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Natural selection is a product of God.
That's actually a good point. I was debating with a friend who graduated with a degree in biology, and she was saying "I believe in God, but its hard sometimes because when you really look at life and its development, its all explained by science." I said, "Yeah, but who do you think is responsible for all of that? Why are you separating science and God? God is a scientist!"
I'm a college student right now majoring in molecular biology and the way I see it is that God knows everything we do and more. We are making scientific strides but God still knows more. Science does explain a lot, but I feel God places that system in order. The laws of science, how matter reacts, genetic anomalies, all of this is a process governed by laws and order. I have somewhat of a similar philosophy regarding God and science that you have. I feel learning about science is a further discovery of how God has created/managed things.
Studies show that 40% of scientist believe in God, around 45% don't, and the rest are agnostic.
I can't see what's so illogical about believing in an unseen force that lies deep in another dimension who is responsible for the creation of the world, its present development and even its future. While it might not be true, I can't see why its illogical.
You are on a mission to disprove God, and if you are wrong, that could mean a pretty nasty judgement day for you, while if I'm wrong, I'll just fade off into non-existence when I die, lol.
Natural selection is a product of God.
Scientists are human and they are certainly no less prone to making a Type I error.
Of course, you may never have taken time to consider what kind of God would allow children be born into "false" religions. I just sit back and enjoy the absurdity of it.
When you said the other night that it was "absurd" to take advice on spiritual matters from nomadic men who know less then you, you were implying (whether intentionally or not) that it would not be absurd to take advice on spiritual matters from someone who knows more than you. I'm pretty sure Alan Sandage knows more than you about science and he feels there is scientific evidence that there is a divine organizing principal behind the creation of the universe. This alone completely contradicts the notion that "Current evidence indicates that God is simply a human creation."
I think it's pretty obvious that I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, so I don't worry about little Hindu kids going to hell. As for my statement about me believing in the safer option and you taking the more dangerous route, it was partly a joke, but did have some truths to it. For example, I don't believe in Buddha but I wouldn't curse him because I really don't know. I just find it interesting when atheist who claim they are so logical blaspheme God, because the most logical person would realize they can't prove God doesn't exist, and therefore blaspheming Him is an unessecary risk. (I'm not saying you're one of these people, just pointing it out)
I am still interesting in what you think about the Darwinian explanations for human morality. I hope they are more convincing than "genetic misfiring". Even before that statement Richard Dawkins argument on that point was weak. He was trying to say animals benefit by being generous to their own family members but in actuality, animals are rarely even generous to their own family members. Have you ever seen a lion pride feeding? The strongest gets to eat first and everyone else better get out of the way. The only way anyone else will get to eat is if he gets full before the carcas is gone. The only generosity I see in the animal kingdom is parents feeding their offspring, unless of course the parents get too hungry, then some of them eat their offspring.
..it frees you up of having to answer to anyone, or having to be held accountable for anything you do, all truth would be relative and you could pillage, rape and plunder all you want and if you ever get caught by any authorities or opposing force you just kill yourself and becoming nothing. Doesn't this sound like the easier plan?
According to your own logic wouldn't it be safer for you to believe there is an evolutionary explanation for religion, when there might not be, rather than not believing in an evolutionary explanation for it, when there actually is one?
How is your theory more scientifically correct than Mr Sandage. The theories you are proposing are by no means established facts in the fields of anthropology yet.
As for your argument on morality and natural selection, that has many loop holes. First of all, it is very arguable that it is more beneficial for humans to try and dominate each other, rather than to be generous.
No, but aren't you arguing for inherent, objective evolutionary truths, the idea that morality is based on human reciprocity and that this has been encoded into our genes by natural selection. How can this be genetic, encoded evolutionary truth and also be culturally relative?I'm not arguing for inherent, objective moral truths
If one didn't believe in the natural selection explanation, wouldn't one be more inclined to believe in the supernatural explanation? For instance if, hypothetically speaking, the natural selection explanation was proven beyond a doubt to be false, and there was no descernable natural explanation for religious beliefs in human species, wouldn't one be more inclined to believe that religious beliefs exist because they are true? Since religion repulses you, wouldn't it be a moral danger (I don't see why the dangers have to be physical) for you to be inclined to have religious beliefs? Would mental survival from the escape of religious beliefs be enough to motivate you to believe in an alternative option? Let me try to put it this way, religious people believe in God to avoid the risk of going to hell, and atheist/agnostics believe in the natural selection explanation for religious beliefs in order to avoid the risk of becoming religious.How would it be safer? What consequence would I face? You seem to fundamentally misunderstand the concept of a Type I and Type II errors. There must be a cost or consequence for choosing whether to believe or not to believe. Exactly what would be the consequence or cost to me if I did not choose to believe in a natural selection explaination to God?
It's not a theory. It's a hypothesis, just as Mr. Sandage has made a hypothesis.
I've implicated evidence to support my notion that God is a product of natural selection
Read the last line of my previous post. You don't understand my argument at all. Reciprocity is not the same as generosity. You are arguing against Dawkins not against me.
As for the Type 1 error, you still haven't shown how this account for religious beliefs amongst humans, only that after the beliefs already exist, why some might be inclined to believe them.
No, but aren't you arguing for inherent, objective evolutionary truths, the idea that morality is based on human reciprocity and that this has been encoded into our genes by natural selection. How can this be genetic, encoded evolutionary truth and also be culturally relative?
If one didn't believe in the natural selection explanation, wouldn't one be more inclined to believe in the supernatural explanation? For instance if, hypothetically speaking, the natural selection explanation was proven beyond a doubt to be false, and there was no descernable natural explanation for religious beliefs in human species, wouldn't one be more inclined to believe that religious beliefs exist because they are true? Since religion repulses you, wouldn't it be a moral danger (I don't see why the dangers have to be physical) for you to be inclined to have religious beliefs? Would mental survival from the escape of religious beliefs be enough to motivate you to believe in an alternative option? Let me try to put it this way, religious people in God to avoid the risk of going to hell, and atheist/agnostics believe in the natural selection explanation for religious beliefs in order to avoid the risk of becoming religious.
You previously referred to it as evidence, not merely a hypothesis.
In my last post, replace the world generosity with reciprocity. Its semantics with me, I think we are really talking about the same thing. Europeans certainly weren't interested in reciprocity when they slaughtered Native Americans in North America and Africans in the Congo and South Africa
I hardly take religion seriously, and there is a reason for it. I understand how humans evolved. We are pattern seeking creatures and some of our cognitive biases are encoded in our genes as a result of how we evolved.
Let me try to explain it in statistical terms. There are two types of statistical errors, a Type I error and a Type II error. Type I errors are known as false positives and Type II errors are known as false negatives. Through natural selection, humans have become far more likely to commit Type I errors.
To illustrate, think of it in terms of our ancient ancestors. A hunter is walking through the jungle and he hears a rustle in the grass, is it a tiger or the wind? Well let us consider the two types of errors he could make.
Type I error: He believes there is a tiger in the grass even though there isn't.
Type II error: He believes there is no tiger in the grass even though there is.
Hunters who commit Type I errors in this scenario face considerably less costly consequences than hunters who commit Type II errors. In other words, the humans who commit Type II errors are more likely to get eaten, to get weeded out, and thus to have fewer offspring. The people who commit more Type I errors are likely to persist.
So how does this relate to religion and God?
It is safer to believe in something that does not exist than it is to not believe in something that does.
That bit of reasoning is also known as Pascal's wager and is the basis of all superstition. To put it in terms of statistical errors...
Type I: False Positive: You believe there is a God there even though there isn’t.
Type II: False Negative: You believe there is no God even though there is.
If you commit a Type II error, then the consequence is usually eternal damnation. It makes logical sense to "play it safe" and choose to believe in something that may not exist and, as already explained, our biology is already predisposed to do so.
I don't claim ownership of this idea. Michael Shermer is one of the originators of this hypothesis.
However, the fact that superstition persists means it has served an evolutionary purpose, but as we progress as a species we are beginning to outgrow it. We begin to see tigers where there are no tigers, such as in aliens, government conspiracies, etc.
Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World: Scientific American
But if there is no God, then what is the meaning of life? Will we not all act like immoral beasts and descend into anarchy? Even if there is no God, doesn't man need this Type I error to keep him moral?
Of course, the answers to these questions are found in natural selection as well. As the environmental forces that constrained our species decreased due to our adaptation, humans became their own chief hostile force in nature. As a result, we began to develop social intelligence that allowed us to emphasize, understand, and cooperate with one another. This is evidenced in the massive changes in our brains, in particular the development of a frontal cortex which allowed us to learn and develop language, reasoning, and other fine capabilities we often take for granted. We formed tribes that competed against other tribes. That is why we are limited even today to remembering up to 150 people and forming such passionate bonds with people who share our values and beliefs. The tribal mentality is a very large part of what makes us human and our increasing social intelligence has allowed us to move from direct competition to reciprocity. It is the ability to negotiate the terms of that reciprocity that is the basis for government, trade, social contracts, and our understanding of human rights.
Of course, once again, this is not solely my hypothesis...
http://web.missouri.edu/~gearyd/Flinnetal2005.pdf
So then what of our purpose as a species if there is no inherent meaning to our existence as decided by some omnipotent supernatural deity?
Well existentialists and humanists have been working on that question for a long time and I'm particularly fond of Carl Sagan's perspective...
If that is not good enough for you, then the absurdist philosopher Albert Camus explained the options all men have quite nicely.
1. Commit suicide (no sense wasting resources if life isn't worth living).
2. Commit philosophical suicide (by committing a Type I error and buying into some supernatural deity or superstition).
3. Accept that there may not be inherent meaning to life and enjoy the fact that you exist and have the power to make your own meaning out of your experiences.
I leave the choice up to you.
Ever heard of an imaginary friend? Every child has one growing up. It's a socializing agent, and a chance to practice and develop social skills. Children speak to them and they hear the imaginary friend talk back. As adults we understand that the child is talking to themselves in something of soliloquy, but the child experiences it as if the friend is real because their imagination allows them to percieve it that way.
Another thing about children is they are often indoctrinated into relgious beliefs before they develop the capacity to reason. It's no wonder that God simply takes the place of their imaginary friend.
But even adults will buy into religion long after childhood. and I indicated why in the last bit of my OP. Any creature that seeks inherent meaning is not going to find it because meaning does not exist outside of human conciousness. Meaning is simply human interpretation of why things are the way they are. There are only 3 ways that humans can deal with this existential challenge. 1. They commit suicide. 2. They commit philsophical suicide by choosing to believe in a supernatural explaination. 3. They accept that there may not be any discernable inherent meaning.
Ah, you are asking whether philosophical suicide is enough of a consequence to me to choose a natural selection theory over a belief in God.
I think I would fear an eternal damnation in hell considerably more than committing philsophical suicide. It would be considerably easier to turn to Christianity and ask for repetance. I'm in a country that is over 70% Christian and which largely looks down on people who are not Christians. I think I would benefit considerably more being a Christian than an agnotic.
No we are not. In fact the statement "most successful nations achieved their success by dominating either other nations" demonstrate a profound ignorance of what reciprocity is. How can a nation even exists if there is no reciprocity between its people?
I've implicated evidence to support my notion that God is a product of natural selection, can you provide evidence to indicate your notion that natural selection is a product of God? Perhaps you could point out somewhere in the Bible where God mentions this force?
Natural selection is largely if not solely based on survival mechanisms, and I don’t see how an imaginary friend is a part of a survival mechanism.
Besides that, we should also find similar percentage of children with imaginary friends to percentage of adults with spiritual beliefs, if that were an underlying cause. However only two-thirds of children have imaginary friends yet over 97% of people in the world believe in God. And also, the studies showing 2/3 of children having imaginary friends are just in the U.S., I can’t imagine this statistic being universal as African children, Chinese children, etc. are very different from American children psychologically speaking. Then we’d have to prove that human children have always had imaginary friends, and that this isn’t a modern phenomenon due to increased social interactions most profoundly with the introduction of the radio and television.
As for your other explanation, humans developing religious beliefs to find a deeper meaning in life, I find that lacking as well. Its seems that idealization is a rather new trend while religion still remains an old one. The idea that most of us want to have purpose in our careers, accomplish something meaningful within our lifetimes, fall in true love, etc. seem to be modern desires. Evidence of this is simply looking at present day native tribes or cultures who aren’t too far removed from their native origins. There is no such thing as having a purpose in a career, you simply feed your family, and love has nothing to do with their marriages, they are simple social functions developed for the breeding of children. Humans searching for deeper meaning in life seems to have developed first amongst the Greek philosophers and religion came thousands of years before that. Even then, these desires for meaning which appeared with the Greeks, for the next thousand or so years, were only found amongst the most advanced civilizations and the most educated peoples of those civilizations. Most everyone else, including the native tribes in Africa, the Americas, Oceania, etc., and also European and Asia medieval peasants, simply wanted to work and breed.
I think Shermer’s argument fails to be convincing in the scientific/anthropologic realm also, that is, to say these type 1 errors are present in the majority of humans due to natural selection. Cognitive traits in humans still aren’t solely explainable by natural selection. You can look at a grand father, his son and his son’s son and it will be very apparent that while one might be physically aggressive, the next might be passive and the next might be somewhere in the middle and so on. Cognitive traits don’t work like alleles. So its hard to conceive that even though more of the men who believed there were Tigers in the bushes survived to reach an age where they could breed more children than the men who believed there was wind in the bushes and frequently died from Tiger attacks, that those type 1 errors were consistently passed down to their children. From what we see today in the study of psychology, cognitive traits aren’t consistently passed down to children. Even Socrates himself noticed this, in that he “argued that successful fathers do not necessarily produce successful sons and that moral excellence was more a matter of divine bequest than parental upbringing.” Socrates
What is more compelling is that, if these men who believed there was only wind in the bushes, did in fact die off at a faster rate from Tiger attacks than the men who believed there were Tigers in the bushes, weren’t the latter right! If a person was seeking to live by the most logical reasoning possible, wouldn't he then chose to be a type 1 errorer, since this has shown to ensure survival?
Ok, I see what you’re saying and for what you’re saying you are right, reciprocity benefits communities and society. However, I will extend that particular part of the debate and ask how you would explain genorousity according to natural selection, the reason why some people risk their lives to save the lives of other people, even if they know you they will never come into contact with that person again. This is certainly not present in the animal kingdom and isn’t a survival mechanism.
Actually, you've presented evidence as to why people are willing to believe in and/or fear some things they cannot see or explain. You haven't presented evidence that God is a product of natural selection. If that were the case, it highlights a fallacy in your example because there would never be a tiger in the bush and, therefore, no natural selection would take place.
This is an interesting theory. Basically, people who don't pay attention to the world around them and/or assume that there are no dangers in it are preferentially eliminated before producing offspring. Is that about the size of it?
Sounds reasonable.
Follow my logic...
1. People who believed in things that did not exist for the sake that they could were more likely to survive and reproduce.
2. Those people went on to create religion because they were more prone to believe in things that did not exist. (superstition)
3. God therefore was indirectly the result of natural selection.
Um...no. It has nothing to do with "paying attention". Both examples recognized that there was a noise in the grass. The difference was one chose to believe in something that could not be seen and the other chose to believe that it was nothing. The one that chose to believe it was nothing was at a disadvantage because if it did turn out to be something, they got eaten. The one that believed in something that could not be seen, was more likely to survive and have offspring that carried the same trait.
Natural selection is the process whereby those who reproduce most will pass on their genes.
And just what the f**k do you think you're doing? Imaginary friends as a precursor to religious belief?You are speculating.
For one, the number of people who believe in God is around 80%, for two, you are assuming that only 2/3 of children have imaginary friends.
However, I cannot prove that all children across all time and in all cultures have imaginary friends.
To the contrary. The very development of religion is proof that man seeks meaning in his existence.
I'm not arguing about all cognitive traits nor is Shermer. We are talking about one cognitive trait. And the fact that 80% of the world is religious is pretty strong evidence that the basis of it is genetic. People are biologically predisposed to believe in things that do not exist simply in case they do.
Umm, my statement was laced with humor. Take that stick out of you a** and relax. Don't turn this into a name calling match. I was merely pointing out the irony that these type 1 believers you criticize so much, are in fact the evolutionary survivors. Since they were right about tigers being in the bushes sometimes, could they not be right about the existence of a hell?Uh what? You have had absolutely no clue what I have been talking about since the beginning, have you? The people who chose Type 1 were the most likely to survive and pass on their genes. That is why superstition is such a universal human trait. If you didn't understand that much, then it was absolutely pointless up until now for me to discuss this with you. No offense, but it is starting to feel like I'm trying to explain this to a teenager
I'm sorry, but I'm not Richard Dawkins. I'm not here to debate generosity.
Furthermore, I'm feeling a bit perturbed that I have been discussing this with you and you don't even seem to understand the premise of my position. I would recommend you watch the video of Shermer in hopes you might understand but I was extremely disappointed to read that you missed out on understanding the Type I and Type II errors.
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