Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-12-2008

[andrewducker]

• Why do we believe?
  Fascinating piece looking at the evidence that human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena, and they they do so as an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Highly Recommended.
  (tags: religion philosophy psychology science)
• The State of the Web - Summer 2008
  Very funny image. Especially the bit about the internet being under attack
  (tags: 2008 web2.0 funny art internet)

Comments

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Starting out with the claim that 'nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe' really rubs me up the wrong way, but I guess I can stand to read on anyway...

[andrewducker]

Much as I dislike it, it is pretty much true. The overwhelming majority of the planet does believe in souls, afterlives and divine creation stories.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

'Overwhelming majority' would have annoyed me much less than 'nearly everyone'. Based on this around 22% probably don't believe in most of those things. The 'theistic but non-religious' 8% may or may not believe in a soul, afterlife, divine creation and/or miracles, but I'd hazard a guess that most don't, and the same goes for Buddhists (and a significant proportion of Hindus, come to think of it). Even if that leaves us with 90% believing in those things (and I'd guess it's more like 80 or 85%) that's not what I'd call 'nearly everyone'.

[andrewducker]

The 'theistic but non-religious' 8% may or may not believe in a soul, afterlife, divine creation and/or miracles, but I'd hazard a guess that most don't, and the same goes for Buddhists (and a significant proportion of Hindus, come to think of it).

Buddhists have Karma and Rebirth - thus souls. They don't, admittedly, have a creator myth.

Hindus have Brahma and Vishnu - as well as Brahman.

Theistic people by definition believe in a god or gods.

It's not, I agree, as universal as the article makes out.

[cosmolinguist]

I found it impossible to get past the introduction because it spent most of its time in attempts at justifying why Americans are right to believe in God (or whatever) and it's only those Europeans that are weirdos.

But having just read this yesterday, I find this article disturbingly close to having a point.

[andrewducker]

Interesting. I didn't see it as justifying that Americans were _right_ - I saw it as reframing things by showing that their attitude was more common. The article, as a whole, certainly isn't pro-religion.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Seems like a lot of conjecture to me.

How would you find two groups of infants to do a properly controlled experiment with, rather than just picking studies which suit your case.

Reading the article, we might say people have a predisposition to look for meaningful patterns in the world, but that you might have a group of infants / children for whom these patterns were then explained without reference to divine / supernatural phenomena, and which would then lead to the formation of a different understanding and culture / society that could become ingrained in the way religions have. (Then again, isn't this what civil religions of the state or party try to do anyway, but usually finding it easier to co-opt already existing belief systems.)

[andrewducker]

How would you find two groups of infants to do a properly controlled experiment with, rather than just picking studies which suit your case.

The experiments with children showing that they ascribe intentionality are very common, and have been carried out all over the place. It's not one experiment on one group of them.

And I don't think it's about _meaninful_ patterns - it's about ascribing intentionality to non-intentional objects. Seeing dumb matter as having reasons for doing things, rather than it being purely reactive. This is incredibly common, and trans-cultural.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

How far is there a common ground between meaningfulness and intentionality? I'm thinking of something like 'fire burns' - making the constant meaningful connection between fire and burns probably matters more in terms of continued well-being than whether the fire burns because god intended it to do so or other explanation.

We - i.e. adults with a rational, scientific type world view - might still refer to the 'intentionality' of objects even as a vestige, as with the dumb computer that doesn't do what I tell it to, or resistentialism.

[andrewducker]

How far is there a common ground between meaningfulness and intentionality? I'm thinking of something like 'fire burns' - making the constant meaningful connection between fire and burns probably matters more in terms of continued well-being than whether the fire burns because god intended it to do so or other explanation.

Absolutely - but the point of the article was that children, worldwide, ascribe intentionality to everything, whether it has it or not. And a lot of people do carry that forward - hence ideas like karma, animism, etc.