yet even more questions are left unaddressed

I enjoyed this essay enough to come back to it several times in the past few weeks and try to glean additional insights from it.

As much as I get from it, it still seems to keep raising more questions in my mind than it answers. It occurs to me that it addresses a number of aspects of common social practices we associated with religion, but it never really talks much about the cultural evolution of theism per se. Ok, perhaps I'm being too picky with the terms for some of you, but I assure you that Evangelical Christians and "fundamentalists" in general are far from being Deists!

If we are serious about studying something, we should be careful to distinguish its variants. It probably wouldn't be as fruitful to lump the common chimp the bonobo and the hominid together and try to understand "their" social behavior as a single family because the species are each distinctive.

The most obvious questions to me are: (1) why we retain such profoundly committed beliefs in worlds that are at least somewhat blatantly counterintuitive, and (2) why do these beliefs take the specific form they do.

I think it is plausible that (1) has a lot to do with the human need to decide whether other people are trustworthy.

Costly displays of committment to a counterintuitive world linked to moral authority and a shared background image of ideal social life are probably a very robust way to signal trustworthiness. Religious discourse preserves the integrity of the counterintuitive world and religious education teaches us how to go from narratives and formal principles to the application of practical moral reasoning to our lives. This ensures that the discourse can remain a reliable signal for spiritual community membership yet still viewed as a source for moral authority.

I think (2) requires a slightly different blend of history and biology. As Fred has observed a number of times, we can think of individual theistic belief similar to the way we think of any other belief, in terms of making subjective sense of what we experience, considering the rich imaginative and emotional components of human reasoning to belief from discourse and experience. I'm choosing an extremely schematic and simplistic way to describe it of course, but I suspect basically accurate.

But that still leaves the cultural evolution of socially widespread belief in distinctive domains like science and religion to explain. As Jim noted, the trend from many gods to one and the changing meaning of dominant public symbols of morality, like the dramatic shift in moral imagery that distinguished Christ, Augustine, and Aquinas from Abraham and Moses (and which today distinguishes Bush from Chomsky).

For one, why do we distinguish the domain of religion as something distinct today? Is it because "theism" is something distinct containing all of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism ? Or is it because we are fascinated by the social phenomenon of community and its relation to discourse and displays of committment.

For most of Western history, there was no such distinction as "religion." The way we made that distinction a couple hundred years ago, and the way we explain it to ourselves, reveals a lot about our cultural evolution. It gets tied up in issues of the political power of Throne and Altar, different moral images for ideallized social life, and the nature of public committments to particular traditions of moral authority.

The Enlightenment philosophers rejected Aquinas' tradition of Aristotelian ethics because of the association with the moral and political authority of the Church and their opposition to it. Yet they replaced it with questions more than practical alternate ethical traditions. Few of us today can seriously claim to decide right from wrong by applying Kant's categorical imperative, and Hume left little in the way of lasting guidelines for how passion leads to moral reasoning, although he had a lot of interesting insights. If his legacy of thinking has been corrupted through logical positivism as "emotivism," or the idea that moral judgment is just a matter of individual emotional response, then we may well have adopted some form of it widely today, but I suggest that we aren't neccessarily better off for it.

For another thing, what is the result of this distinction between religion and other things and how is it justified? As some apologists have pointed out, our secular theories of religion rely on appeal to interpretive traditions in similar ways to those used by the religions themselves.

Something still distinguishes religion, its discourse, beliefs, practices and institutions, and their relationship to human social behavior as a thing worthy of study to understand ourselves.

With any historical and anthropological background at all I think it quickly becomes very hard to support the argument that it is entirely a matter of a few people seducing massive flocks of the gullible, or that this view in any way helps to distinguish "theism" from fads, fashion, advertising, politics, or even the widespread acceptance of the latest scientific theory (at least outside of journals and labs).

I think these issues merit more of our attention than a passing association with flocking or parasitic memes.

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

Revised:yet even more questions are left unaddressed, by James Brody, 01/22/04 some tangential thoughts about religion, by Todd, 02/25/04

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