11.01.08
Explaining away religion?
Religion: Bound to believe?
by Pascal Boyer
Reposted from: From Dawkins site
http://naturereprints.com/nature/journal/v455/n7216/full/4551038a.html
Another false analysis of religion from the Science/Darwinism angle.
Scientists have crystallized around a false view of religion, based on the effort to dominate/destroy it via ‘explaining it’, with Darwin’s theory no less.
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Atheism will always be a harder sell than religion, Pascal Boyer explains, because a slew of cognitive traits predispose us to faith.
Religion isn’t a sales product, but OK. But then why should atheism be a harder sell? Buddhism is an ‘atheist’ religion, and sold very well. Maybe scientists are blaming atheism for the real problem, their reductionist attitude that throws their analyses out of whack.
The use of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘faith’ seem to be taken as synonyms. They are referring to Christianity, it seems, and then generalizing without warning to all religions.
The exploitation of the idea of ‘faith’ by Christianity is misleading, even for Christians, and is a false imputation on other spiritual discourses. Many religious or related discourses request that aspirants drop the idea of faith, and demand everyone learn for himself.
Always this nonsense about cognitive traits. What traits? We are being set up for the ‘analysis’.
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Is religion a product of our evolution? The very question makes many people, religious or otherwise, cringe, although for different reasons. Some people of faith fear that an understanding of the processes underlying belief could undermine it. Others worry that what is shown to be part of our evolutionary heritage will be interpreted as good, true, necessary or inevitable. Still others, many scientists included, simply dismiss the whole issue, seeing religion as childish, dangerous nonsense.
The question of evolution is here evidentally taken to mean Darwinian natural selection. So the answer to the question is an emphatic no. We can see religions arising in historical times by a whole series of processes. One of the most spectacular is the period of the Axial Age.
We have virtually zero knowledge about either nature of religion with early man or how it arose. So this so-called knowledge isn’t knowledge at all, and couldn’t easily erode belief if it doesn’t say anything.
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Such responses make it difficult to establish why and how religious thought is so pervasive in human societies — an understanding that is especially relevant in the current climate of religious fundamentalism. In asking whether religion is one of the many consequences of having the type of brains we come equipped with, we can shed light on what kinds of religion ‘come naturally’ to human minds. We can probe the shared assumptions that religions are built on, however disparate, and examine the connection between religion and ethnic conflict. Lastly, we can hazard a guess at what the realistic prospects are for atheism.
To try and explain away religion on neurological terms is totally futile. Religious is pervasive for the same reason wordprocessing software is pervasive, and we don’t explain away the later by referring to the machine code that runs it. The pervasiveness of religion is the same as the pervasiveness of civil society. What’s your point/?
The (religious) prospects of atheism are, or were, as good as those as theism, until the New Atheists made a botch of it.
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In the past ten years, the evolutionary and cognitive study of religion has begun to mature.
No it hasn’t. It is as immature and adolescent as it always was, and hasn’t taken the first step: acknowledging the psychological reality of religion. The attempt to explain it away is always the same old behavioristic fallacy.
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It does not try to identify the gene or genes for religious thinking. Nor does it simply dream up evolutionary scenarios that might have led to religion as we know it. It does much better than that. It puts forward new hypotheses and testable predictions. It asks what in the human make-up renders religion possible and successful.
Sit down and make a list of specific religions, and what they do. The question of human make-up is not the first issue. Many religions are an attempt to compensate for ‘human make-up’ by trying to cousel, change, or redeem human make-up//
Buddhism attempts to show the way beyond human nature altogether.
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Religious thought and behaviour can be considered part of the natural human capacities, such as music, political systems, family relations or ethnic coalitions. Findings from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and archaeology promise to change our view of religion.
The scientific view of religion is too naively incomprehending for any of this to happen, short of propandizing entire populations and in fact, an immense tide of religion is taking back what secular society has claimed for itself, in part because of the rank stupidity of scientists on religion.
The remainder of this bilge is deleted, you can read the rest at the link.