There have been some good analogies about religion in recent years. In Breaking The Spell philosopher Daniel Dennett compared religion with a particular parasite that invades the ants brain and controls it so that it attempts to be eaten by a bird. Oxford professor Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion compared religion to the way moths misunderstand candles and so fly into them. Both of these analogies, although perhaps insulting to religious people, offer an insight into the large amount of progress science has made in recent years in explaining why we are religious.
The two analogies offer two different perspectives on religion, related to the two different fields of the authors. Dennett, as a philosopher, sees religion as a "meme" (a word created by Richard Dawkins); almost a physical entity. Memes behave like genes, at least for the purposes of natural selection and evolution. Instead of being the discrete genetic code for a particular protein, they are discrete units of information. Both genes and memes replicate themselves and have slight variations at the point of replication.
Like genes, memes "compete" with each other, but in a faster and more direct manner than genes. A meme continues to exist as long as people accept it. If nobody believed in God, there would be no "god meme." A meme that is more likely to encourage its believers to behave in a way that supports the continued existence and replication of that meme is obviously more likely to continue to exist than one that does not. When we evaluate the traits of different memes, this explains why religion has lasted so long, while popular music is far shorter lived. Music memes don't offer any encouragement to continue to accept a particular song or to replicate it. Religion does. Religion encourages its followers to value "faith" instead of evidence, which is convenient since there is no evidence to support religion. It constantly reinforces the strength of belief in its followers by taking credit for anything good that happens in people's lives, despite rational explanations.
In this world view we can see religion as a parasite or a virus, invading people's minds and causing them to spread the virus further and wider. Over time, like most viruses, the religions that have survived are the ones that have been best at invading people's minds, while the least effective religions have died off - survival of the fittest religions.
On the other hand, Richard Dawkins sees religion as a misinterpretation of the world by our body. In the circumstances in which it evolved, a moths attraction to light is a good thing, but candles are very recent and they haven't been able to adapt to this change. Likewise Dawkins argues that religion is a consequence of traits we've evolved for our benefit, misinterpreting sudden changes in the world. In particular our brains rapidly got bigger very quickly and suddenly we started applying useful evolutionary behaviours to much wider concepts than they were useful. This idea is expanded in great detail by Lewis Wolpert in the fantastic book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
Of course these two theories aren't contradictory. It's possible that religion is successful because our psychology is so easily exploitable, and religion has evolved to exploit the particular weaknesses our sudden rapid intellectual evolution provided. When new viruses appear at first they are very powerful and spread very quickly. Then the host evolves an immune system to fight the virus and if the virus doesn't change, eventually it's wiped out. Over the last 200 years humans have started evolving our immune system response to the religion meme, and it's a meme with the ability to strengthen and improve itself. It is, of course, the scepticism/rationality meme, and now atheism is the fastest growing perspective on religion in the world. Scepticism and rationality work so well because instead of advocating faith over evidence, they advocate evidence over faith. They say we should accept the world how it really is, not how we'd like it be. You could even argue that they're not a meme at all, but a meme anti-body. Now that it's spreading so quickly, religion is going to have to evolve dramatically if it is to survive.
There is plenty of evidence to support religion. (Just try earnest prayer to our Father in heaven, through Jesus Christ, and see what transpires!) There is merely a lack of empirical evidence to support religion, meaning, that evidence which is observed by the external senses. Plenty of evidence exists, however, it can't be derived in a laboratory, since it is spiritual (or internal, intrapersonal) rather than physical.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Anonymous's comment to some degree however we can also see also the historical evidence for Jesus Christ. We can see how the bible describes human nature and see if that compares to what we see in the nateral world. We can begin to see some of God's Miracles are sceintifically plausable.
ReplyDeleteWe can see the world is that complex but what chance is it of forming by chance...... People like Dawkins have to argue that its sonar systems come about by chance in nature yet in where desighned and afar latter date by humans.... ect.....