Robert Bellah, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, has written a new book called Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. There are many blurbs on the Amazon page, as well as this description of the contents:
Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.
How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias, but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched.
And in the latest Atlantic, there’s a shortish interview with Bellah: “Where does religion come from?” Sadly, it’s not very enlightening about Bellah’s views, except to say that he sees religion as emanating from some sort of human penchant for drama (the “play instinct,” with a double meaning):
Play is a very elusive idea because it comes in so many forms. It’s hard entirely to put them all under one category. Johan Huizinga’s work was a great help to me, because he makes a strong argument that ritual emerges out of play. I’m a practicing Episcopalian and they call Sunday School “holy play,” which seems to me a little bit cuckoo but there’s some sense to it; in a sense what we’re doing in the liturgy is a kind of play, a profound play. . .
. . . The idea of utopia is always a kind of play, because we know it’s not real–it’s just what we can imagine. But it has the serious possibility of saying, “Look, the world the way it is didn’t have to be that way. It could be different.” And that’s something I think becomes more possible after the Axial Age. With ancient Australian traditions daily life and mythic life are so closely embedded in each other that you really can’t think of anything being any different.
The good thing is that he emphasizes the diversity of religion: many faiths, for example, don’t accept the idea of an afterlife (afterlife also plays an insignificant role in many forms of Judaism), so one can’t say that religion arose to counteract our knowledge of mortality. Or maybe it did, but has since changed as it spread throughout human societies.
I’ve read a fair bit about the origins of religion, and, as you probably know, there are a diversity of theories. There’s Pascal Boyer’s theory that religion comes from our evolved tendency to attribute conscious “agency” to things, even inanimate ones, D. S. Wilson’s idea that religions arose via a form of group selection (he’s not clear whether it’s genetic or cultural evolution) favoring those societies whose faiths made them more cohensive, individual selection for belief, theories that religion coopts our tendency to obey our elders, Freud’s theory that religion is an illusion based on fantasies and wish fulfillment, and, of course, religiously-based theories saying that our religious tendencies were actually instilled in us by God. It’s my view that although some of these theories make sense (Boyer’s in particular), we have no empirical or scientific way to discriminate among them—except to eliminate the last one. A theory that makes sense isn’t necessarily a theory that is right. And I can’t see a resolution of this issue any time soon. The origin of religion may be one of those questions forever beyond our ken.
Bellah, a self-described “practicing Episcopalian,” also has a theory about atheists:
And for those who are atheists, I think there are two kinds of atheism. There’s one kind that says, “Give me a break, I don’t care about that whole thing. It doesn’t mean anything to me.” But there are also people who don’t believe in God but have deep moral commitments and have very strong views on what is good and what is evil and who even may devote themselves to good causes. Atheism per se certainly doesn’t mean that people are antisocial. It just means they have found other symbols. The traditional religious symbols have lost their meaning to them but they still believe in social good, etc.
That’s just bizarre: atheists who have strong beliefs about what’s moral and good and those who don’t? I don’t know any of the latter, and if you’re going to divide atheists that way, well, you could divide religious people along the same axis. And is “social good” really a “symbol” equivalent to God?
None of this makes me want to read his book.
I lean towards Boyer’s explanation too, mainly due to some posts I read over at Epiphenom:
“In other words, when you start to break down people’s sense that they understand what’s going on, they respond by turning up the ‘gain’ on pattern detection. Similar things have been seen in previous studies, except in these studies the gain detection is turned up so high that people see things that aren’t there at all.
For example, people who are made to feel like they are not in control tend to see patterns that aren’t there. And people who are made to feel lonely are more likely to anthropomorphize (i.e. see pets and even gadgets as friends).”
ditto that. Boyer’s needs the least additional speculation than the other theories I’ve heard. Especially given that religious people seem to have such difficulty groking non-causer causality. Even myself, when thinking of the uincaring universe, can’t quite drop the qualia of a universe actually “feeling” ambivalence toward me”…you know? But I get the trick….
I agree the generalized attribution of agency and intentionality is at the root of the origins of religion.
This is also present in other mammals. My dog when he was a puppy would bark at and try to chase after leaves being blown by the wind. I think that this is probably very similar to the animist beliefs of hunter gatherer society.
The agency orientated viewpoint must have evolved parallel to human cultural evolution into more complex beliefs which related human cultural evolution and the resulting social and economic structures.
Sounds like Bellah is one of those people who think religion is mostly some sort of performance are. Which would be fine with me, but then they need to let go of the idea that religion can prescribe how people live their lives, and stop linking religion with morality.
“And for those who are atheists, I think there are two kinds of atheism. There’s one kind that says, “Give me a break, I don’t care about that whole thing. It doesn’t mean anything to me.” But there are also people who don’t believe in God but have deep moral commitments and have very strong views on what is good and what is evil and who even may devote themselves to good causes.”
Seems to me that’s one kind, not two.
But it’s nice to see that he’s given so much thought to atheism.
There are actually two, but type one does not embrace atheists, but rather sociopaths and priests.
If type one is defined by the attitude “Give me a break, I don’t care about that whole thing. It doesn’t mean anything to me”, then that includes this atheist. I don’t see how it has anything to do with deep moral commitments.
He’s trying to say that there’s a significant percentage of atheists that are Nietzsche wannabes.
By definition atheism is amoral, at least in the sense that there isn’t a common standard of morality. If there was, what is it? The whole concept of “good” and “bad” must have an objective standard. C.S. Lewis went from professing atheist to agnostic when he realized this fact. Many athesits will claim to be ethical and moral by claiming that each man has his own standard. “Every man is his own god” concept. By that standard Hitler was just as moral and ethical as Mother Theresa.
By definition Christianity is profoundly immoral, at least in the sense that the claimed source of all morality sees fit to mete out infinite torture for the most trivial of non-infractions.
By this standard, Hitler, whose Mein Kampf reads no different from the writings of Martin Luther; Mother Theresa, who withheld palliative care from her wards while traveling in a private jet to receive her own medical treatments; Torquemada, who would rather his victims suffered months of hell on Earth than an infinite amount of torture at Jesus’s hands; and the Pope, who is waging genocide against black Africans via AIDS and is running a global child rape racket; are all equally evil.
Cheers,
b&
WHo says they are evil? You? How do you define evil? Is it your definition or is there a standard? Who gets to decide what is a “trivial ifraction”? You? Or do you form a group of peers, let us call them “elites”, who then form a committee to decide what is moral and immoral, serious or trivial. Take a vote. Yay, we all voted that killing children who are halfway born is moral. Let’s take another vote.
ps considering I am not a roman catholic nor a lutheran your point is that men did “evil” things, according to . . . someones . . . moral standard. Are you saying that the standard of morality is “majority rule”?
Morality is nothing more nor less than an emergent phenomenon that arises from social interaction. Simply, it’s far more effective to cooperate as part of a group than to go it alone. Pretty much everything else stems from that simple observation.
What is evil? Doing unto others as they do not wish to be done unto. The only time evil may be tolerated is to the minimum amount necessary to stop others from doing unto others against their will.
As to why that’s evil…well, if you knew even the most elementary introductory-lesson bits about game theory, it’d be self-obvious. But, since you’re displaying all the moral and intellectual acumen of a toddler, I’ll spell it out.
If you were to go on a murderous rape rampage, everybody else would band together to stop you.
A society in which everybody did such would rip itself to shreds before it could even raise a single generation.
Therefore, thanks to evolution, there are no societies in which that is the norm. Further, again thanks to evolution, the frequency of people prone to going on murderous rape rampages decreases with each generation as they die out quicker than those who don’t display such tendencies.
That’s also why modern societies are far more moral than the hideous barbarism that is recorded in that abomination of an anthology you worship. We’ve evolved a hell of a lot since the days of genocidal goatherding warlords with delusions of grandeur.
By “we,” of course, I mean the aggregate of society as a whole. There are still plenty of outliers and throwbacks such as yourself. Never fear, though. If we as a society manage to survive, your numbers will ever decrease and fade into the background.
Cheers,
b&
The conclusion seems garbled: “By that standard Hitler was just as moral and ethical as Mother Theresa.” Seems to me that by *any* standard these two vile folk were equally (a-)moral, (un-)ethical, and beyond the pale of ordinary human compassion.
Actually the Nazis at the Nuremburg trials defended themselves by saying that no outside nations can judge them by an arbitrary standard. Who are you to judge? What gives you the right to judge? Don’t people get to govern themselves? Now that we are in the age of “your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth” we are no longer able to judge nations like China, North Korea, or Iraq under Saddam Hussein (well if a democrat is president then we can judge other countries if we feel like it; bomb Libya, threaten Syria, allow Iran to kill citizens in the streets on TV without saying a word).
But you used the word “ordinary”. Is that the standard? What is “ordinary” is the standard? So if it is “ordinary” to gather up black people and put them into the bowels of a ship and take them across the ocean and sell them as property then that can be considered moral?
Look at what happened to the Nazis. They went on a murderous rampage and threatened to take out everybody else with them. Didn’t work out so well for the Nazis, did it?
Oh — and it’s your grimoire that actually commands slavery, and more than one of your gods who was invoked to justify it. If you had read any of the classics, such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, you’d know that you just put on a big, flashing neon sign of how clueless and unskilled a communicator you are. You may think you’re a master debater, but you’d only be correct in the homophonic sense of the phrase.
Cheers,
b&
@ Ben,
“grimoire”–super word!
It isn’t as much amoral as orthogonal of morality.
But it does set “a common standard of morality” since it rejects religion and so its absolute morality, embracing relative morality as the default.
The last part of your comment makes it clear that you don’t understand morality, as it is the exact opposite of “anything goes”. You should try to find out what it is before you comment inanely on a subject.
Others have given great replies, but here are two more points:
I suppose you could call atheism an “amoral” worldview, but only in the sense that admitting magic doesn’t exist has no bearing on morality.
Second, how in hell does religion provide a “standard of morality”? An eternal, universal standard of morality? No way, Josè. Do you keep slaves, as sanctioned in the Babble? I didn’t think so.
Oh. I now see that Torbjörn addressed my first point with his first sentence.
Yeah, Torbjörn is one of those who tends to cut discussions short by clearly and unambiguously stating all that needs be stated. It’s not wise to gloss over his posts….
b&
Thank you guys, web love appreciated and returned!
“The whole concept of “good” and “bad” must have an objective standard.”
Why?
This is very good: “Whether they believe in God, evolutionary biologists may need to pay closer mind to religion. That’s because religious beliefs can shape key behaviors in ways that evolutionary theory would not predict, particularly when it comes to dealing with disease…”http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/does-religion-influence-epidemic.html
Not that impressed. First of all, it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that cultural influences are not well predicted by biology. You might as well complain that biology is not well predicted by chemistry.
I’m not impressed by his favorable comparison of Christianity with Islam and Judaism either. For example, it’s well known that during much of the middle ages, Jewish and Arab medicine was far more advanced than Christian medicine, with Jewish and Moorish doctors being in high demand at European courts, which would be a little hard to explain from his assertions.
Also, if his hypothesis is based on the simultaneous emergence of disease and religion between 800 B.C.E. and 200 B.C.E., why mention Jesus at all, whose religion emerged centuries later?
Sounds to me someone is doing PR for Christianity, nothing more.
I believe that religion comes from the modern human need to know and understand the natural world.
Prior to modern science and technology, the best way to fill in the gaps of our lack of understanding of the unknown was to attribute natural phenomena to other-worldy action(s).
Thus, to ensure the world could be known in this way, powerful mytholodgy and stories(religion) were invented to show we can understand what we do not know.
Conflict occurs when science upends god belief. When we learn the Earth isn’t the center of the universe or that the world is round, or that we evolved, religion fights back to ensure its own survival.
But religious faith cannot replace science or logic, or our understanding of the mechanics of the universe or the fact that there is no evidence for any god now, or ever.
When faced with the facts, modern religious people (who are really just channeling paleolthic responses to nature) have nothing in their philosophical arsenal other than faith. Which we know cannot save lives, allow us to sail on the oceans and to the stars, or make the world a better and safer place to live for all species on the planet.
“Channeling paleolithic responses to nature.” I love it! But they’re oh so modern with their ornately embroidered robes, their icons, their unison chanting of creeds, their … oh wait, no they’re not. Thanks for the eye-opening metaphor!
@Entertaining Doubts. Thank you for the kudos.
Yes, costume, icons and chanting are all forms of power and control. You know who you have to be subservient to in ritual and daily life.
I have my own blog,
http://www.paleolibrarian.blogspot.com.
Please take a look if you’re interested. I’ve been a huge fan of Jerry’s work for a long time and I decided back in May to stake my own claim in the blogosphere.
Cheers,
David
I agree entirely with your idea for where religion comes from (and I was just about to post a comment making the same argument).
Humans want to understand the world around us, and we have a much stronger affinity to someone who says, with confidence, “I know” than we do to someone who admits “I don’t know.” Modern scientific education is designed to burn that tendency out of us.
But ancient people didn’t have the patience* or scientific techniques to get true understanding. It was a lot easier to make up stories, and to ally oneself with a culture’s favorite explanation. All it took was someone to declare, with confidence, that a particular story is true for people to band around that person.
As centuries moved on the explainers became priests, kings jumped in with their own propaganda, and to dispute the story became heresy. That must have evolved into the religions of ancient Egypt, Israel, India, Greece, China, and most everywhere else.
Not every religion has a God or an afterlife, so that’s clearly not a prerequisite. But every religion has a creation story.
* It took a lot of patience. Getting from Babylon’ first scientific data sets on the movement of the planets to Copernicus’s correct theory and Galileo’s proof of it took thousands of years.
I think it’s more about control than understanding. At a time when medicine was worse than useless, neighbouring tribes wanted your land, food and women, and the weather could put on storm and kill you all, men (and I mean men) wanted to feel as though they could influence these events supernaturally, for their own benefit. See comment 1. Religion really doesn’t offer understanding and anyone who is looking for it soon finds religion unsatisfying. Religion offers magic spells to control the universe to your own benefit. Unfortunately it doesn’t actually work, but the history of medicine shows that people prefer something to be done regardless of whether it actually helps or not.
+ 1
Yes! There are many interesting things about study of religion phenomena in humanity (not theology but open ended research), and while I haven’t read this Bellah, I would rather welcome his ideas. It does not matter if he is episcopalian or not, ideas should stand on their own. And from Jerry’s description seems this Bellah is an alright guy.
We should look at phenomena of religions in man as fact of history, and trying not to see everything from current issues lens. Religions was a fact in the same way as discovery of paper, cities, bow and arrows, opium. It may be irrelevant or even evil from current view, but it definitely changed the humanity.
What was the driving force (agencies, drama play, psychological quirks definitely there), the factual births of religions, the detailed descriptions, the effect of societies both followers adversaries and others, etc etc.
While I know most current religionistas are poisoning everything with their own short-sightedness, I do understand the same driving force to do the same exist in everybody (these by themselves are another phenomena for research..).
“That’s just bizarre: atheists who have strong beliefs about what’s moral and good and those who don’t?”
Can’t you say the same thing about the religious? If one doesn’t care enough to think about it, it is much easier to “believe” what the majority is telling you to believe.
Even on the surface religionistas (read: xtians) seems to have “strong morality of right or wrong”, in most cases this is just a facade.
Not many person really digs the questions like right or wrong, that’s including those under their own belief systems.
“Understanding right or wrong” is a political banner for abrahamic religions, and as in any banner, it is neither true nor followed ..
Often, I have read sociologists and historians and related academics describing the members of some culture – Australian Aborigines in this example, Aztecs in 1500 in other examples, etc. – as being unable to conceive of certain key ideas. Here, the Australian Aborigines apparently were / are completely unable to imagine a world that is at all different from the one they inhabit. The Aztecs, according to one rather bizarre subdiscipline, could not even see the ships of the Spanish Conquistadors because such a thing (a large human-made and human-controlled craft capable of crossing oceans) was beyond their minds’ ability to concieve.
It always comes across as rather patronizing and condescending. Oh, yeah, those Aborigines succumbed to European diseases and had low population sizes and were hunter-gatherers rather than farmers because their culture couldn’t *think* of something else! Really? A human mind faced with novelty relies on denial and illusion, exclusively, as responses?
“A human mind faced with novelty relies on denial and illusion, exclusively, as responses?”
Or because we’re so inquistive and imaginative as a species we attribute new things to the spiritual because we have no data to explain it otherwise.
Remember the “cargo cult” During WWII, the U.S. air dropped food to native peoples who never saw a plane. They immediately made it into a bird god and started treating it with supernatural qualities and religeous ritual.
I imagine that if alien life showed up in orbit around earth and started airdropping advanced resources and medicine, the religious consequences would be -hilarious-. There’s almost certainly a sci-fi book I’m getting this idea from, but my point is, we’re Aztecs and we’re premodern island tribes, we’re running more or less the same software on the same hardware, and the exact same thing can (and does, clearly) happen to us.
The way it’s phrased w.r.t. ‘primitive’ cultures is incredibly awkward and patronising, but I tend to parse it as ‘hey, look at the silly failure states of the human mind in the abstract’.
“The Aztecs, according to one rather bizarre subdiscipline, could not even see the ships of the Spanish Conquistadors because such a thing (a large human-made and human-controlled craft capable of crossing oceans) was beyond their minds’ ability to concieve.”
Was that an actual anthropologist or historian who said that, or just some knob in “What the Bleep Do We Know?”?
As I recall just from general reading, Montezuma was expecting the return of a god named Quetzalcoatl, a white,bearded fellow who was coming back to save the day.He originally believed the Spanish were the descendants of Quetzalcoatl.
Not my usual reading matter :- I see no ships European explorers found indigenous peoples unable to see their tallships – or did they?
I don’t buy it.
“The Aztecs, according to one rather bizarre subdiscipline, could not even see the ships of the Spanish Conquistadors because such a thing (a large human-made and human-controlled craft capable of crossing oceans) was beyond their minds’ ability to concieve.”
I call BS. I’ve heard that story before, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a fictional folk history that’s repeated not because it’s true but because it sounds cool. Unless you can come up with some actual evidence that it’s true, using it and other fun-sounding folk histories in your argument robs you of credibility.
Michael Fisher’s link above provides a bit more investigation and a much easier to believe explanation: the story dates back to Captain Cook’s voyage to Australia and it’s not that the Aborigines couldn’t see the ship, they just didn’t have enough time to stop gathering food and gawk at the strange new artifact on the horizon.
He seems to talk about Atheists as if they were some rare and newly discovered animal species.He gently quells the fears of “Christian sapien sapiens ” ,letting them know that some of the members of this alien species may be trainable, and even make good pets.
It’s like some of these writers haven’t even heard of 5th Century Greek philosophy. A way of looking at the world that doesn’t involve interventionist deities? Systems of morality and ethics that don’t depend on authoritarianism? It’s all new to them.
Awesome, now we finally get to criticize others for being unsophisticated 🙂
Well, you’ll be glad to know that Epicurus and Plato’s Euthyphro are both centuries older than Christianity and utterly demolish Christianity’s most cherished theological positions.
Cheers,
b&
The most cherished theological position of a Christian is the resurrection from the dead of Jesus. Before that single space time event Christianity did not exist. For the following 300 years the Romans attempted numerous times to wipe it out. Christians were called atheists (for not believing in roman gods). After that failed the attempt was to institutionalize and politicize the church, but God raised up Athanasius to oppose that. As long as Jesus lives, and He does, no amount of man-made philosophy can “demolish” that fact. I always wonder why folks who believe that all of life is meaningless and purposeless and that we live, die, and then become worm food would bother to care at all what their fellow apes (who are no different that rocks, trees, and fish) think about an after-life that atheists call a fantasy. Why care? Why bother? Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to pursue hedonism to the extreme in the short time you have left to breathe air?
You could be worm food tonight or tomorrow, and you are wasting time talking about Christians . . . huh?
Sigh, we wouldn’t be spending our precious time worrying about believers in weird things if they didn’t constantly try to impose their beliefs on us. I was at a defense of a birth control facility not so long ago where a bunch of crazy catholics were harassing people, and one guy wore a t-shirt saying “Pray for an end to abortion”. Now if he’d been content to merely pray we could all have stayed home. But he wasn’t content with praying and not having an abortion himself, he had to try to make sure no-one else did the things he didn’t like. This is why we “bother”, we have no choice if we want to live without other peoples’ favourite iron age social rules imposed on us.
And just think, you’re wasting time on us with your shopworn apologetics. That’s a privelege we could do without.
Oh, grow up. There never were any zombies in first century Jerusalem, especially any that got his rocks off by ordering his thralls to fondle his intestines.
You can confirm this for yourself by reading the day’s equivalent of the newspaper, today known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The man who invented the concept of the Logos lived during the whole time. He also happened to be brother-in-law to King Herod Agrippa and a diplomat. Never noticed a thing, either. Nor did anybody else, including Christians until a generation after y’all like to pretend it happened.
As I wrote, grow up. Long before you needed to take off your shoes to count your age, you should have learned that there’s more to life than the instant gratification of the next three seconds. Or do you still need diapers? Or do not even bother with such and stink up the air around you the way you stink up this Web site?
b&
I’ve never met an atheist who thinks life is meaningless. Have some sympathy for that poor straw man, will you?
“Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to pursue hedonism to the extreme in the short time you have left to breathe air?”
Again, greeks. As Epikuros already noted, that’s not how you maximise your enjoyment.
I just can’t compete with how sophisticated and well-read theologists are.
Had the same initial response. Ooh, atheists! They’re knuckle-draging, pitchfork-wielding unwashed cretins. But some of them have learned enough to upset things in the asylum. If we give them some prozac and a bit of TLC, the best of them may yet come around. F-off!
I’m glad you addressed this. I saw the announcement about Bellah’s book the other day and thought to myself that it didn’t really make a lot of sense. More troubling is the concealed premise that there really is something defective about people who don’t believe. That’s the only assumption that can make sense of Bellah’s remarks about atheists. In one way his “theory” — that religion is a offshoot of play — is not new. Theologians have been talking about story and narrative for a long time.
The other thing is the idea that the religion of the Axial Age (Karl Jaspers) provided options for an expansive future, utopias (for example) towards which people might, in imagination, travel, and therefore, in reality, could work towards. Whereas my suspicion is that while the Axial Age may have been characterised by the multiplication of imaginary worlds, religion (especially monotheism = Akhnaton and Moses; and (what for a better word I would call) nomotheism = Buddha) was brought in, not to explore these worlds, but, as a very conservative movement, to bring them under control, to put a lid on imagination, and by focusing them, to preserve the old ways. The best way to do this is to establish an orthodoxy, and that’s what Axial Age religion actually did (or at least, as its seems to me, tried to do).
As for the scientific study of religion: while we may never be able to say for sure how religion began or what its basic purpose is or has been, there is such a variety of plausible empirical theories now that it seems that the least plausible idea is that we are religious because there is a god or gods or a transcendent order of things.
On the general topic, I can offer a totally unsolicited recommendation of the blog Genealogy of Religion.
The author is an anthropologist (and, judging by his blogroll, a Gnu Atheist fellow traveller) blogging his PhD dissertation, “which traces the evolutionary origins and cultural histories of supernatural thinking and what has come to be known more recently as ‘religion.'”
I’ve been following it for a couple of months now, and it’s consistently good stuff.
Thanks for the link!
Somebody has to take these issues seriously, academically even ..
Thanks for the unsolicited props!
Judge me not by my blogroll but by this: all genealogies (in the Nietzschean sense of the term) are a form of debunking argument.
There are frontal assaults and there are flank attacks. Both are needed.
“Give me a break, I don’t care about that whole thing. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
I have a brother-in-law who is exactly this kind of atheist. He doesn’t believe, and doesn’t care to understand why he doesn’t believe. I would call him an apathetic atheist.
I would argue that there are a good many people who fall into this category of atheism/deism–living their lives as if God isn’t going to do anything. You know this type: buying insurance, buckling their seat belt, seeing the doctor and dentist, saving money for retirement/college/etc.
Yes, of course. But the problem with Bellah is that he separates your brother (and mine, FWIW) from a moral atheist.
He is, in essence, accusing your brother (and mine) of being amoral. It’s not even damning with faint praise — it’s a direct indictment.
In Bellah’s world, your brother (and mine) are baby roasters.
I’m all for apatheism. If those types constituted the majority of the world’s population, we’d be a heck of a lot safer and more civilized. Bellah looks upon that prospect with horror.
Yes – he seems to be making an assumption that there is some kind of connection between pondering existential issues and morality. I don’t see any relation at all.
He sees the relation because he thinks that Jesus is responsible for both, and in his mind anything that replaces Jesus for the one would have to replace Jesus for the other, as well.
Cheers,
b&
Kevin says that with more apatheism folks around the world would be more “civilized”. I find most atheists are also socialists/communists. They are pro-abortion, pro-regulation, pro-distribution of their neighbors income without their neighbors consent, etc.. They are pro-STATE control of mankind because their fellow men/women are just not enlightened enough to know better. Gotta love that STATE control, like in China, where children need to be protected from their parents taking them to church. Just think . . . atheists concerned that parents may teach their own children what they believe? Better stop that with FORCE! because the elite atheists know what is best for everyone in the STATE. Long live the STATE! 😉
My, my. Nazis and commies all in one thread. What a tiresome bore.
You really made me stumble with that phrasing. It would have saved me confusion if you just typed, “Nazis and commies and states, oh my!”
Hey, isn’t there something in the Bible about how rich people should give their money to the poor, charging interest on loans is immoral, and, well, being rich is a bad thing?
That sounds pretty COMMUNIST to me.
And religious people want the STATE to impose restrictions on what people can do- who can marry who, who has a right to make decisions about their body and reproduction, and what you can spend your money on. Somebody doing something you don’t approve of? Better stop it with FORCE. Because elitist white male Christians know what’s best for everyone in the STATE.
Even the most cursory glance at global statistics shows that religiosity is inversely correlated with prosperity, and the most successful nations have the strongest social support networks.
Religion only thrives in nations with abysmal personal security; in such states, it is often used by the powerful to control the frightened serfs — you being a classic example of such.
If you want to live like a king, don’t believe what the king says, believe what the king knows. “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” — Seneca the Younger (4 BCE – 65 CE).
Seneca, by the way, was perfectly positioned to have witnessed the birth of Christianity, including the activities described in Paul’s letters to the Romans. He wrote nary a word of any of it.
Cheers,
b&
As opposed to pro-forced-pregnancy? Yeah, that’s not totalitarian at all. Do you also advocate not putting any controls on multinationals that are larger than some countries? Sure, what could go wrong? And your neighbors did give their consent to taxation – it’s called voting. Sometimes you don’t get your way in a democracy, of course, but you just have to deal with that, it comes with the system. If you don’t like living in a democracy, there are plenty of places in the world that don’t have it.
Actually, I’d say that the consent to being taxed comes not from voting but from accepting tax-funded services like public roads, fire departments, and law enforcement.
Well said.
These theological discussions or even religion rituals are not necessary to life, not in the sense of eat drink sleep and sex, the real biological imperatives. So it could (in in many cases do) become redundant variable, don’t-cares, do not contribute significantly.
This is what the current pope afraid of, should not be ours.
Now, having said that, still history and evolution of religions is an important (definitely not the most) phenomena, for research.
Of course, the bolded words are meant to convey the idea that, while some atheists have gone completely off the reservation, others manage to find their way by aping the good, solid, moral behavior that is OF COURSE the result, exclusively, of religion’s guidance.
The above, and Jerry’s observation that Bellah’s distinction is in no way confined to describing atheists, just shows that this fellow’s thinking is probably pretty sloppy.
“wide-ranging … nuanced … transcend the quotidian” I detest this abuse of language !
“Axial Age” is a new term for me so I read about it here ~ I can’t tell if it’s a useful idea. It reminds me of when people raved about Bicameralism years back
I think our current knowledge of 3,000yo civilisations is still too patchy for such grand theories. Keep digging.
It’s surely not a question of finding a single origin for religion. Almost certainly numerous aspects have played a role.
Boyer’s theory is most probably part of the story, but co-opting our tendency to obey elders and wish-fulfillment are probably better seen as complementary components rather than as competing theories. An evolved fear of death and desire for justice are surely part of it, as is a desire to understand the forces of nature around us. Mental illness and our failure to understand it are also on the list. Then there is unscrupulous manipulation by power-hungry alpha males, while a desire for a convenient supply of temple virgins may feature in there somewhere as well.
I agree; there is probably no ‘magic bullet’ explanation for the broad category of religion and religious belief. What aspect of religion are we addressing? Belief in the supernatural? Communal rituals? Divine Command Ethics? Feasts and celebrations?
One of the theories I read regarding why supernatural belief is so common had to do with the way our infant brains form our sense of self and outside reality in connection with an all-seeing Other focused on our needs: the mother or caretaker(s.) Many of our supernatural assumptions seem to hark back to the parent-child relationship and our reasonable inference that the entire environment is in the direct control of higher beings or authorities. Objects and events are rewards, punishments, lessons, demonstrations. The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief: Searching for angels and the parent-God by M.D. Faber. Not sure if his psychological theory applies to animism, but it could.
Screw you, Bellah.
There are people who believe in God BUT have deep analytical abilities anyway. Glad to know that the opposite of an apatheist is not an atheist who uses reason to analyze the concept of God, but a nice person.
This is a barely-veiled variation on the tiresome Christian trope that all morality comes from Jesus, and those who aren’t Christian but are moral anyway really do get their moral instincts from Jesus but either don’t realize it or are afraid to admit it.
Quite obnoxious, really.
Cheers,
b&
Not 10 minutes ago, I gave money to Planned Parenthood. I wonder if Bellah thinks that’s a “good cause”?
You monster.
Where does religion come from?
The origins of religion must be one of the most important issues facing scholars today and the answers will not be found within the confines of any one discipline. We are currently in the position of the blind men describing an elephant based upon their perceptions of its various parts; the description, by any one of them, can be refuted by the evidence of the others.
Given the seemingly intractable nature of the effort to understand the origins of religion I think that too little attention is paid to the research of Julien Jaynes. I understand the reluctance of many scholars to give much credence to his hypotheses. Some of these are clearly controversial but they deserve consideration none-the less and much of what he proposes is not so much controversial as it is novel. What I find most intriguing is his idea that the origins of religion may be closely coupled to the origins of consciousness.
Any study that sweeps across broad spans of history, one that delves into psychology, anthropology, linguistics and sociology can be refuted from a limited point of view but Julien Jaynes provides a new perspective that however difficult to grasp is well worth the effort.
The concept that one half of the human brain was sending auditory signals to the other half which were interpreted as dead ancestors or deities, therefore religion, and was the state of human physiology until very recently (3000 years ago?), at which time we gained self-awareness and consciousness is far-fetched.
Thank you gillt, but your very succinct summary conflates four and possibly five concepts as one. Such a summary of, say, evolution or astrophysics could be constructed to show that the conclusions of these disciplines are ‘far-fetched’. (I don’t claim to be clever enough to do so.) Such summary statements can easily be misleading for they permit, in their brevity and simplification, erroneous representations of what is actually claimed in the research. And if we take the term ‘far-fetched’ at face value then much of what science has to say about the world can be said to be so. We know that, historically, as new scientific ideas arose, there were always those naysayers that pointed out that such ideas were far-fetched. I encountered much the same kind of thinking when I asked Steven Pinker for his opinion of Jaynes’ research. His succinct summary, like this one, made presumptions that inaccurately represented what Jayne’s had said. What is evident from these kinds of hasty summaries is that those who make them usually have not read the research which they deign to summarily dismiss. Jaynes’ research and conclusions, his hypotheses, if you will, are sufficiently complex and supported by evidence that they cannot be summarized in one brief statement, however cleverly constructed it may be.
Any second-hand knowledge must, like hearsay evidence in a court, be treated as suspect.
Bellah
According to Bellah, the ” whole thing” the first kind of atheism doesn’t seem to care for is presumably organized religion or religious ritual; that’s the context of his response anyway.
While the second type of atheism in his whole ill-conceived distinction is linked to the first with a conjunction he makes a logical leap that exposes his prejudices.
Suddenly Bellah wants to address the favorite religious bugaboo about atheists’ inherent amorality. So instead of flat out denying the canard that atheism equals amoralism, because would be plainly crazy, he declares one type of atheist (his type of atheist no doubt) as except from this specious accusation. One can only presume that this is in contrast to the first type of atheism, which, in addition to not caring about religious ritual or organized religion, also (or because of this) lacks morality.
This statement says more about Bellah’s prejudices than it does about atheism. He apparently thinks organized religion and religious ritual are somehow linked to morality and that’s ridiculous.
well said
It’s especially ridiculous given that he seems to believe in some kind of “natural history” of religion – completely dismissing the truth claims of religion, but still granting it moral authority. I don’t understand it.
( subscribing )
When I read Bellah’s backhanded compliment that some atheists might even devote themselves to good causes; it’s just that “the traditional religious symbols have lost their meaning to them…”, I thought, How can you lose something you never had in the first place?
Then I realized how saturated our lives are with all things religious: rituals, chants, dogma, prayers, creeds, beliefs; and how I know about them but that they are all lost on me. It brings back the Kris Kristofferson lyrics, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” So since I’ve lost all the religious baggage, I’m free.
So actually atheism’s just another word
for freedom. But we already knew that.
It seems to me that a turn to religion is a somewhat lazy approach to dealing with many if not much of life’s usual challenges. As implied in a number of comments on this thread, it is far easier to accept a ‘global’ view [for want of a better description] offered by religion, warts and all, rather than face those challenges head-on.
It is also partly an issue of inertia. It either takes an exhaustive and enormous energy and effort to flatten the religious speed bump in order to reset the track to human flourishing and well-being, and/or it is a very long-term incremental process by which our individual contributions seem miniscule.
But I do think both aspects of this process have become increasingly more persistent and powerful as our understanding of the cognitive sciences, together with improved research techniques in anthropology, psychology, sociology and allied disciplines collaterally produce confirming data of the nature of religion.
If religion does survive into the future, one thing is for sure, it will be vastly different to that now on display.
I prefer Robert Sapolsky’s explanations of religion and religious behaviour, much more convincing.
http://blip.tv/enneagon/sapolsky-on-religion-2215838
Boyer implicitly supports the teleonomic argument and the one from pareidolia. Thus, I support his position.
Supernaturalists themselves use the genetic argument with their arguments from angst and from happiness-purpose!
They recognize their own need for that illusory intent!
WEIT should ever note those two arguments about intent and the supernaturalists’ two! All this lays bare supernaturalism as the emotional and intellectual and sometimes monetary scam of the ages!
Wistfulness for intent cannot instantiate the supernatural! Neither definition,faith nor postulation can instantiate that divine intent known as God!
WEIT own intent for reason to prevail can aid to get rid of that divine intent in people’s minds . The putative need for intent also lies behind those other reasons why religion.
Thus, Boyer is championing for reason against superstition.
Read Paul Kurtz’s examination of the twin superstitions the supernatural and the paranormal in ” The Transcendental Temptation.”
Lance, A.Rand regurgitation is so supercilius and -stupid!
Please Google covenant morality for humanity- the presumption of humanism to see how both subjectivism and objectivism [not Objectivism] bind on us, and I paradoxically find the former underpinning the latter, taking my cue from John Beversluis in “C.C.Lewis and the Search for Ratinal Religion.”
WEIT might attack the argument from reason- the self-refuation of naturalism that Lewis, Plantinga and others use about which Beverslius keel hauls.WEIT can portray how evolution does account for how we can trust our faculties.
WEIT, Alvin Plantinga is supposed to be an advanced theologian, a top philosopher of religion, whom i ever portray as a purveyor of solecistic, sophisticated sophistry of wiley, woeful woo! People instead should rank him and William Lane Craig and others with John Edward and Syliva Brown[e]!
God uses telepathy [That would violate physics.}
“LOgic is the bane of theists.” Fr.Griggs.
Sorry, I had corrected the typos with spell-check but did not realize I had to correct the repeat also.
I agree but its not that I don’t want to read it; it’s that I don’t have to. We have studied this subject and know that religions are a figment of man’s imagination about his fear of the unknown that also doesn’t exist. We don’t have to go into deep thought as to why man invents things to fill that void; we just know they have and will continue to do so. The problem with this kind of book is that, like religions, especialy Christianity, it is a pimple on the ass of progress.
But perhaps if we do “go into deep thought as to why man invents things to fill that void” we can understand better how to frame arguments that dissuade people from clinging tenaciously to their beliefs. Simply demonstrating that those beliefs are unfounded and irrational is, clearly, not always enough.
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Agreed. Everyone & his/her uncle wants make a killing as an author these days…Enough.
Fear of death. We acquired consciousness of self sufficient to realize that we were going to die. That fact was so terrifying and incomprehensible that we had to believe that in some fashion our “self” would survive death. That belief is religion. Other animals lack that consciousness of self and the consequent awareness of their own impending death and so lack religion.
Well, not all religions posit an afterlife, as others have pointed out above, so that can’t be a universal source of religion.
One alternative factor, perhaps stemming from humans’ long childhoods, the desire for more powerful beings in loco parentis who’ll look after you when things go wrong (but with the corollary that they’ll punish you if you’re naughty… an explanation for why things go badly wrong?).
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Why is it always about evolution when people want to explain religion? Couldn’t we have just come up with it, an invention like the wheel or the freedom of the press?
Interesting. There is indeed an automatic assumption here.
My automatic assumption is that people are dumb.
It’s not like this is rare. I only have to google something to find people running away with baseless speculations. Instant religion; just add clergy.
It might interest someone to know that I ran a shortlived cult in elementary school. Too easy.
Classic! Lol.
“That’s just bizarre: atheists who have strong beliefs about what’s moral and good and those who don’t?”
Sorta, yes.
There are some folks who are sometimes referred to as “apatheistic”; they don’t particularly care. In so far as many lack a belief in God, they also get counted as “atheists”. However, they don’t find the underlying questions about God and morality particularly interesting or salient, and so tend to have intuitive-based fuzzy positions that shift more readily (“are weaker”) than positions of people who have carefully worked out a meticulously self-scrutinized framework. The difficulty in changing their minds is not in dislodging deep-set foundations, but in holding their attention long enough to get them thinking.
Apatheist atheists are the counterpart to “Church of England, I suppose” apatheist theists, who go along with religion from force of habit and not as the result of any deep spiritual self-reflection. There’s also probably comparison to people who take political stances on abortion, taxation, environmental policy, and so forth, who really haven’t thought carefully about it, and who haven’t looked at the data.
Given the current spreading use of gnostic as back-construction from agnostic (independent of the original sense of the Gnostic Christian movement) to mirror theistic-atheistic, the analog patheist-apatheist construction may spread as time passes. (Most Google hits are for misspellings of “pantheist”, but there’s at least one hit back from 2006 of someone making the back-construction.) However, I’d expect it to spread more slowly; by definition, most apatheists don’t care enough to consciously adopt a label.
Most of the New Atheists, thus, are more Patheist Atheists. But there are at least a few Apatheist Atheists and Apatheist Theists on the Internet as well.
I’d expect that the (atheists) apatheists would probably correspond well to the 6.3% of the US that the Pew Forum’s 2008 survey identified as secular “Nothing In Particular”. (Hmmm… “SNIPs”?) Of course, those aren’t all “don’t believe in God” atheists.