Theists are Intelligent

[answers]

I'll keep this short, because I am both lazy and

in any case:

(1) Intelligence is pattern recognition mainly, it just is, don't make me quote stuff please. IQ tests and stuff use it. There done, lets move on.

(2) Pattern recognition is evolutionarily benefical. E.g: look henry just got bitten by a snake, look henry is dead. Snake bite bad, I'm going to avoid snakes...

(3) Recognising patterns that are not there is less evolutionarily damaging than ignoring patterns that are there, so evolution has spawned human kind with over active pattern recognition systems. (example thinking there is a pattern/association between dancing and getting rain doesn't hurt anything, but missing the pattern that the berries in the bush were poisonous and killed henry jnr is very damaging).

(4) Seeing patterns where there are none is the core of superstitious behaviour. For example Skinner's birds experiment demonstrated that regular feeding intervals of birds resulted in incorrect pattern recognition. Birds started pecking at the bottom of their cages, or jumping from corner to corner or twirling in circles. Why? Because the food just happened to be given when they were displaying the behaviour and the pattern was recognised but the causal link was false. Prayer, etc... works the same way.

So the big question, why is there religion? How does evolution allow for it?

Because people are intelligent... but still wrong a lot of the time.

 

[Epictetus]

You ought to read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion on this topic. Basically he says there was an evolutionary advantage in listening to you parents and elders. Natural selection developed gullibility in children. So when your mum told you not to swim in the river because there were crocodiles, you survived if you listened to her. The side effect of this gullibility was that when grandma told you there was a sky fairy that controlled the rain, you believed that too.

 

[Yazata]

Good post, Answers. I'm going to expand on it a little and add some of my own ideas.

Theists are Intelligent

Many of them obviously are. Some of the smartest people that I've encountered in my lifetime have been theists. Some of the dumbest too. Atheists are no different.

So the big question, why is there religion?

Probably for reasons not unrelated to why there's art and music.

How does evolution allow for it?

Human beings are intelligent. They ask questions. (If you want to call that 'seeking patterns', that's fine with me.)

And human beings are born pre-optimized to understand and to interact with other human beings. The evolutionary value of that, to animals living in social groups who are dependent on cooperation, should be obvious.

These social instincts include a cognitive ability to 'read' other people, an ability to interpret other people's bodily movements in terms of intentions and motives. We ascribe inner states to other people and interpret their behavior in terms of those inner states.

And it's pretty obvious that human beings are more comfortable and prefer to think in that social mode. College kids love to hang out with their friends and don't experience any difficulty doing it. (Unless they are autistic, perhaps.) But most of them find learning calculus to be a difficult and challenging task. (And not nearly as much fun.) This despite the fact that learning calculus is a far simpler cognitive task than interpreting ordinary language.

My speculation is that if we put it all together, our human propensity to seek patterns, make connections and ask questions, with our propensity to think in a social mode that interprets events as the results of motives, intentions and inner states, we can perhaps explain paleolithic man's tendency to interpret natural events as the actions of hidden invisible conscious agencies. And belief in gods was born...

This kind of theory would make the belief in gods sort of an "unintended consequence" (there I go anthropomorphizing, it's hard to avoid it) of cognitive abilities that have obvious evolutionary selective value when employed in other contexts.

Because people are intelligent... but still wrong a lot of the time.

Yes. I agree.

 

[river]

but not intelligent enough , because they take the bible as all there is to know about god

the bible is not enough to understand god(s)

 

[Sarkus]

Or enough to possibly understand that there is no God?

 

[arauca]

I'll keep this short, because I am both lazy and

in any case:

(1) Intelligence is pattern recognition mainly, it just is, don't make me quote stuff please. IQ tests and stuff use it. There done, lets move on.

(2) Pattern recognition is evolutionarily benefical. E.g: look henry just got bitten by a snake, look henry is dead. Snake bite bad, I'm going to avoid snakes...

(3) Recognising patterns that are not there is less evolutionarily damaging than ignoring patterns that are there, so evolution has spawned human kind with over active pattern recognition systems. (example thinking there is a pattern/association between dancing and getting rain doesn't hurt anything, but missing the pattern that the berries in the bush were poisonous and killed henry jnr is very damaging).

(4) Seeing patterns where there are none is the core of superstitious behaviour. For example Skinner's birds experiment demonstrated that regular feeding intervals of birds resulted in incorrect pattern recognition. Birds started pecking at the bottom of their cages, or jumping from corner to corner or twirling in circles. Why? Because the food just happened to be given when they were displaying the behaviour and the pattern was recognised but the causal link was false. Prayer, etc... works the same way.

So the big question, why is there religion? How does evolution allow for it?

Because people are intelligent... but still wrong a lot of the time.

Just like the priest who started the theory of Big Bang , Was he wrong ? or is he wrong , he was a theist

 

[river]

Or enough to possibly understand that there is no God?

oh there is a god Sarkus

its just that its rather complicated

 

[arauca]

You ought to read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion on this topic. Basically he says there was an evolutionary advantage in listening to you parents and elders. Natural selection developed gullibility in children. So when your mum told you not to swim in the river because there were crocodiles, you survived if you listened to her. The side effect of this gullibility was that when grandma told you there was a sky fairy that controlled the rain, you believed that too.

Is Richard Dawkins intelligent ? I believe his father was a missionary , ir something like that , then he become super-intelligent because he become an atheist ? , and so was Darwin he was a religious person

 

[river]

Is Richard Dawkins intelligent ? I believe his father was a missionary , ir something like that , then he become super-intelligent because he become an atheist ? , and so was Darwin he was a religious person

arauca

the only intelligent theists are the one's that explore the Ancient past , back to Sumer

 

[spidergoat]

I'll keep this short, because I am both lazy and

in any case:

(1) Intelligence is pattern recognition mainly, it just is, don't make me quote stuff please. IQ tests and stuff use it. There done, lets move on.

(2) Pattern recognition is evolutionarily benefical. E.g: look henry just got bitten by a snake, look henry is dead. Snake bite bad, I'm going to avoid snakes...

(3) Recognising patterns that are not there is less evolutionarily damaging than ignoring patterns that are there, so evolution has spawned human kind with over active pattern recognition systems. (example thinking there is a pattern/association between dancing and getting rain doesn't hurt anything, but missing the pattern that the berries in the bush were poisonous and killed henry jnr is very damaging).

(4) Seeing patterns where there are none is the core of superstitious behaviour. For example Skinner's birds experiment demonstrated that regular feeding intervals of birds resulted in incorrect pattern recognition. Birds started pecking at the bottom of their cages, or jumping from corner to corner or twirling in circles. Why? Because the food just happened to be given when they were displaying the behaviour and the pattern was recognised but the causal link was false. Prayer, etc... works the same way.

So the big question, why is there religion? How does evolution allow for it?

Because people are intelligent... but still wrong a lot of the time.

I would only add that it's not simply patterns, but living agents that we suspect. I agree that theism may be a natural result of how evolution has wired us. I certainly agree that theists can be very intelligent people.

 

[kx000]

Religion serves the fearful, and the hopeless. And those who lie to themselves....

 

[spidergoat]

Severs?

 

[Tero]

Our brains are programmed to observe humans. We look for intent, purpose and lies.

We then extend this purpose to weather, volcanoes etc.

We also make quick decisions, we have to. In that we take short cuts. Like the Monty Hall question

 

[river]

Severs?

religion certainly severs Humanity into this or that religion

and when it comes to crunch time , one religion aganist another , will kill another because any will think that they are closer to god than the other

we see this going on now

 

[arauca]

arauca

the only intelligent theists are the one's that explore the Ancient past , back to Sumer

I am not as intelligent as you can you explain what do you mean ?

 

[river]

“ Originally Posted by river
arauca

the only intelligent theists are the one's that explore the Ancient past , back to Sumer

I am not as intelligent as you can you explain what do you mean ?

looking into the Ancient past gives you and others the chance to find the truth

you will understand when you start to learn

for example read the Earth Chronicles by Zecharia Sitchin it is a start , I've read other books , but its a good start

 

[arauca]

looking into the Ancient past gives you and others the chance to find the truth

you will understand when you start to learn

for example read the Earth Chronicles by Zecharia Sitchin it is a start , I've read other books , but its a good start

Because you read someones opinion that makes you smart, by the way who Sitchin . there is plenty of information , beside I have to follow some ones point of view.
So Sumerian left clay clay tablet and some of their life style an dome history . But who is to say that the fellow who translated their writing os completely write in its translation , and perhaps he left also some of his own opinion.
Look I read some biblical passage in several languages and I see some slight difference . So should I believe one mans translation frim an obscure language written in pictures , which is hard to make connection( make sentences ) that be the truth . I must be stupid.

 

[Yazata]

Zecharia Sitchin (he died in 2010 at the age of 90) was a history crank.

See Here.

He was the author of a whole series of books that told a 'Stargate SG-1' style story in which the ancient Sumerian gods were really space aliens. These aliens supposedly created humans out of apes with genetic engineering or something, then blew themselves up in a nuclear war about 3,000 BCE.

Sitchin argued for his imaginative theories on the basis of his own equally imaginative readings of ancient Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform tablets.

 

[Rav]

So the big question, why is there religion? How does evolution allow for it?

In a nutshell, religious beliefs are a byproduct of the evolution of the hominid brain. Specifically, the large surface area of the human neocortex is almost certainly the result of selective pressures to become better able to deal with the challenges of social interaction, and the components of religious belief use the same neural circuits that mediate the resulting high order social cognitive functions (see Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief by D Kapogiannis. PDF available here). Further, once primitive religious beliefs did begin to appear, they may have provided some sort of survival advantage in and of themselves, and so were possibly specifically selected for.

Dawkins offers the following perspective on the human tendency to project agency:

The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blameworthiness. Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it's hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we're trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate

Trace any monotheistic religion back far enough, and you'll find polytheistic roots, or at least strong evidence of such. Since recorded history only goes back about 6000 years, we can only guess at what things looked like before then. But it seems clear that monotheism is ultimately the end result of the evolution of more primitive religious ideas. Once we stopped running around in small hunter gatherer groups and settled into larger communities (see Neolithic Revolution), we had a greater opportunity to bring our considerable collective intellects to bear on the greater questions of existence. The finer details were hashed out and subjected to intellectual peer review and popular opinion, on a scale and to an extent that had never been possible before. And with the eventual development of written language, we began to record these more formalized and highly evolved ideas. Fast forward many thousands of years and we end up with sophisticated and compelling metaphysical frameworks, moral/ethical systems, and wisdom concerning the human condition. But if the neolithic revolution (or something like it) had never happened, we wouldn't have any of it.

But getting back to what Dawkins said, there is certainly one thing that is in essence synonymous with God, and that is the mystery of existence itself, and it doesn't show any signs of going away anytime soon. As much as science uncovers the underlying mechanics, it also uncovers underlying mysteries. For as long as this is true (and it may always be so), and for as long as human beings are what they are, our collective natural tendency will be to personify this mystery, because that's just how we're wired to model things. And this is why religion can be so appealing to people. It essentially expertly hijacks our social cognitive mechanisms to create a compelling anthropomorphization of a great mystery.



If I had to develop a theistic perspective on all this however, the only one that would seem tenable to me would be some sort of theistic evolution. While I'm certainly not an evolutionary biologist, I know far too much about evolution now to seriously doubt it. Further, although I'm not a historian, I've learned too much about the history of religion to deny that it is indeed an evolution of human thought, or at least that such a position is perfectly consistent with what we see today. But none of this means that some sort of god can't, or doesn't exist. So my theistic view (call it, what Rav would likely think if he was a theist again) would be that God is essentially an unknown quantity, but that our differing personifications and varied conceptions of the related metaphysics, while inaccurate (probably wildly so), are a consequence of some primal or inherent recognition of that which gave us being, since a creation is necessarily a reflection of some aspect of the creator.

 

[Sarkus]

oh there is a god Sarkus

its just that its rather complicated

Yep - you've convinced me!

(1) Intelligence is pattern recognition mainly, it just is, don't make me quote stuff please. IQ tests and stuff use it. There done, lets move on.

Yep - let's swiftly gloss over an entire debate over what intelligence is or isn't.
Pattern recognition is certainly viewed as an aspect of intelligence, but I wouldn't necessarily think it is the main part. But that's another debate.

(2) Pattern recognition is evolutionarily benefical.

For the larger animals, sure. But fungi, bacteria, plants etc, who are arguably far more evolutinarily successful than any animal, have little use for pattern recognition.

(3) Recognising patterns that are not there is less evolutionarily damaging than ignoring patterns that are there, so evolution has spawned human kind with over active pattern recognition systems.

I disagree to an extent. It's not a case of spotting patterns that aren't there... they are there - at least during the period of observation - that's why they're spotted in the first instance.
The key is in understanding which are causal and which are not - as you alluded to later.
Other animals, such as birds, dogs etc - can all be taught to recognise certain patterns (e.g. Pavlov's dog)... but I would say that most animals tend to ignore patterns, whether they perceive them or not, causal or not, that have no immediate bearing on their survival.
Humans don't. It is not because we are over-active in our pattern-recognition system but because we are just generally able to view a scope wider than our survival.

(4) Seeing patterns where there are none is the core of superstitious behaviour.

That's one view. Personally I would say the core is not in the seeing of the pattern (that did exist although non-causally) but in failing to accept the lack of causality when it is shown that there is none.
And superstitions are reinforced each time there is mere correlation... i.e. they see the pattern when it exist (as correlation) and ignore it when there is none.
This view is not disagreeing with you, so much as a different perspective on the issue.

So the big question, why is there religion? How does evolution allow for it?

Evolution allows for many things... such as wearing clothes, television etc. It is more a matter that evolution has nothing against such endeavours as religion.
It is likely just a by-product of numerous survival mechanisms of the past - such as recognising patterns but also curiosity, society etc.