Science vs. Religion: (Chapter Two) (Humans)

by dhw, Friday, February 25, 2011, 12:55 (5019 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: [...] the other 'shocking' discovery was a sudden thought that faith is largely deterministic for humans. Religion is governed by geography. [...] Had I been born in India, I would likely be Hindu, maybe Jain or Sikh [...] Generally speaking it is pretty rare for a person to completely reject the religion they were born into. [...] But the key question is, "How much of this is man-made?"-Like you, I made this 'shocking' discovery in my early teens, when I became an atheist, but I made another discovery in my late teens, when I became an agnostic. This was the fact that most religions had a common core. Indeed the three main monotheistic religions actually shared the same God, and many religions contained similar ideas (creation myths, great floods, personifications of good and evil, death leading to a new life). I also realized that although different people have different languages and social customs, there are certain fundamental human needs (apart from the obvious physical ones) that we all have in common, love being an obvious example. Humour and music may be others. I once read an account of a journey through the Amazon jungle, and the explorers played some Mozart to tribesmen who were entranced. (I don't know if they were laughing as they then prepared the pot!) There seems to be something "spiritual" within all of us, and the different religions are an attempt to systematize it, understand it, make it accessible to us with our limited capacity.-Yes, it's all man-made, but then you can argue that language, maths, science are all man-made, in the sense that we make up terms to describe the real world around us. "God", "Yahweh", "Allah", "Brahma" are just names for an unknown power, just as "1" (one) is a symbol for a single unit, and "legs" for the lumps of bone, flesh and muscle that carry us around, and "sun" for the great burning mass up there in the heavens. The discovery of the common core happened at more or less the same time as my discovery through Darwin that all of us members of the animal kingdom also had a common core: we shared antecedents! And the more I read about the animal kingdom, the more features I found we had in common with other animals. And when I put all of this together, I realized that just as our links with animals were NOT anthropomorphic, it might be possible that religions are NOT anthropomorphizations of whatever force it was that brought us into being, and that their common core might be an ultimate truth: that we ourselves are reflections of that force. It MIGHT be a truth. That's as far as I got then, and I've stayed in the same place ever since. Perhaps you could say I've evolved from being a clever teenager to being an ignorant elderly gentleman!