Comments on: open

By: dysamoria

dysamoria — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:06:17 +0000

I find it’s more the fact that miracles & acts of god are just easier for people to accept as complete ideas than the decades of education (& hundreds of years of science) needed to encapsulate the real facts of what, how & why. Also, the culture is designed to indoctrinate from youth a belief in religion, not science, so the “necessary-reliance-on-others-for-answers road” already has a roadhog on it. I mean, it’s not where science lacks a definite answer to a thing that hurts belief; it’s the complexity of the many interrelated facts & levels of required abstraction that really kills it. How many of us actually sit down & calculate scientific matters on our own before we accept them? We’re not all “brains the size of planets” and we rely on the global species-history’s collection of knowledge for our understandings. Religious folks want simple answers & religion gives nothing but (unless you ask for detailed explanations, which become increasingly deeper self-contradicting mind warps till the religious person just hits their own intellectual/mental max gross load wherein they just spout out “it’s god’s will” or the like).

It’s like answers on “what’s pi?” You don’t spout out the whole thing, nor even a fraction of the known number; you symbolize it with an abbreviated form & the rest is assumed.

Someone said to me once, “That’s like asking why the sky is blue!” in anger at me asking for an explanation to something. Poor choice of symbolizing “the unknowable.” I went and explained why the sky is blue, best as I can as I’m not a walking Internet, and it just pissed them off. They offered another “unknowable” analogy & I offered another explanation… I love that. The person eventually just changed the subject to “science ruins the majesty of everything beautiful!” No, it doesn’t. It shows just how deep the universe goes in both directions (micro & macro). It blows people’s minds, even when they’re great minds.

By: Skip

Skip — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:59:46 +0000

Some people here do not understand scientific method. In science you make a conclusion AFTER you are able to prove something (for example, evidence, research, observation). You can’t make a conclusion first and then demand from the rest of the people to prove you wrong. Religious stuff therefore can’t be proven simply because you can’t prove fantasy stories made up in someones mind.

By: Unruly Simian

Unruly Simian — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:54:50 +0000

I wonder just how screwed up things would be if people didn’t beleive that they would live on a cloud playing a harp, or slaving away trying to keep 72 virgins happy. I guess everyone would just run amok killing, drinking, swearing, fornicating etc. Wait that sounds like my high school prom!!!!!

By: nina

nina — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:24:46 +0000

@Daoloth

I think you’re right – people want the magikal sky daddy because then they are special by the interest of said sky daddy over all the “other” animals on the planet.

they don’t want to accept that we’re just another animal

By: Daoloth

Daoloth — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:57:18 +0000

@ DH. I agree with you.
However, I suspect that it feels like we are making the wrongness of being a psychopath a frequency-dependent selection pressure. This does not feel like morality, you know the kind of thing “If it’s just about genes then blah..blah…it’s not real” etc.
I think its a bit like a magic trick- people who don’t know anything about magic tricks are invariably disappointed when they learn “the secret”.
“Oh, is that it? It was just up her sleeve? That was simple”
People who actually know about conjuring know that the effect is more than just the maguffin (secret pocket in the top hat for the rabbit etc) that makes it work. Its about all the things done to create the effect so that something really simple (man hanging on string) looks like David Copperfield flying.
It’s very easy to buy almost every trick you have ever seen on TV in a good magic shop- seriously- if its not actually for sale in a plastic pack it will be in one of the old books. But there are not that many good magicians out there. Its tougher than it looks to create effects.
I think a similar scale problem happens with morality. If you know a bit about biology then you can see how the trick (altruism) could have evolved.
“Oh, was that it? Its all about genes co-operating? That’s too simple” say the moralists- we want REAL magic- by which they mean, of course- magic that could not have happened.
We want a magic sky fairy to underwrite our actions, a world yet to come that punishes the unbelievers, a platonic realm of THE GOOD, the noumenal, etc etc.
The trick (evolution of moral sentiments because they aid survival) seems too simple.
What do you think?

By: Darwin Harmless

Darwin Harmless — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:56:55 +0000

P.S. – Even if we don’t have morality without religion, which seems unlikely given the morality of my atheist friends, using this as a reason to believe in God is a classic logical fallacy, argumentum ad consequentiam, an argument that concludes a belief is true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences.
We hear this argument all the time. It’s the reason they try to blame Stalin’s purges on atheism.

By: Darwin Harmless

Darwin Harmless — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:52:36 +0000

daoloth: sorry, I missed your message to me, or I would have commented on it. Back on July 12, 2010 at 12:56 pm you wrote:
“@Darwin Harmless. The most common thing I have heard in relation to evolution is “Doesn’t this undermine morality?” It’s not only the religious who assume this, but they are more up front about it.
A lot of supposedly materialist individuals have the same worry- that what we think is important about being human cannot survive scientific inquiry.”

I simply can’t understand this concern. It seems to me that the theory of evolution completely explains where morality comes from. We are moral because to be otherwise would reduce our survival fitness. The immoral tend to be hunted down and kicked out of the gene pool unless they are brilliant and lucky. Even then, they are liable to be done in eventually and their descendants scorned. Witness the recent short drop of Sadam Hussein.
We have empathy, because if we didn’t we wouldn’t get the support of our fellow tribesmen, and without that support we are much more likely to die.
So where is the puzzle? For me the puzzle is that religion can lay a claim to providing morality, given the slaughter and perversion that stains the history of religion like gallons of blood and puke on a shag carpet.

One of my big problems Christianity is that it make it a sin to be simply human. They tell us that we must be moral or we will be punished, rather than telling us that we are moral because it’s basic to our nature. New congnitive research has discovered that virtually all serial killers have a specific kind of brain damage. They are not sinful. They are malfunctioning units. Religion has nothing to say about this, and no cure to provide.

By: AchillesAndTortoise

AchillesAndTortoise — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:40:29 +0000

So Moses accepts evolution, then?

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:41:02 +0000

A commenter at Jerry Coyne’s noted that that one little question – “how?” – got the barmaid permanently banned from The Intersection. snicker

By: truthspeaker

truthspeaker — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:25:54 +0000

I’m not saying it can’t be read as metaphor for loss of innocence, or even that it wasn’t intended as such (I think that was one of the authors’ intentions). But it’s BSing to say it’s a metaphor for evolution.