Evolution of Religion

Religion and Secularism
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There is no doubt that humans have an inherent tendency to perceive patterns and associated connections even when they’re not present. That’s why Percival Lowell saw what he thought were canals on the surface of Mars. The mind favors and sometimes erroneously projects through confirmation bias things that are not real. The mind also has a powerful ability to discern from a loose collection of disparate facts a hidden underlying reality that was previously unknown. The germ theory of disease was theorized (and laughed at) prior to being proven by science. X rays were considered as fantasy by some before they were shown to be real and are now accepted as a powerful diagnostic tool for medicine.

The notion that believers are superimposing their innate tendency to see patterns and connections and by extension a supernatural universal agent of grand design is an age old criticism of theism. It’s absolutely true that the human mind is capable of projecting bias and falsehood, but this varies from person to person and has more to do with the psychology and intellectual temperament of each individual. It’s a general human fault and in no way vitiates the well grounded assertion that the universe is intelligently designed and functions in accordance with its intended design. This doesn’t mean that random chance plays no role in the unfolding events of reality, it only means that design, purpose and intent plays a more dominant role.

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The statement that science can’t provide evidence of anything supernatural and never can is not accurate in my opinion. I just concluded reading every posting contributed by those who offered their thoughts on this subject and must say the logic and rational tenor of this debate is impressive. However, when this question is discussed (and the central question is “does God exist?”) the need to clearly define the terms we use is necessary. It’s been stated that science and religion are at odds with each other and are mutually incompatible, which is to say that either Genesis is right or Darwin is right, either the biblical story of our origins is correct or the anthropological record is correct. Is there any logical doubt in any one’s free thinking mind that we evolved from simple organisms through immensely long stretches of geological time, or that the universe is over 13 billion years old? Science describes reality in a slow careful accumulation of verifiable facts and observations, cross checked and re-examined rigorously before it’s accepted. Religion is being challenged by science and rightly so, but religion has very little to do with the intellectually defensible assertion that a transcendent spiritual reality does exist. In other words God exists. That’s my assertion and I’ll offer my reasons for it anon, but first let’s separate religion from the fundamental question of God’s existence. They are two different things. Religion is layered with custom, tradition and orthodoxy and those things are very worldly, with a history social manipulation and abuse. If someone asked me where they can experience God I certainly wouldn’t tell them to read the bible or go to any church. I would advise them to stay away from religion because religion is taught and practiced from without often with subtle coercion whereas an internal spiritual awakening is subjective, intuitive and personal and therefore more genuine. Now for my original assertion that science, far from never being able to supply evidence for something “supernatural” and by supernatural I assume you mean any phenomenon that can’t be verified by any empirical means. It is my firm belief that nothing observed, documented or shown by science in any way contradicts or runs counter to my belief in a supreme being, nothing. I further contend that far from being unable to offer any evidence of anything supernatural, science in actuality offers very compelling evidence of an unseen and transcendent reality. We call that reality God but the word evokes a widely different set of definitions because it’s been commingled with history, custom and religious orthodoxy. Is there any wonder why the argument can devolve into confusion?

Let’s assume that this being called God does exist. If he does exist then every discovery or breakthrough in our understanding of the universe should corroborate this notion even if only marginally. So how does science buttress the core belief in the existence of God?

I offer the following and this is a partial reiteration of an earlier stated point. If we accept the current model (and overwhelming evidence persuades us we should) describing the universe as starting with the original singularity exploding in the “Big Bang” we need to accept the idea that something initiated that event that didn’t exist in linear time as we know because time didn’t begin until matter was formed because time can’t exist without the presence of matter changing from one state to another and that didn’t happen until that seminal event. Something existed prior to time that exerted a controlling power over the original singularity. If it didn’t exert that controlling and limiting force on this singular object it wouldn’t have exploded into the expanding universe that surrounds us. What is it that could exist prior to time itself? Whatever it was (and still is) it must be incorporeal and unbounded by time.

Secondly, The universe is miraculously balanced in a way that insures a long lived and stable cosmos. The perfect balance between matter and anti-matter is not likely the product of random chance.

Thirdly, throughout the universe an ongoing process of evolved emergent complexity is constantly at work producing ever more complicated forms from simpler, more basic levels of organization. The universe seems to be re-organizing and combining with itself in ever greater degrees of complexity. We ourselves are the most immediate example of this universal tendency. What could be driving this emergent phenomenon?

Fourthly, God is often described as "omniscient’ (all-knowing). Is there evidence for this? I believe there is. We speak of something called consciousness as if it were something that is ours. We say my consciousness or your consciousness but is it? It really isn’t. What is ours is our direct experience of consciousness but that is something different. In the same way that we experience a beautiful sunset, we can say the experience belongs to us but not the sunset itself. That exists independently of those who experience it. In the same way "consciousness is something we enter into. It’s not produced by the brain but is experienced through the human brain. That means consciousness has another source. That source is universal and timeless because it very likely existed prior to the emergence of the human brain which receives, interprets and experiences consciousness but is not the source of it. This explains why we find considerable differences in the level of intellectual and emotional acuity in various individuals. The difference being one person who is highly evolved has entered more deeply into universal consciousness and a less evolved person hasn’t. This universal consciousness is a manifestation of the “omniscience” that is ascribed to God. I apologize for being expansive but these are complex ideas and there is simply no short hand way to convey them. I thank you for your indulgence.

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The current model includes theories of states without time or matter that are unstable and led/lead to a Big Bang. I can provide some details, but I’m not a physicists.

Secondly, those unstable states happen (I would say “all the time”, but they aren’t in time). The physical universes they create will have different constants, so it kind of is like random chance.

Thirdly, the constants lead to evolution.

Fourthly, evolution leads to us and what we call consciousness. The sunset exists independently of us and we don’t know what its experience is or if it has one. There is no such thing as “more highly evolved”, get over yourself.

First, we took the power away from the church, then we provided alternatives to their narrative, we answered the questions they couldn’t answer and did the things they said their miracles could do. Now, we have dealt with the deists, the last “yeah but”. You have nothing left except the fraction of a percent chance that science is wrong. That’s no way to live.

Definitions of God are comingled with history because they are the history of us coming to terms with who we are. So if someone seeks God, I would send them straight to those crazy stories and books, telling them that they are stories of course. If they wanted to see God, I’d send them to you. I might also send them to meditation, or on a mountain climb, or just to stare at a tree for 4 hours. Of course religion asserts that a “transcendent spiritual reality” exists. Most people have felt that, just not all of them attach to a religion.

That’s the point when religion and science are at odds. When someone has an experience, but then speculates what it was without collecting any additional data or doing any additional experimenting. Some go further to abandon logic entirely. I stay right there with religion. Unless you are very isolated, your culture will get in the way of interpreting a “peak moment”. Before we had all this science, religion often helped control those experiences, keeping all the young men from claiming they were god and killing each other off to prove it. But that’s a longer conversation for somewhere else.

 

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Holmes: ... then all human activities and beliefs including theological ones are the result of that evolutionary process.

So how can the atheist berate the theist when the theist exists as a result of natural selection?


Well because theological beliefs all centered on the ego and are disassociated from the physical world.

Religions are all about the human EGO trying to find its place in a vast incomprehensible universe.

Whereas, science is humanity’s best effort for reaching outside the confines of our own EGO’s in the best effort yet to comprehend that vast physical creation that we’ve evolved out of.

 

So long folks continue refusing to recognize that fundamental divide, they’ll continue chasing their tails as our Holmes does so wonderfully with his rhetorical fancy dancing.

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There is no such thing as “more highly evolved”
Lausten, could you unpack that?

When people say “more highly evolved” aren’t they referring to greater complexity and abilities of said creature.

The reptilian brain - the mammal brain - the human brain, and such.

That’s not to say the more complex is “better” - since it’s utterly dependent on the foundation (and logistical duties) that those more limited “organisms” provides.

Yes, that word ‘organism’ is poor, but it underscores their individuality, though connected in a myriad of ways.


<em>Oh and I really should welcome, "I am the Genus Homo, just like you"  I myself found that up there one of the more fascinating reads around these parts in a while.  Though I appreciate Lausten jumping in there and calling him out on some of his points - .  I sure hope "just like you" returns to continue.  I'd love to see how this one shakes out.</em>
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@holmes

If you admit there are things you do not know then how can you be an atheist? You have no way of knowing whether the things you don’t know are or are not due to God, so you must remain open minded and therefore cannot be an atheist.
Your logic is flawed. There are always things we do not know. I do not know what you had for breakfast, for example. But not knowing that does not prevent me from knowing the Earth is a sphere. I can see where you're going with that, but by that logic I would have to entertain every explanation I have ever heard. We're created by the Christian God, other gods, aliens, abiogenesis, we weren't created at all, we're just minds in a giant computer, etc. Sometimes it's okay to pick the explanation that makes the most sense and reject the explanations you find silly. We all do it all the time.

@michaelmckinney1951

I think the reason for stating that science cannot answer supernatural questions and never will be able to, my reason, anyway, is that science is the study of the natural and cannot offer supernatural explanations. Therefore if ghosts were proven to be real tomorrow science would start investigating that, not as a supernatural phenomena, but as a natural one. The nature of the supernatural is being beyond the physical, observable universe. No observations means no science (precluding the purely mathematical sciences).

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can the scientific method evolve?

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Before the microscope was invented, did anyone suspect that there were such thousands of animulations that wreak havoc on the economy?

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Before the invention of the electron microscope did people ever believe in viruses?

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Did Ernst Ruska believe in the existence of viruses before inventing the electron microscope?

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I am the Genus Homo, just like you: Everything looks as if it proceeded from a precise formula from an all-knowing mind.
As Douglas Adams said, that's what a puddle could think when seeing how perfectly it fits into the depression it is filling. The moral of the story is, there's nothing amazing about us existing in a universe in which we exist.

It’s the same as saying, “Things are the way they are because they turned out this way.” It’s a tautology, not a revelation or even an interesting fact.

Widdershins: Therefore if ghosts were proven to be real tomorrow science would start investigating that, not as a supernatural phenomena, but as a natural one.
That's a toughie to get through to anyone who believes in the supernatural. It isn't complicated or counterintuitive, but for some reason it's hard to explain.

 

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When people say “more highly evolved” aren’t they referring to greater complexity and abilities of said creature.
That would be a definition I would accept, but it was not how Genus was using it. He was referring to functions of the brain that include entering "more deeply into universal consciousness" and having "level of intellectual and emotional acuity" and in the context of understanding God. There is no thin line here, he's already crossed in to claiming that some people have special powers that don't really exist. I would have cut his deism a lot more slack if he had not included that.

We don’t know if we are an improved version of all other life, or if we are a virus with shoes. We don’t have the perspective to even make the judgment. We can show that we capable of compassion, but there’s plenty of evidence that we are here to destroy.

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3point, Thanks for this Douglas Adams quote. I love it. The puddle is no doubt an advocate for intelligent design.

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Before the invention of the electron microscope did people ever believe in viruses?
Viruses cannot be seen under a microscope. They're too small. It's bacterium you're thinking of.

That aside, the argument I think you’re making is wrong. Scientific method does not need to be modified to account for new discoveries, scientific theory does. Scientific method usually STARTS with observation. Yes, there are times, especially in physics, when they start with “what if” and then start looking for observations (theoretical physics is an entire branch just for “what if”), but the scientific method starts with observation. So when that first person looked into that first microscope and saw that first bacteria, that is the point where scientific method started. You are conflating the discovery with the theory which sprang from it. There was the observation and then scientific method was used to create the theory.

But yes, scientific method could evolve if it needed to. IF we found a better way of getting to objective truth. It’s not written in stone. But that is highly unlikely to happen. There is really nothing special about the rules of scientific method. They’re all pretty straight forward, common sense stuff. You can’t give a supernatural explanation. Why? Because discovery stops once you do. If you say, “God did it” then there’s no need to look any further. So it MUST be a natural explanation. And it must be repeatable. Why? Because if your experiment isn’t reliably repeatable then your explanation obviously isn’t working. It must be testable. Why? Because if you can’t test it then you can just make up the answers you like. It must make predictions. Why? Because if you really have this thing figured out then you should be able to explain what will happen when I do X, test it, and see that it is exactly as you predicted. If it’s not then your explanation doesn’t work.

So yeah, it could evolve, but that’s not very likely because what we have now works and we know of no way to make it work better. Any time someone tries to change it they are doing so to try to shoehorn in some junk science, such as when Michael Behe tried to change the definition of a theory to include intelligent design, but that definition also included the ether theory of light propagation and astrology as branches of science.

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Widdershins: But yes, scientific method could evolve if it needed to.
Yes, that ability is baked into the scientific method. It would be very unscientific if someone came up with an improvement to the method, proved it worked, but 'science' didn't adopt it.

I’m not sure what Flacus it trying to get at by asking lots of odd questions. Hopefully your answer clears up some of them.

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The flaw in Mr. Adam’s argument is not difficult to explain. First; He is using a blatant example of anthropomorphism to illustrate his point. It’s ironic that an agnostic or atheist would employ such reasoning because it’s usually used against believers in claiming they are the ones ascribing human traits and attributes to the universe when they assert it shows direction, purpose and intelligence, but in Mr. Adams’s very first words that are cited is this phrase; “Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking,” If that’s not an extreme example of an anthropomorphic bias then the word and its meaning must have radically changed, but as Tee Bryan Peneguy correctly defined in a prior posting, the meaning of the word “anthropomorphism” hasn’t changed. Setting that aside, if Mr. Adams is asking us (and he is) to imagine a puddle of water suddenly becoming self-aware and capable of reflective understanding, it’s just as possible for us to imagine that this imaginary puddle may have made a completely different comment, a comment that might say “Gee, I fully understand that if this depression in the road had not been here I would be a dis-aggregated flow of water that would have found its way to somewhere other than here and even though it is here, this by no means is an indication that it was placed here for my convenience.”

This might sound ludicrous and it is. Just as ludicrous as the puddle saying to it self what was above cited. Therefore Mr. Adams’s comment is nugatory and says nothing. He should try and find a more cogent line of argument than conjuring impossibilities.

I want to thank Citizenchal for his gracious welcome. Michael Mckinney

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This might sound ludicrous and it is. Just as ludicrous as the puddle saying to it self what was above cited. Therefore Mr. Adams’s comment is nugatory and says nothing.
It's not ludicrous, it's an analogy, a thought experiment, or as Jesus said, "it is as if".

Did you get a chance to read my response to your post the other day? I’m very interested in your comments.

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Douglas Adams was one of the greatest satirical writers of our times. He was pretty constantly presenting things in a way that points out how ludicrous much of our beliefs and actions are. And he did it in a very funny way. You might enjoy his books, like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), <b>The Restaurant at the End of the Universe</b> (1980), <b>Life, the Universe and Everything</b> (1982), <b>So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish</b> (1984), and others. All exquisitely silly on one level and perhaps profound on another. I highly recommend them.

But you are correct about a puddle that suddenly became sentient and verbal. It might have said just about anything.

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In response to your inquiry about what I thought about your earlier posting I read it several times and found it generally convoluted and lacking any central unifying premise. You open your statement with an oblique reference to current models that I assume allow for “timelessness” to “constants that lead to evolution” to getting over myself to taking the power of the church to staring at trees for four hours to keeping young men from claiming to be God and killing each other to prove it and so it goes.

Scattered and abstruse reasoning doesn’t make for persuasive advocacy.

In contrast; I offered 4 points of consideration in my prior posts and stated their meaning with what I believe to be straight forward reasoning. Thus far not one of them has been directly refuted with convincing logic. All debates should try to join conflicting points of argument with specific criticism.

My four points stand.

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Scattered and abstruse reasoning doesn’t make for persuasive advocacy. -- Genus
Okay. I thought I'd try something a little different since there are arguments against the Kalam Cosmological Argument everywhere. I'll edit out all my ramblings and address your points more directly.