On God, still

November 1, 2006 in links, on..., science, thought

Even since I read a post over at Wandering Apricot about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion I’ve been thinking a lot about both religion’s (and religious organizations’) role in society and the role religious beliefs must play in understanding the mind. Apparently, for some reason, this is on the minds of other WordPress bloggers as well (including some pretty fierce debate over at this blog about evangelism and even the possibility of the existence of a God).

Recently, I mentioned an article by Paul Bloom about a cognitive/evolutionary basis for religious and superstitious belief. It’s a good, easy read that will probably be interesting to anyone that cares to read it, given that having an opinion on religion is hard to escape. What follows after the break was originally conceived as a response to Apricot’s comment, but it was getting long enough to warrant it’s own post.

I think the reason I like the Bloom article so much is that it is a step in the direction of validating religious beliefs through scientific arguments, or, in this case at least, philosophical arguments coming from a respected scientist whose work generally involves turning philosophical arguments into scientific studies. And at least in my interpretation of his argument, superstitious belief isn’t so much a “misfire” but a wonderful example of exaptation, when something that evolved for one purpose (to understand and deal with people) came to be used for something entirely different (to understand and deal with other similarly complex, large scale phenomena, like “life itself” or “existence”).

New Athieism seeks to deny the reality and validity of any sort of superstitious or religious belief, but these beliefs are at the center of how we experience the world and ourselves, no less than reason and rationality are. This sort of denial is much the same as the denial of rationality in favor of religious belief (or doctrine) that characterizes the most extreme and dangerous forms of religious conviction. The problems with an over-reliance on “rationality” is that we as individuals and groups of individuals are incapable of simply knowing enough to be able to make every decision rationally, so we need some other basis on which to interpret things and make decisions.

I’m not so sure that one can equate extreme rationality with New Atheism, but I think the preceding argument is a good step in the direction of a refutation of that doctrine. We can’t just excise superstition and religion from our worldviews like we can cut a cancerous lesion out of the body, because, according to Bloom, superstition and religion (in all their forms) are more like the liver than a tumor: prone to failure and malfunction but still essential.