Religion
Anyone who knows me probably also knows that I am an ex-Christian atheist. However, my views on religion are a lot more complex than "God doesn't exist," and I'm not sure if I've ever really put them down in writing.
To start off, I believe in an objective physical universe with no spiritual component, and that human beings are also physical beings with no spiritual component. I believe we can determine the nature of the universe and things therein to an extent via our senses and logical reasoning abilities, but that what we perceive may differ from reality (e.g. optical illusions). Where that happens, we may make mistakes.
It seems to me that religions are obvious myths. Why believe in God and not Santa Claus? Why believe in reincarnation and not unicorns? Why the Abrahamic God, but not Krishna, or vice versa? The amount of evidence for each of these things is equally nonexistent. If you start with the premise that they exist, you can rationalize them, but that is an invalid way of reaching truth. You don't bend the evidence to fit your theories. You look at the evidence logically and scientifically and let it suggest hypotheses which you then test. And personally, I have never seen anything arising from the natural world that suggests any kind of religious tenets at all - not morals, not deities, not ways of life. Not in a falsifiable way.
No, any suggestion of religious tenets comes straight from human brains - written texts, prophecies, dreams, visions, feelings, beliefs, sensations. All of it.
Generally speaking, I believe I am right to be an atheist, and that it is perfectly logical to be an atheist, and that anyone with sufficient intelligence can understand the logical arguments for atheism. At the same time, I know and know of highly intelligent people who are also religious. I'm sure they understand, or at the very least are capable of understanding, everything I understand. It doesn't seem to me that belief or disbelief is necessarily related to intelligence.
And, of course, I myself believe lots of things not rooted in physical reality. For example, although I'm not sure how to accomplish it, I'd love to see the world become more just and equitable. Why? I just think it sounds like a good idea. Nothing in the physical world suggests that human society ought to be just and equitable - in fact you could make the case that it suggests quite the opposite - but I still believe in that.
All human beings believe in something and have some sort of moral system. Without shoulds and oughts, and concepts like responsibility and fairness, would we have laws, courts, or governments? No. Would we function socially the way we do? Unquestionably, we would not. Morality is central to human nature, and every person, theist or atheist, excluding perhaps sociopaths, is moral in some way.
The difference between theists and atheists is that theists contextualize their morality within a relationship with an imaginary being, and atheists do not.
So what I've been wondering is, where in the human mind do gods come from?
I mentioned above that we make mistakes where perception differs from reality. And I do think that's a huge part of it. My example was optical illusions. Well, let's think about a specific illusion - have you ever seen a picture of a white and dark checkered surface with a shadow on part of it, and been surprised to learn that the shadowed light squares are as dark as the dark un-shadowed squares? The reason for that, I imagine, is that human brains don't just take in raw data and leave it at that. Sometimes that takes too long, so the brain takes shortcuts. And sometimes that means getting a good practical result at the expense of objective truth. Our own brains tell us lies, and that may sometimes lead to our believing things that aren't true.
But there's much more to it than that. What fascinates me, personally, and has always fascinated me, is how human brains make connections between concepts. Now, sometimes it's not that mysterious. I see an apple, I associate it with thoughts or concepts or impressions like tasty, snack, nutritious, etc. I can draw very direct, literal, pragmatic lines between those concepts. If I want to eat a small portion of food during the day, it's a snack, and an apple could be one of those snacks. Apples are nutritious and taste good, so they are preferable to some other snacks. These associations help me conduct my everyday business.
Where it gets mysterious is when people associate things that actually are not related to one another in a direct and literal sense. Everyone has seen and participated in these freewheeling, completely impractical, indirect associations through religion, art, or education. I had a Shakespeare class in college wherein the professor associated a bramble-rimmed hole in the ground with a woman's vagina. There's a slight visual similarity and a vaguely comparable functionality between those two things, but they're not really related in a practical sense. They're only related figuratively. And we make these figurative associations all the time.
I think this, like morality, arises from our social nature. Specifically, from communication, because communication requires interpretation. Interpretation requires the ability to sift through multiple ambiguous clues and make connections between them to recreate the meaning intended by the other person.
Religion is sometimes characterized as the way people explained natural phenomena before science. I think that's wrong. I think religion is a way of negotiating with the natural world. We know our actions have social consequences, and we know other people's actions often have consequences for us, and that is the basis of our social interactions and of our attempts at communication. The more skillfully we interact with others, or the better our personal qualities are as seen by others, the better our outcomes are likely to be.
A lot of things happen to us that aren't really a consequence of anyone's actions, so what do we do? We try and use our social skills to try and control our outcomes. We try to interpret ambiguous clues to understand the meaning in them - to understand the intent of whatever mysterious being may control our fate. We try to gain the approval of this being, or live in harmony with it, or whatever we think is best, and thereby make our lives better, or at least make ourselves feel better about our lives.
So that's what I think about religion. It is deeply intertwined with our nature as social creatures. Morality is inescapable for every human being, whether religious or otherwise, but belief in imaginary beings is an unnecessary outgrowth of the application of social techniques to indifferent phenomena.
To start off, I believe in an objective physical universe with no spiritual component, and that human beings are also physical beings with no spiritual component. I believe we can determine the nature of the universe and things therein to an extent via our senses and logical reasoning abilities, but that what we perceive may differ from reality (e.g. optical illusions). Where that happens, we may make mistakes.
It seems to me that religions are obvious myths. Why believe in God and not Santa Claus? Why believe in reincarnation and not unicorns? Why the Abrahamic God, but not Krishna, or vice versa? The amount of evidence for each of these things is equally nonexistent. If you start with the premise that they exist, you can rationalize them, but that is an invalid way of reaching truth. You don't bend the evidence to fit your theories. You look at the evidence logically and scientifically and let it suggest hypotheses which you then test. And personally, I have never seen anything arising from the natural world that suggests any kind of religious tenets at all - not morals, not deities, not ways of life. Not in a falsifiable way.
No, any suggestion of religious tenets comes straight from human brains - written texts, prophecies, dreams, visions, feelings, beliefs, sensations. All of it.
Generally speaking, I believe I am right to be an atheist, and that it is perfectly logical to be an atheist, and that anyone with sufficient intelligence can understand the logical arguments for atheism. At the same time, I know and know of highly intelligent people who are also religious. I'm sure they understand, or at the very least are capable of understanding, everything I understand. It doesn't seem to me that belief or disbelief is necessarily related to intelligence.
And, of course, I myself believe lots of things not rooted in physical reality. For example, although I'm not sure how to accomplish it, I'd love to see the world become more just and equitable. Why? I just think it sounds like a good idea. Nothing in the physical world suggests that human society ought to be just and equitable - in fact you could make the case that it suggests quite the opposite - but I still believe in that.
All human beings believe in something and have some sort of moral system. Without shoulds and oughts, and concepts like responsibility and fairness, would we have laws, courts, or governments? No. Would we function socially the way we do? Unquestionably, we would not. Morality is central to human nature, and every person, theist or atheist, excluding perhaps sociopaths, is moral in some way.
The difference between theists and atheists is that theists contextualize their morality within a relationship with an imaginary being, and atheists do not.
So what I've been wondering is, where in the human mind do gods come from?
I mentioned above that we make mistakes where perception differs from reality. And I do think that's a huge part of it. My example was optical illusions. Well, let's think about a specific illusion - have you ever seen a picture of a white and dark checkered surface with a shadow on part of it, and been surprised to learn that the shadowed light squares are as dark as the dark un-shadowed squares? The reason for that, I imagine, is that human brains don't just take in raw data and leave it at that. Sometimes that takes too long, so the brain takes shortcuts. And sometimes that means getting a good practical result at the expense of objective truth. Our own brains tell us lies, and that may sometimes lead to our believing things that aren't true.
But there's much more to it than that. What fascinates me, personally, and has always fascinated me, is how human brains make connections between concepts. Now, sometimes it's not that mysterious. I see an apple, I associate it with thoughts or concepts or impressions like tasty, snack, nutritious, etc. I can draw very direct, literal, pragmatic lines between those concepts. If I want to eat a small portion of food during the day, it's a snack, and an apple could be one of those snacks. Apples are nutritious and taste good, so they are preferable to some other snacks. These associations help me conduct my everyday business.
Where it gets mysterious is when people associate things that actually are not related to one another in a direct and literal sense. Everyone has seen and participated in these freewheeling, completely impractical, indirect associations through religion, art, or education. I had a Shakespeare class in college wherein the professor associated a bramble-rimmed hole in the ground with a woman's vagina. There's a slight visual similarity and a vaguely comparable functionality between those two things, but they're not really related in a practical sense. They're only related figuratively. And we make these figurative associations all the time.
I think this, like morality, arises from our social nature. Specifically, from communication, because communication requires interpretation. Interpretation requires the ability to sift through multiple ambiguous clues and make connections between them to recreate the meaning intended by the other person.
Religion is sometimes characterized as the way people explained natural phenomena before science. I think that's wrong. I think religion is a way of negotiating with the natural world. We know our actions have social consequences, and we know other people's actions often have consequences for us, and that is the basis of our social interactions and of our attempts at communication. The more skillfully we interact with others, or the better our personal qualities are as seen by others, the better our outcomes are likely to be.
A lot of things happen to us that aren't really a consequence of anyone's actions, so what do we do? We try and use our social skills to try and control our outcomes. We try to interpret ambiguous clues to understand the meaning in them - to understand the intent of whatever mysterious being may control our fate. We try to gain the approval of this being, or live in harmony with it, or whatever we think is best, and thereby make our lives better, or at least make ourselves feel better about our lives.
So that's what I think about religion. It is deeply intertwined with our nature as social creatures. Morality is inescapable for every human being, whether religious or otherwise, but belief in imaginary beings is an unnecessary outgrowth of the application of social techniques to indifferent phenomena.