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Why do you believe in random chance instead of God?" asked the uninvited Instant Message a few weeks ago.
"Well, He's real, and He saved my life" they added, despite my standard response that evolution was not atheism or fully random, and then went on to confess, "Until I let Jesus into my life, I was lost. I shot dope into my arm every day and stole and lied. I was a scumbag."
I get IM's like this almost everyday, although the one above caught my attention and tugged at my heartstrings more than most. Normally, I would launch into a discussion about the evidence for God, or the evidence for evolution, and hit hard on the fact that evolution does not equate to atheism. I would attempt to engage them politely but truthfully on those matters.
But in this case I thought, why bother? This person, assuming they're not lying, seems to be better off with religion than without. And if creationism is a vital component of that faith, then who am I to disrupt it?
Well, maybe there is a good reason to disrupt the creationism portion. Maybe there isn't. We've seen a lot of discussion of religion. It's an inevitable consequence of discussing our primary topic. Should creationism cause concern for our modern culture? You be the judge...
I gather it's often inferred that atheists such as myself see no value in religion. Atheism incidentally is not about why you believe in a deity, it's about why should I believe your belief is valid?
I can't speak for other atheists, but I'd be willing to speculate that some of them feel the way I do. Value is too loaded a term for the purposes of my essay, so I'll use the word utility instead. And I see plenty of utility in religion. Whether that utility is of value or not is a subjective call which can depend a great deal upon which end of the paradigm one find's oneself.
But culturally, of course religion has had immense utility! And much (I would argue all) of this usefulness exists regardless if the underlying supernatural deities really exist or not. I'm sure we can all think of the obvious ways.
An afterlife reduces anxiety over things we cannot control such as death and suffering. A reward in the afterlife for following a set of defined rules promotes cultural harmony, just as effectively perhaps as a punishment for violating those rules discourages the negative complementary behavior.
When Marx said "Religion is the opiate of the masses" I don't think he was being cynical or condescending. I'd update that phrase to read: Religion is the Demerol, prozac, and valium of the people. And, sometimes, people need those drugs desperately.
Anecdotal anthropomorphic stories of the deity(s) nature and modus operandi fits in handily with human intuition and lends meaning to the universe in terms that humans can comprehend. Thus the seemingly inhospitable, indifferent, universe is less intimidating, more comfortable, a little smaller, and makes more sense. That's not necessarily a bad thing at all.
On another front, religion can produce cooperation across kin-bonded groups. It provides and effective separation between 'us' and 'them.'
This is no small feat, but it is a double edged sword. Cooperation across kin bonds is not something humans do easily. Our primate heritage has seen to that by leaving us with evolutionary baggage making such cooperation challenging. Common religion, just as common language or common dress, smoothes over this differential. And large scale cooperation provides very real and immediate benefits in competing with rival human clan/groups who cannot do the same. Witness the devastating effects when civilized Europeans encountered paleo-indian and Neolithic new-world societies. The indigenous populations didn't stand a chance.
Sincerely believing in an afterlife, and in supernatural, inescapable, justice, would certainly make charging a machine gun nest full of enemies more palatable to a foot soldier. It makes suicide attacks possible. And if you happen be a surviving member of the culture who benefits from these activities, it provides a sort of cultural advantage over rival groups who do not posses it.
Apologetics and rationalization of murder, genocide, and theft, helps make decimating heathen stone age societies, or any society, morally acceptable. Destroying competition and coveting the treasure of rival groups is a gain for the dominant culture. So, just as an advantageous genetic trait can foster a differential in mortality/fertility and be preferentially selected for, an advantageous religious meme can lend the same effect to a culture/tribe.
But some anthropologists, neurologists, and psychologists, feel there is more to the utility of religion than just some of these obvious points I've briefly covered. Much, much, more. Religion could be symptomatic of the advantageous differential anatomically modern humans held over their arguably less cognitive, close, hominid cousins. Religion could be an outgrowth of something which makes us fully human. The propensity to believe...
Religion reflects a propensity to believe in humans. You can't believe in something you can't detect, unless you can first imagine it. This applies to both fairies and neutrinos, to Big Bangs and Noachian Floods.
We take such mental operations as imagination for granted, but we don't know if our hominid peers could use their imaginations with the same degree of versatility. And this propensity to suspect and accept unseen cause and effect drives not only religion, it drives investigation; and thus ultimately, all of science. This propensity has provided a powerful selective advantage in both those venues. It leads to both religion and innovation. Both represent greater control of sorts over the universe.
As modern humans, we can compartmentalize and then dissolve those compartmental walls, letting the ideas freely mix with such unconscious ease we scarcely think about it. We tend to criticize compartmentalization as a purely negative thing, allowing egregious acts to take place with no remorse or second thoughts. When in fact, compartmentalization is essential. The human mind must be able to keep conflicting factoids away from each other, or it might be paralyzed with anxiety and indecision. If you considered the very real possibility that your car was being stolen out of the parking lot at work every second, or that a plane might crash into your home any minute, you would have a very hard time getting anything done.
Compartmentalization allows us to function on a daily basis by avoiding such anxiety. I strongly suspect our hominid cousins and early ancestors could compartmentalize. They certainly had even more need to do so, if anything.
Some folks even speculate that early hominids compartmentalized so well, that they could not concentrate on two things at once. That compartmentalization preceded innovation. That our modern ability to dissolve the compartments is new or enhanced in extant Hsaps.
The classic example being tool making. A neander could consciously make a stone tool, but he could not consciously daydream at the same time. This is an intriguing possibility, but it's also something we may never know.
Some scientists speculate that migraine headaches and what we normally consider as mental disease, i.e., schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. just to name a few candidates, are not diseases at all in the colloquial meaning of the term; but the price paid for by the few for the ability of the many to unite our compartmental fields of cognitive thought. Perhaps, because of neuro-morphological variation, some humans cannot turn off or mitigate their enhanced internal parallel processing, or the processing runs away with itself on corrupted data/stimuli. A poor analogue might be the immune system. Because of variation, some people's immune system cannot distinguish internal structures and benign substances from pathogenic infections. They're trigger happy, and thus attack and destroy healthy tissue. The result can be anything from hay fever to Lupus. Perhaps a similar price is paid by a few unlucky individuals for our widespread ability to intellectualize.
Other have raised the specter that millennia of religious indoctrination, and most especially the systematic culling of out-spoken critics, has dulled one leg of the invesitigative method; the critical analysis portion at least. The investigation and rational analysis portion might be removed or reduced. And, if those behaviors could be linked substantively to a heritable suite of traits, they might be right.
The chilling end result of that evolutionary experiment might be a human population composed of mostly credulous 'tards. People unable to exercise their critical thinking skills ... because they don't have them, or they have a vestigial, undeveloped, version. With a few elite rulers who hold the intellectual advantage of careful, critical, planning skills, over their less fortunate subjects. In this scenario, the average person is not able to utilize critical thinking skills because they don't have any. They're hard wired from the get go and subsequently enculturated to not have them. And, if you try to explain it to them, you'll have about as much success as explaining color to a blind-man born without a visual cortex.
It's a little tin foil hattish I know. But it does explains the wide spread acceptance of unfounded belief in unseen supernatural causes. Astrology, creationism, voodoo, etc., ad nausea.
If any of these speculations hold a shred of accuracy, then we as a species are in big, big, trouble. Us Vs Them was useful, very useful, right up until the advent of modern warfare. It now plausibly spells the demise of modern civilization and possibly the extinction of the human race. Weapons of Mass Destruction are far more likely to be used by individuals who perceive they're acting in accordance with the Will of the head deity, to hell with the consequences to this temporary planet. Off the wall justification and promises of immortal paradise based on the interpreted revelations of the divine deity are easily swallowed by a population of credulous 'tards. And that population is more likely to followup with additional destruction if so misleadingly motivated.
It is for this reason that I draw the line between what I arbitrarily call rational theists and irrational theists. It isn't a game with me. The former I can live with, despite disagreement over the validity of the underlying supernatural beings. The latter cannot peacefully coexist with anybody outside of the theistically bonded group. It isn't a game because those rival, intolerant groups are happily marching the human race to oblivion with us rational skeptics and rational theists helplessly attached.
In reality the deities proposed by religious groups are absurd caricatures of an archtypical alpha human male, or alpha human fertile female, in most cases. I find that idea highly unlikely, even though the religion itself may have conferred some value at some point regardless.
I don't know which faction will prevail, the rational or the irrational. Only time will tell. But I must admit, I fear we're in for a long hard slog through radioactive, poisonous, and infected, future biomes. What do you think?