MonDie

I mentioned mortality salience's relationship to religious belief before. I thought I should review the source I used and present the information here. I'm using the quote box since my paraphrasing is largely made up of direct quotes. Additionally, here is a related Wikipedia link that others can check out. http://en.wikipedia....nagement_Theory

I don't know what "the rest of [his] demands" are, but you appear to be making the Guilt By Association Ad Hominem fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Guilt_by_association

Wouldn't either be an ad hominem fallacy?

How do you know there aren't genes that influence the course of one's attempts at logical thinking?

I agree that individuals learn logic to a certain extent, but I thought each side might have some backing. Also consider the dimensions of space. Could it be that we evolved to reason about a three dimensional physical world because it was simpler? Maybe vertebrates would have evolved to understand space differently if they were traveling at super high speeds, and we would understand space that way even if we were raised moving at low speeds. EDIT: How is it that a person can know proper logic when it is shown to them? For example, if I made up a phony logical rule, you would be able to tell that it was phony. Is that because you judge whether it fits your observations, or is it because you have a genetic predisposition for identifying proper logic?

Was everything made by something else for its maker's purposes? Was everything not made by something else for its maker's purposes? I don't know if the former is true, but I do know the latter is false. I also know that everything either was or wasn't made by something else for its particular maker's purposes. Let me restate that more clearly. every (individual) thing either was or wasn't made by something else for its particular maker's purposes. A baby tiger was made by its mother for its mother's purpose. A hammer was made by a human for that human's purpose. Indeed, each of those things were made by something else for their particular makers' purposes. So when somebody says, "Everything was made by something else for its particular maker's purposes," what are they saying? Just go back to the first bolded text above and replace "either was or wasn't" with "was." This statement isn't a claim of an ultimate maker. The creator of the creator paradox comes in when somebody claims that the sum of all things was made by something else for that maker's purposes. "The sum of all things" always refers to a specific thing, but what it specifically refers to is dependent on what things there are. For example, when you say the sum of all things was created by something else, you must change your definition of "the sum of all things" to incorporate this "something else." Thus, whatever "something else" originally referred to is now part of the sum of all things, so "something else" is now redefined as well. This constitutes the linguistic-based paradox, which results from the usage of words that can mean different things in different contexts. However, the Big Bang Theory does not make this logical paradox because it clearly states what was made by what. Therefore, logically, it could be true.

Aha! I don't need to learn the details of relativity because it's been contemplated already! (see my last post)

If my question hasn't been answered, it might be interesting to other people who can apply their knowledge to it. If it has been answered, that answer will be interesting to me. I'll elaborate on the title. Humans can understand the scientific method, and evolution obviously enabled this understanding in some way. However, did random mutation endow random rules of logic until it endowed the correct rules of logic, or did evolution give individuals the capacity to learn the correct rules of logic? One thing I think of is the way babies are taking in so much information. Perhaps this thread would have been best for an interdisciplinary forum including both evolution and developmental psychology, but there is no such forum, so I chose genetics as a compromise.

The moved posts were dispersed throughout this thread on the basis of the date-of-posting. I'll find out the proper methods of contacting the moderators, and I'll inform them of this. Here is the interaction between Athena and I. Athena's next post that was moved, which was a response to iNow, is #36.

EDIT: I'm into part ten. Most of the experiments were covered in my Social Psychology class, but we never covered Hallucinations or Anthropomorphism although those were broadly covered in PSYC101.<div>The textbook for the class was Social Psychology: Goals In Interaction (5th) (Kenrick, Neuberg, Cialdini). It was an easy class. </div>

Yes, it might provide some good answers, but the genetic basis for religion would probably be a complex pattern of genes, and we couldn't just rule out all of those genes as obsolete. The processes that lead to religion might be very fundamental, although they probably aren't as fundamental as reasoning since other apes have reason, but maybe not religion. These are what I have thought of as possible adaptive functions. Considering the existing evidence showing that contemplation of death reinforces religious beliefs, religion might have somehow given people more will to continue living. Also, it might have played a role in relieving stress during illness because death wouldn't seem as bad if one thought they were going to an afterlife. It might have relieved the stress of losing loved ones too. For this concept, religion might have arisen from nurturing instincts.

Did I forget to utilize the emoticons again? EDIT:

I just thought of an interesting idea, thanks to Athena. Obviously, humans have a genetic predisposition toward using the scientific method because there are other organisms with little or no capacity to think as we do. We could consider that humans also have a genetic predisposition toward believing in a god or gods, and it might have even been an adaption to environmental stresses. Evidence could be found by identifying individuals who inherit religious tendencies or by showing that religion developed even in isolated or prototype cultures. EDIT: caffeine-induced speculations removed

Refutation: The United States had a president who not only did cocaine and got a DUI, but was a solid C student at Yale. I think you need to more clearly define "knowledge" and "power" as they were used in that context. If you truly don't believe in the scientific method, stop using it. Next time you want to use your car, and your wife wonders "why isn't it starting," just respond, "I don't know if it will start because I haven't put the key in yet." When she asks, "Hasn't it reliably started at previous instances when you turned the key," you can respond, "Yes, but that doesn't mean it will start when I turn the key this time. I think I'll just walk today, honey." While you're at it, stop pushing things with your hands with the expectation that they will move. EDIT: The scientific method isn't something that people just imagined, it's a collection of rules that almost everyone begins deriving from their observations of the physical world when they're babies.

I don't know about the Indo-European religions. Such similarities between religions might be due to cultural diffusion, in which case, I wouldn't see those spiritual ideas as exceptions. If you want to show that the better explanation is that the similarities are due to the reality of those spiritual beings, you need to show some evidence against the alternative explanations. For example, you would have to show evidence against cultural diffusion determining their spiritual ideas. Lack of evidence for cultural diffusion would not be evidence, the evidence would have to show that the cultures couldn't have come into contact in a way that could have facilitated the similarities in spiritual ideas, e.g. a physical barrier. EDIT: However, there might still be other explanations. For example, anthropologists can explain cultural similarities as adaptions to similar environments.

Athena, I don't know of any evidence that religion causes morality or even well-being. Also, as I realized while making posts prior to this, religion isn't all that easy to define. When religion starts to include otherwise secular concepts, such as helping others as valuable behavior, where is the boundary between religion and general culture? EDIT: Furthermore, there is the issue of cause-and-effect because people who join religion-based community service groups might do it out of a desire to be helpful, not out of religiosity. EDIT: However, that same idea can be applied to the evils committed in the name of religion. Do people who murder homosexuals truly do it out of religiosity?

Furthermore, as with all imaginary concepts, each guess incorporated into the concept has its own chances of being true or false unless it's somehow impossible. Imagine asking a psychic when you will meet your wife. The psychic has much better odds if they say, "sometime within the next three years," rather than, "five months from now on a steamboat on the Mississippi river." But the latter speculation is akin to what religion is doing. I'll take up one particular issue. Religions might have seemed more plausible in the past because they crafted god to be human-like. This is part of the concept, and it justifies man's abuse of nature. What are the chances that both of the following are true; there is an origin for our universe, and that thing (origin of our universe) happens to be human-like? Consider that it took nearly four billion years for us to evolve, and that there are millions or hundreds of millions of species. Actually, the chances become so small that one might even say we KNOW the christian god doesn't exist. Immortal, if god gives us emotions, who gives god emotions?

Thanks, I found an English forum post about comma+not. Apparently the comma replaces an "and."

I made a mistake. You never claimed otherwise. If I only had a brain. It's good to see that you never edited the post. Maybe I'll stop editing my submitted posts.

I have one disagreement. Science has been explaining more and more, so it probably will continue to explain more. But it only follows that science will eventually explain everything that it can explain. If the underlined part is removed from my previous statement, the logic becomes flawed. That is why I included this argument: "[T]he argument that something cannot be explained naturally leads nowhere because one can only prove the absence of natural explanations for some event by discovering every natural concept there is to discover. So we can really only make progress by finding natural explanations, not by asserting the absence of them." Furthermore, people who aren't experts shouldn't pretend to know that the experts don't know. By the way, does anybody know the correct grammatical format for my only/not statements, such as the one in the second blue sentence?

I'm unsure of where you wanted my thoughts to go. Explanations aren't experienced. Rather, they're developed through reasoning. Religious people are experiencing the same world, but they're reasoning differently.

TAR2 Just because you can't think of a scientific explanation, that doesn't mean there isn't one or won't be one. You might lack vital information, whether than information is general natural principles or the specific events resulting in your experience. There might be someone else who could explain it scientifically, but they probably aren't busy explaining every so called spiritual experience. Anyway, the argument that something cannot be explained naturally leads nowhere because one can only prove the absence of natural explanations for some event by discovering every natural concept there is to discover. So we can really only make progress by finding natural explanations, not by asserting the absence of them.

I've always had a hard time deciding what word to use to refer to the fundamental awareness of one's own mind being, so I just decide that "consciousness" is good enough. It's constantly being renewed because the thoughts that compose one's mind now are different from the thoughts that will compose one's mind 5 minutes from now. The matter that dictates one's thoughts changes when they learn, but thoughts don't have a lasting existence. This next argument might be stronger if you eliminate the assumption of a psychological time that is synchronized with the time of the physical world. The concept of time is useful for operating in the physical world, but it doesn't necessitate the existence of psychological time. In fact, time seems to be only a dimension of the physical world and not a dimension of the psychological world because one cannot experience the mind of the past despite having memories that reinforce the concept of time. There is no death without time because death is a change that occurs through time. Therefore, there is no reason to fear psychological death, only physical death, which constitutes the death of the self within the physical world we share. Ooh, but now I am considering that cause-and-effect is the basis for our belief in time for both the physical world and the psychological world. Time doesn't exist in the physical world either, but, just as physical events lead to other physical events, psychological events lead to other psychological events. So we shouldn't fear death itself because it doesn't exist. Rather, we should fear not living up to our full potential, which dying sooner can cause. If you want to end my suffering, you will stop asking questions now. I'm joking. I'm glad I finally refuted that second argument, which I had held onto for a few years.

I think I avoid death because of my self, not my consciousness. Consciousness by itself is constantly renewed like the skin of a shedding salamander, so there is no reason to call it ours and fear losing it. However, the idea of a self incorporates the concepts of will and progress, and I don't want to die because I will lose my progress. So I don't fear 'Game Over' because my turn will be done, I fear it because I want to finish the game. I know it's more difficult to be happy with this attitude, but it's the attitude I've chosen. Nirvana can kiss my ass.

If a person witnessed talking garden gnomes two-thousand years ago, then I'd be impressed.