The thoughts of Gregory W. Lester (as edited down by John W. Loftus) (okay, now I feel like calling myself Daniel W. Fincke): Because senses and beliefs are both tools for survival and have evolved to augment one another, our brain considers them to be separate but equally important purveyors of survival information….This means that [...]
Fantastic, insightful, and intuitively correct stuff about why we bother to use innuendos and other forms of indirect language where the literal meaning of what we are saying is undisguisedly clear: Thanks to Shane. Your Thoughts?
In reply to my post a week ago on the incoherence of saying that we relied upon God, or at least religion, in order to either discover or verify what was good and evil, Clergy Guy asks: Daniel, do you have some thoughts on defining good and evil apart from religion? How do we/should we [...]
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study this February revealed that less than one fifth of all American adults under 30 report regular church attendance. But they still also overwhelmingly claim belief in God. Tom Rees thinks that despite their beliefs, their abandonment of the pews may indicate that a multi-generational secularization [...]
Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of [...]
Shermer does TED and explains how two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired traits, useful for survival, backfire on us: Your Thoughts?
Yesterday I replied to Mary Midgley’s article out this weekend, which claimed that evolutionary theory does not refute Genesis since Genesis was not meant to be a literal description of how God made the world. In reply I revisted remarks and videos that I posted last fall which overviewed the ways that even if we [...]
Salon has a neat interview with Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder and neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. He argues here that the sense of smell immediately leads us to value judgment than the other senses are and then explains how our moms influence our tastes: And what’s the relationship between [...]
After this introductory paragraph, every sentence in this post will summarize and link a different post expressing my views, primarily on topics related to atheism, philosophy, and ethics—which are the primary preoccupations of this blog. I am organizing all of these links into this one summary statement of “Camels With Hammers’ Philosophy.” This post will [...]
Robin Hanson responds to work such as Frans de Waal’s which emphasizes the invaluable role that empathy and cooperation played in natural selection of humans by stressing that as good as cooperation might be, we are prone to making serious errors about what genuinely helpful cooperation entails in specific instances: The unstated moral behind most [...]
Below is a thought-provoking video which critiques the notion of fallenness from several angles. It builds off of one point I’ve wanted to write about for a while and that’s that the non-literal reading of Genesis is just as false as the metaphorical one. When religious people argue that the Garden of Eden story is [...]
Greta Christina takes down the argument that the desire for God proves there is a God to fulfill it out there to be discovered: Someone (I can’t remember who now) recently pointed out that the “no atheists in foxholes” argument, even if it were true (which it’s not), isn’t an argument for God’s existence. It’s actually [...]
Sendai Anonymous tears into Satoshi Kanazawa for His ridiculous research trying (and failing) to link “attractiveness” with reproductive strategies and reproductive success, and all sorts of vacuous claims regarding “attractiveness”. His statistics proved to be flawed and were many times criticised, which Kanazawa obviously ignored. He also claimed that women are getting more “attractive” faster [...]
John Wilkins has a good post on the value of our minds’ readinesses to defer to authorities from an evolutionary standpoint: The evolutionary justification for this is, of course the following: if evolution were a designer, trying to ensure that thinking beings learned and knew what they had to to survive, a cheaper rule than [...]
Francis Collins trots out a familiar old argument against atheism. The argument is that if there is no God then our morality is an illusion. Collins’s presentation of this argument features an unusual and suspicious spin. Collins knows that arguments can be made from evolutionary psychology that broadly moral thinking seems to have evolved in [...]
I am puzzled by appeals to history to oppose gay marriage because history is only the story of what people have done and never of itself directly tells us anything about right or wrong. Results of history can serve as warnings about effective and uneffective approaches to goal x or goal y but what people [...]
Thanks to AtheisTube for the find. Your Thoughts?
A few weeks ago now, I wrote a post, Commitment To Value Without God, in which I discussed how even when I was a Christian, I realized that I did not need to make reference to God in order to either psychologically recognize the value of sumptuous food or good friendship or any of various [...]
RichardDawkins.net has reprinted a 2006 debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, the prominent (and now powerful) proponent of compatibility between religion and science who has recently been selected by Obama to head up the NIH. The article has some really interesting moments, so I recommend you read it in full. Here is what I [...]
In a previous post, I raised some remarks from psychologist of morality Jonathan Haidt, in which he discussed his theory that moral thinking appeals to 5 essential modules hardwired into our brains by evolution. In the interview I cited from a couple of years ago he only referred to 4 of the 5 modules but [...]
Interesting arguments. I’m not sure how many of them threaten the credibility of either evolutionary psychology or sociobiology as disciplines themselves , rather than specific morally and politically unpleasant theses advanced by particular theories derived by scientists working within those fields. And these arguments force evo psych and sociobiology to incorporate a view of the [...]