It's funny when liberals claim to be free from religion.
Posted on 05/25/2009 6:03:43 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
One idea is that religion is related to evolution, in that belief confers some survival advantage. Another idea is that as with other supernatural beliefs, religion is appealing because it offers answers to things that otherwise seem inexplicable (and before modern science, a lot of things were inexplicable, from the stars in the sky to stormy weather to human illness and death). But throughout history, just feeling better by having an explanation for things would not necessarily confer much of a survival advantage.
As James Dow at Oakland University in Michigan sees things: "Religious people talk about things that cannot be seen, stories that cannot be verified, and beings and forces beyond the ordinary. Perhaps their gods are truly at work, or perhaps in human nature there is an impulse to proclaim religious knowledge. If so, it would have to have arisen by natural selection."
...To spread virtual religion in the simulation, non-believers have to help. The complex reasoning for why this might be so -- which Pigliucci explains more fully -- is that religious people inspire trust, and so the community tends to help them.
Dow says his simulation, which he calls evogod, "shows that a central unifying feature of religion, a belief in an unverifiable world, could have evolved alongside of verifiable knowledge. ... The evogod simulation shows how a capacity to create religious ideas can evolve by social selection. It reveals a selection process that can increase genetically inherited capacities to communicate unreal, unverifiable information."
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
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2009 Religion and Science: Two Peas in a Pod or Fruits of Different Vines? The Oakland Journal, Winter 2009, Issue Number 16.
2008 Is Religion and Evolutionary Adaptation? Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 11(2) 2.
2006 A Scientific Definition of Religion. Anpere: Anthropological Perspectives on Religion. (www.anpere.net)
2006 The Evolution of Religion: Three Anthropological Approaches. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 18(1):67-91.
1996 Curandiero. In Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture. Barbara A. Tenenbaum, ed. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
1992 External and Internal Approaches to Emotion. Psycoloquy 3(1):1.1
1989 Apprentice Shaman. In Apprenticeship: From Theory to Method and Back Again. Michael Coy, ed. Albany: State University of New York Press.
1986 Universal Aspects of Symbolic Healing: A Theoretical Synthesis. American Anthropologist 88(1):56-69.
1980 Ritual and Play. Newsletter of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play 6(3):5-6.
1980 More on the Anthropology of Symbolic Healing. Current Anthropology 21(2):277-278.
Or, it could have arisen by revelation. Perhaps God revealed Himself to the first people He created, and told them about Himself.
Maybe another more accurate way of stating this would be the “evolution of humanism”.
If there were even a scintilla of truth to “natural selection” we wouldn't have unexplained birth defects or disease when the person started out healthy and normal. You could still end the life of the “defective person” and the defects would show up again and again and again. Natural selection doesn't work. It's just another way to suggest that getting rid of “imperfect people” would end imperfection - it's as false as ever. It's eugenics with a mythical justification.
bfltr
This is patently false. There is a tremendous amount of archaeological evidence to verify many of the events recorded in Scripture. And there is a tremendous about of manuscript evidence to verify those Scriptures as well.
The author has created straw men which are as numerous as a paranoid farmer.
The problem comes when evolutionists attribute new genetic information to natural selection...and that is impossible.
Nonsense. Religion was created in 4004 BC.
Atheism = Stalinism
Flame away, you “seckies”.
;^)
The belief of our Lord Christ Jesus on the Cross did not save Him from physical death, but God the Father did bestow Him ressurrected life as man for the faith which was found to be righteous.
I wonder if the author's advice to the Adversary will benefit if he sincerely thinks a belief independent of God confers survival advantage.
5.4 An ontogenetic residue of the evolution of a capacity for religion can be found. This does not show that it evolved precisely in the way that the evogod model proposes; however does show that biological evolution lies behind religious thinking. Religious thinking begins in early childhood. Children naturally begin to acquire language during the second year after birth. Some psychologists believe that the ability to conceive of supernatural entities, such as the Christian God, appear even before the abilities to understand observable realities (Barrett and Richert 2003). God is simple compared to the real world, and a child finds the idea of God easier to understand. Children are intuitive theists (Kleemen 1999). The evidence points toward an inherited biological propensity to think in religious terms (Bulbulia 2004a).
Bold mine...huh? Thanks for posting. Interesting.
LOL! No “creationist” believes in natural selection. Darwinists do believe in natural selection. Variation within a SPECIES as you just pointed out - a dog with long hair won't do well in a hot climate and you will NOT find them there either. A dog is a dog is a dog and a dog is a SPECIES of the animal world.
“The problem comes when evolutionists attribute new genetic information to natural selection...and that is impossible. “
No, the problem with evolutionists is they want to believe everything “evolved” without God or “Intelligent Design”. They really want to believe that life magically happened through inanimate substances through animals and then "evolved" to humans. Darwinists believe in “natural selection” without design. You've got it backwards. Don't' preach to me about what I believe and know other Creationists believe.
Oh yeah? Jesus Christ was in his humanity a rather ordinary person, quite visible to thousands who gathered to hear his teachings and witness his miracles. Many were so convinced by their encounters with Him that they willingly submitted to torture and death rather than deny his gospel. (We all know, of course, that the willingness to suffer and die prematurely, leaving no physical offspring, is easily explained by evolution, right? /s) And some quirk of evolution, I suppose, caused Jewish prophets to predict the coming and even the mode of death of this God-man centuries before.
Perhaps it's just useful or entertaining to have people around who can "coalesce the vapors of human existence into a viable and meaningful comprehension."
You read my mind ... I went to that website and was thoroughly disgusted. They’re compromising ... .
“From a creationist perspective natural selection is a process whereby organisms possessing specific characteristics (reflective of their genetic makeup) survive better than others in a given environment or under a given selective pressure (i.e., antibiotic resistance in bacteria). Those with certain characteristics live, and those without them diminish in number or die.”
The problem with this “persepctive” that is new ... is that it assumes God creates life where it can’t survive. That is the fallacy with this compromised view. God isn’t stupid and doesn’t create life where it can not survive.
“The problem for evolutionists is that natural selection is nondirectional—should the environment change or the selective pressure be removed, those organisms with previously selected for characteristics are typically less able to deal with the changes and may be selected against because their genetic information has decreased—more on this later. Evolution of the molecules-to-man variety, requires directional change. Thus, the term “evolution” cannot be rightly used in the context of describing what natural selection can accomplish.”
The website you referred to is assuming “bi-directional” survival. While there is variation within a species, the species isn’t going to greatly CHANGE by itself to fit the environemnt. Instead the variation of the species will die out if for example the weather pattern changes. For example if it gets hotter in say, New York, dogs will not suddenly or over time go from long hair to short hair or short hair to long hair if the weather gets colder. This is the fallacy with their compromise on design.
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