RE: Evolutionary explanation of religion
November 25, 2020 at 1:57 am
(This post was last modified: November 25, 2020 at 2:06 am by The Grand Nudger.)
The ability to see intent and agency is even older than full modernity, and probably older than our own anatomic modernity. For whatever reason, for all those hundreds of k's (and in all of the other animals that do the same)..it didn't produce any god beliefs or any evidence of god beliefs. Produced plenty of evidence for all sorts of other things, and right about the end of the stone age we have tons of evidence of god beliefs.
You're asking how we'd collect evidence for something that we have collected evidence for. Evolutionary biology isn't the explanation for god beliefs. Nothing appears to have changed in us so that we started believing in them - and I suppose you could call it an accident of (pre)history that we hadn't done so before. It was no new ability, and it's not a heritable trait, just a new situation.
They're a cultural phenomena, not biology.
(speaking of accidents of history, we may not believe in gods for much longer...obviously this tape hasn't rolled out yet - and on the timescale that we're considering future anthropologists might find the meteoric rise and utter collapse of these types of beliefs to be an aberration - a vanishing moment)
You're asking how we'd collect evidence for something that we have collected evidence for. Evolutionary biology isn't the explanation for god beliefs. Nothing appears to have changed in us so that we started believing in them - and I suppose you could call it an accident of (pre)history that we hadn't done so before. It was no new ability, and it's not a heritable trait, just a new situation.
They're a cultural phenomena, not biology.
(speaking of accidents of history, we may not believe in gods for much longer...obviously this tape hasn't rolled out yet - and on the timescale that we're considering future anthropologists might find the meteoric rise and utter collapse of these types of beliefs to be an aberration - a vanishing moment)
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