Although William James and others have argued at length for the functions religious belief accomplishes, it seems to me at the moment, that the question looks at the matter upside down. The question is whether we have any function within the context of being itself. And of course the short answer is that nobody knows.
The function of theories is something entirely within the scope of human purposes. So one need not look any further for an answer about that.
As far as what I said being a theory, I don’t think of it as such. It might be more aptly considered a worldview or what Charles Taylor calls a cosmic imaginary, or what Martin Heidegger characterized as an existential understanding. I fully recognize that other people see it in different ways, and I have no problem with that in general.
Is anyone’s worldview the final adequate one? I doubt it. Scientific discoveries change what we know about the universe all the time. And our personal and social experiences do the same for us as individuals. So here we are discussing how we see things. It seems like a reasonable thing to do for people who are interested in this sort of thing. Not everybody is.
The story of Abraham and Isaac in the OT gives the quintessential example of faith as realized when it was written. I would approach the story from an evolutionary point of view, not as exegesis as Kierkegaard wrote about it. Primitive times meant a primitive view of God, one that might put you to the test, Obedience in those days was seen as loyalty. (See the original sin concept,)
I am not very fond of most of the OT. It describes a God Dawkins characterizes as evil in the God Delusion. It’s a pity that Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk attack the very fundamentalist God many modern Christians are trying to, in their evolving searches, outgrow. It is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, We see that here and in other threads, It is insensitivity to the full complexity of being human.
What can be said about evolving humans that does not take into account our existential awareness and the continuation of archetypes?
Is what is deep within us too shadowy for comment? Or does our inner knowing lose something of itself when exposed to the light of consciousness?
I proposed early on that the experience of being involved in evolution translates into myth and continues to evolve as conscious memes. That among these myths is a recognition of a Creator. To deny this is to dismiss centuries of philosophical and religious ideas. These ideas had to come from somewhere.
Of course now you’re talking about the evolution of the concept of God not evolution in the sense of natural selection. Karen Armstrong and Robert Wright have traced this evolution in their books the History of God and the Evolution of God respectively.
From the standpoint of cultural evolution, the Abraham and Isaac story can be viewed as representing that moment when the nation of Israel rejected human sacrifice as a norm. In the story Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son. It was God who provided the sacrificial animal. And animal sacrifice played a huge part in the Hebrew religion until 70 AD when the temple at Jerusalem was destroyed. Barbaric from a modern perspective. But here we are with our factory farms.
The Hebrew Bible can be read as the history of God evolving conceptually from a local tribal God to the God of the universe. The clash of cultures then as now is a powerful stimulus that evokes that transformative process. None more than the encounter between the Greeks and the Jews during the Hellenistic period following Alexander’s conquest. That produced the synthesis that has dominated Western culture ever since.
It’s a good question. I think focusing on Ultimate Reality produces a shift from an egocentric POV to one of ultimate concern. You see that in religious people but you also see it in people of purely scientific orientation. Like Richard Dawkins who said that reality is ultimately a mystery but he rejects religion as the best means available for understanding that mystery. His dedication to his belief in science as the means for pursuing ultimate concern is shown in his by his evangelistic campaign advocating the supplanting of religion by a scientific worldview.
Incidentally Dowd includes a letter from Richard Dawkins to his daughter as an appendix to his book “Thank God for Evolution”. Since Dawkins gave his permission for Dowd to include it, I suppose he must have been at least tacitly supportive of Dowd’s message.
Felix,
Doesn’t the evolution of a concept, a meme, depend on the parallel evolution of the brain/mind? I realize that God does not evolve, yet our ideas about God do evolve as do our brain/minds.
Jaynes suggests that the ancient Greek Gods died out to the mind because of brain development toward use of the left brain.
Is this an example of logic trumping belief-- when Greek philosophy became more important than Greek religion-- with physical underpinnings for both?
The brain capacity for thought and language would have to be there for the change to occur. But it seems highly unlikely that the cognitive shift from myth to philosophy was the result of natural selection.
Natural selection is much slower process. And what would link of a shift from religion to philosophy to survival and reproduction?
So the shift might be more simply explained in terms of cultural evolution which is the province of the social science theory. Does it correlate with a shift in neural activity in brain centers?
Perhaps. It seems to correlate with the shift from oral to written culture. But, how would you test that hypothesis?
Are there any oral cultural people left to put under a functional PET scan for comparison? It’s an experimental design challenge.
Felix,
I brought up the Jaynes theory in an attempt to shy away from the tendency of philosophy to branch out into ephemeral abstractions and religion to fall into he said/she said endless controversy. In other words I’m looking for natural, physical evidence of brain/mind producing consciousness that translates into mental interpretations of the physical experience of change. Have you read about Paul MacLean’s theory of the triune brain?
Thinking of Phineas Gage, I got off on a tangent about the origins of consciousness. Please ignore my last two posts.
Back to business, the question arises-- does the word God explain where we came from and why we are here? Not all in science would answer in the negative.
Some scientists seem to think that there is experiential evidence that something of what it means to be human lies in the ultimate mystery of existence and can be encountered. What seems to irritate other, more radical scientists is belief that the word God explains only humanity’s inhumanity to man, citing the radical schisms in religion that produce wars and witch hunts. But these is much more to belief in God than that–there is the human need for meaning, which the belief satisfies. If this were not the case the God religions would have died off centuries ago. It has been said that if there was no God, we would invent one.
For answer to the question, if you’re serious, probably your best or at least quickest bet is psychedelics like psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, or ayahuasca. Although not for everybody, and certainly not the only way to experience God, they often produce experiences of the numinous or the divine.
I mean talking about what an orgasm is like to someone who’s never had one is an exercise in futility. And a rational description or definition of an orgasm will never replace the real thing.
Insanity is illegal defense wherein the accused claims that he or she was unable to discern the difference between right and wrong in the commission of a capital crime. Beyond that it’s become a descriptor that people use for things they find incomprehensible. “That’s insane” they exclaim when they are shocked by the latest news. The exclamation explains nothing.
Possibly my favourite drug alongside MDMA. But I’d not base a divine ontological theory on their effects.
In fact I’ve probably taken as many or more different drugs than most; my only serious exception being heroin.
Have you tasted the delights of mushies?