From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Fri May 14 2004 - 16:42:36 MDT
[rhinoceros]
A while back we had some discussions here about the "God Module", a part of the brain's temporal lobe, which was supposed to be responsible for a person's susceptibility to a sense of spiritual experience.
Here is a refresher.
http://www.iol.ie/~afifi/BICNews/Health/health19.htm
Now, it seems that Steven Pinker, the author of "The Blank Slate"
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0670031518)
does not believe that there is such a God Module, nor that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. This runs counter to several attempts to explain religion as a subject of Evolutionary Psychology in the last years.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=379634
(Title of the article omitted because it was misleading)
April 21, 2004
<snip>
The only way religious belief could be an adaptation is if a personal, intervening, miracle-producing, reward-giving, retributive god exists,” Pinker said, provoking laughs from the audience.
Pinker presented his evidence in his speech titled “The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion: Does the Brain Have a ‘God Module?’” The speech was hosted by the Harvard Secular Society as its first “flagship” event of the year.
Pinker began his argument by refuting what he called “three spurious adaptationist explanations of religion:” the suggestion that people embrace religion for its comfort, its sense of community and its ethical value.
Although he admitted that those three theories may be true, he questioned their merit in explaining the universal, widespread popularity of religion.
Pinker furthermore dismissed the idea of religion as a “source of higher ethical yearnings” and an unambiguous moral guide.
“The Bible is a manual for rape, genocide, and the destruction of families...Religion has given us stonings, witch burnings, crusades, Inquisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombers...and mothers who drown their children in the river,” he said.
Pinker continued by identifying the difference between evolutionary adaptation and its by-products, and suggested that religion was of the latter category.
Religion, he said, “may be a by-product of certain features of our psychology that may [have been evolutionarily] adaptable.”
This includes the fact that religion can have practical benefits to both “producers” and “consumers” of religion.
Pinker concluded by suggesting that the battleground between religion and science in the 21st century would be psychology, just as it had been cosmology in the 17th century and biology in the 19th.
<snip>
[rhinoceros]
See also the following debate between Steven Pinker and Steven Rose (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/rose.html) who leans more towards the "blank slate".
"THE TWO STEVES"-Pinker vs. Rose - A Debate (Part II) Continued
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_rose/part2/part2_p2.html
<snip>
QUESTION: It seems to me that the only constant in societies over the last four thousand years has been the presence of some sort of religious suasion forming a moral and ethical framework. Where is the God module in the brain?
PINKER: As I mentioned, I don't think that religion is an adaptation, so I don't think there is a God module. I do discuss at some length in the book how it arises as an interaction of other parts of the minds. One part is an intuitive psychology. Once you have an ability to interpret other people's behavior in terms of unobservable beliefs and desires, that is, a mind. We impute minds to one another; we don't treat one another as wind-up dolls. That faculty can, then, in a sense, run amok, and imagine minds that exist independently of bodies, namely spirits, souls, ghosts, and so on. That's an example of how a part of the mind that evolved for one purpose can give rise to something quite different. I don't think that's the totality of religious belief, and I discuss some of the other components that collectively give rise to it, but that's an example of how a kind of belief can be a major part of human experience, but not necessarily specifically selected by evolution.
ROSE: I'm not sure that I have a mind that deals either in god or in modules, so I'm not sure I can answer the question. I do think it's extremely important to understand the function religion has played through humanity's history and the moral vacuum which is the result perhaps in the loss of the faith and the creation either of a religious society or of a more socially just society, which we're facing at the moment. I would not like to see ultra-Darwinism become the religion of the future.
<snip>
[rhinoceros]
The rest of the debate was also interesting.
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