10.05.08

More stupidity on religion in Science magazine

Posted in Science & Religion at 4:32 pm by nemo

Previously cited today: Opiate of the masses – and evolutionary aid

Opiate of the masses – and evolutionary aid
by The Star
From Dawkins site
http://www.thestar.com/article/510711

The chronic stupidity of biologists, indeed scientists, on religion is a remarkable side effect of Darwinism, or the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, if you prefer.
Now another article in Science tries its luck.

Christian creationists have long railed against the theory of evolution. But you may not have heard anything yet.
A new Canadian paper in the journal Science suggests that Christianity itself may be a function of evolution.

This is pretty drastic, but if we read further we find that the ‘new insight’ is still another rehash of group/kin selection theories applied with a dead hand on, apparently Christianity first, then by the usual false generalization, religion in general. These theories, based on the need to explain altruism given the assumptions of natural selection, hence selfishness (survival competition, etc…), are ad hoc extensions to the original selectionist dogma, and are reductionist in the extreme, i.e. they beggar as a matter of principle the reality of ethics, by making it the accidental by product of evolutionary dynamics, i.e. natural selection. Darwin knew he had a problem here, and the original idea to play a trick on the idea of selectionist explanation is a clever piece of legerdemain, that has grown since into a new scientific shibboleth, an artifice of logic, and one that has never been verified properly in practice, and which certainly fails any empirical test as we examine the reality of religion in world history.
In passing, one should note the suspicion that has always haunted this theory is the ideological subtext of capitalist economic systems where a premium lies on the need for a legitimation of selfishness.
Thus the obsession over altruism. But ethical behavior is far more comprehensive than the single issue of altruism, we should note, and the demand from an evolutionary theory would be to explain all the virtues and vices, why single out altruism, and most of all, the glaring void in Darwinism, to produce the agent, free to choose, in such a spectrum of behavior. Most of all biology must produce a post-reductionist theory that takes into account the conscious meaning of ethical issues, something more than a behaviorist calculus of causal mechanics substituting for the emergent self-consciousness of ethical/ethicizing ‘man’. Thus biology as a causal methodology can never produce, or at any rate has never produced, a true clarification of the evolution of ethics and ethical action.
Instead, the question is reduced to a question of breeding.

What is remarkable is the obtuseness of scientists on this question, amounting to an incompetence that is unnerving to anyone trying to defend science against religion. They seem to live in a closed system where they cannot despite any amount of cautionary recommendation actually sit down and look at the history of religions as we know them in world civilization. Any such study would demonstrate at once the complexity of the question and the absurdity of reducing it to questions of breeding.
Let us at least try to make this clear with an example (it won’t succeed, such is the nature of the scientific obsession with reductionism): Buddhism.
Could anyone seriously maintain that this religion is connected to breeding practices?
It takes one’s breath away to see this kind of highly promoted so-called science thrown into the science/religion debate over and over again, in the false arrogance that science is all-explanatory and can simply, pace the New Atheist debate on the subject, debunk religion in one potshot to the greater glory of scientific reason.
Is there noone in the science community who can call a halt to this cultural kwashiokor generated in the era of scientism?

The question of religion in world history is highly complex, and needs to start in the Neolithic (or, most certainly in the Paleolithic, had we the data), and proceed to study the transformations with time, up to the period of the so-called Axial period, after which we see the great religions as we know them now.
In all fairness, the article does point to the effect of globalization on religion. The era of globalization was well underway by the Axial Age, and the emergence of globalizing religions at that point is no accident. Who has ever denied it. It is not a scientific insight.
This historical approach will show us the diversity, and, more, the transformations of religion in time, and the danger, even, of speaking of Christianity as a fixed entity.
In general scientists are entangled in a post-Christian context as ex-Christians, unable to do anything but thrash around in a constricted humanism that, correctly, points to the metaphysical trappings of Christian doctrine, thinking that the conclusive issue.
Generally, scientists betray the fact that they have never studied the subject of religion, no doubt have specialized since high school in technical disciplines, and discredit the label of science with a brand of Darwinian stupidity applied to religion.

Christian creationists have long railed against the theory of evolution. But you may not have heard anything yet.

A new Canadian paper in the journal Science suggests that Christianity itself may be a function of evolution.

In a review article that is sure to prove controversial, University of British Columbia researchers say that the world’s great religions may have emerged as a codification of cultural traits that allowed people to be more successful breeders.

“We’re setting aside the question of whether religions are true in a metaphysical sense,” says Ara Norenzayan, a UBC psychologist and lead author of the paper. He and his team reviewed dozens of studies on the emergence of religions from disciplines as diverse as psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, economics and ethnography.

“We’re trying to understand what religion is and explain it in terms of human nature and human culture.”

The paper argues that social co-operation and altruism conferred an evolutionary advantage as populations grew larger, and that moralizing religions were key to creating large-scale cohesion.

The theory of evolution holds that all creatures are driven by a biological urge to pass on as many of their own genes as possible to the next generation.

This urge inevitably leads to competition to be the more successful breeder. Any mating advantage an individual possesses could itself be passed on to its offspring.

But biologists have wondered, in this breeding free-for-all, why altruism and co-operation exist, especially in the human setting.

Norenzayan says that familial co-operation is understandable because members of the same clans would posses many of the same genes.

“The idea here is that to the extent we are interacting with someone who is genetically related to us, we are going to be altruistic just because it will benefit our (shared) genes to help.”

In smaller social groups, he continues, a sense of built-up trust between individuals would allow for longer survival – and better breeding opportunities – because an “I scratch your back, you scratch my back” existence can greatly ease life’s burdens.

However, while the evolutionary advantages of living in large groups are obvious – large groups do better than small ones in the competition for resources – the mechanism for large-scale altruism and cohesion has been puzzling.

“There is a strong incentive for people … to get the benefits of co-operation, but not return co-operation and do better than the co-operators,” Norenzayan contends. “The best strategy is not to co-operate but pretend to co-operate.”

And this is where religion comes in.

“One explanation for why religions have had such a staying power throughout human history and human societies,” he says, “is that they play a role in promoting altruistic tendencies in very large groups.

“This is something that is very hard to get.”

Thus religious thought, while cultural in origin, meshed ideally with the evolutionary imperative for group co-operation, Norenzayan says.

“Of course it’s not a genetic process; it’s a cultural process,” he says. “But it’s feeding back into our evolutionary adaptation and then making possible co-operative tendencies in larger and larger groups.”

It’s likely no coincidence, Norenzayan says, that all the world’s great religions emerged as human populations were exploding.

And common among all of these creeds are messages of altruism, selflessness, compassion and co-operation.

University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson says the review is a quality piece of work that makes a good case for setting religion squarely in the context of human evolution and biology.

Indeed, he adds, its findings should almost be obvious, given the acceptance of other universal human traits, such as cognition and language, as being evolutionary in origin.

“Religion is a human universal,” says Peterson, an expert in the biological basis of religious thought. “And the probability that a human universal didn’t evolve? I think you have to assume that it evolved and prove the opposite. That isn’t normally what happens when people are discussing religion.”

Peterson says the paper’s linkage of growing group size and the emergence of moralizing deities is an important new concept in the field.

Norenzayan cautions, however, that the demise of religion in many Western countries does not augur a collapse in social cohesion.

He suggests that other, secular mechanisms such as enlightenment-influenced laws, courts and effective policing can serve in place of severed religious regulations.

“There are other ways to be less selfish, more co-operative; you don’t have to necessarily have religion to solve that problem.”

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