Azaran on 2/2/2012 at 10:00

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Yeah that's precisely the problem nowadays.



There are alternative religious hypotheses more reasonable than the Christian "fine tuned" one. For instance, ancient Gnosticism and many Neoplatonic schools saw the physical world as a mistake, either an imperfect reflection of another, spiritual world, or a fallen imitation of it; there was even one that saw the physical world as a pile of rubbish that arose out of the primeval creation (I think it might be in Lurianic Kabbalah but I'm not sure). The point being that these particular belief systems view human life on this planet as an unintended reality, whereby fragments of the Divine light became trapped in matter. As an intellectual exercise, if we were to assume that there really is a Deity\Deities and a spiritual world, I think this hypothesis would be the most reasonable one, and the fine-tuned argument no longer applies.

There's an even more interesting one in the Hermetica (in the Discourses of Isis to Horus, 1st-4th centuries), based on Plato's Timaeus. According to it, Man originally inhabited one of the spiritual planes above the physical universe; at one level there was the supreme God, at another lower one there were various Gods and Goddesses, and at a still lower one there were human souls. These were appointed by God to create life on earth. Having so done, they began to rebel, trying to ascend into other planes, and God was displeased. He then ordered Hermes to create human bodies on earth, and then trapped the souls into them as punishment.
For the sake of argument, assuming that there was a God or Gods, and humans have immortal souls, this particular myth would probably be the most reasonable one from a scientific stand point. Think about it: Homo Sapiens are perhaps the newest species of animal on this earth, and at one point sometime around 200,000 -500,000 years ago (or thereabouts) their brains became large enough to develop consciousness, a faculty that distinguishes us from most other animals. If you correlate the myth with the facts, you could reach a reasonable conclusion that human souls incarnated around the time when the brain became large enough to accommodate them.

Nicker on 2/2/2012 at 10:47

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The Aristotelian model being enthusiastically endorsed by the Church. In which case the Church was claiming it's own science to be superior. The "scientists" ranged against Galileo were just papal attack dogs. Galileo only recanted after he was shown the instruments of torture, the inquisition's telescopes into the human soul. He lived under house arrest for the rest of his life. Are you going to tell me that the College of Astronomers enforced that?

Sorry but your objection is just a semantic distraction.



There are some rare exceptions, like certain branches of Buddhism but the vast majority of religions throughout history and even today, concern themselves with the afterlife. It's the raison d'etre of the Abrahamic sects. Fear the stick - love the carrot.

Claiming that the carrot's love for you is your inspiration sounds more like stick denial to me.

Claiming to know what happens after death or the will of the ineffable, sounds like hubris.

jay pettitt on 2/2/2012 at 10:52

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There's a hypothesis that altruism is an evolved trait that works well for social species where it would be reciprocated and/or demonstrate suitability as a mate (a sort of social equivalent to a peacocks' economically unsound tail feathers.)

That we then feel the need to extend altruism and empathy to people on the other side of the world when it might not seem likely that reciprocation or mating may result would be yet another example of evolution being cackhanded.

But those are the cards we're dealt.



None. If you want to go live in a ditch in the middle of nowhere and wait for a rapist to steal your apples then help yourself.

I may have misunderstood the point you're trying to make.

faetal on 2/2/2012 at 11:11

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It is the most evolutionarily stable strategy for socially cohesive animals. Mathematically speaking alone, genes which result in altruistic behaviour will thrive more than those which don't. This has been postulated by something as simple as game theory and observed numerous times in nature. In any animal society, there is an equilibrium between doves and hawks which naturally favours doves because if everyone is fucking everyone else over, no one benefits. This is decades old evolutionary psychology. It's not really contested by anything other than religious indignation that they own morality.



Wrong. The waters are muddied by human civilisation because there will always be a proportion of non-altruistic, non-moralistic behaviour in any population of social animals (apart from ants, bees etc.. as there behaviour can be classified on a far more mechanistic basis). Civilisation makes it look as though everyone behaves nicely because of the legal system and other systems of reward etc.. but this has been shown to not be the case. Some people will happily sit back and live on social benefits because it behooves them to work, others will work even if it means being worse off, simply because they want to have self-respect. The reason I don't go out killing, raping and stealing isn't because of my upbringing per se (though parental behavioural conditioning can be seen as a very useful feedback mechanism) or because of religious morals, it is because the concept of these actions results in my brain releasing chemicals which cause anxiety, guilt - negative emotions. Brains wired to have anything other than this response in social animals would likely not be conducive to reproduction success on the same level as those who exhibit a more socially conducive response, thus over millennia, you end up with genetic drift in favour of social responsibility, morals and altruism. As mentioned before, there will always be a proportion of sociopaths, as this strategy can also yield benefits, but in order to do so, there must be useful amount of altruists to take advantage of. Therefore the most evolutionarily stable outcome is an equilibrium of a large number of altruists, to a small number of sociopaths, accounting of course for it being something of a multimodal distribution between and within the two.



Because ordinary scenario doesn't involve everyone's life being in immediate danger, I'm not sure how this contributes to a discussion of ordinary human behaviour.



It is a trade system, but not on the scale you're predisposed to think. The trade off for altruism is better reproductive prospects and success. At least, that's what it *was* when our species came about. What it is now is, like I say, muddied by the amount of intervention human society has placed upon input and output of human behaviour and reproductive success.

The science is all there - it's really not a mystery which is up for debate. Religious people just have a hard time accepting this if they view their belief as being the foundation of why they are a good person. It's called cognitive dissonance, which again, is very well studied.

Nicker on 2/2/2012 at 11:14

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In other words in might be all an illusion. But if that's true then science still gives us the most reliable description of our shared hallucination because we do have a great deal of commonality in our perception of "reality", as malleable as that reality may be.

Superstitious and arbitrary thinking can only compound the misunderstanding of a dubious reality, denying us even the hope of understanding our delusional state.

Plus science delivers the goods.

So no, it's not just "a preference". Even in uncertainty science is still the superior choice.