Are we hard-wired to believe in gods?

[Jack]

I was raised to be a skeptic. My parents encouraged me to question everything. As a result, at an early age I became aware that I was an outsider. I found it hard to fully embrace any particular belief system unless all my questions could be answered, and they seldom were.

At the same time, I knew I believed in a spiritual side to life. Too many emotions we feel, love-hate-joy-depression-wonder-boredom-ennui, had a direct and real impact on our daily lives yet lack any physical explanation. To deny the spiritual seemed like folly to me. Yet as I explored religion after religion, new-age to ancient, I found that I couldn't accept the notion of god in any form. The gods were answers to questions that mystified us in the past. These days, there are fewer and fewer reasons to suppose gods. In other words, I'm an atheist as it relates to both religion (I don't accept religion's concept of god) and philosophy (I don't perceive the need to suppose gods exist).

Lately I've begun to notice that others, often neuro-scientists and physicists, are also seeking answers to why we humans seem determined to believe in some sort of higher power. Some suggest we might be hard-wired to believe in gods.

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article about all this entitled Darwin's God. If this subject interests you as much as it does me, click on over and give it a read. Then give it some thought.

Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain. Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there? In short, are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?

Read the full article…

[Boetie]

Isherwood and other readers

How about if you would take this test

The Do-It-Yourself Deity

Then when you are done with that take this test

Battleground God

Then think about the OP.

[Jack]

Fun games but I don't see the parallel.

[arielmessenger]

at age 35 that seems to have permanently changed my ideas of reality. I can never go back to my prior science position that God and spiritual reality may or may not exist, it doesn't matter to practical life. I inadvertently stepped into what the Hindus call "maya" or seeing the world as an illusion and once seen that way you can't erase it. Once your personal Script is seen and the Scripts of others seen as well, you know that we are all in this gigantic Play playing out our roles that have been scripted beforehand somewhere.

One can get a glimpse of the psychological shock of finding out our world is scripted by seeing the movie The 13th Floor wherein the protagonist discovers his computer simulated world only mirrors another one in which he is a simulation. The Matrix has a similar idea I think.

I now firmly believe in God and the reality of the spiritual world but what "
God" is besides my intellectual understanding of It as seen in hindsight I don't know--I cannot distinguish between God and the Path I see Something has laid out for my life and everyone else's.

[Jack]

I gather the neuro-scientific angles of the article wouldn't interest you, then.

[Boetie]

Quote by: Isherwood I gather the neuro-scientific angles of the article wouldn't interest you, then.

He doesn't understand that what he was having was a C-4, D-28 synapse firing. All neuro synapse have been mapped. You no longer say I'm laughing you now say I'm having a Y-38, T-14 synapse firing.

Disclaimer I made the above up, but it is food for thought.

But the question about religious experience is this. If you never had a religious experience before how do you know the experience you are having is a religious experience? How do you know it isn't a Napolean complex that you are experiencing?

[Technosoul]

Quote by: arielmessenger at age 35 that seems to have permanently changed my ideas of reality. I can never go back to my prior science position that God and spiritual reality may or may not exist, it doesn't matter to practical life. I inadvertently stepped into what the Hindus call "maya" or seeing the world as an illusion and once seen that way you can't erase it. Once your personal Script is seen and the Scripts of others seen as well, you know that we are all in this gigantic Play playing out our roles that have been scripted beforehand somewhere. One can get a glimpse of the psychological shock of finding out our world is scripted by seeing the movie The 13th Floor wherein the protagonist discovers his computer simulated world only mirrors another one in which he is a simulation. The Matrix has a similar idea I think. I now firmly believe in God and the reality of the spiritual world but what " God" is besides my intellectual understanding of It as seen in hindsight I don't know--I cannot distinguish between God and the Path I see Something has laid out for my life and everyone else's.

Once upon a time a new comer monk went to a cave to meditate and to find out about the meaning of life. He discovered "maya" and saw that life is an illusion, a idea that only exsists in the mind of the observer. He set forth on his trip back to the temple to tell the elders about the truth that had enlightened him. On the way back he sat down to rest. He accidently sat on a bumble bee which stung him and the monk screamed with pain.

"That was no illusion" he thought. And so he returned to the cave to meditate some more, and no one knows what became of the young man.

( that is an old Zen story).

[Jack]

If you never had a religious experience before how do you know the experience you are having is a religious experience?

From subjective experience, I don't know how you'd tell. We're the ones who assign our emotions their value, so I'm not sure we'd ever know. But science may be able to, based on where the activity is located and what's happening there. I'm not so well read on this topic yet I can make an intelligent statement.

[Alive]

In gods particularly? I doubt it. Gods are almost certainly not universal to all cultures; certain peoples have ancestor cults and magic and shamans and such, but not gods. Religion, however, is universal to all cultures (though not to all individuals.) Therefore religion probably does have some function, and our tendency to it is probably innate.

However, this tendency can obviously be expressed in many different ways. Perhaps some people who have abandoned what they perceive as religion fulfill their innate tendency in other ways, or perhaps they have actually rejected it entirely in favor of other innate instincts they focus on more.

[Technosoul]

Glad you posted this idea. Lets explore the idea more.

We know from having domesticated animals that we can create a kind of god-animal relationship with our pets. A dog will honor his human master in much the same way as a religious person might honer the gods. A dog will look to his human god for most of it's needs, food and direction, etc. Which is simular to what humans pray for relative to the master god. Adapting to that new relationship during the process of domestication could impact the evolution of that animal, relative to it's habits, behavorism, and other factors.
Domestication and evolution - would be an interesting aspect worth more research and investigation.

Now I am not a strong advocate that belief has much to do with the physical evolution of the brain, but more about the evolution of ideas and concepts.

The human race became self-domesticated as pack animals when the need to "be civilized" became important to them. Human domestication and religion are the same thing which has the purpose of taming the "beast" for the purposes of having a group culture where people are civil to one another.

Now as humans formulated groups they had leaders who would arise among them as the chief, witchdoctor, or whatever title history has labeled them as being. The leader would dominate and have ways to train and to domesticate the rest of the group in order to insure conformity to his rules.

In the bible faiths they view the leaders as kings or temple leaders. And they have evolved the concept that those kings are set up by a God and that they were selected as the messinger of God for the whole tribe (kingdom). However before that the conformers believed that their human leaders were gods, the gods of divine authority. History tells us that in Rome (during biblical times) the leader thought that he was a god. And these humans, who were self-proclaimed gods, walked amoung the people, and ruled over them. Along the way some groups were not satisfied with mere humans as their gods, and so the humans that were leaders made adjustments by claiming to be agents of an unseen "higher authority".

In the 1800s and later on the phycholists started to comprehend the methods used for the domestication of animals, namely the stick and carrot method. AKA - reward or punishment. Western religions employ hell as the stick and heaven as the reward, which the say will be effected on "judgement day" or in the "afterlife". Training the "best" in human nature to confrom to the "house rules" of the master.

This is not a total put down to the process because human survival depended on that kind of self-domestication, otherwise we would no doubt have all killed each other off long ago. And so in effect we have evolved a need for such a God, or a human leader who can act as a god with as much ability to control the masses as do the concepts of heaven and hell, and related articles of faith. Such a person might someday be a intellectual scientist or a Doctor ( like Dr Phil). Or a poltical leader such as Obana, who is able to proclaim the rewards of tomorrow via his motvaitonal speeches as well as the punishments for the non-comformers. Faith would still be employed as a factor for estabishing that cult like culture.

Do animals have faith? I would think that a dog has faith in his human master to give it the right direction to take. Which they often do without questioning the commands given and without being in the least big skeptical.
Animals have faith in the role modeling of their parents and in other members of the group - aka - monkey see monkey do.

Now in reality we are pretty much equal to one another, but when two humans get ready to fight one another (or two Tom Cats for that matter) they each believe they can win the fight. That they are a little bit more "super" then the other guy. That is when the "beast" in human nature come out and we drop the training to be civil. It is easy to see how a figher would daydream about having supernatural powers. Even kids enjoy the fantasy comic books about Superman and other heros. Others might daydream about having the ability to heal people with supernatual powers, or about having a "supernatual bank account" via winning the Lotto. So this takes us into another area of exploration - The evolution of day dreams. The visions, the trance, the extra-reality experience. The moment when the grand illusion seems more realistic then our factural day to day life style. Whatever, the daydreamer often seeks to manifest his science fictional make believe into reality by inventing things and manifesting supernatual technology via science. And that "faith" in our ability is the motivational factor behind much of our human progress which adds to our survival rate relative to some of the threats known about in nature or from other humans. We as a culture have awakened to the possiblity that technology might be our pathway to becoming the masters of our world and someday the whole universe. The Technogods of the future. But will these Technogods have a technosoul?

Well, those are a few of many ideas I can barf up about this topic, I might post some different ones later on.

[Zhavric]

Dawkins has some interesting hypothesis for why we evolved religion.

From a Darwinian standpoint, religion has to give us some demonstrable benefit or be a byproduct of an existing benefit.

Dawkins points to children.

Children absorb information like sponges. This makes tremendous sense from a natural selection perspective; a species that can absorb learned information has distinct advantages over species which do not.

Think about how we lived way back when fire was a new "technology" and stone tools is all we had. A human learns how to make a net from vines to catch fish in a river. The human teaches his offspring how to build nets. The child absorbs this information and is able to share it with others for the rest of his life. The child doesn't have to go through the trial & error the parent did.

At the same time that this child is making a net, he's also asking his old man about the natural world around them. Dad doesn't have a clue, either. When lightning scares father and son, dad says the tribe has angered the thunder god.

Now, children of a young age aren't going to have the critical thinking skills necessary to discern "make a net" from "appease thunder god". If the father presents them as survival skills, the child is going to absorb them as survival skills with little to no fuss.

Isherwood was born and raised a skeptic. The skill he learned in his childhood protected him from indoctrination into a religion.

I am not suggesting that human beings are programmable machines. Isherwood examined the emotions he felt to see if they were connected to a god.

Ultimately, though... the religion we are taught as a child is likely the one we'll hold our entire life. Many religions exploit this, indoctrinating their children from the time the child is old enough to understand... making it unlikely that the child will later reject the religion. Not impossible. Just unlikely.

So, that's where religion originates. It is a byproduct of our ability to pass on information memetically and absorb it at a young age.

[ZNFYRH]

Isherwood,

Great topic!!

I think that the development of intelligence came from the understanding of cause and effect. As we came to remember effects and what caused them, we became creatures who looked for the causes of everything.

Why does the bright, hot thing move through the sky?

Where did that baby come from?

Why did these plants grow where they didn't before?

With that questioning intelligence I think we came to realize that we were unique. We could teach other animals a limited remembrance of cause and effect (domestication) but none could match us for the longevity of our memories. As a result, we came to personify that which gave cause to events. We came to perceive those things as being caused by something like us.

Eventually, we came to believe that things were caused by something we couldn't see that used methods we don't understand.

So while we aren't "hard-wired" to believe in gods, I think it's inevitable in the development of intelligence to think that some kind of personality is the cause for events. Understanding the events for that they really are comes later, but in the meantime humans need an answer of some kind.

Yes, I've taken this idea from another thread and added my own perspective to it. I'm flexible in my thinking, that way.

[arielmessenger]

maya, the world as illusion, that informed ancient human beings, reality was not what it seemed. Before this, fear of the dark probably engendered the first feelings of spirits roaming around, modeled on dangerous animals at first, but fear doesn't produce religious awe and the manifold creations of spiritually inspired human beings.

Atheists are prone to seeing God and religion as a step up from the dominant father son relationship but in my personal religious conversion experience that had zero bearing. Also, I was actually hostile to Christianity before the experience, having seen on and off the hypocrisy of the religionists in my father's family of dedicated Evangelicals.

God "manipulated" my whole world for 3 days and I had no scientific explanation for how this could happen. Three days of non-stop synchronicity experiences and by the end of the third day I "knew" the Script well enough that I have a memory of being able to predict what my family and friends would say before they said it. In that state of mind, it all made sense. The unseen spiritual journey we all are engaged in whether we know it or not.

I never met any God evoking fear. It was the manipulation of my world that made me aware of "God"'s direct presence in my life. But there never was or is any Thing there but a Path that one can tell is God by the trail of clues, for me they were all couched in Holy Land terms, at least until 1998 when a Native American spiritual vision came through. So for me, I know God is there by the Path laid out that I follow and see the results. The results have been so spectacular that I have gone public with them, e.g. the Story of Paxcalibur.

[Osborn F Enready]

Isherwood said: Are we hard-wired to believe in gods?

No. We are hardwired to understand what is around us, and often, fallible as we are, we attribute things to answers without exploring the logic of cause and effect, that would verify such things.

We are hard-wired to survive. God has little to do with that, if there is one.

[Captain Chaos]

Quote by: Osborn F Enready No. We are hardwired to understand what is around us, and often, fallible as we are, we attribute things to answers without exploring the logic of cause and effect, that would verify such things. We are hard-wired to survive. God has little to do with that, if there is one.

We are hard-wired with the capacity for spiritual experiences:

-NDEs
-Meeting 'god' or a guide during the life review
-Temporal lobe effects
-Hearing voices
-Ketamine-like brain chemicals

These experiences may be entirely bogus, partly real, or totally real. Whatever your interpretation, we have a natural capacity to have these sorts of experiences. This does not necessarily mean that natural selection and mutation drove us to be able to have these experiences. It may be that they are byproducts of some other thing that evolved.

However, the shaman who has mystical experiences - and convinces others they are real - may well rise to high state in the tribe, and thus earn the right to many wives, and thus pass on the genes that lead to such a brain configuration.


Another aspect of this is that humans clearly have a natural aptitude for finding patterns. Thus, they are able to find real-world apparent connections to their mystical experiences. From this, they build mythologies.

From there, I believe social darwinism determines which mythologies become widespread and accepted by a percentage of the population.


What is needed is the scientific study of these various mystical experiences. This helps limit unwarranted pattern recognition, and find true commonalities. For example, the common aspects of the life review cause me to believe (among other things) that near death experiences do probably often include a component that is real.

More pattern recognition, of course.

[arielmessenger]

but I have yet to find any science buffs at all interested in my experiences. More interested in putting my views down than seeing them as evidence of spiritual reality or human religious brain functioning..(sob):(

[Captain Chaos]

Quote by: arielmessenger but I have yet to find any science buffs at all interested in my experiences. More interested in putting my views down than seeing them as evidence of spiritual reality or human religious brain functioning..(sob):(

I, as a science buff, was quite interested in putting your visions to the test.

Unfortunately, their nature does not lend themselves to tests that I would accept. That is not personal, and is not a put-down.

[Osborn F Enready]

I don't disagree with anything you said Chaos.

Was that a supplemental to my post (hence why you quoted me) or was that supposed to be a rebuttal?

[Captain Chaos]

Quote by: Osborn F Enready I don't disagree with anything you said Chaos. Was that a supplemental to my post (hence why you quoted me) or was that supposed to be a rebuttal?

supplement

I was pointing out that, while we are not hard-wired for gods, per se - we are hardwired for spiritual experiences, and hard wired for pattern recognition - which leads us to believe in gods.

[jascowhiz0]

No we are not hard wired to believe in Gods. Just the human race in general can't understand philosophy or science and to answer these questions they make god up as an answer.