Theism, Religion and Lack thereof

Harlequin said:

ITT Harle ignores the current discussion about sperms and continues down a different line of thought

I'm currently reading a book called The God Part of the Brain by a man called Matthew Alder. It's a very, very interesting book and I'd encourage absolutely everyone here to read it if they ever get the chance. It's been published for a while now (1996 I believe, although it's been updated with new statistics since), but you should still be able to pick up a copy at most book shops; I bought mine last week in Waterstone's.

Anyway, like I've already said it's a very interesting book. It subjects religiosity and spirituality to a rigorous scientific analysis and he's come up with the idea that religiosity and spirituality, like for example, musical ability or athleticism, probably has a large degree of genetic influence. He explores and examines how such traits could evolve in the prehuman animal and presents a very interesting and convincing argument. There's also a section devoted to why America, although a first world nation, has such a massive religious majority (the argument he presents is very obvious, but I do think it deserves mentioning solely because it remains the most likely answer to the question of "Why is the US so religious?"), which I found interesting.

So, basically, the conclusion is that our experience of religion and spirituality is something we generate from within. That is, nothing about it is external, which implies that there is no such thing as a spiritual world that exists separately from our own, real and mundane, world.

Everyone here should read this book, btw. ANYWAY so: thoughts?

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That's not so strange.

Singapore
Japan
South Korea

There you go.

Harle, I tend to think that such a statement as

He explores and examines how such traits could evolve in the prehuman animal and presents a very interesting and convincing argument.

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would imply that religious people are less evolved

Eyes evolved. Does that make people who can see less evolved than people who can't?

(What the hell does less evolved mean, anyway? Wouldn't a creature that survived this long with less evolutions be considered more successful?)

rock-ground said:

That's not so strange.

Singapore
Japan
South Korea

There you go.

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I'll grant you Singapore, but:

wiki said:

About 70 percent of Japanese profess no religious membership,[6][7] according to Johnstone (1993:323), 84% of the Japanese claim no personal religion. And according to Demerath (2001:138), 64% do not believe in God, and 55% do not believe in Buddha.

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wiki said:

According to 2005 statistics compiled by the South Korean government, approximately 46.5% of the South Korean population express no religious preference.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_South_Korea#cite_note-1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Japan#cite_note-7

Pwnemon said:

Harle, I tend to think that such a statement as would imply that religious people are less evolved

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Er, no it doesn't...? And what does "less evolved" even mean? Is someone who doesn't have perfect pitch "less evolved" than someone who does?

It's like, um, how I'd say "He explores and examines how such traits [as loyalty and friendliness] could evolve in the predog animal"; a trait has to appear in the pre-whatever animal before it can appear in the animal! Anyway, the book doesn't make any value judgement on which kind of alleles are better or worse, and simply says that certain combinations of genes are likely to result in a genetic predisposition to more or less religiosity and spirituality, just like certain combinations of genes are likely to result in a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, musical talent, athleticism, ability at mathematics etc...

Pwnemon said:

Harle, I tend to think that such a statement as

would imply that religious people are less evolved

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Nothing is less evolved than anything else. There is no evolutionary ladder. Besideswhich, it's the mutations that humans developed in ancient times and linger on today that are the most successful, so if religion evolved in prehuman animals and continues today, then that makes religion evolutionarily successful.

Harlequin said:

The book doesn't seek to make any distinction between the genetic make up of religious people or non-religious people other than that there very probably is one, in just the same way as there's a difference between people with a genetic predisposition to musical talent or athletic ability and so on and so forth. In fact, the book treats everything in an unbiased and scientific manner, and seeks only to explain how such a genetic predisposition could arise and what that means for the various world religions and belief systems.

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Eh. I'm no genetics student, but given that race has no real genetic basis, I find that idea that there's any sort of link between a person's beliefs and genes a bit silly :/

And even if there is a link, there's still no such thing as a "scientific and unbiased" approach - all research is biased by the people who carry it out. IQ tests were thought to be a 'scientific and unbiased' method of measuring someone's intelligence.

If people are born with different skin colors or other distinctive features of particular races, there are genes causing it; what the heck else would be? That doesn't mean race isn't a silly classification anyway because the physical traits defining some race probably have very little in the way of correlation with anything else of interest, but that doesn't mean some people aren't genetically predisposed to having darker skin than others, which is the sort of thing we're talking about when discussing the possibility of genetic predispositions towards religious belief.

It seems quite likely to me that there is some genetic factor; religious beliefs of various sorts have been with the human species so persistently and for so long that it's easily plausible they're evolved. (This is as opposed to things like political beliefs, which are very unlikely to be directly related to genetics because politics as we know them have been around for such a short time, on an evolutionary scale.)

Dannichu said:

And even if there is a link, there's still no such thing as a "scientific and unbiased" approach - all research is biased by the people who carry it out. IQ tests were thought to be a 'scientific and unbiased' method of measuring someone's intelligence.

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I apologize for derailing the thread, but are they not? I have never heard of this and it sounds like a genuinely interesting subject.

Dannichu said:

Eh. I'm no genetics student, but given that race has no real genetic basis, I find that idea that there's any sort of link between a person's beliefs and genes a bit silly :/

And even if there is a link, there's still no such thing as a "scientific and unbiased" approach - all research is biased by the people who carry it out. IQ tests were thought to be a 'scientific and unbiased' method of measuring someone's intelligence.

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Bachuru said:

If people are born with different skin colors or other distinctive features of particular races, there are genes causing it; what the heck else would be? That doesn't mean race isn't a silly classification anyway because the physical traits defining some race probably have very little in the way of correlation with anything else of interest, but that doesn't mean some people aren't genetically predisposed to having darker skin than others, which is the sort of thing we're talking about when discussing the possibility of genetic predispositions towards religious belief.

It seems quite likely to me that there is some genetic factor; religious beliefs of various sorts have been with the human species so persistently and for so long that it's easily plausible they're evolved. (This is as opposed to things like political beliefs, which are very unlikely to be directly related to genetics because politics as we know them have been around for such a short time, on an evolutionary scale.)

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Butterfree summed this up quite well, so I'm going to reproduce her post here, but I'm also going to add a short little bit.

The thing that's genetically determined isn't the belief, it's the predisposition towards having such a belief -- like some people are innately more talented at music or mathematics or languages than other people. Of course there's an environmental component to religion (there has to be), but the argument here is that there are particular sets of genes which influence positively or negatively how religious and spiritual a person is. Religion and spirituality are what's called cross-cultural traits, which means that pretty much every culture ever studied has both of them, and in any other animal but the human one we'd suggest there's a genetic basis for behaviours stemming from this.

The book goes on to describe various physiological responses to different kinds of stimuli, and I'd outline them here but to do so would be to essentially reproduce the book, and I don't want to do that. If you're interested I'd really, really suggest picking this book up and reading it regardless of where on your "to read" list it falls, because it should skip ahead to first place.

RE: unbiased: the author was originally biased towards God. As in, he set out trying to find God, not, like, say God doesn't exist. He doesn't even say much either way, other than "this is the evidence. This is what it could mean." Basically, everything he writes comes from evidence-based reasoning with evidence gained from scientific tests -- it's as close to unbiased as we can possibly get.

And even if there is a link, there's still no such thing as a "scientific and unbiased" approach - all research is biased by the people who carry it out. IQ tests were thought to be a 'scientific and unbiased' method of measuring someone's intelligence.

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This is very true for social sciences - but absolutely irrelevant in the natural sciences

#1 bro said:

I apologize for derailing the thread, but are they not? I have never heard of this and it sounds like a genuinely interesting subject.

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I think it has something to do with the language used being biased against minorities or something? I really don't know how, but IQ tests aren't the best measure of intelligence to begin with.