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hjs --How astute! You think people tend to follow the herd? You mean like SHEEP? People are like sheep? Where did I hear that before...hmmm.

hjs--do something for someone other than yourself and then you'll learn something.

Bill--you're quoting me? I didn't use the word spirit. Where did you get that from? I didn't say anything about FEELING someone was dead, I said you SEE a light go out. It's pretty cool. Go visit the sick, Bill, and watch for the light in people's eyes. When you see it go out write a dissertation about it. And, boys, get off the computer and get a life.

hjs--I sleep well at night, laugh all day long, play with my great teenage kids, love my husband and watch over my elderly mother. I'm so happy I could pop. And, this will blow your minds too--I love the Boy Scouts of America!
Yes, I go camping out in the dark forest and I'm not afraid. You guys are afraid of life.
Where is God? Grow up. What does presence mean? How dull are you?

"How come you can feel a presence in someone who is unconscious and feel an emptiness when they're dead? What is that?"

Because even an unconscious person is "animated" by his/her involuntary processes: lungs breathe, blood courses, muscles tense or relax. No matter how well known to you, once a person is dead you're seeing them as you've never seen them before. Just because you FEEL that their, like, spirit has departed doesn't make it so.

moe
i guess that helps u sleep at nite.

What came first God or religion?
Where is the proof of God? People believe in God NOT because they fear their own death, but because they have experienced God in their lives, in the death of others, in the literary tomes of mankind's experience, in the scientific discoveries of the perfection of mathematical processes and order in every aspect of science--in DNA strands, in every aspect of cell reproduction.
God is not silent--man is just a complete idiot.
Just watch a small creature die, hopefully, by accident. Or a person. Watch the eyes closely. At the moment of death the light in the eyes goes out and you know they are gone. Gone? Gone where? What's gone? What was that light? How can you tell they're gone when the machines in a hospital haven't registered it yet?
Define presence. How come you can FEEL someone looking at you from across a crowded room? What is that force? How can you feel the presence of someone enter a room if you didn't hear him come in? How come you can feel a presence in someone who is unconscious and feel an emptiness when they're dead? What is that?

Ed
where is the proof of god
and where is he today. why is he only interested in "talking" to simple people of yesterday and silent today.

Your guest's reasoning begs the question. The idea that religion would have been un-selected if it weren't vital presupposes an idea of "progress" that doesn't belong to evolution, the unmitigated benefit of anything selected for, and the availability of religion-replacing alternatives that religion was selected over.

This whole argument ignores the known mechanisms of genetics and what genes code for - proteins and the intermediates that make them. The area that requires study in terms of behavior is the biochemistry of neurotransmitters and receptors in the brain.
The "mind" is a survival mechanism and behaviors evolve socially, not genetically, to insure survival. If you wonder why "primitives" danced and sang all night, spend a night in the bush in Africa, wander away from the fire and see how near the lion tracks come to your camp. The advantage of making a lot of noise all night will be immediately apparent.

You seem to have it updside down. God is the cause, religion is the response. Of course it is colored and shaped by the society itself, and the time, and it evolves as time goes on. Oh atheist NYC.

This reminds me of the very low regard in which The New York Times's science reporting is held. When I was hanging out with physicists, the Times was the butt of many jokes, especially the steady diet (in the 70s and 80s) of stories on how relativity had just been disproved because x or y had been observed to travel faster than the speed of light.

Mr. Wade did not answer the question regarding whether or not the beings posited by religion exist.

As a cohesive force, religion does play a role in a homogeneous society. It does not play the same role in a heterogeneous society.

Paul Susi

I wonder why evolutionary biologists won't admit that history and culture can have concrete effects on our "nature". Just because something has been around since the dawn of humanity does not necessarily mean that it is genetic!!

Could religion have just be a phase in Human evolution, and once Humans no longer need god to justify morals, that we can move beyond it? Were not there yet, but we are a young species in the scope of things.

Richard Dawkins DID NOT say that the religious impulse MUST have an evolutionary-biological explanation. He said that the universality makes an evolutionary explanation plausible.

We could also provide an evolutionary explanation by appeal to a selective pressure for conservatism.

In other words, there is a selective pressure for people to go with what they find familiar. No religion in that specifically.

Indeed, Wade has pretty much conceded this. He claims that religion provides a vehicle for social cohesion.

SO what he is really claiming is that there is a selective pressure for group or social cohesion. Could be religion, could be politics, could be tiddly winks.

Mr. Wade has provided absolutely no evidence for why an "evolutionary" approach to explaining the origins of religion is preferable to other approaches. Sociologists like Emile Durkheim argued that religion is a collective good which regulates social behavior; that religion functions to bolster norms and regulate behavior in no way leads necessarily to an evolutionary account of it. That is, just because X is old and X is beneficial does not mean that X must be "genetic." Why adopt an "evolutionary" perspective here--given all of the well-known problems with this way of thinking--instead of better alternatives, like sociological explanation?

Except this theory also give the lie to the actual truth claims of any religion and thus amounts to a kind of "blushing" (I should hope) paternalism. Knowing that religion can be accounted for this way, how could one in good conscience sing its praises, despite the apparent "benefits"?

This is reductionism at its worst. Not to give a pass to religion, but the crusades were as much a pursuit for land (Spain) as it was a pursuit for "god". My problem with this type of thinking is that there is some sort of objective reality that is now beared solely by libertarians and evolution.

This is a very flimsy theory. Animals (especially primates) have survived by working in cooperative groups since prehistoric times. There is no reason to think that Religion was the thing that tied early humans together.... survival is a strong enough motivator.

The problem with this is he is assuming all religions were based on what Nietzsche called "slave morality" which is a relatively new innovation. Before this most religions supported a despotic arrengement of society and glorified the leader as a God. Early leaders and Gods were indestinguishable. It wasn't until slave morality that we decided humans were not Gods but God was some supernatural force in a check on power of the leaders. So the religion he's talking about is not the original religions of the early days of human development.

This is not science - this is pure speculation.

How did I along with so many millions of others end up atheists then? My parents are violently religious, so not from them! I think it's actually the evolution of logic that allowed a certain group to realize they could manipulate a mass of people to kill for them, give money to them, keep the peace... by creating a faith fantasy of ultimate punishment or reward.

Yes, it's a lovely notion and it would be - a heaven - if it was accurate, so we are eager to believe. It does give hope to the hopeless.. but I don't think it's instinctive.

Bingo! Mr. Lehrer just hit it on the head with his comment about the need for insularity -- if Nicholas Wade's thesis is right.

In the religion-evolution "war," it's worth remembering that even IF religion is genetically programmed, that doesn't have any bearing on whether religion right or whether God real. It simply means that we might have an evolutionary reason for believing in the supernatural...NOT that the supernatural is real.

Here as in many other places, we have to avoid the trap that would make 'nature' normative.

Nietzsche said something like, 'That which survives, survives; what a pity that which survives is so often brutal and stupid.'

There comes a time to (as someone put it) put away childish things.

IF Nicholas Wade is right (he's dead wrong), then the religion in question is presumably a polytheistic, animist variety -- that after was the dominant religious form for the first 150,000 years of homo sapiens.

BUT I really can't overstate how grossly wrong Nicholas Wade is.

Why do journalists and radically soft-scientists take so long to catch up with hard scientists like biologists, chemists, physicists, molecular biologists, etc.

Again, the human genome IS TOO SMALL to support MOST of the sociobiology and evolutionary psychology claims.

Utterly utterly wrong. NOT EVEN A GOOD FRESHMAN UNDERGRAD paper.

ed
it "can't be explained by purely sociological causes"

of course it can! there is no PROOF of god the there never will be.

easter bunnies have more power.

Can you ask him about proofs regarding this theory? Either psychological or population studies.

Also, can he discuss group selection theory generally?

Scientology is the church of the self.

Stephen Jay Gould would have had a field day with this. Richard Lewontin, Gould's colleague at Harvard and of similar mind on 'evolutionary psychology' and the reductivist program of human sociobiology, would shred Wade's thesis.

Even the Father of Sociobiology -- E.O. Wilson -- now takes the view that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have been pretty much demolished by the discovery that the human genome is far smaller than originally assumed. That is, humans have far far fewer genes than we thought at the start of the genome project.

BUT, let's take Wade's claim as fact for the sake of argument.

I would suggest then that the 'impulse to faith' is subject to conflicting selective pressures. It is our version of the Sabre-Tooth Cat's canines. Okay, fine, there was a selective advantage to being 'religious'. But now that little monster of religiosity has grown so much that it threatens to doom us -- witness the insane conflicts in the Middle East, or the hysterical, A-factual fanaticism of the right-wing (and so-called 'moderates') in the US.

If religion is seen as a social construction of course can be seen as a product of evolution. But religion is man's organized response to God, and can't be explained by purely sociological causes, not even primarily so.

God made me an atheist. That, or I'm a mutant.

"humans are genetically impelled to religious faith. "
could we say instead humans are gullible or "humans are genetically impelled" to following the herd?

it's because we know we're going to die.

We've always seemed to seek out answers for our existence whether it be through mythology, polytheism, monotheism, and/or science. What is it about our psyche that compels us to do this? And what benefits are there to this seemingly neverending quest.

thanks!
Gabrielle

How has the Enlightenment affected religion?

What explains the rise of fundamentalists?