Re: On the Origins of Atheism

On Dec 6, 12:32 am, j.wilki...@xxxxxxxxx (John Wilkins) wrote:
(smokes both pot and crack?)

A substance dualist thinks there are two kinds of stuff in the world:
the material and the spiritual/mental/soul. It was effectively invented
by Descartes, but the claim has been made many time that this is the
"default" view of most naive cultures. A recent paper argues this is
false:

Hodge, K. Mitch. 2008. Descartes' Mistake: How Afterlife Beliefs
Challenge the Assumption that Humans are Intuitive Cartesian Substance
Dualists. Journal of Cognition and Culture 8: 387–415.


--
John S. Wilkins, Philosophy, University of Queensland
scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre

An interesting article, but the author seems to me to to get his
reasoning backwards. We become "intuitive dualists" through self
observation while very much alive - every time we feel our mind tells
our body to do something. This is a sense datum, an observation, even
though of course we might just delude ourselves (though you could ask
what is doing the deluding in this case, and why)

As humans, we also speculate about the afterlife. But since nobody
ever came back, we are rather lacking data for this.

So the fact that our (mere speculations) about the afterlife are not
always, in all cultures, a neat fit for mind body dualism, is
hardly a strong argument that mind body dualism is not the default
view of most cultures.

The form of the reasoning seems to me eerily familiar to the
creationists who argue that because science at present has only
speculation to offer for the situation before the big bang (the data-
free "beforelife, equiv to the afterlife in Hodge) we can also not
make sound assumptions about evolution in the data rich present.
Dualism might just not work in theories about the afterlife, but that
does not rule out its intuitive compellingness for describing life.

.