Re: Science versus religion fnord

On Jul 7, 6:03 pm, Garamond Lethe <cartographi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2009-07-07, slothrop <slothrop1...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 6, 6:18 pm, Garamond Lethe <cartographi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2009-07-06, snex <x...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip>



I find it unfortunate that this degenerated into name-calling, because
I was enjoying a lot of it...I also find it sad that snex didn't spend
more time thinking about what he was saying in response a lot of the
time, because I think if he'd spent the time investigating the claims
being made he'd have stood a better chance of asking better
questions...as it stands I think he's right in the "obfuscation"
arguments, but got too over-emotional when presented with material he
had to read through...

Garamond, if you will, just to address a couple things I was curious
about reading your answers....

1.) What does the evolutionary success of "The people who believe X"
say about "X"? How far should one go in investigating this
relationship? I refer to your statement "They have evidence.  They
live longer, they're happier..."  Evidence of what, exactly?

I was focusing almost entirely on snex's problem of rhetoric, and I'm
afraid that doesn't make for very stimulating reading.  I'm glad you
were able to pick up on a few of the more interesting bits.

The point here was snex's formulation of there being "no justification
for religion".  This is a trivial flaw --- any justification, however
minor, is enough to refute it.  It's a repeated flaw, though, so I
(tediously, I admit) chose to focus on it.

The justification itself though is somewhat interesting.  It's well
known (and if you'd like the cites I'll be happy to dig them out when I
get to the lab, just let me know) that religious people self-report
higher levels of happiness and (if I'm remembering correctly) life
satisfaction.  There's also a correlation to longer and healthier lives..

There are solid biological reasons for this.  We're social creatures and
do much better when we socialize.  Church attendence regularizes this.
This is not a lofty theological reason for belief in a diety, but I've
read enough church surveys to know that "fellowship" is one of the most
important reasons given by the folks who sit in the pews.  As such, I
consider it a justification for belief sufficient to show that the
overbroad statement by snex is incorrect.



I had a pretty conservative Protestant upbringing (I went to Bob Jones
a couple years til I ran out of money), and I can still say to this
day that some of my happiest moments were those spent with groups of
my peers/extended family, singing together and sharing a sense of
community. It's only if I think about it for a long time do I remember
that what we were doing was praising God; my memories of those times
gives me chills in remembering the fellowship, not the relationship to
God itself. That's just me, of course...
The other happiest times of my life were spent with close friends who
shared similar beliefs to myself, partaking in things that were
common interests, most notably playing chamber music together (In
fact, I would be willing to bet if such a study could ever be put
together, they would find that the life-expectancy and "happines-
quotient" of close bands of people playing chamber-music together for
non-payment reasons over an extended period of time is as long/high as
any other group of people you can find)...

I had to leave the Bob Jones crowd eventually when I learned that
there was actually literature in the world that showed my literal
beliefs to be "unjustifiable", if you will, but I always found myself
missing those days of communing with fellow believers...until I made
some other friends and discovered different communal interests.
My further reading on the origins of human cooperation (of all kinds,
including language and music) point me in the direction of thinking
that what is going on in a congregation of people from a neurological/
psychological/cultural/etc level is a lot more involved than my fundy
back-ground gave me a model to easily digest.
This is a little long-winded way of saying that I still am not sure
"religion" is justified by it's evolutionary success. Communal
sharing, familial bonding, the discussion of/meditation on cultural
signals and markers....these are certainly justifiable from all the
scientific literature I'm familiar with. But the term "religion" seems
too vague to make such a statement, given that there seems to be so
much disagreement even within TO just what the heck the word means. To
a lot of people (the people I grew up with and who won't talk to me
anymore) the term denotes pledging allegiance to the belief in regular
supernatural intervention in the world, and I'm not sure that focusing
on just that item would make the "evolutionary success" cut.


<crap, snip the rest pending taking care of 2-month old crying in the
background....>


slothrop

.

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