (British understatement) to the adamant, the uncompromising, the compulsive as in the Purgatory exorcism threads. I can't leave that scab alone. I don't want to be unkind to non-rationalists but non/un-rationalism has (compulsion... irrational compulsion) to be challenged.
If by scrupulous behaviour one means Kant's categorical imperative and/or Bentham's utilitarianism, they can't possibly work as that assumes the rationalist delusion. i.e. that we are or should be rational creatures devoid of the need for emotional intelligence.
Oh dear! I feel I have derailed the thread! Thanks for your comments. I'm thinking about a Purgatory thread to continue the discussion, but I don't think it really fits here.
Indeed. It's too a/live for Dead Horses! LilBuddha and I are on the same page, again! Nietzsche was half right: morality is herd instinct in the individual; but group and individual naturally selected gene based moralities are different though overlapping.
Martin 54: We should be kind because that's what we're partially wired - the better angels of our nature - to be
Imago Dei..evolution sure couldn’t do it.
With God, all things are possible. If God is able to raise up children of Abraham from stones (Matt. 3:9), then God is surely able to create humans in his image via evolution.
Martin 54: We should be kind because that's what we're partially wired - the better angels of our nature - to be
Imago Dei..evolution sure couldn’t do it.
With God, all things are possible. If God is able to raise up children of Abraham from stones (Matt. 3:9), then God is surely able to create humans in his image via evolution.
Quite. The notion of God creating a process that will slowly produce beings in his image is a far more impressive demonstration of the scope of his power and wisdom than any snap-of-the-fingers instantaneous creation. To build a universe of endless variety and absurd scale with the capacity (the objective?) of evolving first tiny, self-ordering molecules, then cells, then eukaryotes, then multi-cellular organisms and vertebrates and mammals and self-awareness and God-awareness. That is a demonstration of an almighty God; not to think of an outcome and merely call it into being, but to create a system consistent in time and space.
Wearing my Host Hat, and on reflection, I think the evolution of morality is actually a perfectly valid Dead Horse topic, given the Dead Horse range. But it is probably best to split the topic off from this legacy thread on biblical inerrancy.
It's a good, separate, topic anyway. And there is a split thread function in the new software. So I'm going to tidy up.
Martin 54: We should be kind because that's what we're partially wired - the better angels of our nature - to be
Imago Dei..evolution sure couldn’t do it.
Actually, yes it can. Kindness is the outworking of empathy, and empathy is a positive trait in a social species so would be selected for. I don't think it's any harder to account for than any other behaviour.
Martin 54: We should be kind because that's what we're partially wired - the better angels of our nature - to be
Imago Dei..evolution sure couldn’t do it.
Sorry? I am not an image of God. I'm a piece of hard wired haunted meat. Imago Dei is a metaphor for our extremely constrained 'moral' capacity. As you yourself demonstrate justifying the murder of rape victims. Only evolution can explain such opportunity costs.
Going back to wolf packs and their ability to cooperate, care for each other, administer punishment, and so on, this has been termed proto-morality, see for example works by Frans de Waal. In fact, this has been termed an evolutionary precursor, which maybe begs questions.
You probably can't demonstrate an evolutionary link yet as there are no moral fossils, but see Karl's post.
Incidentally, de Waal has also studied fairness, deception, and reconciliation in primates. Early skepticism about the use of such terms in relation to animals, has largely disappeared.
That's still a preference. Why should we be kind? I heard the late A J Ayer argue in favour of scrupulous behaviour years ago, but it still seems like a choice to me. And once you admit the category of choice in the operation of evolved sentience, I think you let the genie of morality out of the bottle.
Evolution is the biological process whereby an individual enhances their reproductive success. We have thrown into this cultural factors ?cultural evolution? which means we modify the biological process for nonbiological reasons which may be motivated for reasons other than reproductive success. So we do moral things because of thoughts that it's right to do so, even if it harms us as individuals.
I don't think that's true. Social behaviour amongst pack animals doesn't appear to be predicated just on individual survival. In the wolf pack example I saw on TV, members of the pack took risks with their own safety to draw a bear away from the den containing wolf cubs which were not their own. When you reflect on that, what was at risk was the vulnerable members of the pack. We have to avoid anthropomorphism of course, but the behaviour was not obviously 'selfish' in defence of their own genes. It undoubtedly contributed to something different, the future survival chances of the pack.
These behaviours are thought provoking and not easily explained away.
Selfish gene theory predicts that you will take risks, to help your kin, as they share some of your genes. But non-kin are different, and altruism to them presents a problem. However, one could argue for a pressure for altruism, which might be beneficial.
The more we look, the more we see the connectedness of our species to living creatures. In terms of personal ethics, pride in our perceived specialness may make us indifferent to that, whereas the awareness of connectedness may produce some greater sense of personal responsibility. Remembering a famous phrase by a Christian mystic, we are not 'islands'.
You get some of the flavour of that in the debate over the Hebrew word in the Genesis creation story which has been translated as 'subdue'. Subduing seems to imply innate tendencies to dominate by using power. I don't find in myself a desire to dominate and also find that I dislike dominant behaviour. The meme that might is not right seems to be deep within me. And yet I live in a world where the success of might is everywhere present in both human and animal societies.
Rats have been recorded refusing food for themselves if getting the food harms another rat.
The interpretation of the rat studies is not straightforward. Rat study discussion. In addition, there's really no lesson re humans being special or not out of it.
Care must be exercise in descriptions based on our own mental states when the outcome can have clear moral and scientific consequences.
Scientists must always keep an open mind. But before rushing to declare that humans must seek moral guidance from rats, we should pause and try to understand exactly what the data say.
Rats have been recorded refusing food for themselves if getting the food harms another rat.
The interpretation of the rat studies is not straightforward. Rat study discussion. In addition, there's really no lesson re humans being special or not out of it.
That is not what your quote says.
Care must be exercise in descriptions based on our own mental states when the outcome can have clear moral and scientific consequences.
Scientists must always keep an open mind. But before rushing to declare that humans must seek moral guidance from rats, we should pause and try to understand exactly what the data say.
This says we must be cautious about our conclusions, not that there can be no lesson.
You link also talks about two possibilities: One is empathy, the other is the rat reliving its own stress caused by the alarm calls or pheromones of the trapped rat.
The cries of a baby are irritating to humans, regardless of that human's empathetic response to babies or a particular baby.
The lesson, IMO, is that other animals are mindless automatons and we are special flowers. We are more like them and they like us, though it isn't completely simple.
I think there is a missing "not" in your penultimate sentence!
Dagnabbit! Yes, it should read:
The lesson, IMO, is that other animals are not mindless automatons and we are special flowers. We are more like them and they like us, though it isn't completely simple.
Thought of the famous quote from David Sloan Wilson, "altruistic groups beat selfish groups", Wilson an advocate of group selection, heresy to selfish gene fans. But he finds a way to show that altruism is advantageous.
Has this thread discussed how some scientists think religion evolved as a way of giving people incentives to behave in ways conducive to group cohesion in order to receive spiritual rewards and avoid spiritual punishments? Of course, "group cohesion" might mean acceptance of inequality or repression of dissent, deviance, and diversity - but evolutionarily it might have meant an avoidance of group conflict (even if enforced through fear of the supernatural) that allowed the group, and therefore one's extended kin, to survive and reproduce.
I wonder, despite vast differences in religions and moral systems, what conceptions of religious sins and commandments are universal or near-universal among all cultures and whether or not this is because of a co-evolution of religion and moral codes.
That is part of it, see for example Scott Atran's book "In Gods We Trust", but there is also the idea that tribal religions encode the tribe's knowledge and practices about the environment, hunting, farming, human fertility, and so on.
This raises an interesting question about post-tribal religion, and how it helps organize social groups in a different way. Capitalist religion, I suppose.
I think it is as easy to say the reverse. That a group encodes their knowledge and practices encode their religion. But I don’t think religion, or an analogue, is necessary. Elephants don’t likely have a religion and they impart knowledge and practice.
Solzhenitsyn observed (Gulag Archipelago Part 2) that religions strive to control innate evil behaviour. In terms of group behaviour, innate, unbridled selfishness is a threat to group harmony and stability.
There is a hint of that kind of utilitarian thinking in the Wiki argument I linked. So I guess seeing religion as a teacher and enforcer of cultural norms works as clue to its development.
Is it necessary? I think that is a less important question than is it true.
Yes, I only gave half a quote earlier about altruism, Wilson actually said that within a group, selfishness wins, between groups, altruism wins. I think that this was actually demonstrated mathematically, via game theory, beyond me really. And group selection is usually known as multi-level selection, as I think it includes selfish gene.
As to whether religion is required, probably not. It's quite aesthetic, I suppose, aesthetics being fairly important. But humans seem to create myths regularly, not all myths being religious of course.
That reminds me of Jung, who argued that heaven and hell exist in the human psyche, and are projected outwards. It even sounds banal today.
Solzhenitsyn observed (Gulag Archipelago Part 2) that religions strive to control innate evil behaviour. In terms of group behaviour, innate, unbridled selfishness is a threat to group harmony and stability.
There is a hint of that kind of utilitarian thinking in the Wiki argument I linked. So I guess seeing religion as a teacher and enforcer of cultural norms works as clue to its development.
Is it necessary? I think that is a less important question than is it true.
I think religion evolved, in part, as an enforcer of valued behaviours. Having a greater authority to back one's position is an effective tool. An example would be Plato and Socrates. It is actually irrelevant whether Socrates existed, Plato's use of him as an authority is exactly the same.
I think it is as easy to say the reverse. That a group encodes their knowledge and practices encode their religion. But I don’t think religion, or an analogue, is necessary. Elephants don’t likely have a religion and they impart knowledge and practice.
Maybe you were referring to this, but there are some controversial scientific claims that animals exhibit behavior that indicates spirituality. It seems pretty non-falsifiable to me, though, so I don't know if there is much value to such inquiry.
What do you mean by "an analogue" of religion? Do you mean spirituality in general, whether or not it involves a belief in the supernatural? Or do you specifically mean a belief in the supernatural?
Technologically-advanced societies with complex economies, effective courts and law enforcement, and efficient provision of social services may indeed not need religion as a way to record useful knowledge and encourage socially-beneficial conduct. So organized religion is not necessary in this sense.
However, what pre-modern societies have not had some structured form of spiritual beliefs and spiritual rituals? Even if these do not involve deities, dogma, scripture, etc., in the way that Western cultures conceive of religion, it's hard to say that any of these cultures lack religion defined in a broader sense. It's impossible to say if religion is necessary to any culture's survival, but the fact that it seems to be pretty universal seems to indicate that as humans evolved culture (and therefore a concept of morality), they also evolved spiritual rituals and beliefs.
It doesn't help that Wikipedia attempts to define religion by saying: "Religion may be defined as a cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. However, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion."
With such a definition, any philosophy of life or ethics shared by a culture or subculture, any set of transcendent or spiritual cultural rituals - no matter how shallow, faddish, or consumerist they may seem, and whether or not the subculture performing them even considers itself spiritual (it may in fact be a militantly anti-spiritual group) can be called religious. With such a definition it would seem that religion is indeed inseparable from being human and therefore could very well have been evolutionarily adaptive.
I think you can't have one of culture, religion, or ethics without having both of the others. But this is using a very broad anthropological-ish (I'm no anthropologist) definition of these things.
I think it is as easy to say the reverse. That a group encodes their knowledge and practices encode their religion. But I don’t think religion, or an analogue, is necessary. Elephants don’t likely have a religion and they impart knowledge and practice.
Maybe you were referring to this, but there are some controversial scientific claims that animals exhibit behavior that indicates spirituality. It seems pretty non-falsifiable to me, though, so I don't know if there is much value to such inquiry.
I'm not certain where you get that when I said 'Elephants do not likely have a religion'.
What do you mean by "an analogue" of religion?
I mean a set of principles that one follow in the manner of a religion, no spirituality implied.
I think you can't have one of culture, religion, or ethics without having both of the others.
I honestly don't see why religion is necessary. Culture and ethics are the agreed upon rules by which we manage to survive in groups without murderifying each other. That religion has been intertwined does not them mean it must be.
I'm not certain where you get that when I said 'Elephants do not likely have a religion'.
...
I honestly don't see why religion is necessary. Culture and ethics are the agreed upon rules by which we manage to survive in groups without murderifying each other. That religion has been intertwined does not them mean it must be.
I didn't mean that I thought you believe elephants have religion. I was saying that I wasn't sure if your comment that elephants do not likely have a religion meant that you had heard about the claims of elephant religious behavior and were skeptical about them. I didn't want to say "actually, there were these scientists that controversially said this" when that may have already been what you had been referring to and rejecting (perhaps rightfully so). I'm bad at this. I'm sorry.
What definition of religion are you using? Some scholars consider a non-spiritual "set of principles" to be a religion. (Basically, just about anything can be a religion.) But most people don't talk about religion using the terminology of religious studies scholars (pretty soon, the way university finances and trends in university courses are going, there won't be any religious studies scholars ).
I guess what I am trying to say is that being human means having some kind of philosophy of life, even if it is very informal and instinctual. It means having rituals, even if one does not consider them spiritual at all. And it means having feelings of awe and transcendence - even if one does not think that they have any spiritual element. I am calling these phenomena, when viewed at the cultural or societal level "religion." Maybe this definition is not very common among most people.
When you say religion is not "necessary" do you mean that it is not necessary for societies to survive (I'm not claiming this), that it is not an inherent part of humans and human interaction (I am claiming this), both, or something else?
Sorry about going off on a tangent when this thread is about the evolution of morality.
I didn't mean that I thought you believe elephants have religion. I was saying that I wasn't sure if your comment that elephants do not likely have a religion meant that you had heard about the claims of elephant religious behavior and were skeptical about them. I didn't want to say "actually, there were these scientists that controversially said this" when that may have already been what you had been referring to and rejecting (perhaps rightfully so). I'm bad at this. I'm sorry.
No worries. No, I wasn't referencing those studies. I am saying that we have no real evidence that animlas have religion and yet they impart behaviour to their children. Even if those vague claims of animal spirituality are correct, they do not then impart a codified morality based on that.
What definition of religion are you using? Some scholars consider a non-spiritual "set of principles" to be a religion.
Any definition too broad is essentially meaningless.
I guess what I am trying to say is that being human means having some kind of philosophy of life, even if it is very informal and instinctual. It means having rituals, even if one does not consider them spiritual at all. And it means having feelings of awe and transcendence - even if one does not think that they have any spiritual element. I am calling these phenomena, when viewed at the cultural or societal level "religion."
Humanity has this, I don't think all humans do.
When you say religion is not "necessary" do you mean that it is not necessary for societies to survive (I'm not claiming this), that it is not an inherent part of humans and human interaction (I am claiming this), both, or something else?
Both. The only "proof" that religion is inherent is that it exists. It is at least as logical to view religion as an artefact of trying to understand the universe.
The only "proof" that religion is inherent is that it exists. It is at least as logical to view religion as an artefact of trying to understand the universe.
I think this is fair. It is undoubtedly true that we can identify human hands in the construction of religion as an artefact. The issue is whether the artefact is based on, and contains, divine revelation, or is purely a human construct.
The durability, variability and ubiquity of religious belief certainly shows that many human communities have found it useful. Much modern criticism has focused, often justifiably, on its more baleful aspects.
I try to avoid the "no true Scotsman" argument. So I'll put an analogous question. Is it possible that there is divine revelation at the core? Something worth preserving?
Personally I am very happy to look at possible baleful effects of religious belief and see whether the criticisms are justified. The human aspects of the artefacts benefit from criticism and consequential refinement. That is true whether or not there is divine revelation at the core. Stubborn dogmatic defence of the indefensible is not the right way to go. We can learn and adapt.
The only "proof" that religion is inherent is that it exists. It is at least as logical to view religion as an artefact of trying to understand the universe.
I think this is fair. It is undoubtedly true that we can identify human hands in the construction of religion as an artefact. The issue is whether the artefact is based on, and contains, divine revelation, or is purely a human construct.
The durability, variability and ubiquity of religious belief certainly shows that many human communities have found it useful. Much modern criticism has focused, often justifiably, on its more baleful aspects.
It has been useful as a social glue and social control. There are positive and negative benefits.
I try to avoid the "no true Scotsman" argument. So I'll put an analogous question. Is it possible that there is divine revelation at the core? Something worth preserving?
Of course it is possible. Is it worth preserving, that is a more difficult question. It has, IMO, not proven net politicise in result.
Personally I am very happy to look at possible baleful effects of religious belief and see whether the criticisms are justified. The human aspects of the artefacts benefit from criticism and consequential refinement. That is true whether or not there is divine revelation at the core. Stubborn dogmatic defence of the indefensible is not the right way to go. We can learn and adapt.
This I agree with. Though the narrow view that we discuss here was born of the challenge brought by modern thinking, it will not be the saviour of religion, but contribute to its downfall.
Comments
There are many answers to our moral dilemmas and failing, Boogie, hence my use of "somehow". I was watching a natural world programme about a wolf family today and pondered on the social cohesiveness and co-operation of the pack in protecting the youngest, accepting leadership from the experienced alpha male and alpha females, and their total ruthlessness in hunting down prey. All of the behaviour is I suppose to some extent instinctive yet there were remarkable signs of intelligent assessment going on. But I don't think the sentience of wolves demonstrates moral awareness.
How real is our sense of moral awareness? Is it unique to human beings, or is what we call moral awareness simply an extension of the kind of intelligent assessment we can see in social behaviour in the animal kingdom. And indeed is it possible to even talk about sin, missing the mark, without some kind of moral awareness? They are all good questions, I think, and Christians have come up with varying answers to them. Human behaviour is full of conundrums.
We vastly if not completely overstate human qualities, especially morality, which is a consequence of the emergence of rhetorical, three legged consciousness.
First, one needs to define morality. That it does, and always has, varied between cultures should be telling that much of it is culturally defined. So much of what a particular culture or sub-culture defines as MORAL is no more than prejudice. Stepping into the shared, such as murder, we go into predilection which evolved for our particular evolution and development. We are not the only species that regulates when killing of another of our own is OK and when it is not.
What we call moral is subjective to both how we evolved and how we live. The second shapes morality well more than some would like to admit. Including myself.
We should be kind because that's what we're partially wired - the better angels of our nature - to be and in our new emergent social structures (cyberspace) it's got to be in there. I don't see choice as meaningful in this or any other significant situation. Being kind, even sacrificially, rarely makes us feel worse. Where's the choice? Impulse control at best. Kindness is enlightened self interest - something I'm severely limited in as I demonstrate here; I tend (British understatement) to the adamant, the uncompromising, the compulsive as in the Purgatory exorcism threads. I can't leave that scab alone. I don't want to be unkind to non-rationalists but non/un-rationalism has (compulsion... irrational compulsion) to be challenged.
If by scrupulous behaviour one means Kant's categorical imperative and/or Bentham's utilitarianism, they can't possibly work as that assumes the rationalist delusion. i.e. that we are or should be rational creatures devoid of the need for emotional intelligence.
Quite. The notion of God creating a process that will slowly produce beings in his image is a far more impressive demonstration of the scope of his power and wisdom than any snap-of-the-fingers instantaneous creation. To build a universe of endless variety and absurd scale with the capacity (the objective?) of evolving first tiny, self-ordering molecules, then cells, then eukaryotes, then multi-cellular organisms and vertebrates and mammals and self-awareness and God-awareness. That is a demonstration of an almighty God; not to think of an outcome and merely call it into being, but to create a system consistent in time and space.
It's a good, separate, topic anyway. And there is a split thread function in the new software. So I'm going to tidy up.
Barnabas62
Dead Horses Host
Actually, yes it can. Kindness is the outworking of empathy, and empathy is a positive trait in a social species so would be selected for. I don't think it's any harder to account for than any other behaviour.
Sorry? I am not an image of God. I'm a piece of hard wired haunted meat. Imago Dei is a metaphor for our extremely constrained 'moral' capacity. As you yourself demonstrate justifying the murder of rape victims. Only evolution can explain such opportunity costs.
You probably can't demonstrate an evolutionary link yet as there are no moral fossils, but see Karl's post.
These behaviours are thought provoking and not easily explained away.
You get some of the flavour of that in the debate over the Hebrew word in the Genesis creation story which has been translated as 'subdue'. Subduing seems to imply innate tendencies to dominate by using power. I don't find in myself a desire to dominate and also find that I dislike dominant behaviour. The meme that might is not right seems to be deep within me. And yet I live in a world where the success of might is everywhere present in both human and animal societies.
The interpretation of the rat studies is not straightforward. Rat study discussion. In addition, there's really no lesson re humans being special or not out of it.
You link also talks about two possibilities: One is empathy, the other is the rat reliving its own stress caused by the alarm calls or pheromones of the trapped rat.
The cries of a baby are irritating to humans, regardless of that human's empathetic response to babies or a particular baby.
The lesson, IMO, is that other animals are mindless automatons and we are special flowers. We are more like them and they like us, though it isn't completely simple.
The lesson, IMO, is that other animals are not mindless automatons and we are special flowers. We are more like them and they like us, though it isn't completely simple.
I wonder, despite vast differences in religions and moral systems, what conceptions of religious sins and commandments are universal or near-universal among all cultures and whether or not this is because of a co-evolution of religion and moral codes.
This raises an interesting question about post-tribal religion, and how it helps organize social groups in a different way. Capitalist religion, I suppose.
There is a hint of that kind of utilitarian thinking in the Wiki argument I linked. So I guess seeing religion as a teacher and enforcer of cultural norms works as clue to its development.
Is it necessary? I think that is a less important question than is it true.
As to whether religion is required, probably not. It's quite aesthetic, I suppose, aesthetics being fairly important. But humans seem to create myths regularly, not all myths being religious of course.
That reminds me of Jung, who argued that heaven and hell exist in the human psyche, and are projected outwards. It even sounds banal today.
Maybe you were referring to this, but there are some controversial scientific claims that animals exhibit behavior that indicates spirituality. It seems pretty non-falsifiable to me, though, so I don't know if there is much value to such inquiry.
What do you mean by "an analogue" of religion? Do you mean spirituality in general, whether or not it involves a belief in the supernatural? Or do you specifically mean a belief in the supernatural?
Technologically-advanced societies with complex economies, effective courts and law enforcement, and efficient provision of social services may indeed not need religion as a way to record useful knowledge and encourage socially-beneficial conduct. So organized religion is not necessary in this sense.
However, what pre-modern societies have not had some structured form of spiritual beliefs and spiritual rituals? Even if these do not involve deities, dogma, scripture, etc., in the way that Western cultures conceive of religion, it's hard to say that any of these cultures lack religion defined in a broader sense. It's impossible to say if religion is necessary to any culture's survival, but the fact that it seems to be pretty universal seems to indicate that as humans evolved culture (and therefore a concept of morality), they also evolved spiritual rituals and beliefs.
It doesn't help that Wikipedia attempts to define religion by saying: "Religion may be defined as a cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. However, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion."
With such a definition, any philosophy of life or ethics shared by a culture or subculture, any set of transcendent or spiritual cultural rituals - no matter how shallow, faddish, or consumerist they may seem, and whether or not the subculture performing them even considers itself spiritual (it may in fact be a militantly anti-spiritual group) can be called religious. With such a definition it would seem that religion is indeed inseparable from being human and therefore could very well have been evolutionarily adaptive.
I think you can't have one of culture, religion, or ethics without having both of the others. But this is using a very broad anthropological-ish (I'm no anthropologist) definition of these things.
I honestly don't see why religion is necessary. Culture and ethics are the agreed upon rules by which we manage to survive in groups without murderifying each other. That religion has been intertwined does not them mean it must be.
I didn't mean that I thought you believe elephants have religion. I was saying that I wasn't sure if your comment that elephants do not likely have a religion meant that you had heard about the claims of elephant religious behavior and were skeptical about them. I didn't want to say "actually, there were these scientists that controversially said this" when that may have already been what you had been referring to and rejecting (perhaps rightfully so). I'm bad at this. I'm sorry.
What definition of religion are you using? Some scholars consider a non-spiritual "set of principles" to be a religion. (Basically, just about anything can be a religion.) But most people don't talk about religion using the terminology of religious studies scholars (pretty soon, the way university finances and trends in university courses are going, there won't be any religious studies scholars
I guess what I am trying to say is that being human means having some kind of philosophy of life, even if it is very informal and instinctual. It means having rituals, even if one does not consider them spiritual at all. And it means having feelings of awe and transcendence - even if one does not think that they have any spiritual element. I am calling these phenomena, when viewed at the cultural or societal level "religion." Maybe this definition is not very common among most people.
When you say religion is not "necessary" do you mean that it is not necessary for societies to survive (I'm not claiming this), that it is not an inherent part of humans and human interaction (I am claiming this), both, or something else?
Sorry about going off on a tangent when this thread is about the evolution of morality.
Humanity has this, I don't think all humans do.
Both. The only "proof" that religion is inherent is that it exists. It is at least as logical to view religion as an artefact of trying to understand the universe.
I think this is fair. It is undoubtedly true that we can identify human hands in the construction of religion as an artefact. The issue is whether the artefact is based on, and contains, divine revelation, or is purely a human construct.
The durability, variability and ubiquity of religious belief certainly shows that many human communities have found it useful. Much modern criticism has focused, often justifiably, on its more baleful aspects.
I try to avoid the "no true Scotsman" argument. So I'll put an analogous question. Is it possible that there is divine revelation at the core? Something worth preserving?
Personally I am very happy to look at possible baleful effects of religious belief and see whether the criticisms are justified. The human aspects of the artefacts benefit from criticism and consequential refinement. That is true whether or not there is divine revelation at the core. Stubborn dogmatic defence of the indefensible is not the right way to go. We can learn and adapt.
'But it's all right ma, it's life and life only."
Martin54, dragging conflicts in from other threads counts as getting unduly personal. Take it to Hell or stop it please.
Thanks
L
Dead Horses Host
hosting off