Why Religion?

[rousseau]

I don't honestly think that the brains of believers and nonbelievers are different. Even atheists can be pigheaded, stubborn, stupid, and just plain wrong sometimes.

If you look at demographics where people are more religious than not, you see clear trends, or at least associations. Conservatives are more likely to be religious than liberals, and women are more likely to be religious than men.

If there wasn't at least a small correlation between brain function and propensity for religiosity then trends like these wouldn't exist.

Granted, I doubt that propensity for belief is confined to ipso facto religion, and extends to other concepts like liberalism, marxism etc. But it's pretty clear that a certain type of mind is more likely to be persuaded by religious arguments in a world where materialistic explanations run large, and another kind of mind that is able to see through them.

Study the differences between the membership of this and a Christian forum and I'm sure you'd see clear patterns emerge. But I do agree with you that even atheists can demonstrate the same dogmatic stubbornness that the religious can, maybe a question of degree.

 

[Copernicus]

If you look at demographics where people are more religious than not, you see clear trends, or at least associations. Conservatives are more likely to be religious than liberals, and women are more likely to be religious than men.

I agree with both of these subjective impressions, but both could have more to do with cultural demographics, level of education, age, etc., than genetic inheritance. So I am hesitant to start attributing such differences to causes that are without some kind of objective basis.

If there wasn't at least a small correlation between brain function and propensity for religiosity then trends like these wouldn't exist.

This statement begs the question.

Granted, I doubt that propensity for belief is confined to ipso facto religion, and extends to other concepts like liberalism, marxism etc. But it's pretty clear that a certain type of mind is more likely to be persuaded by religious arguments in a world where materialistic explanations run large, and another kind of mind that is able to see through them.

The question is what gives rise to "a certain type of mind" or "another kind of mind". Nature or nurture? To what extent does the direction a mind swings in depend on the brain structure one inherits and to what extent does it depend on serendipitous experiences, mentoring, training, education, and other purely environmental factors?

Study the differences between the membership of this and a Christian forum and I'm sure you'd see clear patterns emerge. But I do agree with you that even atheists can demonstrate the same dogmatic stubbornness that the religious can, maybe a question of degree.

I am not denying differences of behavior between members of Christian debate forums and members of this forum, but I am questioning that we can so easily attribute those differences to some kind of difference in heritable brain structure. It is almost like we are arguing a religious version of  The Bell Curve. We notice behavior differences between whites and non-whites, so some are tempted to interpret those differences as caused by genetic differences rather than environmental factors. Similarly, those of us who notice differences between the behavior of a secular community and a religious community can be tempted to attribute differences to inherited mental capacity.

 

[rousseau]

I agree with both of these subjective impressions, but both could have more to do with cultural demographics, level of education, age, etc., than genetic inheritance. So I am hesitant to start attributing such differences to causes that are without some kind of objective basis.



This statement begs the question.



The question is what gives rise to "a certain type of mind" or "another kind of mind". Nature or nurture? To what extent does the direction a mind swings in depend on the brain structure one inherits and to what extent does it depend on serendipitous experiences, mentoring, training, education, and other purely environmental factors?



I am not denying differences of behavior between members of Christian debate forums and members of this forum, but I am questioning that we can so easily attribute those differences to some kind of difference in heritable brain structure. It is almost like we are arguing a religious version of  The Bell Curve. We notice behavior differences between whites and non-whites, so some are tempted to interpret those differences as caused by genetic differences rather than environmental factors. Similarly, those of us who notice differences between the behavior of a secular community and a religious community can be tempted to attribute differences to inherited mental capacity.

To me it seems like you're going to great lengths to skirt around what is a pretty obvious fact. Of course environmental factors play a part in how we develop, but you can't put the cart before the horse. Heritable and genetic factors are the parent of environmental influences, so for the most part environmental influence is also genetic

Take a red state. Those who jive with that culture (have cognitive similarities) tend to stay while those who don't tend to leave. It is the genetic qualities that set the framework for the environment, meaning genetics reinforce themselves twice.

Of course something as complicated as religious belief doesn't have a simple formula underlying it, but even just a few minutes of quick googling will highlight cognitive differences between the religious and non-religious. That being said I don't think religious belief is literally inherited, but rather more commonly associated with certain cognitive qualities.

 

[Copernicus]

To me it seems like you're going to great lengths to skirt around what is a pretty obvious fact. Of course environmental factors play a part in how we develop, but you can't put the cart before the horse. Heritable and genetic factors are the parent of environmental influences, so for the most part environmental influence is also genetic

I don't think that environmental factors are heritable traits, but environmental factors certainly favor some genetic configurations over others. So I would say that you are confusing the roles of parent and child. In any case, I suspect that you are flirting too much with a  genetic fallacy here.

Take a red state. Those who jive with that culture (have cognitive similarities) tend to stay while those who don't tend to leave. It is the genetic qualities that set the framework for the environment, meaning genetics reinforce themselves twice.

Leaving aside the questionable assumption that people tend to move on the basis of their cognitive sympathies (and less so for factors such as job opportunities and family matters), you are again begging the question by claiming that "genetic qualities set the framework for the environment". That is the conclusion that your argument is supposed to support, but it appears as just a bald assertion. Stable environments tend to favor and disfavor heritable traits, but you haven't proven that religious behavior is even remotely correlated with genetic inheritance.

Of course something as complicated as religious belief doesn't have a simple formula underlying it, but even just a few minutes of quick googling will highlight cognitive differences between the religious and non-religious. That being said I don't think religious belief is literally inherited, but rather more commonly associated with certain cognitive qualities.

It bears repeating that I am not denying differences in the behavior of religious and non-religious people. The issue is over what causes those differences, and rank speculation gets very low marks as a premise when it comes to drawing a reasonable conclusion.

Look, I once took a seminar in language acquisition from the noted developmental psychologist,  Brian MacWhinney. We got to discussing Noam Chomsky's claim that the language faculty is innate in human beings--a claim that is considered one of his hallmark contributions to the study of language. Chomsky's claim was based largely on the existence of linguistic universals--traits that one could claim to exist across all human languages. Chomsky conjectured that there was no other good explanation for them other than the existence of some kind of "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD) in the brains of human beings. MacWhinney was quite unimpressed by that claim, because, as a developmental psychologist, he never questioned that the linguistic faculty was at least partially attributable to human genetics. Our brains are predisposed to acquire spoken languages. At the very least, it helps us understand why there are no human communities anywhere that lack a naturally-acquired language. And we can observe a schedule of maturation with recognizable environmental trigger points to mature language behavior. However, MacWhinney dismissed a great many of Chomsky's more substantive claims about specific linguistic properties. He said that there needed to be more than the fact that a given property was ubiquitous (i.e. universal) in human language. Some could easily be attributed to other factors in human society. The question was always what was inherited or innate versus what was learned solely through environmental exposure. You can't simply jump to facile conclusions the way Chomsky was prone to doing. And it seems to me that several folks have been doing that in this thread.

 

[rousseau]

I don't think that environmental factors are heritable traits, but environmental factors certainly favor some genetic configurations over others. So I would say that you are confusing the roles of parent and child. In any case, I suspect that you are flirting too much with a  genetic fallacy here.



Leaving aside the questionable assumption that people tend to move on the basis of their cognitive sympathies (and less so for factors such as job opportunities and family matters), you are again begging the question by claiming that "genetic qualities set the framework for the environment". That is the conclusion that your argument is supposed to support, but it appears as just a bald assertion. Stable environments tend to favor and disfavor heritable traits, but you haven't proven that religious behavior is even remotely correlated with genetic inheritance.



It bears repeating that I am not denying differences in the behavior of religious and non-religious people. The issue is over what causes those differences, and rank speculation gets very low marks as a premise when it comes to drawing a reasonable conclusion.

Look, I once took a seminar in language acquisition from the noted developmental psychologist,  Brian MacWhinney. We got to discussing Noam Chomsky's claim that the language faculty is innate in human beings--a claim that is considered one of his hallmark contributions to the study of language. Chomsky's claim was based largely on the existence of linguistic universals--traits that one could claim to exist across all human languages. Chomsky conjectured that there was no other good explanation for them other than the existence of some kind of "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD) in the brains of human beings. MacWhinney was quite unimpressed by that claim, because, as a developmental psychologist, he never questioned that the linguistic faculty was at least partially attributable to human genetics. Our brains are predisposed to acquire spoken languages. At the very least, it helps us understand why there are no human communities anywhere that lack a naturally-acquired language. And we can observe a schedule of maturation with recognizable environmental trigger points to mature language behavior. However, MacWhinney dismissed a great many of Chomsky's more substantive claims about specific linguistic properties. He said that there needed to be more than the fact that a given property was ubiquitous (i.e. universal) in human language. Some could easily be attributed to other factors in human society. The question was always what was inherited or innate versus what was learned solely through environmental exposure. You can't simply jump to facile conclusions the way Chomsky was prone to doing. And it seems to me that several folks have been doing that in this thread.

You seem to have misunderstood my post in a number of places. Unfortunately I don't really have the time to prove anything to you, but you are the one making a strong assertion despite contrary evidence existing (which I've pointed you to).

You've made a pretty bold claim that there is no significant difference in brain architecture between the religious and non-religious, despite religiosity being correlated with gender, political orientation, and IQ. If you think that comes entirely down to the environment and not neural architecture I really don't know what else to tell you.

But if it wasn't clear already I'm not arguing that religious belief is heritable, I'm arguing that certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely.

 

[Copernicus]

I don't think that environmental factors are heritable traits, but environmental factors certainly favor some genetic configurations over others. So I would say that you are confusing the roles of parent and child. In any case, I suspect that you are flirting too much with a  genetic fallacy here.



Leaving aside the questionable assumption that people tend to move on the basis of their cognitive sympathies (and less so for factors such as job opportunities and family matters), you are again begging the question by claiming that "genetic qualities set the framework for the environment". That is the conclusion that your argument is supposed to support, but it appears as just a bald assertion. Stable environments tend to favor and disfavor heritable traits, but you haven't proven that religious behavior is even remotely correlated with genetic inheritance.



It bears repeating that I am not denying differences in the behavior of religious and non-religious people. The issue is over what causes those differences, and rank speculation gets very low marks as a premise when it comes to drawing a reasonable conclusion.

Look, I once took a seminar in language acquisition from the noted developmental psychologist,  Brian MacWhinney. We got to discussing Noam Chomsky's claim that the language faculty is innate in human beings--a claim that is considered one of his hallmark contributions to the study of language. Chomsky's claim was based largely on the existence of linguistic universals--traits that one could claim to exist across all human languages. Chomsky conjectured that there was no other good explanation for them other than the existence of some kind of "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD) in the brains of human beings. MacWhinney was quite unimpressed by that claim, because, as a developmental psychologist, he never questioned that the linguistic faculty was at least partially attributable to human genetics. Our brains are predisposed to acquire spoken languages. At the very least, it helps us understand why there are no human communities anywhere that lack a naturally-acquired language. And we can observe a schedule of maturation with recognizable environmental trigger points to mature language behavior. However, MacWhinney dismissed a great many of Chomsky's more substantive claims about specific linguistic properties. He said that there needed to be more than the fact that a given property was ubiquitous (i.e. universal) in human language. Some could easily be attributed to other factors in human society. The question was always what was inherited or innate versus what was learned solely through environmental exposure. You can't simply jump to facile conclusions the way Chomsky was prone to doing. And it seems to me that several folks have been doing that in this thread.

You seem to have misunderstood my post in a number of places. Unfortunately I don't really have the time to prove anything to you, but you are the one making a strong assertion despite contrary evidence existing (which I've pointed you to).

You've made a pretty bold claim that there is no significant difference in brain architecture between the religious and non-religious, despite religiosity being correlated with gender, political orientation, and IQ. If you think that comes entirely down to the environment and not neural architecture I really don't know what else to tell you.

But if it wasn't clear already I'm not arguing that religious belief is heritable, I'm arguing that certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely.

I guess we'll have to let it go at that, since you aren't directing me to anything specific that I've missed or misrepresented in your posts. We can certainly agree that "certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely", but maybe we disagree on how individuals come to have those faculties. It is very easy to attribute differences between communities of believers to genetic, rather than environmental factors, as we've seen in debates over differences among racial, ethnic, and national groups. Therefore, I believe we should exercise extreme caution before trying to make the case, for example, that religious fanatics or political fanatics are genetically predisposed to be that way. That's not to deny that they could be, but we need some reasonably good evidence to support that conclusion. Merely observing that different groups are statistically more likely to exhibit certain behaviors is not enough.

 

[steve_bank]

I have listened to Condoleezza Rice speak and in interviews. She is educated and IMO brilliant. She worked up to the top the pollical world, no small feat, highly competitive. An accomplished piano player. Stanford prof.

You may not like her politics but an intelligent thinking person to say the least. Yet in an interview she said she did not plan how her life went, she trusts in god.

Religion is not just about the ignorant uneducated peasants-masses.

 

[rousseau]

I don't think that environmental factors are heritable traits, but environmental factors certainly favor some genetic configurations over others. So I would say that you are confusing the roles of parent and child. In any case, I suspect that you are flirting too much with a  genetic fallacy here.



Leaving aside the questionable assumption that people tend to move on the basis of their cognitive sympathies (and less so for factors such as job opportunities and family matters), you are again begging the question by claiming that "genetic qualities set the framework for the environment". That is the conclusion that your argument is supposed to support, but it appears as just a bald assertion. Stable environments tend to favor and disfavor heritable traits, but you haven't proven that religious behavior is even remotely correlated with genetic inheritance.



It bears repeating that I am not denying differences in the behavior of religious and non-religious people. The issue is over what causes those differences, and rank speculation gets very low marks as a premise when it comes to drawing a reasonable conclusion.

Look, I once took a seminar in language acquisition from the noted developmental psychologist,  Brian MacWhinney. We got to discussing Noam Chomsky's claim that the language faculty is innate in human beings--a claim that is considered one of his hallmark contributions to the study of language. Chomsky's claim was based largely on the existence of linguistic universals--traits that one could claim to exist across all human languages. Chomsky conjectured that there was no other good explanation for them other than the existence of some kind of "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD) in the brains of human beings. MacWhinney was quite unimpressed by that claim, because, as a developmental psychologist, he never questioned that the linguistic faculty was at least partially attributable to human genetics. Our brains are predisposed to acquire spoken languages. At the very least, it helps us understand why there are no human communities anywhere that lack a naturally-acquired language. And we can observe a schedule of maturation with recognizable environmental trigger points to mature language behavior. However, MacWhinney dismissed a great many of Chomsky's more substantive claims about specific linguistic properties. He said that there needed to be more than the fact that a given property was ubiquitous (i.e. universal) in human language. Some could easily be attributed to other factors in human society. The question was always what was inherited or innate versus what was learned solely through environmental exposure. You can't simply jump to facile conclusions the way Chomsky was prone to doing. And it seems to me that several folks have been doing that in this thread.

You seem to have misunderstood my post in a number of places. Unfortunately I don't really have the time to prove anything to you, but you are the one making a strong assertion despite contrary evidence existing (which I've pointed you to).

You've made a pretty bold claim that there is no significant difference in brain architecture between the religious and non-religious, despite religiosity being correlated with gender, political orientation, and IQ. If you think that comes entirely down to the environment and not neural architecture I really don't know what else to tell you.

But if it wasn't clear already I'm not arguing that religious belief is heritable, I'm arguing that certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely.

I guess we'll have to let it go at that, since you aren't directing me to anything specific that I've missed or misrepresented in your posts. We can certainly agree that "certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely", but maybe we disagree on how individuals come to have those faculties. It is very easy to attribute differences between communities of believers to genetic, rather than environmental factors, as we've seen in debates over differences among racial, ethnic, and national groups. Therefore, I believe we should exercise extreme caution before trying to make the case, for example, that religious fanatics or political fanatics are genetically predisposed to be that way. That's not to deny that they could be, but we need some reasonably good evidence to support that conclusion. Merely observing that different groups are statistically more likely to exhibit certain behaviors is not enough.

Unfortunately with a one year old in tow and another on the way I get diminishing returns with more and more effort to convince people of something online.

I believe if you were to do some quick Googling on Google Scholar for something like 'cognitive differences between the religious/non-religious' the answer would be sitting right there. To me all I really need to see are the clear associations and trends, and the reality of a neural explanation is intuitively obvious.

I would also be careful in drawing an analogy between religion and racial, ethnic, and national groups with regards to cognitive differences. Religion is in an entirely different class, and it's identity isn't even well-defined. Your argument applies very well to race/ethnicity/nationality, but religion is cross-cultural and doesn't really respect any clear boundaries.

In my view, if you break it down, religious thought is pretty much just a puzzle that some people are able to break through, and others aren't. I could go into quite a bit of depth about how most of us aren't able to break through it, and how this is completely normal, but that's another thread. The overarching point is that some people are never able to figure it out, while others are. Some people are deep into delusion, while others experience more subtle forms.

In my father's family there are 5 siblings, all identical upbringing, all went to church every week, all lived in the same town, none of them went on to higher education. But some of them are devoutly religious while others aren't. Some of them.. even after many decades are true believers. Of course this is just a single anecdote, but I think it demonstrates the point well: essentially identical upbringing and environment, but different outcomes. So what do we attribute the difference in outcomes to if not genetic cause? Randomness? Some people are unlucky enough to not be exposed to materialistic thought? That sounds a lot more far-fetched to me than some people just think differently and experience the world differently than others due to innate qualities.

 

[Copernicus]

Rousseau, I completely understand your point about the distraction that a discussion like this can cause while you are dealing with raising a family, and congratulations on the pending arrival of another.

Both of us are materialists and can certainly agree that everything mental is ultimately grounded in, and generated by, physical brain activity. So I'm not denying a "neural explanation" for belief systems. For me, the discussion has always been about what causes people to acquire and maintain religious beliefs. My own opinion is that there is nothing at all fundamentally different in the brains of those with deep religious faith and those who reject religion. It all derives from the associative nature of human cognition--the fact that we build models of reality purely on the basis of experiences--but that we all use roughly the same neural "toolbox" to build those models. I certainly don't rule out the possibility that some people are more genetically predisposed than others to cling doggedly or become obsessed with their faith-based belief systems. However, we are a long way from establishing that, and there seem to me to be other equally good explanations.

Your family experience is quite common, and it is certainly true of my family. My three siblings are more religious than I am, and my paternal grandparents were even Jehovah's Witnesses. I believe that I inherited by father's tendency to proselytize, as did he from his parents (although he rejected his religious upbringing early in life). But was that because of our DNA or because my father was exposed to that behavior early in life and so was I? Everyone in a biological family shares genetic material, but they can all have very different sets of friends and experiences with religious communities. Siblings can have very different personalities, but are those differences attributable solely to genetic differences? It strikes me as absurd to come to such a conclusion without some evidence to support the conjecture. If everything isn't attributable to genetics, then what is? That is the question.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I don't think that environmental factors are heritable traits, but environmental factors certainly favor some genetic configurations over others. So I would say that you are confusing the roles of parent and child. In any case, I suspect that you are flirting too much with a  genetic fallacy here.



Leaving aside the questionable assumption that people tend to move on the basis of their cognitive sympathies (and less so for factors such as job opportunities and family matters), you are again begging the question by claiming that "genetic qualities set the framework for the environment". That is the conclusion that your argument is supposed to support, but it appears as just a bald assertion. Stable environments tend to favor and disfavor heritable traits, but you haven't proven that religious behavior is even remotely correlated with genetic inheritance.



It bears repeating that I am not denying differences in the behavior of religious and non-religious people. The issue is over what causes those differences, and rank speculation gets very low marks as a premise when it comes to drawing a reasonable conclusion.

Look, I once took a seminar in language acquisition from the noted developmental psychologist,  Brian MacWhinney. We got to discussing Noam Chomsky's claim that the language faculty is innate in human beings--a claim that is considered one of his hallmark contributions to the study of language. Chomsky's claim was based largely on the existence of linguistic universals--traits that one could claim to exist across all human languages. Chomsky conjectured that there was no other good explanation for them other than the existence of some kind of "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD) in the brains of human beings. MacWhinney was quite unimpressed by that claim, because, as a developmental psychologist, he never questioned that the linguistic faculty was at least partially attributable to human genetics. Our brains are predisposed to acquire spoken languages. At the very least, it helps us understand why there are no human communities anywhere that lack a naturally-acquired language. And we can observe a schedule of maturation with recognizable environmental trigger points to mature language behavior. However, MacWhinney dismissed a great many of Chomsky's more substantive claims about specific linguistic properties. He said that there needed to be more than the fact that a given property was ubiquitous (i.e. universal) in human language. Some could easily be attributed to other factors in human society. The question was always what was inherited or innate versus what was learned solely through environmental exposure. You can't simply jump to facile conclusions the way Chomsky was prone to doing. And it seems to me that several folks have been doing that in this thread.

You seem to have misunderstood my post in a number of places. Unfortunately I don't really have the time to prove anything to you, but you are the one making a strong assertion despite contrary evidence existing (which I've pointed you to).

You've made a pretty bold claim that there is no significant difference in brain architecture between the religious and non-religious, despite religiosity being correlated with gender, political orientation, and IQ. If you think that comes entirely down to the environment and not neural architecture I really don't know what else to tell you.

But if it wasn't clear already I'm not arguing that religious belief is heritable, I'm arguing that certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely.

I guess we'll have to let it go at that, since you aren't directing me to anything specific that I've missed or misrepresented in your posts. We can certainly agree that "certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely", but maybe we disagree on how individuals come to have those faculties. It is very easy to attribute differences between communities of believers to genetic, rather than environmental factors, as we've seen in debates over differences among racial, ethnic, and national groups. Therefore, I believe we should exercise extreme caution before trying to make the case, for example, that religious fanatics or political fanatics are genetically predisposed to be that way. That's not to deny that they could be, but we need some reasonably good evidence to support that conclusion. Merely observing that different groups are statistically more likely to exhibit certain behaviors is not enough.

Unfortunately with a one year old in tow and another on the way I get diminishing returns with more and more effort to convince people of something online.

I believe if you were to do some quick Googling on Google Scholar for something like 'cognitive differences between the religious/non-religious' the answer would be sitting right there. To me all I really need to see are the clear associations and trends, and the reality of a neural explanation is intuitively obvious.

I would also be careful in drawing an analogy between religion and racial, ethnic, and national groups with regards to cognitive differences. Religion is in an entirely different class, and it's identity isn't even well-defined. Your argument applies very well to race/ethnicity/nationality, but religion is cross-cultural and doesn't really respect any clear boundaries.

In my view, if you break it down, religious thought is pretty much just a puzzle that some people are able to break through, and others aren't. I could go into quite a bit of depth about how most of us aren't able to break through it, and how this is completely normal, but that's another thread. The overarching point is that some people are never able to figure it out, while others are. Some people are deep into delusion, while others experience more subtle forms.

In my father's family there are 5 siblings, all identical upbringing, all went to church every week, all lived in the same town, none of them went on to higher education. But some of them are devoutly religious while others aren't. Some of them.. even after many decades are true believers. Of course this is just a single anecdote, but I think it demonstrates the point well: essentially identical upbringing and environment, but different outcomes. So what do we attribute the difference in outcomes to if not genetic cause? Randomness? Some people are unlucky enough to not be exposed to materialistic thought? That sounds a lot more far-fetched to me than some people just think differently and experience the world differently than others due to innate qualities.

Agree 100% Same family experiences. It's obvious we are born with tremendously different cognitive abilities, interests and predispositions. The brain isn't some kind of magic organ. It's physical and lots of what it is is preset and determined just like height and eye color is in other parts of the organism.

 

[none]

yandex duckduck baidu and the one that crawls this site...the internet is where religion dies.
of course there is Facebook.

 

[Copernicus]

...

...

In my father's family there are 5 siblings, all identical upbringing, all went to church every week, all lived in the same town, none of them went on to higher education. But some of them are devoutly religious while others aren't. Some of them.. even after many decades are true believers. Of course this is just a single anecdote, but I think it demonstrates the point well: essentially identical upbringing and environment, but different outcomes. So what do we attribute the difference in outcomes to if not genetic cause? Randomness? Some people are unlucky enough to not be exposed to materialistic thought? That sounds a lot more far-fetched to me than some people just think differently and experience the world differently than others due to innate qualities.

Agree 100% Same family experiences. It's obvious we are born with tremendously different cognitive abilities, interests and predispositions. The brain isn't some kind of magic organ. It's physical and lots of what it is is preset and determined just like height and eye color is in other parts of the organism.

It is obvious that we are born with different cognitive abilities, yet do those genetically inherited abilities make a difference when it comes to the acquisition and maintenance of religious faith? After all, it is also obvious that our beliefs and behaviors are also strongly affected by experiences after we are born, and even siblings can have very different experiences that have a bearing on what they come to believe. I continue to worry that this tendency to attribute behavioral differences to genes rather than experiences is not really much different from the infamous attempts to build up stereotypes of racial behavior. The mistakes made in The Bell Curve should serve as a cautionary tale when we go down that route. The premise there was that statistical differences were a sufficient basis for branding some racial groups as cognitively inferior to others.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

...

...

In my father's family there are 5 siblings, all identical upbringing, all went to church every week, all lived in the same town, none of them went on to higher education. But some of them are devoutly religious while others aren't. Some of them.. even after many decades are true believers. Of course this is just a single anecdote, but I think it demonstrates the point well: essentially identical upbringing and environment, but different outcomes. So what do we attribute the difference in outcomes to if not genetic cause? Randomness? Some people are unlucky enough to not be exposed to materialistic thought? That sounds a lot more far-fetched to me than some people just think differently and experience the world differently than others due to innate qualities.

Agree 100% Same family experiences. It's obvious we are born with tremendously different cognitive abilities, interests and predispositions. The brain isn't some kind of magic organ. It's physical and lots of what it is is preset and determined just like height and eye color is in other parts of the organism.

It is obvious that we are born with different cognitive abilities, yet do those genetically inherited abilities make a difference when it comes to the acquisition and maintenance of religious faith?

You are saying we're different but still all the same. Alright then.

 

[rousseau]

My own opinion is that there is nothing at all fundamentally different in the brains of those with deep religious faith and those who reject religion.

I don't disagree with this. Fundamentally, we all have the same brain structure that for most of us does very similar things. Statistically, the majority of us should think in a fairly similar way, with tails at both ends of the spectrum (of course this is a simplification).

With regards to religious thought I don't think it's so much ipso facto religion that we're talking about, but dogmatic thinking, that is prevalent across our species. Very few of us are good at questioning our core beliefs, whatever they may be, and so end up being persuaded by whatever cultural element we find the most attractive. It's my view that we've evolved to learn about, accept, and internalize the world we're born into, and not question that world in a fundamental way. Most peoples opinions, thoughts, and habits, then, are a reflection of the popular culture they live in. This speaks to your point in that it may be Christianity, or it may be atheism, in both cases the underlying framework is often a result of dogma.

But I do think that variation in brain structure has major explanatory power in what kind of behaviours people will actually express throughout their lives, in a number of ways. Propensity to rely on emotion and intuition versus logic, introversion versus extroversion, memory capacity, how the endocrine system expresses itself, and on and on. A lot of this is hard-wired in a very real way.

 

[Copernicus]

...
It is obvious that we are born with different cognitive abilities, yet do those genetically inherited abilities make a difference when it comes to the acquisition and maintenance of religious faith?

You are saying we're different but still all the same. Alright then.

That isn't even remotely what I said, but nice try.

 

[bilby]

I don't think that environmental factors are heritable traits, but environmental factors certainly favor some genetic configurations over others. So I would say that you are confusing the roles of parent and child. In any case, I suspect that you are flirting too much with a  genetic fallacy here.



Leaving aside the questionable assumption that people tend to move on the basis of their cognitive sympathies (and less so for factors such as job opportunities and family matters), you are again begging the question by claiming that "genetic qualities set the framework for the environment". That is the conclusion that your argument is supposed to support, but it appears as just a bald assertion. Stable environments tend to favor and disfavor heritable traits, but you haven't proven that religious behavior is even remotely correlated with genetic inheritance.



It bears repeating that I am not denying differences in the behavior of religious and non-religious people. The issue is over what causes those differences, and rank speculation gets very low marks as a premise when it comes to drawing a reasonable conclusion.

Look, I once took a seminar in language acquisition from the noted developmental psychologist,  Brian MacWhinney. We got to discussing Noam Chomsky's claim that the language faculty is innate in human beings--a claim that is considered one of his hallmark contributions to the study of language. Chomsky's claim was based largely on the existence of linguistic universals--traits that one could claim to exist across all human languages. Chomsky conjectured that there was no other good explanation for them other than the existence of some kind of "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD) in the brains of human beings. MacWhinney was quite unimpressed by that claim, because, as a developmental psychologist, he never questioned that the linguistic faculty was at least partially attributable to human genetics. Our brains are predisposed to acquire spoken languages. At the very least, it helps us understand why there are no human communities anywhere that lack a naturally-acquired language. And we can observe a schedule of maturation with recognizable environmental trigger points to mature language behavior. However, MacWhinney dismissed a great many of Chomsky's more substantive claims about specific linguistic properties. He said that there needed to be more than the fact that a given property was ubiquitous (i.e. universal) in human language. Some could easily be attributed to other factors in human society. The question was always what was inherited or innate versus what was learned solely through environmental exposure. You can't simply jump to facile conclusions the way Chomsky was prone to doing. And it seems to me that several folks have been doing that in this thread.

You seem to have misunderstood my post in a number of places. Unfortunately I don't really have the time to prove anything to you, but you are the one making a strong assertion despite contrary evidence existing (which I've pointed you to).

You've made a pretty bold claim that there is no significant difference in brain architecture between the religious and non-religious, despite religiosity being correlated with gender, political orientation, and IQ. If you think that comes entirely down to the environment and not neural architecture I really don't know what else to tell you.

But if it wasn't clear already I'm not arguing that religious belief is heritable, I'm arguing that certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely.

I guess we'll have to let it go at that, since you aren't directing me to anything specific that I've missed or misrepresented in your posts. We can certainly agree that "certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely", but maybe we disagree on how individuals come to have those faculties. It is very easy to attribute differences between communities of believers to genetic, rather than environmental factors, as we've seen in debates over differences among racial, ethnic, and national groups. Therefore, I believe we should exercise extreme caution before trying to make the case, for example, that religious fanatics or political fanatics are genetically predisposed to be that way. That's not to deny that they could be, but we need some reasonably good evidence to support that conclusion. Merely observing that different groups are statistically more likely to exhibit certain behaviors is not enough.

Unfortunately with a one year old in tow and another on the way I get diminishing returns with more and more effort to convince people of something online.

I believe if you were to do some quick Googling on Google Scholar for something like 'cognitive differences between the religious/non-religious' the answer would be sitting right there. To me all I really need to see are the clear associations and trends, and the reality of a neural explanation is intuitively obvious.

I would also be careful in drawing an analogy between religion and racial, ethnic, and national groups with regards to cognitive differences. Religion is in an entirely different class, and it's identity isn't even well-defined. Your argument applies very well to race/ethnicity/nationality, but religion is cross-cultural and doesn't really respect any clear boundaries.

In my view, if you break it down, religious thought is pretty much just a puzzle that some people are able to break through, and others aren't. I could go into quite a bit of depth about how most of us aren't able to break through it, and how this is completely normal, but that's another thread. The overarching point is that some people are never able to figure it out, while others are. Some people are deep into delusion, while others experience more subtle forms.

In my father's family there are 5 siblings, all identical upbringing, all went to church every week, all lived in the same town, none of them went on to higher education. But some of them are devoutly religious while others aren't. Some of them.. even after many decades are true believers. Of course this is just a single anecdote, but I think it demonstrates the point well: essentially identical upbringing and environment, but different outcomes. So what do we attribute the difference in outcomes to if not genetic cause? Randomness? Some people are unlucky enough to not be exposed to materialistic thought? That sounds a lot more far-fetched to me than some people just think differently and experience the world differently than others due to innate qualities.

Agree 100% Same family experiences. It's obvious we are born with tremendously different cognitive abilities, interests and predispositions. The brain isn't some kind of magic organ. It's physical and lots of what it is is preset and determined just like height and eye color is in other parts of the organism.

And lots is environmental.

Usain Bolt was doubtless born with some traits that predisposed him to be a fast sprinter. But equally he doubtless would not have been anything like as fast as he is had his culture not set high store by athletic excellence, nor if he had failed to train effectively, eat an appropriate diet, and have the mental resilience to recover from setbacks.

Similarly, a person's predisposition to superstition is a combination of genetic and environmental factors; And it is likely futile and certainly foolish to attempt to determine which is more important - the degree to which each is important is likely different from one individual to the next.

 

[rousseau]

I don't think that environmental factors are heritable traits, but environmental factors certainly favor some genetic configurations over others. So I would say that you are confusing the roles of parent and child. In any case, I suspect that you are flirting too much with a  genetic fallacy here.



Leaving aside the questionable assumption that people tend to move on the basis of their cognitive sympathies (and less so for factors such as job opportunities and family matters), you are again begging the question by claiming that "genetic qualities set the framework for the environment". That is the conclusion that your argument is supposed to support, but it appears as just a bald assertion. Stable environments tend to favor and disfavor heritable traits, but you haven't proven that religious behavior is even remotely correlated with genetic inheritance.



It bears repeating that I am not denying differences in the behavior of religious and non-religious people. The issue is over what causes those differences, and rank speculation gets very low marks as a premise when it comes to drawing a reasonable conclusion.

Look, I once took a seminar in language acquisition from the noted developmental psychologist,  Brian MacWhinney. We got to discussing Noam Chomsky's claim that the language faculty is innate in human beings--a claim that is considered one of his hallmark contributions to the study of language. Chomsky's claim was based largely on the existence of linguistic universals--traits that one could claim to exist across all human languages. Chomsky conjectured that there was no other good explanation for them other than the existence of some kind of "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD) in the brains of human beings. MacWhinney was quite unimpressed by that claim, because, as a developmental psychologist, he never questioned that the linguistic faculty was at least partially attributable to human genetics. Our brains are predisposed to acquire spoken languages. At the very least, it helps us understand why there are no human communities anywhere that lack a naturally-acquired language. And we can observe a schedule of maturation with recognizable environmental trigger points to mature language behavior. However, MacWhinney dismissed a great many of Chomsky's more substantive claims about specific linguistic properties. He said that there needed to be more than the fact that a given property was ubiquitous (i.e. universal) in human language. Some could easily be attributed to other factors in human society. The question was always what was inherited or innate versus what was learned solely through environmental exposure. You can't simply jump to facile conclusions the way Chomsky was prone to doing. And it seems to me that several folks have been doing that in this thread.

You seem to have misunderstood my post in a number of places. Unfortunately I don't really have the time to prove anything to you, but you are the one making a strong assertion despite contrary evidence existing (which I've pointed you to).

You've made a pretty bold claim that there is no significant difference in brain architecture between the religious and non-religious, despite religiosity being correlated with gender, political orientation, and IQ. If you think that comes entirely down to the environment and not neural architecture I really don't know what else to tell you.

But if it wasn't clear already I'm not arguing that religious belief is heritable, I'm arguing that certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely.

I guess we'll have to let it go at that, since you aren't directing me to anything specific that I've missed or misrepresented in your posts. We can certainly agree that "certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely", but maybe we disagree on how individuals come to have those faculties. It is very easy to attribute differences between communities of believers to genetic, rather than environmental factors, as we've seen in debates over differences among racial, ethnic, and national groups. Therefore, I believe we should exercise extreme caution before trying to make the case, for example, that religious fanatics or political fanatics are genetically predisposed to be that way. That's not to deny that they could be, but we need some reasonably good evidence to support that conclusion. Merely observing that different groups are statistically more likely to exhibit certain behaviors is not enough.

Unfortunately with a one year old in tow and another on the way I get diminishing returns with more and more effort to convince people of something online.

I believe if you were to do some quick Googling on Google Scholar for something like 'cognitive differences between the religious/non-religious' the answer would be sitting right there. To me all I really need to see are the clear associations and trends, and the reality of a neural explanation is intuitively obvious.

I would also be careful in drawing an analogy between religion and racial, ethnic, and national groups with regards to cognitive differences. Religion is in an entirely different class, and it's identity isn't even well-defined. Your argument applies very well to race/ethnicity/nationality, but religion is cross-cultural and doesn't really respect any clear boundaries.

In my view, if you break it down, religious thought is pretty much just a puzzle that some people are able to break through, and others aren't. I could go into quite a bit of depth about how most of us aren't able to break through it, and how this is completely normal, but that's another thread. The overarching point is that some people are never able to figure it out, while others are. Some people are deep into delusion, while others experience more subtle forms.

In my father's family there are 5 siblings, all identical upbringing, all went to church every week, all lived in the same town, none of them went on to higher education. But some of them are devoutly religious while others aren't. Some of them.. even after many decades are true believers. Of course this is just a single anecdote, but I think it demonstrates the point well: essentially identical upbringing and environment, but different outcomes. So what do we attribute the difference in outcomes to if not genetic cause? Randomness? Some people are unlucky enough to not be exposed to materialistic thought? That sounds a lot more far-fetched to me than some people just think differently and experience the world differently than others due to innate qualities.

Agree 100% Same family experiences. It's obvious we are born with tremendously different cognitive abilities, interests and predispositions. The brain isn't some kind of magic organ. It's physical and lots of what it is is preset and determined just like height and eye color is in other parts of the organism.

And lots is environmental.

Similarly, a person's predisposition to superstition is a combination of genetic and environmental factors; And it is likely futile and certainly foolish to attempt to determine which is more important - the degree to which each is important is likely different from one individual to the next.

I don't think a predisposition can be environmental, I suspect what you mean is that a person's likelihood of acquiring belief comes from a combination of genetic and environmental factors. I don't disagree, but I think it's also true that in our current culture people tend to underestimate (or not even understand) genetic influence, and overestimate environmental influence. Steven Pinker wrote an entire book about it (The Blank Slate), and how the idea has origins deeply rooted in history.

A great example of this is parenting. Most parents assume that they have reasonable control over how their kids turn out, and how successful they become, but research shows that genetics (assuming a reasonably normal environment) accounts for almost all of it. Parents can do basically nothing but provide food/warmth/shelter/love for their kid, and assuming they can afford post-secondary education it's pretty much up to the child how they'll turn out. The assumption that environment is important is a good one to make, because it ensures that parents try to do a good job. But in reality it really doesn't matter that much.

Of course a person is going to be influenced by their environment, but genetic predisposition does exist. That's how evolution works: some people are more likely to be successful and find niches due to innate attributes, some are more likely to be drawn to certain parts of a culture due to innate attributes. And not only is the human brain included in this, it's genetic variation is likely central to human competition.

And I'd re-iterate my former point that genetics also plays a role in shaping the environment that houses it, it reinforces itself twice. This is because people with similar attributes (and consequently beliefs) tend to group together, while people with dissimilar attributes (and consequently beliefs) tend to repel each other. You can see this happen in almost any context: Christians will find each other, people of a similar race will find each other, people of a similar nationality. IOW, environment isn't arbitrary, genetic attributes typically underlie it.

 

[Copernicus]

Nobody is denying that there are genetic predispositions. That's how evolution works. It selects for the predispositions that lead to more offspring over the long run. However, it is still an unwarranted leap to go from the observation of different behaviors to the conclusion that those behaviors were entirely or partially because of genetic predispositions. To validate an empirical claim of that sort, one needs to have confirmable evidence.

If religious faith is a genetic predisposition in humans, then why has secularism spread so widely throughout Europe and North America in just a few generations? A rapidly spreading genetic change? One can go to absurd lengths to try to attribute behavior to genetic predispositions, and it has never worked out well in the past when people have let their imaginations run in that direction. As I pointed out earlier in this thread, there are plenty of good environmental conditions that promote the spread of religious faith. I think that the Darwinian apostle, Richard Dawkins, was closer to the mark when he suggested that the propensity for faith in God had more to do with an evolutionary misfire than a God gene.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

...
It is obvious that we are born with different cognitive abilities, yet do those genetically inherited abilities make a difference when it comes to the acquisition and maintenance of religious faith?

You are saying we're different but still all the same. Alright then.

That isn't even remotely what I said, but nice try.

You've said exactly that just not using the same words. It's as if you think the brain isn't something physical like the rest of the body, that it's some kind of magic organ that determines its own path. If you've ever coached kids you know that kids vary tremendously in their physical abilities. Why exactly do you think the brains in those kids are any different? Some will have a natural gift for math and languages or something else. Some will have difficulties concentrating. You maintain that all these differences are primarily external to the brain. Are you afraid of the truth?

 

[rousseau]

Nobody is denying that there are genetic predispositions. That's how evolution works. It selects for the predispositions that lead to more offspring over the long run. However, it is still an unwarranted leap to go from the observation of different behaviors to the conclusion that those behaviors were entirely or partially because of genetic predispositions. To validate an empirical claim of that sort, one needs to have confirmable evidence.

If religious faith is a genetic predisposition in humans, then why has secularism spread so widely throughout Europe and North America in just a few generations? A rapidly spreading genetic change? One can go to absurd lengths to try to attribute behavior to genetic predispositions, and it has never worked out well in the past when people have let their imaginations run in that direction. As I pointed out earlier in this thread, there are plenty of good environmental conditions that promote the spread of religious faith. I think that the Darwinian apostle, Richard Dawkins, was closer to the mark when he suggested that the propensity for faith in God had more to do with an evolutionary misfire than a God gene.

Nobody is denying that there are genetic predispositions. That's how evolution works. It selects for the predispositions that lead to more offspring over the long run. However, it is still an unwarranted leap to go from the observation of different behaviors to the conclusion that those behaviors were entirely or partially because of genetic predispositions. To validate an empirical claim of that sort, one needs to have confirmable evidence.

If religious faith is a genetic predisposition in humans, then why has secularism spread so widely throughout Europe and North America in just a few generations? A rapidly spreading genetic change? One can go to absurd lengths to try to attribute behavior to genetic predispositions, and it has never worked out well in the past when people have let their imaginations run in that direction. As I pointed out earlier in this thread, there are plenty of good environmental conditions that promote the spread of religious faith. I think that the Darwinian apostle, Richard Dawkins, was closer to the mark when he suggested that the propensity for faith in God had more to do with an evolutionary misfire than a God gene.

Likewise nobody is arguing that ipso facto religious belief is a genetic predisposition. The genetic predisposition is what makes some people likely to take up religious belief. Those aren't the same statements. Genetics aren't destiny with regards to beliefs. On that we seem to be on the same page. You keep asking me for evidence of this and I've pointed you to Google Scholar where that evidence is.

To go along with the 'brains are the same' analogy, it is very likely that many of us have a propensity for religiosity, but it exists in varying degrees. Some are easily swayed by ridiculous Christian arguments while others are more savvy but still give undue reverence to something like science. The pattern is similar but exists at different degrees.