Crusades and accidents

[dougo]

Two more articles about religion, via zosa's friend dave: a Wired article called "The Crusade Against Religion", about "The New Atheists" (e.g. Dawkins and Dennett) and an Atlantic Monthly article called "Is God an Accident?".

The Wired article is kind of shallow and not especially enlightening, other than to show what Wired thinks about atheism: it's trendy, but not worth pissing off your friends for. It portrays Dawkins as a fanatical atheist who wants to remove freedom of religion from the Bill of Rights; to be fair, Dawkins himself does not seem to emphasize enough the difference between speaking out against religion (or simply speaking up for atheism) and outlawing religion, but I'm pretty sure he's all about the former and not the latter. Or maybe I'm just projecting.

The Atlantic Monthly article discusses the biological roots of religion, but I think it goes a little too far in calling our instincts for religion an "accident". Besides being deliberately provocational—creationists love to attack the strawman that evolution is just a series of "accidents"—it seems premature to conclude that supernatural belief is just a side effect or byproduct of the way our brains have separate subsystems for objects and people rather than having its own evolutionary benefits. Dawkins mentioned this in his talk at Harvard as well, so maybe there has been some research to prove that a propensity for religion is not by itself a survival characteristic, but common sense says that, for example, belief in an afterlife could make someone be more willing to die for an altruistic cause (i.e. to benefit his family, tribe, or species), or less willing to "sin" when it would otherwise have no negative effect on himself. This is the sort of thing that I imagined Dennett's Breaking the Spell would have discussed, but after hearing some of dictator555's reviews I'm not so sure.

Comments

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

I think The Neandertal Enigma gets into some of the evolutionary aspects of psychology and religion later in the book. But of course, that's all speculation, so not really very helpful in this sort of debate.

There's also a ... Brin(?) story about a plague that causes everyone to be altruistic -- sort of the flipside to the paradox of why a parasite should kill off its host... Oh, right, in this case it made people really want to donate blood.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's Brin. "The Giving Plague".

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

Did you see Salon's interview with Dawkins?

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. Do you have a link handy?

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/10/13/dawkins/index.html

You may also be interested in other stuff on similar topics, gathered here:

http://dir.salon.com/topics/atoms_and_eden/

[mrmorse.livejournal.com]

I read Breaking the Spell a couple of weeks ago. I was reading really fast, so I know I missed stuff, so my impressions may not be complete or accurate. Dennett touches the subject of a biological basis for religious belief, but primarily as a subject for more research. He proposes that a biological predisposition towards religion may be a real phenomenon, but also that it may be piggy-backing on more fundamental evolved behaviors. But he also admits that that's his pet theory and the subject needs more research.

The fundamental theme of Breaking the Spell is that religion needs more research, so there you go.