Hypothesis: the more educated you are the less likely you are to be religious

Beleg Cúthalion on 7/2/2012 at 11:01

Quote Posted by Vasquez

I'm thinking here is the gist of where you go wrong. Saying something is based on biology and evolution doesn't mean it's useless nonsense - quite the contrary.

Sorry, this time it was a typo I guess, I didn't mean "biological nonsense" but "biologically nonsense", i.e. that the concept of guilt couldn't be upheld (or could? that's why I threw it in) with our knowledge of how decisions are made.

Quote Posted by Muzman

I don't now exactly how we're going to deal with this. I think mostly our post hoc conceptualisation of things (post post hoc even) will stand, because that's what we do and there's nothing very wrong with it. It will just fold in new concepts that deal with the problem of concepts I suppose.

AFAIK religion provided some of these post hoc assessments... Sorry, just wanted to point out the typo above. Got to catch my train now...

faetal on 7/2/2012 at 11:17

Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion

This meme idea as presented is seriously flawed, it's presenting a theory and making the facts "fit" (or not) afterwards, which, as you surely know, is anything but scientific. If you call it "awesome" you're either not seeing its discrepancies with very simple worldly circumstances or you don't care because it goes along with your opinion.

Just because you either don't understand it or don't like it, does not mean it is flawed. It is a very well researched and supported set of theories. I was referring to DDLs summary of it as awesome. Maybe it is the language barrier at work, but your constant re-assigning of my intentions is beginning to get tiresome. If you can't attack the idea, attack the person, right? It's not about making the facts fit, it's about finding an explanation for phenomena, which is how science works. Making the facts fit would be, I don't know, saying something like: "Funnily enough, Chrtistianity, according to the sources, would be just such a religion." in response to the scientific description of nature.

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The very knowledge about evolution gives you the ability to mess with it, let it be or actively thwart it.

Not really. Evolution is about reproductive success. The intrinsic human values taken at the global level has already showed its general consensus on trying to manipulate reproductive success - c.f. eugenics.

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The world by now is too complex to employ a simple survival-of-the-fittest(-community) measurement.

No it isn't. You don't get what survival of the fittest means clearly. The selection factors may have changed, but those who have children who are likely to go on to have other children are still throwing their genes into the future. The factors may have changed, but the mechanism remains intact.

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To see what I have in mind we could tackle it from the other side: If religion and similar concepts with a seperation of body and mind approach are oldfashioned and unfit to survive (natural) scientific progress, how would you organize human life then (I'm thinking of aspects like abandoning the concept of guilt since it's biological nonsense and things like this)?

Er, guilt is a natural human emotion. I don't have a scintilla of religious upbringing, but if I do something either by design or fault which makes someone else's day worse, I feel guilty as hell. It's an obvious natural part of altruism, otherwise what behavioural leash would there be to dissuade people from being dicks to each other? Yet another thing which religion falsely claims dominion over. It's called empathy - the ability to imagine how someone else must feel, and it is inherently human. It has also been observed in apes. How would I organise human life? Simple - people go about their business and think what ever they like, but wrong doing punishable by law as it is. If someone wants to believe in god, then by all means - go ahead. But if they try to lobby government to ban abortion or gay marriage, they had better have more than numerously translated, heavily edited, bronze age scripture and belief in the supernatural to back it up.

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That's what I'm after, how would you "think" about it?

PS: I just noticed that Dawkins indeed talks about coadapted meme complexes, so the idea of a single meme equalling one religion is indeed nonsense.

No one said that it was one meme complex, you are splitting hairs again.

faetal on 7/2/2012 at 11:35

Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion

i.e. that the concept of guilt couldn't be upheld (or could? that's why I threw it in) with our knowledge of how decisions are made.

No, this isn't how it works. Guilt is a natural response to a set of stimuli. It's not like you can learn that free will isn't 100% free in our original sense of the word and that this then switches off our guilt. I'd say that it makes guilt stop making sense in a religious context (i.e. that guilt is an active process which requires employing one's teachings to evoke), but makes even more sense in a biological context as negative outcome of negative actions, the presence of which would naturally modify people's behaviour towards being more socially cohesive, provided it was working properly, e.g. psychopaths, who don't exhibit normal empathy, don't tend to feel guilt or associate it as negative. This is why we have such finely tuned social senses too. For example, various studies have showed that basic facial analysis can be used to determine if someone is more likely to be a threat or not, because normal empathy shows up involuntarily in very subtle body language.

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AFAIK religion provided some of these post hoc assessments... Sorry, just wanted to point out the typo above. Got to catch my train now...

No, religion just tries to take credit for humankind's inherent good. It is also part of why it is such a strong set of memes - by co-opting positive aspects of humanity.

DDL on 7/2/2012 at 11:38

I think I almost spat my tea out reading this

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The dying out of religions is immensely closely linked to conquest, killed charismatic leaders and other forms of external forceful action with their respective ties to economics or survival in the broadest sense.

Religion: not becoming obsolete, it's just that U GUISE KILLED ~~JESUS~~ SOMEONE

-actually which charismatic leaders ARE we talking about here? I'm very confused.

Then a little later I read this:

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PS: I just noticed that Dawkins indeed talks about coadapted meme complexes, so the idea of a single meme equalling one religion is indeed nonsense.

And I kinda lost the will to care about debating anything with Beleg anymore. I mean, I tried, but if I have to clarify things like this, then it's pointless.
For the record, Beleg, there is no clearly defined delineation of "idea", no clean benchmark to say "that is exactly where that idea starts and ends, and THAT is exactly where that other idea starts and ends". It's an inherently loose term. Religion is an idea. It's also composed of other ideas, themselves composed of other ideas. Many of these ideas overlap and spread and also affect OTHER ideas, often ideas unrelated to religion itself (the idea of death as something to be feared, for instance, is a powerful aspect of religion, but you don't need to be religious to fear death). You can't just say "hah, religion is MORE TAHN ONE IDEAA!!!11 SO U LOSE", because all you'd be demonstrating is an inexplicably terrifying level of inappropriate attention to detail and total and utter lack of sense of context (unless that was the idea?).

Dawkins uses terms like 'coadapted meme complexes' because he's trying too damn hard to fit memetics onto a genetic analogy (though it's worth noting -as Muzman does- that things like epigenetics and the like mean that even fitting genetics itself onto the traditional genetic analogy is no longer quite appropriate). It's not a straight equivalence, as you can see from the simple fact that genes are physical entities, and ideas are not (and genes have a sequence of nucleotides, ideas do not). A lot of the rules, however, are the same -useful traits increase success of gene/meme, useless traits decrease success. Genes/Memes can be linked, so that their successes/failures tend to mirror each other (and in this way a gene/meme that is largely useless can be successful by linkage to a gene that's highly useful). And so on.

Shit, what am I doing? You're not going to actually listen to this anyway.

Fuck it. Ok, let's have a quick (and hilariously specific) question: why does muscular dystrophy exist? Why would any being capable of empathy and with the power to intervene be content to sit on the sidelines in his/her/its transcendent layer (see, I can use the buzzwords, who said I couldn't?) and watch young boys progressively lose their ability to walk, and then their ability to breathe, before dying in their mid-twenties from either heart or respiratory failure after a life of muscle weakness and constant pain? What kind of shitty god would let this happen, and why?

I know, I know, it's a theodicy question, but I note you haven't really provided an answer to any of those yet.

(and the nice thing about "why is god such a fucking dick" questions is that us evolutionary biologists have totally sensible, non-handwavy-'moves in mysterious ways' answers)

jay pettitt on 7/2/2012 at 11:51

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The typo hardly matters.

Pro tip: You do need to establish that things are so before declaring that they are.

Who told you that guilt made no sense biologically? (and by biologically I presume you mean in an evolutionary sort of way). Why do you think that?

p.s. I've still got absolutely no idea what the broad thrust (or even if you have one) of your argument is or where you're coming from. Without that the last umpteen pages of the discussion would seem to be mostly pointless waffle - even by comm chat standards. Stop dithering and put your cards on the table.

faetal on 7/2/2012 at 11:56

DDL, in a large sense, ideas ARE physical entities that reside in the neurological make up of people's brains. When words are decoded by the brain into concepts, this is actually effected by chemical re-routing of neural connectivity. Every tiny piece of data which enters the brain, physically and chemically alters it. This is why cognitive dissonance exists because if someone fires in a concept which can not make an easy route through the existing infrastructure and overly itself onto it, the brain is forced to decide between trashing an entire metropolis of ideas to make room for a small town, or to reject, much like an immune system, the idea which is threatening the integrity of the far larger (and thus more invested in) "city" of pre-existing ideas. THIS is primarily why the science vs. religion debate occurs, because depending on where you are on the spectrum, a lot of what science has uncovered simply does not fit around the religious mind set. This is also why indoctrination of children is so effective, because it builds the ideas up to a point where it needs something quite devastatingly effective in order to displace the religious part.

THIS is one of the most interesting aspects of biology I have come across.

Vasquez on 7/2/2012 at 12:00

Guilt question already answered by many, thanks guys :) But I have one more question to Beleg:

If religion is the source of all humanly goodness, how come human life becomes better, safer and in many many other ways generally nicer in parts of the world where religion is losing its hold of the people?

And why is it that in Old Testament times, well the whole Biblical times really, life was brutal, there was much more war-waging, crazy killing and raping sprees, in everyday life children, animals, women and slaves were treated very cruelly etc. even though the gods were hollering advice and commands to people from every bush and bonfire?

zombe on 7/2/2012 at 12:28

Link-drop: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poHZkBu8mCo) (Michael Shermer on the Science of Good and Evil at TAM 2). Quite interesting.

Showed up recently on JREF and is a bit relevant to what the current discussion circles around - so, though i post it.

Independent Thief on 7/2/2012 at 12:44

Quote Posted by Vasquez

If religion is the source of all humanly goodness, how come human life becomes better, safer and in many many other ways generally nicer in parts of the world where religion is losing its hold of the people?

Today we have better medicine, technology, law enforcement etc. That is what enables us to live better lives than our ancestors, as I mentioned before 'religion losing it's hold on the people' is more due to our affluence gorging us where we are chasing consumer goodies, wasting our time on entertainment etc rather than pondering more important things.

Independent Thief on 7/2/2012 at 12:51

On another note:

Quote Posted by faetal

I then launched into a diatribe about whether they truly believed that all of humanity was some kind of mendacious, violent, looting, raping and killing free-for-all before some quasi-historical chap in the middle east decided to go round telling everyone to be nicer to each other and they all dutifully responded saying "ok then"?

Actually all of human history is humans going on 'violent, looting, raping and killing free-for-all' blood and madness sprees whether inspired by religious or secular ideas (or simply for the fun of it in some cases). Now we just go about it with better weapons.