Atheology
posted by saurabh in Religion |I recently caught up with my friend Claudio Pasqua, a janitor who happens to work in Harvard’s Divinity School. I previously interviewed him on the bizarre subject of alien religions, here. Since we both enjoyed the experience, we decided to have another go at it, on a slightly less esoteric subject.
RHINOCRISY: So, first off, I bet people are curious about it, so I should let you clear up why it is you’ve never bothered to actually enroll in this school and get a degree and maybe a faculty post.
CLAUDIO PASQUA: You mean as opposed to enduring a lifetime of Good Will Hunting jokes?
R: Heh, yeah.
CP: Well, the list of reasons is really endless, and I’m making up new ones all the time, but to be brief: I’m happy where I am.
R: Fair enough, we’ll leave it at that. Okay, so I wanted to, um, basically get you to ramble on at length about atheism.
CP: Define ‘at length’.
R: Haha. Well, to set the stage: religion is something that’s certainly become a very important political issue in the last few years, and it seems to me that there’s a growing reaction to it, at least in the West, of people who think that the way to avoid all these problems around religion is to reject religion entirely.
CP: Okay, let me just launch a few opening salvos before I really get into this. First of all, I think its foolish to conflate religion and politics. Of course there’s a long history of the two being intertwined, in many cases inextricably so, like with the Holy Roman Church or the Egyptian Pharaohs, and today is no different: we should expect that people in general will express their closely held aspirations through whatever medium they’re most comfortable with. So I think that, just because we perceive a strong religious dimension to a lot of the conflicts that go on in the world today, that doesn’t mean that those conflicts are the product of religion itself.
R: Example?
CP: Example. Well, we could go pretty much anywhere. Take Chechnya, for instance. Here you have a pretty mundane, routine separatist movement, of a kind that’s not too surprising considering the dissolution of the Soviet empire. But introduce a few actors who happen to be bearded Islamists, and suddenly the conflict has an apparent religious dimension. But I don’t think it really does; it’s just that those people have a strong religious dimension, so everything they do and say will be colored that way. It’s a bit silly, really - on the one hand, people say, “Oh, religion is all about domination and control, anyway,” but on the other, they refuse to recognize that these people’s actions are driven by very un-religious motives, and they just happen to layer a nice patina of religious justification over that.
R: So you don’t think religion is the problem with the world.
CP: Well, I wouldn’t even dream of trying to make a claim like that. That presumes that the world is some sort of Rubik’s cube that can be solved at all, and I don’t think life is like that.
R: Okay, to state it a bit differently, do you think that, on the balance, the world would be better off if everyone were atheists?
CP: No. Absolutely, no. Because, why? Are all of these issues we see in the world - war, disease, ignorance, misogyny, terrorism - are they the product of religious views? There are plenty of examples of conflicts that have nothing to do with religion. Most of the wars of the modern era were fought for entirely mundane reasons like, “We want that oil you have,” or, “We want that land you have,” or, “We want that wealth-of-some-kind you have.” I simply don’t believe that in the absence of religion, we wouldn’t make up other equally good excuses to fight over. And in fact, we know religion isn’t the problem, because religion yields all the time to other pressures. Four centuries ago, religion justified slavery. One century ago, religion mandated the end of slavery. What changed? The social substrate changed; the religion only reflects that.
R: But there’s some clear instances where religious belief and nothing else is the cause of some particular insanity.
CP: I’m sure there is. I’m sure there is. But we can find the same contusions of belief in any field, without resorting to religion. People accept all kinds of poorly-justified things as axiomatic and then run off in strange directions on that basis. Economics is called ‘the dismal science’ for a reason, you know.
R: Haha.
CP: But what is it that we mean by religion, really? I mean, if we set aside the part that’s a meditation on existence and life and death and all of that - the social dimension, that’s the projection of our values, nothing more. And it has to flow in that direction, because there’s no other source for it.
R: Now you sound like an atheist.
CP: Well, I’m not making a comment on the authenticity of any religious claims, that’s not my point. I’m just saying, religion is the provenance of man. Religious expression is the creation of man, and man makes all the decisions, even if you believe that God told you all this. That’s why you have Bible-thumpers in America who conveniently ignore ninety-five percent of what’s written in Leviticus and Deuteronomy - because the change in the social substrate has eviscerated the relevance of those texts. And now they have some different imperative, and why should we pretend that those texts are the source of those? Of course they’re not. Of course!
R: What about to the educated set in the West? I mean, I would bet most of the people I work with are atheists.
CP: I think that’s more or less what’s going on here. This is just a form of elitism, and not a very intelligent one, either. Actually I find Dawkins and that whole crowd profoundly incurious. If you’re religious, then the question of why religions exist is moot - a personal god exists, therefore we need religion to deal with it. But if you’re not religious, then you should be devoting a lot of energy to the sociological question of why religion exists. And I just don’t see that amongst most of this modern set of atheists; their critique doesn’t transcend the level of eighth grade geometry proofs. “I can logically demonstrate that this religious claim is false, therefore religion is bunk, QED.” Okay, but why did all these people develop this huge edifice? What need does it serve? If we banish it, what are we really losing?
R: Well, I don’t want to present a strawman, but I’d think the argument would be that religion is just a remnant of earlier eras of human development. It had explanatory value before, and now it doesn’t; it’s been supplanted by science and rationalist philosophies.
CP: That’s fine, and one could well argue that many of the roles that religion served in previous years have been supplanted - and in better form - by other modern institutions. We’ve almost completely replaced the religious justification for states with a much more utilitarian one. Five thousand years ago the Egyptians were worshiping their kings. Five hundred years ago the Chinese considered their emperor to be divine. Nowadays when Saparmurat Niyazov announces that he’s a god, the world laughs at him. His people laughed at him. Or they would have, anyway, if they weren’t terrified of him. But what upsets me is that there’s no inquiry into these aspects of religion. The sociology of this stuff is vast and complex, and it’s tied up with so many other questions - if you’re really going to pretend to the throne of the intelligent, rational and scientific, show some goddamn curiosity. [pause] Sorry, I probably shouldn’t blaspheme in the Harvard Divinity School.
R: Say three Hail Marys.
CP: Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Anyway, it just irks me. There’s a Tolstoy quote I’m fond of that says, something like: “Science tells us nothing, because it doesn’t answer our most important question: how shall we live?” And that’s correct. Science leaves many questions unanswered, and just because it eradicates the justification for religion doesn’t mean that the answers religion provides didn’t have social utility.
R: Well, people have tried to replace those things. Like Mill’s utilitarianism.
CP: Sure, people have tried. And I’m not gainsaying that effort. But at least acknowledge that that effort needs to be made. At least acknowledge that there’s a void to fill, and that we need the tools to fill it. And until those exist, then of course religion has tremendous importance.
R: This is a great conversation, but we might want to wrap up here before it runs really long.
CP: Too long and you’ll never transcribe the thing.
R: Haha. I actually farm it out to a center in Bangalore that does it for me. Okay, last question: do you believe in God?
CP: Haha. That would be telling. Does saying “I don’t know” mean I’m an agnostic?
R: Way to shatter your credibility.
CP: Just don’t transcribe this part.
Loading ...
Great post. Thank you.
[...] root of all evil? Posted on January 24, 2008 by Ian I don’t think that it is. But Saurabh’s commentary is one of the best that I have [...]
awesome post. Next time I’m in Boston and you actually reply to my email, I would love to meet this person.
But if you’re not religious, then you should be devoting a lot of energy to the sociological question of why religion exists.
Forget sociological curiousity, try empathetic, psychologial social curiosity. The vast majorit of your fellow human beings have an interest–find out why on an individual level. I have absolutely no sense at all that Dawkins et al would have any desire to understand me as a person. I can only vouch for myself, but I try hard (and think I’m fairly successful) in relating to plenty of atheists as person. It’s the complete aura of disrespect that set Dawkins et al apart. Elitism at its best.
CP says: Actually I find Dawkins and that whole crowd profoundly incurious. If you’re religious, then the question of why religions exist is moot - a personal god exists, therefore we need religion to deal with it. But if you’re not religious, then you should be devoting a lot of energy to the sociological question of why religion exists. And I just don’t see that amongst most of this modern set of atheists; their critique doesn’t transcend the level of eighth grade geometry proofs. “I can logically demonstrate that this religious claim is false, therefore religion is bunk, QED.”
The question of why religion exists is an interesting one, and I’d recommend Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained.
But as for “Dawkins and that whole crowd” (who I’ll assume to be Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens) the point of their work hasn’t been to examine that issue. The main point of their work has been persuasion and advocacy, so I’m confused by the “incurious” critique. They’ve done their own exploring and now they’re choosing a battle. It seems far from clear to me that detailed examination of why religion exists should be part of their tactics.
That theoretical point aside, in their books Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris DO make interesting commentary on why religion exists along with their advocacy and persuasion. And the primary purpose of Dennett’s book is to call for scientific examination of the existence of religion.
Saheli says: “I have absolutely no sense at all that Dawkins et al would have any desire to understand me as a person.”
I have no sense that you want to understand them as people. Elitism at its best?
Most of these “et al” demonstrate a personal connection to various believers in their writing, especially Hitchens.
“It’s the complete aura of disrespect that set Dawkins et al apart.”
Sets them apart from what? How are they disrespectful? What are they disrespectful of?
I say they are disrespectful of bad ideas. They happen to be ideas that people aren’t used to hearing challenged so rigorously, and so to sensitive ears the critique ends up sounding much more strident than would a similarly worded critique in a less emotionally-charged subject area. This in fact is one of their main points, that because of the heightened sensitivity to criticism of religion, religion has gotten too much of a free pass for too long.
Boyer’s book is available online, here, if you want to read it. It’s okay, certainly better than Dennett or Dawkins’ stuff. Both of them have similar treatments of the “origin of religion” question. (I actually clipped a good bit of the above conversation where we were discussing Dawkins’ take on this issue.) But their treatments are extremely sloppy and there are very few signs of intelligence or reason. The evolutionary arguments are just bad, as is the case with most “evolutionary psychology” crap. The sociological arguments are sometimes worse. Boyer attempts to argue that there’s no such thing as culture, for God’s sake. If that’s the level of insight I’m meant to appreciate, I’m afraid I don’t find it appealing.
As to the advocacy: if I’m going to take anyone’s advocacy seriously, it should be founded on good principles. The fact that Dawkins and Hitchens and the like show no inclination towards exploring the question of religion’s utility is quite evident in their advocacy. Why should I give them my attention? Because they have conviction? No; I’m going to demand that they actually have reasonable and cogent things to say. And I’m afraid they don’t, because they’re missing, from my perspective, the majority of the picture (the sociology), and misunderstanding a good deal of the rest (confusing religion and politics, as Claudio says above).
Sam Harris is much more interesting, because he’s at least interested in ethics and spirituality. But when he talks about them, he gets shit from other atheists who don’t want to give any of that the time of day. Why not? That’s what life is all about. If you’re not going to make profitable explorations of those issues, leave it to those who do - which, for the moment, is the religious.
neither atheism nor any faith i know feel unfamiliar. shocks and strangeness make poor persuasion, right, but i’ve been both places, inside, and how they address the unlimited is like that, unlimited, as though that were an ideal. something appealing for a limited thing. agnostic’s not the word for where that led.
“Boyer attempts to argue that there’s no such thing as culture, for God’s sake”
I read Boyer’s book and didn’t come away with this impression at all, but it has been a while. Can you point me to specific passages?
“if I’m going to take anyone’s advocacy seriously, it should be founded on good principles.”
How is their advocacy not founded on good principles? They advocate reason and logic and evidence over superstition, blind faith, and authoritarianism.
“Sam Harris is much more interesting, because he’s at least interested in ethics and spirituality. But when he talks about them, he gets shit from other atheists who don’t want to give any of that the time of day.”
This might be true for spirituality, whatever that means, but is certainly not true for ethics.
Re: Boyer, he discuses “culture as memes” and endorses memetics, a pseudo-science first proposed by Dawkins. He also makes asshat statements like this: “So we describe culture as some kind of external force that pushes people one way or another. But this is rather mysterious. How could a similarity cause anything? There is no external force here. If people feel a conflict between their inclinations and a norm that is followed by everybody else, it is a conflict within their own heads.” This is an extremely poor basis for evaluating human behavior; it ignores, at the very least, the idea of emergent behavior in complex systems. Anyway.
First, not every religion is founded in authoritarianism, nor in blind faith. But that issue aside, you’re correct: their advocacy is on that basis, but as Claudio says above, that’s an incredibly unsophisticated treatment of the issue. I think his description is apt: eighth-grade geometry proofs. Which is the point I’ve been trying to make: there’s more at issue here than the fact that religion is not founded in objective truth. To quote V for Vendetta: “Artists use lies to tell the truth.” Which is something that I’ve seen precious little appreciation of from atheists. Religion offers something - atheists offer nothing in return, and expect that to suffice?
If theirs is an “incredibly unsophisticated treatment of the issue” and “there’s more at issue here” than religion’s founding on untrue claims, then what exactly is “the issue”? And are you sure your issue is the same as theirs? I suspect it isn’t because you say things like “atheists offer nothing in return, and expect that to suffice.” Of course atheism offers nothing in return; atheism isn’t a philosophy or a belief system. Atheism is just a refusal to make claims that can’t be supported. Atheism is just taking everyone’s dismissal of every other deity that we’re all happy to write off as fiction (Zeus, Thor, etc) and pointing out that the god of Abraham belongs in that same club. Atheism isn’t culture or community. Why should it offer anything in return for the lies it rejects?
Why such brusque dismissals of memes and evolutionary psychology? You might want to take another look there, because both of those concepts/methodologies can offer valuable insights.
I offer those brusque dismissals because I am an evolutionary biologist, and thus I have some idea how difficult it is to make claims about adaptation and evolution; very few of the claims made by evolutionary psychology have anything resembling a basis in evidence. Memetics is perhaps worse; it claims to be an analog of genetics, but I can tell you exactly how genes are structured and transmitted, and how they acquire mutations. No one can make such a claim for memes. It is pseudoscience. It’s an appealing way to think about the world, but it’s not an especially rigorous one.
As to the main argument, I’m uncertain how else to phrase it if it remains unclear, but I’ll try. Atheism says we should reject religion because it makes false claims. I am saying that, in addition to requiring us to accept false claims, religion adds lots of other value. Thus, if we are to consider the question of rejecting religion, we should weigh the total merit of both of these things - that is, the benefit of rejecting religion’s false claims, and the benefit of losing whatever else religion adds. But the latter half is ignored by atheists, meaning the argument is incomplete.
Sorry, one other thing I meant to include in my last. The notion that religion is about using lies to tell the truth simply isn’t how the vast majority of religious people see it. Disturbingly large numbers of people believe the literal claims of their holy books. Their books aren’t literature to them, and their religion isn’t art. It is a truth claim and a world view. Wrong, and incoherant, respectively.
Yeah. But this isn’t a question of how religious people see their religion; it’s whether YOU can see that something that isn’t literally true can still have utility. It seems you can’t, so perhaps it’s best to leave it at that. But I suggest you read Ecclesiastes when you next have some free time.
Atheism says we should reject religion because it makes false claims.
Atheism says there are no gods, and that any religion based on belief in a god is therefor based on a lie. Many atheists therefor reject religion.
I am saying that, in addition to requiring us to accept false claims, religion adds lots of other value. Thus, if we are to consider the question of rejecting religion, we should weigh the total merit of both of these things - that is, the benefit of rejecting religion’s false claims, and the benefit of losing whatever else religion adds. But the latter half is ignored by atheists, meaning the argument is incomplete.
It simply isn’t true that atheists ignore that religion has some positive effects, nor is it true that the books under discussion ignore positive effects. They all argue that the net effect is negative. Have you read the books in question? Every one of them acknowledge that some positive things happen because of religion.
But this isn’t a question of how religious people see their religion; it’s whether YOU can see that something that isn’t literally true can still have utility. It seems you can’t, so perhaps it’s best to leave it at that.
WHAT isn’t a question of how religion people see their religion? Religious people who see their religion in their own terms have immense power over the rest of us - power to block stem cell funding, or to fly planes into buildings, or to prevent teaching evolution in our schools. These writers say that it is about time that people who reject religion be allowed to speak up without fear or physical or social consequences, that they be empowered to stand for reason over superstition. How is this not an important issue, and do you keep saying is it not “THE issue” and “THE question” that you keep wanting it to be?
As for me, of course I see that lies can have utility, and in a few situations might have a net positive utility. I can see that religion has some positive effects, but it seems quite likely to me that the net effects are negative. All of these writers seem to feel the same, regardless of your assertion that they ignore any possible positive effects.
I don’t know if a whole side discussion about memes or evolutionary psychology is worth it, but I think you’re unfairly dismissing both because you think they make claims that are stronger than the evidence/theory justifies. I think that while some people might make such claims under the banner of memetics or evolutionary psychology, that shouldn’t throw out the whole thing. People used to make (and I guess still do) ridiculous claims based on Darwin’s theory. There are some good and appropriately limited claims that come from evolutionary psych, and some valuable models/ideas that flow from thinking about memes.
If evolutionary psychology has some good and limited claims, name them. Memetics, meanwhile, is flawed at its base. The “meme” cannot be accurately described in any way that renders it subject to investigation.
Frankly I think the danger of religion is exaggerated. The ability of religious groups to block the progress of science is limited, and I don’t believe that any Christian tide is in danger of swarming our schools and universities and making us all learn Creationism. Sure, they have some power, but their danger is vastly overblown by the fact that atheists find them useful props for proselytizing.
The important issues are always political. Abortion, for example, is not fundamentally about religious belief. In fact the Christian religious grounds for believing abortion is murder are fairly thin. The zeal for it is driven by something much more obvious, which is control over female reproductivity. That is NOT a religious battle.
I have, in fact, read Dawkins, Dennett and some of Sam Harris. I find their treatment of religion to be extremely slipshod, and whatever attention they give to positive aspects of religion are cursory examinations of their strawmen. I’ve never even seen anything as simple as, “What is the effect of belief in an afterlife?” And they VERY, VERY often conflate politics and religion, which renders their assessment of the negative effects of religion extremely suspect. Their primary interest is in advocacy, and their arguments show it.
Scattered replies:
- While the battle for control over female reproductivity might have non-religious origins, it very clearly has strong religious support. You could argue that various wars that are commonly thought of as religious had various socio-economic or other factors, but many of the people who are out there in the trenches believe they are doing the good lord’s work.
- Speaking of male control of female sexuality, evolutionary psychology offers a good framework for understanding some aspects of the phenomenon. Helping to raise another man’s child you’ve mistaken for your own is a disaster for a man’s genetic legacy. Culturally varying mechanisms for controlling female sexuality can be linked to the opportunity cost of cuckoldry. Evolutionary psychology can claim a solid theoretical framework for understanding behaviors in this way, and a growing body of evidence to support it.
- There absolutely is a danger posed to education by American Christianity. Biology teachers across the country are reluctant to teach evolution in high schools, knowing that the religiously-inspired backlash from the community will be extreme.
- The idea that you think the power of religion is vastly overblown and a useful prop for atheist proselytizing is astonishingly backwards. In America something like 90% of people profess a belief in god, and our politicians are almost always forced to cater to various religious ideas. Religious objections are blocking promising avenues of scientific research, and disrupting quality of life for homosexuals and various other out-groups. And that’s just in America; this is obviously worse in many other areas. You can be killed for saying the wrong thing about god in many places.
- I’ve touched on this a bit so far, but I’ll hit it again. I agree that religion and politics are intertwined, but many people act for religious reasons on issues that you or I might call political. The less religion is involved, that’s one less factor to muddle things up. Yes this still leave a million other factors to muddle things up.
- Don’t genes suffer from the same ambiguity of definition as memes?
This is something I would like to ask Mr. Pasqua…
Isn’t it just fundamentally wrong to teach generations of kids to believe in an entity without evidence?
Not only to believe in it, as bad as that is, but to actively fear it because it will sentence them to an eternity of torture if they displease it.
He also makes asshat statements like this: “So we describe culture as some kind of external force that pushes people one way or another. But this is rather mysterious. How could a similarity cause anything? There is no external force here. If people feel a conflict between their inclinations and a norm that is followed by everybody else, it is a conflict within their own heads.” This is an extremely poor basis for evaluating human behavior; it ignores, at the very least, the idea of emergent behavior in complex systems.
Could you elaborate on how Boyer’s discussion of culture as a set of memes ingores the idea of emergent behavior in complex systems? Specifically the ignore part.
Emergence is a property of the SYSTEM, defined (subjectively or objectively) by some outside observer, not a property of the individual within a system. The quote you mentioned is part of a discussion of properties of an individual, and how seeing culture as a set of memes undermines various common concepts about culture. To me it seems like there’s an implicit understanding of emergence in Boyer’s discussion of this matter, but I’m curious to see why you not only disagree but disagree so much as to slap Boyer with the asshat.
Boyer’s approach is analogous to modeling weather systems via particle kinetics. It is dumb. Beyond that, humans as a whole are obviously attuned to social cues on many different levels; suggesting that culture as an external force on people’s behavior is not a good way to understand human behavior strikes me as unwise. Finally, I’ll agree that it is “all in your head”, just like, say, PTSD.
Regarding evolutionary psych, your example is a great demonstration of what evolutionary psych does: take some particular prejudiced view of the world (males are domineering and seek to control female sexuality), assume it has a genetic basis, then make up some bullshit story about how it evolved and pretend it’s science. I have news for you: there is ZERO evidence that this is true. In fact, there isn’t even good agreement on why sexual reproduction is adaptive - there’s certainly nothing resembling evidence that males seeking control of female sexuality ever conferred a selective advantage.
As for the definitions of genes, they’re extremely well understood: we know the medium in which they are encoded (DNA), we know the structure and encoding of genes in DNA, we know how they are transmitted from person to person, we know a lot about how they acquire mutations and how those mutations segregate in the population. No similar claims can be made for memes.
As to the travails of religion in the US, you summed them up neatly: repression of gays and women. Both of these flow entirely from the American construction of male sexuality, and nothing else. Men feel threatened by the existence of gays, and they feel threatened by female control of their own sexuality. American culture teaches men to value their masculinity above all else; in that context anything that suggests you might be a sexual object rather than the objectifier is a threat. Religion is a tool for protecting the boundaries of male sexuality, but in its absence I feel certain other tools would move up in prominence. “Maxim” magazine, for instance, is an example of the latter.
It’s true that kids aren’t getting good science educations in the US, but I don’t think Creationism is to blame. There have been a handful of examples of creationists trying to get their stuff taught in schools, all of which have been rudely slapped down soon after. I have never seen any evidence that teachers are intimidated by this and are not teaching evolution.
Unfortunately it’s hard to get hold of Claudio to answer random questions, but I can easily field this one:
Is it wrong to tell kids that Santa Claus exists? I don’t think so - it adds a bit of wonder and magic into their lives.
“Regarding evolutionary psych, your example is a great demonstration of what evolutionary psych does: take some particular prejudiced view of the world (males are domineering and seek to control female sexuality), assume it has a genetic basis, then make up some bullshit story about how it evolved and pretend it’s science. I have news for you: there is ZERO evidence that this is true. In fact, there isn’t even good agreement on why sexual reproduction is adaptive - there’s certainly nothing resembling evidence that males seeking control of female sexuality ever conferred a selective advantage.”
You need to stop sneering and read the literature. There is evidence to support these ideas - men react more strongly negatively to the thought of their wife sleeping with another man than to the thought of her in love with another. Women react more strongly to the thought of their man in love with another than sleeping with her. This is exactly what you would predict based on their parental investment in reproduction - a man loses out big time by raising another man’s child. A woman loses out more if her man leaves her than if he just spends an hour with someone.
“As for the definitions of genes, they’re extremely well understood: we know the medium in which they are encoded (DNA), we know the structure and encoding of genes in DNA, we know how they are transmitted from person to person, we know a lot about how they acquire mutations and how those mutations segregate in the population. No similar claims can be made for memes.”
That doesn’t make the idea of memes worthless. Memes can be thought of as a unit of cultural transmission, as genes are a unit of genetic transmission. Memes mutate as they replicate. Just because memes are a parallel concept to genes doesn’t mean we have share everything about genes for memes to be meaningful.
“As to the travails of religion in the US, you summed them up neatly: repression of gays and women. Both of these flow entirely from the American construction of male sexuality, and nothing else.”
It is pretty hard to take this seriously. You are saying that religion has nothing at all to do with repression of gays or women, or even obstructing science education. This is simply an astonishing claim, one that you’re asserting as fact without any support.
By the way, your claim that Boyer argues that culture doesn’t exist is completely wrong. Your obvious misunderstanding of this basic point suggests your understanding of his arguments, evolutionary psychology, and the concept of memes is probably pretty flawed.
I *have* read literature on evolutionary psych. It’s an appealing construction that men feel that way about women cheating because they evolved to feel that way, but plausability != proof. There are many plausible explanations for things that turn out to be false. It is probably the case that men get jealous of their wives sleeping around, although I’m skeptical that the differences fall neatly on the lines you suggest, with men jealous of infidelity and women jealous of love (do you have a citation?). But, even assuming that’s the case, you have not (a) demonstrated that this has a genetic basis, and (b) demonstrated that this arose definitively through adaptive evolution because of some non-paternity advantage. Lacking those crucial pieces, your claim has gone from “evolutionary psychology” to merely an observation about human behavior.
I’m not saying that religion has nothing to do with repression of gays or women, or obstructing science. I’m saying that the desire to repress gays and women preceded the religious justification for it, and that the idea that religion is obstructing science is overblown.
Citations for sexual jealousy:
Daly M, Wilson MI, Weghorst SJ (1982) Male sexual jealousy. Ethology & Sociobiology 3: 11-27.
Buss, David, et al. (1992) “Sex Differences in Jealousy: Evolution, Physiology, and Pyschology,” Psychological Science 3:251-55. HERE.
The Cinderella Effect is another evolutionary psychology theory that is well established with substantial supporting data.
“As to the travails of religion in the US, you summed them up neatly: repression of gays and women. Both of these flow entirely from the American construction of male sexuality, and nothing else.”
“I’m not saying that religion has nothing to do with repression of gays or women”
I assume that since you said the second one most recently, it is a revision of your first statement. You seem to be backing away from most of what you’ve expressed. Boyer didn’t argue there is no such thing as culture, contrary to what you originally asserted. Boyer doesn’t ignore emergence in complex systems, contrary to what you originally asserted. Religion has something to do with repression of gays and women, contrary to what you originally asserted.
I think you’ll recognize from my persistence and relative civility that I’m not just here to give you a hard time. I’m here because a few weeks ago I saw a link to a post of yours and liked it, so I check back in sometimes. Take it for what its worth, but your arguments seem a lot like those of creationist. “Evolution is all just wishful thinking people who want to justify their perverse values”… blah blah. The evidence is there; look at that rather than worrying about motives. Not all science has to be as rigid and definitive as you seem to think. Provisional theories are still quite useful and to belittle them is counterproductive. There’s lots of work to be done, but you seem to be approaching things not with healthy skepticism but with a closed mind. Again, take the criticism for what its worth from a random internet reader. Consider it or tell me to eff off, your call.
As a closing thought, I do see a problem with teaching kids that its ok to lie to them for amusement. In a world with such vast beauty and depraved cruelty, who needs pretend magic to have a sense of wonder? Down with Santa!
Sorry, I find your comment insulting in the extreme. You know apparently very little of my personal history and my attitudes if you suggest I’m like a creationist, or that I lack healthy skepticism. I have no commitments, here. I’m not very religious, and I’m sympathetic to many atheist beliefs. The fact is, I have studied evolutionary biology extensively - I’m not sure what your background is, but if there’s anything I can pretend to some degree of expertise in, evolution is it. So I’m not just talking through my hat, here.
I’m far from alone in criticizing evolutionary psych; many biologists agree with my position. (I suggest you go back and look at that Buss, et al article you linked above - the VERY NEXT ARTICLE trashes Buss’s research.) I’m not sure why this your dog in this race, but: Evolutionary psychology makes lots of provisional theories, but it makes many, many more specious claims that it dresses up as science. EP journals are littered with articles touting bogus premises with little evidence. And, getting back to the original point, the EP argument that Dennett makes is EXTREMELY ill-founded and lacking in evidence. I find provisional theories like this devoid of value, especially when they’re completely self-serving. Lack of rigor in an entire field produces sloppy results; this is not “okay”, it is dangerous.
As for backing off my point, I’m doing no such thing. I have consistently maintained the same thing that Claudio stated above: religion follows social norms, it doesn’t create them. This is why I say that repression of gays flows from male desire to control sexuality only. Yes, religion plays a role in that repression, but not an originating role. Re: Boyer, my original statement might be construed as an inaccurate paraphrase of Boyer’s contention that culture should be ignored because memes are what matter. Although you don’t seem to agree, memetics is not a demonstrated reality. Thought and culture are not particulate, as Dawkins and Boyer suggest. Individuals are not collections of information-packets that they’re artlessly routing around and exchanging. There; I made those claims, and now I stand on just as firm ground as Dawkins and Boyer.
I’m unconvinced you really read the above interview or digested any of its arguments. I do appreciate your civility in continuing this debate, however.
My intention isn’t to insult you; I’m just letting you know how you’ve come across to me. Obviously I don’t know you personally, so I’m basing my comments only on what you’ve written here in this thread. I don’t imagine I’ve ever written a dozen paragraphs that a criticism of would be “insulting in the extreme.” Note that I criticized your arguments not you personally. I don’t expect that you sat down and worked for 3 hours on each response, so a little sloppiness of word or thought is to be expected. The net effect was a series of arguments that reminded me of creationist argument style. Whatever, I’ll back off the stylistic critique and focus on the issues. Sorry for the offense.
While I’ll certainly agree that to some extent religion follows social norms, it makes little sense to say religion has no role in creating social norms. Why are we cutting off foreskins? Seems pretty reasonable to suggest that it can and does flow both ways - religion to social norms and social norms to religion. And even if religion sexual repression does flow from other aspects of human psychology, giving those negative tendencies the blessing of the creator of the universe and a holy stamp of approval is a massive problem, no?
If you think there’s lots of bogus stuff waving the EP flag, fine, but there’s some good stuff too. Don’t throw it all out. The human mind is a biological product of natural selection. Working from that basic premise offers many insights. Is there something that Buss claims that isn’t fair for him to claim?
PS - here’s the response to the article that “trashed” buss’s research.
We’re cutting off foreskins because, basically, it doesn’t matter. If it did, we’d stop doing it. Or large portions of us would. Just like we stopped doing so many other things that used to be religiously mandated but now seem out of date (again, see the interview). Yes, there are some cases where religion is used to uphold lagging social norms, but it cuts both ways. In the modern day the Catholic church has served as one of the principal bulwarks of abortion law in Latin America. But it has also served as one of the main agents acting to oppose genocide there. In my own city I’ve worked with many progressive religious groups - one of the main groups pushing progressive health care reform in Mass. is a religious one. Religion motivates people to do good. (Or, rather, to be precise, religion often reflects the positive aspirations of society.)
But in any case, the lag is not due to religion. The lag is due to the fact that people, generally, are reluctant to update to more progressive norms when it requires conceding something. E.g., in the modern era, it’s considered unacceptable by most of the Western world to invade other countries (Iraq notwithstanding). The religious justifications for this largely disappeared before the other ideological ones. Is the holy stamp of approval a massive problem? Maybe - it means religion is conservative (in the “conserve” sense of that word). But I’m not convinced that it’s any more conservative than humanity is generally.
one might also ask what effect a dictionary has on language
but proscription and codification require standards of measure, which in culture would be a king or god’s behavior; accord and fruitful cooperation being the goal