Article: "Why Is Religion Natural?"

[Blake]

Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily (http://aldaily.com), I recently ran across this article (http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-03/religion.html) which perhaps many of you have already seen but I had not. I found its argument against frequent atheist critiques of religion compelling (e.g., "religion thrives through the suspension of rational thought"), and its positing that religious belief "consists of by-products of normal mental functioning" intriguing, particularly since if true it would helpfully inform dialogues between the devout and the irreligious.

[viscousmemories]

Thanks for the link, Blake. I meant to read this when you posted it, but I just now found the time. (Well okay, the time for half the article. I'm cursed with an inability to read with anything resembling speed, and now I'm sleepy.)

I found this chunk very intriguing:

Most Christians would describe their notion of God in terms of transcendence and extraordinary physical and mental characteristics. God is everywhere, attends to everything at the same time. However, subtle experimental tasks reveal that, when they are not reflecting upon their own beliefs, these same people use another concept of God, as a human-like agent with a particular viewpoint, a particular position and serial attention. God considers one problem and then another. Now that concept is mostly tacit. It drives people's thoughts about particular events, episodes of interaction with God, but it is not accessible to people as "their belief." In other words, people do not believe what they believe they believe.

[Clutch Munny]

I think both of the following are true:

- Religion thrives through errors in reasoning. (Which may or may not be what "the suspension of rational thought" amounts to.)

- Religiosity comprises by-products of normal mental functioning.

There's only a tension if one holds that extremely careful thinking is normal, or that normality entails desirability.

Religion is natural, because the biases that undergird it are natural -- indeed, innate for the most part. It is identifying these biases, and self-monitoring to detect them, that is grossly unnatural. And hard. Anyone figures out how to make it easy, give me shout.

[HelenM]

I found this chunk very intriguing:

Most Christians would describe their notion of God in terms of transcendence and extraordinary physical and mental characteristics. God is everywhere, attends to everything at the same time. However, subtle experimental tasks reveal that, when they are not reflecting upon their own beliefs, these same people use another concept of God, as a human-like agent with a particular viewpoint, a particular position and serial attention. God considers one problem and then another. Now that concept is mostly tacit. It drives people's thoughts about particular events, episodes of interaction with God, but it is not accessible to people as "their belief." In other words, people do not believe what they believe they believe.

I haven't read the whole article, but simply responding to the quote:

I question the conclusion that people do not believe what they believe they believe. Conservative Christian teaching is that God is transcendent with extraodinary physical and mental characteristics yet relates to human believers as a human-like agent with serial attention. It's not an either/or in conservative Christian teaching.

I suspect faulty metholodogy - my guess is that the experimenters simply didn't ask the right questions and that the right questions would have revealed that those theists were indeed aware of how they perceive God relating to them as they go through their day.

Helen

[viscousmemories]

I question the conclusion that people do not believe what they believe they believe. Conservative Christian teaching is that God is transcendent with extraodinary physical and mental characteristics yet relates to human believers as a human-like agent with serial attention. It's not an either/or in conservative Christian teaching.
Well, let me preface this by saying that I was raised as a Christian, so when I said that block of text was 'intriguing' I meant that it struck a chord in me personally. When I think back to the time that I believed in the Christian God (until around 20 years old) I remember conceptualizing Him not as an omni-God, but as kind of a superman with a particular viewpoint and position.

I know the value of anecdotal evidence and I'm not trying to use my experience to prove anything, just saying that it seems reasonable to me to suspect that most people (believer in God or not) cannot easily wrap their mind around the concept of an 'impartial' omni-God.

I suspect faulty metholodogy - my guess is that the experimenters simply didn't ask the right questions and that the right questions would have revealed that those theists were indeed aware of how they perceive God relating to them as they go through their day.
I didn't interpret the comment as "theists aren't aware of how they perceive God relating to them" as much as "theists aren't aware of the fact that how they perceive God relating to them contradicts the nature of an omni-God". Which isn't to say I think your conclusion is wrong, but that claim seems at least intuitively reasonable to me.