Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Well, my thoughts are this. I'm not going to throw it in anyone's faces. That's not who I am. I don't believe that just because this study came out, it's +1 for religion. Not at all. But it confirms what I have always speculated about human beings in general. I always felt the belief in God was in-bred inside of us. I don't know how or why but I have always felt this way. Sometimes I try to imagine myself as an Atheist. And I cannot. I find that I can't shake the idea of God no matter how hard I try or where I travel. God is in our everyday lives. Just looking at the vast universe or the stars or planets or mountains or beaches or islands or landscapes on Earth, loudly speaks it was beautifully created. I feel like believing in God is instinctual and always has been. No matter what culture or nation you come from, there is some God that people worship. Our soul regconizes a God no matter if we want to accept it mentally or physically in worship. He put that inside of us to get us to know that he is there and he DID create everything and we are his creations. That's just my feelings.
I am cautious about this study as I'm not sure whether this is an original study or a meta-analysis of many different studies. Meta-analysis, while often useful, should not be called a definitive study. They are notoriously riddled with problems and can easily skew data. Selection bias of studies to be included in the analysis can be a problem and differing research goals and techniques used by the individual studies are often hard to work into a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis should not substitute for a large single study.
I'm not sure why you feel it is necessary to resist throwing this study 'in anyone's faces' (presumably atheist) as it does not prove your beliefs. It says nothing about whether god exists; if the study is valid, it only says that your beliefs are instinctive and does not explore how we acquired this instinct (although, you've jumped straight to 'god put it there' without considering natural explanations). Before jumping to any conclusions, we need more research to validate this as an instinctive drive and then we need to study the mechanism. Let's get the studies started! I, as an atheist, am not fearful of these types of studies nor their conclusions.
Religion is Man's fears manifested. What do we fear? Death. Religion quells our fear of death somewhat. We also fear purposelessness. Religion also fills in that hole as well. So yeah I guess it's human nature for us to look for something to help quiet our fears. It's just something in our nature we need to grow beyond.
I'm not surprised by the conclusion of the study, but I think that it is simply putting a fence around a very large part of human nature, and hanging the sign "Special" on it. In fact humans are tenaciously busy making up stories about gaps in their knowledge that make them fearful or angry, or just itchy with curiosity.
Out of the non-"spiritual" realm, people spend huge amounts of time making up political and historical myths and endless baseless stories to explain the actions of other people in everyday life...when in fact "Don't know" is the answer. But humans would rather spin fabrications to fill these gaps than live with "Don't know."
So, for my buck, sure believing in gods is human nature, because it is part of the plug-the-hole with chatter and make-believe that permeates all parts of human life. Also, I think it satisfies the desire for pleasure: it is fun to make up stories out of nothing, it is fun to be creative, and it is thrilling to create belief in the face of Don't know.
No matter what culture or nation you come from, there is some God that people worship. Our soul regconizes a God no matter if we want to accept it mentally or physically in worship. He put that inside of us to get us to know that he is there and he DID create everything and we are his creations. That's just my feelings.
1. People made things.
2. So people started believing that big things (earth/universe) had to have been made by big people (gods).
3. Our brains got wired for belief because any "explanation" is better than none.
4. It's 2013. Sometimes reason and logic overrides the wiring.
I'm not sure whether it helps at all, but my first reaction to the OP was: "nice to have my suspicions endorsed".
It was on a discussion of Plantinga's argument about imperfect human perception and the validity of religious inspiration that, about half way through triggered the conclusion that religious feelings were an evolutionary product, just like social behaviour, survival instinct and competition for mates.
It implied that religion has no validity other than as an evolved survival -trait and I have inclined to the view that, if we have any traits, they have (at least in origin) some survival value.
I hardly need to give many examples of how faith in a divine being has helped people to survive, achieve and endure. The effectiveness of what I call 'spiritual steroids' cannot be doubted. But my view is that I would rather see what I can do without some additional motivational faith - puggle.
In fact I wonder whether this study is coming up with anything new at all other than fiddling in some dubious conclusions designed to prove that God must be real.
In fact, the innate religious instinct is better evidence that it doesn't need to be.
P.s Looking at the link, the study is pretty much as I thought, other than it does not see it as evidence for God. It is aware that both sides can make points from it ("Dawkins would tell us to grow out of it" I would hope he would say 'understand it, and don't be fooled by it') and the 'belief' article does not seem to be making a particular case for theism (unlike the OP, who does). 'belief' site seems to be an impartial reporting of news about the religion debate.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 11-23-2013 at 07:09 AM..
Here's a comment from the article that I found interesting. I hadn't even thought about things this way before.
"I tend to agree. The soupy plasma, big bang, complex organisms created out of total chaos is so unlikely (calculate those odds) as to be beyond possible. Scientists would have us believe that a random soup of particles (not even electrons, protons, neutrons at that point of time!), reached some critical mass, went through a sudden and massive expanse, formed electrons, protons, neutrons, which then formed elements, which then formed compounds, which then formed cells, etc,etc,etc, till we get to people. Yea right. You need a LOT more faith to believe THAT than God. To put total randomness into a cosmic clothes washer, put it on spin cycle for a billion years, and expect anything of such sophisticated design and order to come out is beyond belief. Even Dr. Flu (one time "leader" of atheism) and Einstein didn't carry those beliefs to the grave with them."
Hello allenk893.
I am not discouraging a belief in god per se, but I would contend that this argument, while superficially intriguing, is not particularly convincing to me on several levels. I have recently been reading about such theistic arguments and would encourage you to do the same. A good place to start would be googling the words "watchmaker analogy."
In short my major problem with it is this - we are calculating the probability of events after they have already occurred. I liken it to a lottery drawing. If I see the winning numbers on the day after the drawing, I could say that it was amazing that this particular string of numbers should be the winning combination. The chance of any set coming out in the interstate lottery is only 1 in about 78,000,000. Out of all those possibilities, we see the winning combination. Nonetheless, these particular numbers did come out for two reasons. First, because although very unlikely, they were no more unlikely than any other set of numbers. Second, they came out because some set of numbers had to, regardless of how likely any particular set is.
The same is true of the universe. No matter how unlikely this arrangement may be, some arrangement had to develop and ultimately this one (on a universal, not planetary scale) is no less likely than any other.
When you can predict the numbers before they come out, that's when you've got something.
I don't know if I've made the argument clear. It is a bit complex to explain over an Internet post.
Out of the non-"spiritual" realm, people spend huge amounts of time making up political and historical myths and endless baseless stories to explain the actions of other people in everyday life...when in fact "Don't know" is the answer. But humans would rather spin fabrications to fill these gaps than live with "Don't know."
Or equally, "Don't like it". Conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination come to mind. I think I heard it best put by some talking head yesterday on one of the news channels: we can't accept that a no-account loser with a $30 mail order rifle could kill the leader of the free world in such a spectacularly thorough and instantaneous fashion, and take our "innocence" in the bargain ... hence all the conspiracy theories and legends accreting around the event.
So we spin fabrications when we don't know ... but also when we don't WANT to know.
Religion is Man's fears manifested. What do we fear? Death. Religion quells our fear of death somewhat. We also fear purposelessness. Religion also fills in that hole as well. So yeah I guess it's human nature for us to look for something to help quiet our fears. It's just something in our nature we need to grow beyond.
My co-worker follows the late Sylvia Browne because she defined his purpose and because of the fear of death. I know he didn't mean it this way, but it sounded like a belief in God kept his behavior in check.
Does a desire to survive mean a fear of death? Or can that fear be taught? I guess I talking about degrees of fear because I do have some fear, just not enough to need a heaven. Other humans scare me more than no heaven.
I think about my co-worker who is a cool man but he is filled with a fear and purposelessness that I would have never known had we not talked about life after death. And I don't even know how we got into that conversation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mythunderstood
Not true. I have never believed in any god (since birth) and was not even aware of the concept until someone taught me about it.
Yes. My daughter is not aware of god because I haven't taught it to her. I remember when we invited another little girl and her mother to our home. I am not sure why the little friend mentioned "Jesus" and then her mother decided to inform her daughter that mine "doesn't believe in Jesus." As if my daughter chose not to believe.
I simply responded that my daughter doesn't believe in Jesus for the same reason she doesn't believe in Mohammad.
nobody is born with religious belief. somebody taught them that religion
I think the idea is that they are born "being able to be infected with religion" and need some serious doses of immunity and anti-religiotics... or perhaps pro-religiotics (good religions). People aren't born sick, but they are born susceptible to sickness. Science now provides the true and agnostic answers which religion used to have a pretentious monopoly on. They probably should have said "religious desire/lust" is in some people's human nature. But of course, in the study I'm sure they found that both Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, etc. filled that part of "human nature" for some people with the religion gene.
People don't usually fall prey to religion until they have some occurrences in their life that make them desperate for it, but sometimes science and philosophy, as institutions, gives them better answers.
"religious belief" can be human nature in that some genes make one need religion or else become evil/suicidal. Of course, such mutations can be "selected out"... science and society provide basically all the services that religion provides, and sometimes better too.
like Kevxu said, some people just don't like reality, and prefer to live in their mental worlds were they deny their agnostic human nature.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
