WilliamGoode
New Member
Are we talking semiotics? Because in that case, non belief clearly would signal belief system. Isn't non-belief just a system of belief?
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Are humans hardwired to believe in god(s)?
- Thread starter jeager106
- Start date
Are we talking semiotics? Because in that case, non belief clearly would signal belief system. Isn't non-belief just a system of belief?
Yes to the above. It is the belief that external gods are irrelevant to them in these areas. It is a belief that they are not necessary, if you really boil it down to what is being said. Atheism is in this regard a positive view, not merely a negative view.
WilliamGoode
New Member
I think so, at least generally speaking. If we aren't looking for something greater than ourselves, then what are we doing?
Marisa
Well-Known Member
Hard wired for belief, yes. The animal that can believe the tall grass ahead moves because a predator lurks there lives longer than the one that must inspect the tall grass for proof.
I did not say "belief in God" in the sense of a specific form. I touched on this when I said, " I think the mistake would be to say that this hardwired tendency results in specific types of beliefs, such as believing the stories in the Bible are factually true.". But if you understand "God" as not "this deity form", then it fits how I said it at the outset of the post, "Of course humans had become hardwired for religious beliefs and spiritual practices." My wording was very specific. It's is a belief of a certain nature, of which "God" represents in many cases, or can for all intents and purposes be understood as that, even without that name or specific beliefs. It's a way of view the world. And I'm not speaking of simply seeing agency. That's only one piece of it.
Indeed, I've been watching for something like this.
And I did lay some athiest bait so athiests would jump on this and comment.
I appologize if there was any offense, there shoudln't have been.
I just wanted as many athiest comments as possible along with others. So thank you and keep it going please.
I again say: " ever culture, all peoples since before recorded history has believed in something greater than man."
Why?
Someone schooled in Dawkins should have an opinion, ergo the invitation to athiests as well as anyone else with an opinion.
PERHAPS IF I MODIFY THE QUESTION TO:
ARE HUMANS HYARDWIRED TO HAVE FAITH IN SOMETHING GREAT THAN MAN?
ARE HUMANS HARDWIRED OR DID HUMANS INVENT FAITH AS THE GREEKS INVENTED
REASON?
Of course there has been the age old conflict between faith and reason.
Ask any athiest. Which is what I'm doing. Athiest seem more reason based than faithful tho
niether mental attitude is "wrong". Quite the contrary in fact. I do learn much from athiests.
Last edited:
There is no conflict between faith and reason. There is only a conflict between the literal interpretations of the symbols of faith and reason. Most people miss this simple fact conflating specific interpretations of symbols with faith itself. Point in case many people with faith do not agree with those literal interpretations. The common factor is not faith, but how the mind interprets things. Change the pre-rational interpretations, and faith and reason are complementary.
And that's the whole thing right there. Expand the perspective, and it's no longer pre-rational. That a majority has a perspective, does not define the understanding for everyone. If you shift the center of gravity where the majority are not thinking of God in mythic-literal terms, then it's no longer incompatible. A majority of people see themselves as the center of the universe. Does that mean a view of the self is invalid, or that all views of the self reflect that belief?
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
No. We are not hardwired for any belief in God or greater purpose or whatever makes a persons boat float in a specific venue.
I do however take we are hardwired to generally seek.out ideologies to a greater or lesser extent by which in doing so, are clearly useful as a coping mechanism to deal with issues that can include religion, of which may or may not include a factual basis to go upon. It could be just an interim take on things, or be protracted such as in cases of long term fundamentalism.
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
Actually, we are. We are hardwired to be social animals, we are hardwired to universally express and recognize a handful of facial expressions, we are hardwired to be sexual animals.
This is not a "hardwired" condition but one that is brought on by the individual. Muscles are hardwired to strengthen, just as experiences alter the shape of the brain, but that doesn't mean your fingers will be strong enough to play an F chord the first time you pick up a guitar.
The point of that is to say that as a species, entering into religious or spiritual states seems to be someone our brains are hardwired to do easily. Of course, it takes the practice of ritual to bring this out in the individual as a more normal condition, but the very brain itself is wired to have these sorts of experiences, and the results are pretty much the same everywhere, accounting for the cultural differences in symbolic languages. I'll share this section of this article about research done by neuroscience on Franciscan nuns, Tibetan Buddhist monks, and Pentecostals in religious ecstasies that touches on that:
What he's found is surprising: religious feeling is not invisible. The common thread among mystical and spiritual practices is that while people are engaged in them, the lobes of their brain can be seen working together to create a powerful emotional experience. "When we looked at [subjects'] brain scans, instead of the frontal lobes going up, the frontal lobes actually went down [in blood flow]. Which makes sense in the context of what they are describing is happening to them," Newberg explains. "They don't feel that they're purposely making it [happen]. They feel that they are being basically overcome by the experience."
He believes that what subjects describe as their interaction with God is a shutting down of their concentrative, willful attention in order to allow this experience of transcendence to happen. "For them it's the spirit of God which is moving through them. I can't prove that or disprove that on the basis of a brain scan, but I can see the changes that are going on in the brain while they're engaged in this very, very powerful and very deep spiritual practice... It certainly looks like the way the brain is put together makes it very easy for human beings to have religious and spiritual experiences."
The question, then, is not whether we're wired for what we've come to call spiritual experiences exist, but how a tendency towards the transcendent makes us better adapted to live and survive in the world around us. What is the evolutionary purpose of belief?
{Emphasis mine]. In other words, this is something our species has inherited to have the ability to do when engaged with. People who don't even practice or engage in any sort of meditation or ritual forms can have spontaneous peak experiences of a religious or spiritual nature. But the practice of ritual and meditation makes one more prone to this. It seems all our brains have this ability. How much or little or frequent is another question.He believes that what subjects describe as their interaction with God is a shutting down of their concentrative, willful attention in order to allow this experience of transcendence to happen. "For them it's the spirit of God which is moving through them. I can't prove that or disprove that on the basis of a brain scan, but I can see the changes that are going on in the brain while they're engaged in this very, very powerful and very deep spiritual practice... It certainly looks like the way the brain is put together makes it very easy for human beings to have religious and spiritual experiences."
The question, then, is not whether we're wired for what we've come to call spiritual experiences exist, but how a tendency towards the transcendent makes us better adapted to live and survive in the world around us. What is the evolutionary purpose of belief?
Orbit
I'm a planet
I have a few thoughts on this. I think it is similar to the question "why do we dream?"--what evolutionary survival value is there in that? Well, it appears that sleep is when the brain integrates new information, and processes all kinds of stimuli. Dreams seem to be an epi-phenomena of this processing. It's done for our psychological health. I think that spiritual experiences are analogous; we have them for our psychological health, on a deeper level, one might label it "spiritual health". Bottom line: it keeps us sane.
Orbit
I'm a planet
That actually wasn't an "atheist answer" it was an "anthropology answer". I'm not sure what you're asking here. If I take your questions literally, the answer is no, humans are not hardwired for faith in something greater (another anthropological answer).
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
"Let us make man in our image and likeness." We are, according to the very Bible itself, the very image of likeness of god. If one follows this through logically, we, humans, are gods. We have only to achieve this state, and we are getting closer to controlling even life and death itself with each passing generation.
Because there is such variance between the definitions of things such as "gods" and "souls" and the "afterlife," it seems we have made them up. But, being having a mind based on realism, we are not the image or likeness of god.
We have not a clue as to what reality is, what existence is, or to what even life is. And we are going to try and pretend we know of a being who would be outside of our very limited three dimensional capabilities that are heavily prone to errors of bias and "glitches" in our senses? How do we even try to rationalize anything that may be "above" us when we really know so very little about ourselves and the planet we inhabit? Faith and emotions are very easily flawed and misplaced. How should we ever even really know when we are susceptible to the placebo effect? When a sugar pill can have a measurable effect on someone, how are to ever really know what, if anything, lies "above" us?
We are just too limited and flawed.
Such gods are however widely variant in characteristics to the point that is probably more accurate to say that belief in supernatural entities of some sort (more often spirits than properly gods) arose spontaneously nearly everywhere.
The very word "god" is nearly meaningless, and it still does not properly cover animism, which I believe to be more universal than theism even.
That would miss the point, though.
It should be obvious: in order to defend ourselves from undue assumptions and pressures.
That is a bit of an open question for the time being.
Have you heard of bicameralism, though? I really have to read more about that, but my current understanding is that there is strong if inconclusive evidence that just a few millennia ago many or even most people actually "heard" the voices from their own right brain hemispheres due to a lack of better neural integration in the brain.
Odds are good that the idea of deities arose from that neurological phenomenon, which apparently became rarer as time went by.
I think there is also sufficient anthropological evidence to at least suggest that the idea that gods are something to be actually believed was rare until very recent centuries. It is difficult for me to imagine that early Christians thought of Jesus as a literal corporeal entity. It may well be that the notion was made popular by the rivalry with Islam, come to think of it.
Most any succesfull non-Abrahamic faith (and even Judaism) actually work far better without making much if any emphasis on literal belief. As is only natural really.
Yes, I would agree with it, and it's my view that something like meditation should be made something as much a part of public awareness as promoting healthy diet and exercise. It should be including in all school programs like phy ed and healthy lunch programs are. It needs to become a part of our daily lives. It's my view that we are in essence monkeys with oversized brains which makes us particularly anxious and neurotic, especially in a fast-paced, fast changing world. It gets us back in touch with ourselves, reconnects us to the world, and the result is more peaceful, calmer, and happier lives.
Methinks the practices of religion developed the tools to access this. Even if it is not a specific meditation practice as a discipline, the tools of ritual and prayer have the sorts of effects meditation does, and is a form or part of an actual meditation practice. Meditation just goes deeper. We came up with these because it allowed us access to the spiritual side of ourselves we intuitively, existentially, sense disconnection from. That disconnection causes fear and anxiety, and to reconnect with "God", or the world, is to reduce or eliminate that existential fear.
We are wired to the spiritual, to the transcendent, because we became self-aware, consciously thinking about ourselves as individuals in relation to the world. Transcendence beyond that separate self-sense is the only way to relief because we cannot return to nonbeing, to death, to commit suicide. We are trapped between two worlds, as it were, and hence the rise of mythologies of a fall from Paradise to describe this current existential condition. How do we reconnect with that source? We either learn to cope with this dread, or we transcend it. The spiritual experience is geared towards transcending it. We are hardwired to transcend this condition, to grow into being fully self-aware, as opposed to half-awake between heaven and hell in an existential limbo.
Last edited:
William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience detailed the universal belief systems of the human species. Freud's colleague GustavJung called our belief in God a universal archetype, an integral part of our collective unconscious.
Dr. Andrew Newberg, University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist and author of "Why We Believe What We Believe," is working on ways to track how the human brain processes religion and spirituality. It's all part of new field of study called neurotheology.
Why, for example, do we continue to be fascinated by God, religion, UFOs, conspiracy theories, and miracle cures, even when science can dispute many of these claims? Simply put: Why do we believe what we believe?
From:
Neurotheology -Is "God" Hardwired in the Human Brain?
Goor read. There are many articles on the web supporting that humans are indeed "hardwired to seek, believe, search for
meaning", etc.
Dr. Andrew Newberg, University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist and author of "Why We Believe What We Believe," is working on ways to track how the human brain processes religion and spirituality. It's all part of new field of study called neurotheology.
Why, for example, do we continue to be fascinated by God, religion, UFOs, conspiracy theories, and miracle cures, even when science can dispute many of these claims? Simply put: Why do we believe what we believe?
From:
Neurotheology -Is "God" Hardwired in the Human Brain?
Goor read. There are many articles on the web supporting that humans are indeed "hardwired to seek, believe, search for
meaning", etc.
roger1440
I do stuff
Yeah, dat
Awkward Fingers
Omphaloskeptic
is a lack of doing anything athletic, being athletic?