Re: George Coyne and Richard Dawkins

erik simpson <eastside.erik@gmail.com> wrote:

On 5/22/24 8:51 AM, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

On Wed, 22 May 2024 07:44:39 -0700
John Harshman <john.harshman@gmail.com> wrote:
 
[time for a snip]

He got himself into that pickle by saying God is not an intervening
engineer. The alternative is that every living thing has a soul.

 
There are other alternatives. For example, the soul could be an emergent
property of the body, particularly of the brain. If he gave us brains
(mentioned above), souls could have come along with that, and perhaps
even gradually. Maybe chimps have near-but-not-quite-souls.
 

 
How about: God emerges from sapient (or could I say superstitious?) beings?
 
[]
 

The near-universal appearance of religion (however defined) in human
societies suggests that religion should be considered in an evolutionary
context.  Is is part of our extended phenotype in the same sense as
beaver dams are an expression of that of beavers?  An obvious positive
advantage to human society is that religion can be a social glue; a
clear disadvantage is that it can provoke conflict between societies.
 

People may vary on a scale of spirituality, or longing to be a part of
something larger than oneself (oceanic feeling). Relgion seems an offshoot
of that. Gould saw it as a nonaptive byproduct of having large enough brain
sufficient for contemplating mortality, which dovetails with Ernest
Becker’s views and the long-standing work of terror management theorists.

Religion is so varied it seems a suitcase word.

As a social glue religion may help make up for social networking shortfalls
of memory capacity aka the Dunbar number.

As for conflict religion may be a factor, but just as another example of
that narcissism of small differences Freud had borrowed from someone. His
own field splintered into rival factions and many of them were atheists.