Article: 78367 of alt.atheism Newsgroups: alt.atheism Path: lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk!warwick!news.dcs.warwick.ac.uk!simon From: simon@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Simon Clippingdale) Subject: Alleged need for religion (was: Great Truths) Message-ID: <1994May19.180129.28629@dcs.warwick.ac.uk> Sender: news@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Network News) Nntp-Posting-Host: nin Organization: Department of Computer Science, Warwick University, England References: <2r1fnn$4iv@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> <2r2t4s$4q6@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu> Date: Thu, 19 May 1994 18:01:29 GMT Lines: 275 In article <2r2t4s$4q6@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu> ptolemy@next12csc.wam.umd.edu (Matt Colvin) writes: > This is *not* an argument from wishful thinking. It's a suggestion that > maybe we have a basic need (not a wish; there is a difference) for a God. > And a suggestion that perhaps that need is an *indication* (for the last > time -- not a proof!) of God's existence. At the risk of re-posting an old article for the second time, I shall re-post an old article for the second time. (My defence is that the first re-post was on one of Stan's threads and so most people won't have seen it; also, I'm too busy to bang all this stuff in afresh.) It addresses Matt's suggestion that there may be some basic need for god/s, and argues that this `need' is wrongly inferred from the observed prevalence of theism. ******************************* cut here ************************************** Newsgroups: alt.atheism From: simon@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Simon Clippingdale) Subject: Re: Occam's Razor and the need for religion (long) Message-ID: <1994Jan9.165211.16512@dcs.warwick.ac.uk> Organization: Department of Computer Science, Warwick University, England References: <940105.21266.ROBINSUE@delphi.com> Date: Sun, 9 Jan 1994 16:52:11 GMT This got sort of long. Those who don't want rakes of evidence for memetic transmission of religion are advised to cut to the chase. In article youngn@logica.co.uk (Nicholas Young) writes: > Looking at the perceived "need for religion", various people (atheists or > agnostics presumably) find psychological, biological, social, etc. > explanations. Compare this type of answer with the theist one that the need > for religion is there because we are created to have a relationship with > God. How do you apply Occam's razor to this case? Which theory is more > "likely" - has the greater probability because it is less complex? Does > O.R. have anything to say here at all? What does it say? I don't think this is a case for O.R. yet, although I'll get there by the last line of the post. We can do better in this case, because there is observable evidence -- namely the patterns of distribution of, and variation among, religious beliefs -- which IMHO strongly supports the claim that social mechanisms are responsible for the transmission or inheritance of those beliefs. You might say that this isn't the same question as explaining the "need" for religious belief, rather than its mode of transmission, and I would agree. But the "need" is *inferred* from the observed patterns of belief (actually from some small part of them, ie. the general prevalence of belief) by believers who then go further and ascribe the supposed "need" to a deity, invariably their own. The "need" isn't an observation itself, and it's the *observations* (the data) which require explanation. The proposed "need" IMHO does a very poor job of it by comparison to other proposed mechanisms which explain and predict, in far greater detail, the observed characteristics of the *distribution* of religious belief, about which religions themselves (and the idea of a "need") are virtually silent. The analogy from which the predictions follow is one between evolutionary theory and what Dawkins and others have termed `memetics', by deliberate analogy with genetics. This involves the reproduction and propagation of memes -- ideas -- in a substrate population of human minds. The analogy follows directly from the idea of modifiable inheritance. When people tell a story, or a joke, or pass on some report of an event, they relate their own assimilation of it, which is often at least slightly different from what they originally heard. The reader/listener assimilates the material himself, and one cycle of reproduction is complete; the idea or set of interrelated ideas (`meme complex') is now resident in another `host' mind, possibly in modified form. If memetic transmission *were* entirely responsible for the propagation of religious belief, what patterns of distribution should we expect to observe? To the extent that the analogy is valid, patterns of religious belief should look rather like other branching-tree structures which are characteristic of descent with modification, such as the tree of ancestral evolutionary relationships between biological species. Memes are analogous to genes; the religious (or other) beliefs of an individual are analogous to the genes possessed by an individual organism, and a given religion or religious grouping is analogous to an interbreeding group of organisms (a species), defined as a whole by the meme pool of all its members. Predictions which IMHO reasonably follow, and are borne out, include: (i) Religions should change slowly with time as their `meme pools' are subject to the memetic equivalents of genetic drift (random resampling) and natural selection (nonrandom resampling). Example: it is currently not entirely _de rigeur_ for Christians to burn witches, despite a past history of so doing (and express instruction so to do in the Bible). By contrast, most religious dogma itself has pretensions to timelessness: of being absolute and immutable Truth carved in stone by an unswerving deity. Such a view would seem to have big trouble accounting for the observed change over time, without resorting to fudges like `progressive revelation' (which doesn't actually handle `subsequently-contradictory revelation' too well). The memetic view, however, predicts such change and would be in trouble if it were *not* observed. (ii) Branching of the descent tree (`speciation'): if two people's or two groups' assimilations of the same meme set are similar but different, and the differences are not resolved before further onward transmission, a meme set can effectively split into two related sets which subsequently diverge (this follows from (i)). In a religous context, this means that we should expect to see sects budding off from religions, and in time growing into distinct religions themselves if contact between the groupings decreases so that the meme pools are not resolved and become incompatible (analogous to the development of reproductive isolation between two once-interbreeding populations, and their subsequent divergence into two species). Examples: Judaism and Christianity (which has diverged from Judaism over dietary law, for instance, as well as the central JC question), or Catholicism and Protestantism (which has lost the doctrine of transsubstantiation, for instance, quite apart from the original divergence of dogma). (iii) Stronger competition between more similar variants, since they occupy and compete for more similar `memetic niches'. Example: Mormons and [other] Christians. Most debate from Mormons (take a look at talk.religion.misc) is addressed to other Christians, rather than say to Wiccans or Baha'is, because the meme sets are much closer and compete for `hosts' with broadly the same sympathies or inclinations. Much religious dogma itself, though, would seem to suggest that *less* similar variants should be more mutually hostile (worshippers of different [`false'] gods are usually reserved the greatest scorn). The phenomenon is visible in other memetic settings too; the British far left really does resemble the Python depiction of the antagonism between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front. (iv) Faster ideological change in smaller cults than larger ones, because a `mutant' meme, or a new pattern of emphasis/expression of existing memes (which itself constitutes a meme set) can establish itself in a smaller population much more readily than in a larger group with more memetic `inertia'. Compare with faster genetic evolution in smaller populations, and the effects of inbreeding. Examples: few very small sects, of the same order of size as the Branch Davidians or Jim Jones et al, have lasted hundreds of years with a more or less stable ideology as have Judaism or Islam. (v) Many different religions should exist, with mutual contradictions in general. This may seem almost too obvious to be worth stating, but it remains a significant problem both for those who maintain that their religion is divinely given and none of the others are (they have the symmetry to explain, and are forced into special pleading) and for those who maintain that all religion is really one, driven by one deity (usually theirs, unsurprisingly). These folks are forced into a circularity: religions are all one and god-given -- you can tell they're god-given from their common points -- except for the points where they conflict. The memetic view predicts the existence of many conflicting dogmas, and needs no arbitrary special pleading or circularity to explain it. (vi) Religious practice should be distributed geographically in a `causal' manner; we should not expect that a new island of Islam could spontaneously appear in a sea of Christianity, for example, if those people had never previously heard of Islam, Mohammed or the Qur'an, nor had any contact with people who had. (This is not to rule out the spontaneous emergence of *novel* religious beliefs, but rather carbon copies of existing religions unknown in the locality). This is really a distillation of the entire argument: *contact* with others is entirely responsible for the transmission of religious belief. Or to put it another way, revelation is bunk. Those who claim to have received revelation invariably cite their local deity as the source, never somebody else's deity (previously unknown to the revelee) which has chosen to reveal Its own, perhaps differing, Truth. This despite the fact that the other deity has supposedly been revealing said Truth to Its own flock for centuries. Example: nobody in South America had heard of JC, his mother, or his alleged Father until 1492, which is strange given the density of miraculous appearances and revelations which were supposedly going on where they were better known. Only people already familiar with Elvis have `seen' Elvis. Of course, religions can always rationalise this problem away: our deity *chooses* not to reveal Itself except to those already receptive by virtue of having heard the Word, or: It does reveal Itself but in ways which differ from one revelee to another, coincidentally resembling the locally popular deity in every case. No such rationalisation is necessary for memetics to explain it, since memetics predicts it. (vii) Because contact and the passing of information usually required until recently that two people be in the same place, we should expect to find a larger discrepancy on average between the religious beliefs of people further apart, even if the intervening population is continuous. Religious dogma itself furnishes no obvious reason why this should be the case, but it is trivially clear that it is, even on a present-day ride from Texas to New York, let alone on a trek across Europe, through Asia to the Far East back in good ol' 1492. (How different things might have been today if America had been `discovered' from the other direction!) (viii) We should expect that the fastest growing religions in a population significantly far from saturation should be those which have evolved the most effective means of propagation. If the `gain' per generation is greater than 1, exponential growth is possible. In days of yore, transmission from parent to child (see below) maintained a gain of somewhere around 1, but some relatively recent religions have evolved new memes which increase this figure -- the memes which express the imperative of evangelism. A religion with strong evangelical memes is capable of spreading epidemically and displacing religions without such memes. Example: the current growth of a particularly virulent evangelical Christianity in China at the expense of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism which contain no such memes for evangelism. While memetic notions account IMHO more than adequately for the qualitative patterns of belief, they can also account for why there is just *so* much of the stuff about in some places and far less in others (which is itself a problem for a supposedly universal "need" for religion). We are born gurgling and drooling, with no concept of just about anything (insert cruel and heartless joke about least favoured person here). We have to learn a hell of a lot of stuff in order to be able to function as members of adult society, and even just to stay alive long enough to reach that stage. We have to be -- and are wired to be -- programmed. But the single most fundamental part of that programming in a highly developed society is the moral code: behavioural constraints, concepts of authority, punishment and responsibility, which we are taught almost from age nothing, often by our parents. We are wired to believe what our parents tell us. No matter what our parents may happen to believe, if they drum it into us when we're young enough, we'll almost certainly `believe' it, and `believe' it deeply and subrationally because we don't yet have reason available to us (hence the scare quotes around `believe'; `feel' or `[just] know' might be better). And just about the first thing we're taught by our parents is a sense of morality; those memes are banged in very early in our lives because they're so important in a society. If morality is expressed in a heavily personified way, with deities and devils, that's the way we are likely to go on seeing things. If it isn't, then we are less likely ever to see it that way. So I'd suggest that the question "why are so *many* people [in a given area] religious?" is most effectively answered with "because so many of their parents were". Provided that religiosity doesn't significantly reduce or increase one's chances of having kids and actually passing it on to them, there's no _prima facie_ reason why it should either decline or grow, without some other bias which tends to propagate it (eg. the emergence of memes for evangelism or against contraception) or stifle it (eg. the fact that more questions about the universe now have rational answers than they did in the past, and invite no appeal to supernature). I don't buy the idea of an innate "need" for religion; I don't think it's necessary to explain widespread religiosity, and it's flat contradicted by the existence of atheists and of places with a significant proportion of them. Memetic notions, however, given that small children are wired up to believe their parents, can just as happily explain both, *and* explain the detailed geographical and temporal patterns of religious belief distribution as above. > Of course, if you rule out God and the supernatural a priori, you will get > the obvious answer. But if not, and you approach the subject agnostically, > is it any different? IMHO the evidence points quite unambiguously to social and cultural processes as being responsible for religious belief, because the observed patterns of belief show all the characteristics which would be predicted, and actually contradict what most of the various beliefs themselves would contend about timeless deities and so forth. While that doesn't rule out the existence of any such deities, it certainly disposes, to my satisfaction at least, of the idea that religious belief bears any relation to It/Them if It/They exist at all. If neither religious belief nor anything else points to the existence of a divine realm, *then* it's time for Ockham's Razor, with the caveat that it also doesn't rule out anything, but just tells us that the unembellished version (with the memetics but without the gods) is more probable given the observations. ***************************** cut here **************************************** -- Simon Clippingdale simon@dcs.warwick.ac.uk Department of Computer Science Tel (+44) 203 523296 University of Warwick FAX (+44) 203 525714 Coventry CV4 7AL, U.K.