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.
This is one of the most interesting videos I've seen. The speaker is Justin Barrett, a psychologist who taught for five years at Oxford University's School of Anthropology. He is known for his research on religion. (Note that there is another Justin Barrett who is an Irish, far right nationalist, anti-abortion and anti-immigration activist. These two are not the same people).
He tries to determine how the brain constructs religion and belief in gods.
Now...it usually seems like atheists are the ones who view our sensed/envisioned gods as mentally constructed/imagined. The theists seem more often to believe they genuinely sense/experience the presence of something outside themselves.
Justin Barrett is a Christian who believes the gods we think we experience/sense are mentally constructed and imagined (and now everybody's heads explode in confusion).
His view is that, why is speaking to us directly any better of an idea for a god to do, to reach us...than building our brains in a way that we can envision/imagine that god?
So, the first part of the video is about him discussing possible evolutionary and psychological ways religion formed, and telling a bit about how the brain works. You might consider skipping to about 18:00 because the first section doesn't give much information. It might have some value though. I don't remember.
It stays interesting until about 47:00 when he began some preachy talk about why certain religions and science do not contradict each other. The preachiness climaxes at about 55:00 when he describes religion as a positive thing...while conveniently not mentioning the ancient hominid practice of ritual cannibalism/human sacrafice/etc. I'm sure many believers will love it. It'll make many nonbelievers cringe.
Most of it is quite interesting though, I think. There's a question/answer session after about the 57:00 minute point I didn't watch.
I can't find the youtube right now (searched for more than two hours, watched a few because I forgot who the guy was) but one scientist showed how intuitive beliefs are easy for people to hold but real science like physics requires people to check their preconception, not that they outright removed them when they learned the truer thing. What it was, was that physics students could think about intuitive things with the easy/fast thinking area, but had to use their "inhibition" part of the brain to think about actual physics, like physics was their diet plan and they had to deny their cravings for intuitive thinking.
I think it's impossible to distill the reasons why people believe in a god down to an hour treatise on video. Each person has their own sets of difficult circumstances for why they turn to divinity for guidance and support. But the god they choose to believe in is usually a god of their own making.
Even fundamentalists, without realizing it, don't worship the god of the Bible. He is a fictional creation of theologians. William Lane Craig worships a god completely different from Mike Licona's god, event though they share some superficial characteristics. The idea is that we formulate the god in our mind that most meets our psychological and spiritual needs, then extrapolate and cherry-pick the verses in the Bible that helps us give foundation to making that god mold to our needs, while subconsciously discarding the rest of the verses that do not. That's why the Bible is such a marvelously pliable document, so flexible it is like putty in the hands of Christians, who can shape it into more interpretations than there are stars in the heavens.
I will have to check the video out. I don't see a problem with the idea that humans are wired by genetics to belief (but I would disagree - if that is what the video is saying - that a deity wired us that way) - after all, despite all our advances in Reason we still have something that drives many of us to some form of belief, no matter how rational or irrational.
I will point out that seeing religion as a purely "negative" thing by non-believers is a gross oversimplification. It has become more and more common in recent times, especially with the rise of the internet. But most of the people reaching these conclusions are not reaching them after spending a good amount of time researching history, religion or psychology but are rather reaching it after reading a few books by popular Atheists (if they even do that), their friends or well... internet posts heh heh!
To clarify, I am referring to those people who oversimplify and see religion as a strictly negative aspect of humanity that should be abolished or we'll never "advance" to whatever utopia they envision should be the next step in humanity's mental and spiritual "evolution". The world is not black and white. Not everything is good or bad, positive or negative.
Even fundamentalists, without realizing it, don't worship the god of the Bible. He is a fictional creation of theologians.
I have always told certain believers that when they bring back the Mosaic Code, start invoking the name of Yahweh and sacrificing their turtle-doves, I'll be impressed. And horrified, but whatever.
People are made uncomfortable by having to answer "I don't know." to these two questions:
1. What is the origin of the universe in general and humanity in particular?
2. What happens to one's consciousness when the physical body dies?
So they make up gods and religions in order to have alternate answers that make them comfortable.
Yes, and I'd add, some people are made uncomfortable by having to answer "I don't know" to pretty much anything. You have mentioned the two "big kahunas", but there is a certain mindset that just wants to be told what to think / do or what is True (preferably by an authority figure) concerning anything they are more than mildly unsure of. "Not knowing" is a source of anxiety and/or fear for these folks, and is therefore intolerable. A belief-system offering certitude is comforting and calming for them.
Others respond to ignorance with study, research, learning, exploring, experimenting and the like. I suspect it's partly a function of curiosity (or lack thereof), partly a function of whether one is socialized to fear the unknown or not, and it may be influenced by other character traits like patience and laziness. Maybe some of it is just native (in)ability to deal with ambiguity, I don't know. A strong bias for the familiar and intuitive could have been a survival advantage to our ancestors, though I daresay it doesn't serve us very well anymore.
What doesn't help is teaching children from the cradle to "lean not on their own understanding" like it's some naughty / dirty thing to do, and encouraging them to blindly trust Parson Brown and other authority figures and making it taboo to ask uncomfortable questions.
Personally, I think atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss are on a fool's errand, traveling around trying to convince people God doesn't exist.
I believe in the "God Gene". I do think we are hardwired by God to believe in a deity of some sort. Sometimes figuring out which is the right one to worship poses a problem, but the drive to worship a higher being will always be a part of us.
People are made uncomfortable by having to answer "I don't know." to these two questions:
1. What is the origin of the universe in general and humanity in particular?
2. What happens to one's consciousness when the physical body dies?
So they make up gods and religions in order to have alternate answers that make them comfortable.
Yes, I believe this man, or another, talked about how children are "in general" seemingly born with duality ingrained in them (or quickly acquired it from the environment at a very early age). The example was that in a study where a puppet crock eats a puppet mouse, the children will respond that the mouse cannot move (the body is dead) but that the mouse still feels and thinks certain things (that the mind is still alive).
07-29-2014, 01:47 AM
2K5Gx2km
n/a posts
I don't think we are wired for god/s per se. What we are wired for is abstract and metaphoric thought. This gets translated into a specific theism by people like that in video.
This is not a very good apologetic since if this was correct then the only thing god would have wired us for is a very general and ambiguous theism without any of the details we find in all the minds of every theist - that would be the ultimate snafu. Obviously god is not a very good electrical engineer since the results turned out 1000's of gods and multiple interpretations of those gods.
Furthermore, if we are only to experience the 'truth' of this god in ourselves then why does every theistic religion have external experiences to justify his existence? This guy says he is a Christian but his own holy book has god talking to people and performing all kinds of tricks.
All this is about is Christians trying incorporate evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, etc. into some apologetic since a lot of the research in these areas is doing damage to the stranglehold religion has had on some of these tough questions.
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.
