Re: Is God an Accident? [Paul Bloom]

http://bill.srnr.arizona.edu/classes/596b/Schaffer/God-Accident.html
When I was a teenager my rabbi believed that the Lubavitcher Rebbe,
who was living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was the Messiah, and that
the world was soon to end. He believed that the earth was a few
thousand years old, and that the fossil record was a consequence of
the Great Flood.

That sounds like one of the stupidest rabbis I ever heard of.

My rabbi was no crackpot; he was an intelligent and amiable man, a
teacher and a scholar.

Frankly I don't believe you.

It is easy for those of us who reject
supernatural beliefs to agree with Stephen Jay Gould that the best way
to accord dignity and respect to both science and religion is to
recognize that they apply to "non-overlapping magisteria": science
gets the realm of facts, religion the realm of values.

Here I disagree with Gould. Religion makes bold claims about values,
but such claims are worthless.

The
anthropologist Edward Tylor got it right in 1871, when he noted that
the "minimum definition of religion" is a belief in spiritual beings,
in the supernatural.

I.e. the arrogant attitude that we don't have to conform to logic or
reason or evidence, we can make up something beyond the usual rules of
evidence and just assert it and act like it is valuable.

The United States is a poster child for supernatural belief.

Maybe, maybe not. I suggest we confront alleged supernatural-believers
with simple experiments. For example, we have one of them lie down flat
on the floor, and fasten them so they can't escape, and we hoist a
heavy anvil over them, and arrange a trip for releasing the anvil. We
ask them whether they believe, after the trip happens, that the anvil
will fall down and crush them to death, as predicted by Newton's laws
of gravition and mechanics, or something else will happen, something
caused by supernatural forces. Then if they claim the latter, we indeed
do the trip and see what happens. But if they claim the anvil would
crush them, we unfasten them and let them go, and put a plastic doll in
their place, before releasing the anvil to fall and predictably crush
the plastic doll. (Or to save money use an obandoned milk carton or
other object we find in the trash.)

So what's your prediction for the result of the survey?
Newton, or supernatural, or split nearly evenly?

the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in which
churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their
product, whereas European churches are often under state control and,
like many government monopolies, have become inefficient.

That kind of argument is invalid for one important reason: When it
comes to after-death stuff, nobody has ever gotten to actually sample
the merchandise to determine whether one brand is better than another,
and hence make an intelligent decision for future purchases. It's all
advertising lies. The best lies make the sale, quality of product be
dammed. Imagine for example if during childhood, say at the end of the
baby-food stage when you are ready to convert to regular adult foods,
you were shown various advertisements for various kinds of foods, never
allowed to taste any of the new adult foods, and required to make a
decision which brand of each kind of food you'd consume for the rest of
your life?

One traditional approach to the origin of religious belief begins with
the observation that it is difficult to be a person.

That sentence doesn't seem to have any meaning. Would somebody please
translate it to E-prime?

... perhaps, as Marx suggested, we have adopted religion as an opiate,
to soothe the pain of existence.

He was correct on that point.

we don't typically get solace from propositions
that we don't already believe to be true. Hungry people don't cheer
themselves up by believing that they just had a large meal. Heaven is
a reassuring notion only insofar as people believe such a place
exists;

That's why there's such great emphasis on brainwashing children while
they are still very young, when it's easy to stick them with such
beliefs. The same idea was expressed in a song in South Pacific:
You have to be taught before it's too late.
Before you are six or seven or eight.

Babies have two systems that work in a
cold-bloodedly rational way to help them anticipate and
understand--and, when they get older, to manipulate--physical and
social entities.

Yes.

But these systems go awry in two
important ways that are the foundations of religion. First, we
perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world
of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and
bodiless souls.

Yes. Religion is in this way a mental infection, a mal-meme.

Second, as we will see, our system of social understanding
overshoots, inferring goals and desires where none exist. This makes
us animists and creationists.

Yes. A second way religion is a mal-meme.

Before I go on, I want to ask a question: When we deal with physical
infections, such as viruses, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure, it's best to get a vaccination to be immune to the virus, rather
than wait until we are infected and try to fight the already raging
infection. So what kind of preventative immunization would be effective
to prevent people from being vulnerable to later infections of religion?

We are dualists; it seems
intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity--a
mind or soul--are genuinely distinct.

No, I don't think so. Maybe you should speak only for yourself instead
of trying to speak for others.

We don't feel that we are our
bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own
them.

That's meaningless. My foot occupies my shoe, because I can take it out
at night and put it back in the next day. I've never experienced any
such activity regarding my thought processes and my brain, so I don't
feel like it would be just fine for somebody to shoot a bullet through
my brain so long as I'm warned a moment beforehand so my mind can jump
out of the way. I take it you'd be willing to let somebody shoot out
your brain if you're warned ahead of time??

Because
we see people as separate from their bodies, we easily understand
situations in which people's bodies are radically changed while their
personhood stays intact.

I disagree, and really would prefer you speak only for yourself.

in Star Trek a scheming villain forcibly occupies
Captain Kirk's body so as to take command of the Enterprise

That episode was a complete fantasy, not to be taken literally. At best
we can make like such a thing was meaningful, and then study how we
might hypothetically react to such a situation. But the moment we start
to think how such a situation might occur, we realize it is nonsense.

The mind is what the brain does.

Yes, that is indeed a good way of expressing the idea.

I don't want to overstate the consensus here; there is no
accepted theory as to precisely how this happens, and some scholars
are skeptical that we will ever develop such a theory.

Here we are in agreement, but I have a reason, do you?
My reason is that there is only one mind I can experience, my own, and
AFAIK nobody else can experience that same mind, so there's no way any
of them can observe my mind in order to evaluate the result of any
experiments they might someday perform. I might do experiments myself,
and observe the result, but there's no way anybody else could replicate
my experiment, so there's no way my results could be tested to see
whether I faked them or got anything legitimate. Some other people have
claimed to have done such experiments on their own minds, but none of
those results could be verified by even one other person, so I suspect
all the results were bogus, either self-deception or outright fraud.

"You can make
me go to bed, but you can't make me go to sleep. It's my brain!"

Your son was mistaken. There's a drug that was used to keep the
post-stroke Israeli prime minister in a coma for weeks after his
surgery to allow his body time to physically heal. If you had access to
that same drug, you could indeed have made your son's brain go to sleep
despite his wish to stay awake.

Children in our culture are taught that the brain
is involved in thinking, but they interpret this in a narrow sense, as
referring to conscious problem solving, academic rumination. They do
not see the brain as the source of conscious experience

There's a simple way to refute such false beliefs. Ask the child to
spend the next week dreaming, and then tell you all those dreams at the
end of the week. You bring in several of the child's friends, who sit
patiently by the bedside for a week, as you give the drug to induce a
coma, maintain the coma for one week, then let the child come out of
the coma. While the child is in the drug-induced coma, you allow the
children to tease the coma-child in various ways, such as rolling him
over and over many times one day, and forcing him to smell ammonia and
hydrogen sulfide for most of a second day, etc. At the end of the week,
don't give the child a clue that any such botherings happended, just
ask about what dreams or other experiences the child has from that
week. Of course the child will deny that any week passed at all, but
the friends will confirm that.

Then there are souls without bodies.

Nope, that's a complete lie/fantasy.

Richard Dawkins may well be right when he describes the theory of
natural selection as one of our species' finest accomplishments; it is
an intellectually satisfying and empirically supported account of our
own existence. But almost nobody believes it.

I disagree. Most likely the polls are rigged to have loaded questions.

the real problem with natural selection is that it makes no
intuitive sense.

I disagree. It seems totally obvious to me. You set up replication,
with random mutations, and selection toward some goal, and the
statistics drift closer and closer to the goal as far-away individuals
die out and near individuals reproduce like rabbits. How could it not?
The goal doesn't have to be something you know in advance. It can
simply be better solution to some problem you can't solve yourself.
(Maybe we need to approach the problem of viruses like this: We set up
a way to breed human cells, which are induced to breed rapidly, and are
selected for resistance to a virus. Then we use the highly-evolved
cells to make a vaccine.)
..

.

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