a smarty pants experiment with language, science and religion
Everyone is born an atheist.
There are lots of variations on this theme floating about the place. I don’t think it’s completely false. But it doesn’t make any sense. Everyone is born with a lack of belief in gods. Fair enough. But everyone is born with a lack of understanding of science and everyone is born with a lack of language to express themselves. It’s not meaningful to assert what we don’t know as babies.
Let’s imagine a nasty experiment, a la Emperor Fredrick II, who apparently in the 13th century wanted to know what ‘natural’ language was – Latin, Greek and Hebrew being among the supposed possibilities – and had a group of children raised within a language void. So, let’s imagine we can take three of groups of socialised people (socialised through silent observation and imitation) but interactionless in terms of language, science and religion. We drop them off on three different planets, exactly like earth, and observe the results in terms of the development of language, science and religion.
Now, you may be imagining the results of this experiment but you’re probably wrong. I’ll tell you what will happen, because I’m more likely to be right (my experiment).
In terms of language, sounds for basic needs would be available within the first generation. Ways to express hunger, interest, attraction and fear, location of food, things like that. Perhaps also ways to indicate incidents in the past and present. Over a few hundred years, more words would be generated and the beginnings of symbols to express the words. After a couple of thousand of years, the three groups of people would develop various functional languages that would have little in common with any languages currently in existence.
The development of scientific understanding would obviously take a lot longer. Language and writing would have to be well established. Eventually, after thousands of years, the humans would reach a level on par with our current understanding of the physical world. The method of expression would be different but the understanding would be pretty much the same.
Religion is a different kettle of fish. In the first generation, every person would undoubtedly formulate their own superstitious explanation for the many things they don’t understand. They would influence each other by their reactions to weather, animals and the world around them, and within a couple of generations groups would undoubtedly be cowering before trees that bear fruit or making fearful signs at the sun to encourage its benevolence. Innate curiosity that leads to a desire to understand a confusing physical world, plus the need to feel protected that never abandons us from childhood, would see the creation of basic deities in a flash. As common language developed, so the most successful or appealing of these superstitious thoughts would be adapted by the majority, and primitive religions would be established. The mentally ill or power-hungry ‘prophets’ would be among them within a few hundred years. Within a thousand years, none of the religions would be the same as any we currently see, but a lot of them would have come to the logical conclusion that a fundamental principle for a stable society is to treat others as you wish to be treated (science).
Therefore, as a result of my thoroughly scientific experiment, it has been proven that theism is natural and people are not born atheists. In the same way that language is natural and people are not born with an understanding of science. Don’t undervalue atheism – it’s a measure of evolutionary advancement steeped in logic and common sense – but it’s not a natural state in the absence of scientific understanding.
The difference between your well thought out rational prose and the conclusion arrived at by those dickheads sponsored by the Templeton Foundation trying to push God Belief is their use of oh so subtle twisted terminology. And while we may be predisposed to believe in some form of supernatural occurances at the beginning of our journey along the path of life, i.e. lightening and thunder and tax refunds, we grow out of this nonsense pretty sharpish until only a belief in Santa Claus remains, which is perfectly logical, and true….of course.
BTW,do you think your 17 year older .”liker”. photographer feller from Dublin read your post? I do hope so.
😉
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What’s the Templeton Foundation thing? I just wikipedia-ed them but I guess they fund a lot of crap ‘scientific’ research?
Wow, I’m impressed you check out likers. If people don’t comment, I assume it’s spam. I see the the same little icons on lots of pages – there are many busy clickers out there.
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The Templeton Foundation:
Rather Google it, please, and read at your leisure.
They sponsor lots of things. A “We’re not really Christians but we are , really.” group.
They sponsored one of those ” Are we predisposed to God” things at Oxford involving academics from many fields, but headed by a ….wait for it children…..Christian.
I went full tilt with two of my favorite Christians over it, one of them being Unklee. John ‘knows’ him.
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Unklee is an idiot, although a polite one
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The point in saying every child is born an a-theist (without theism) is simply to counter the theistic claim that their god/religion is eternal.
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I know. Would you agree it doesn’t make that much sense though? I guess ‘no child is born innately understanding your specific religion’ doesn’t have the same ring.
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Lacks a certain punchyness, but i know where you’re coming from. Is punchyness a word? If its not i’m making it one now!
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We are all born atheists. We have to be taught a particular brand of theism.
However, I appreciate your point and I think you could safely say that anthropological studies have also shown exactly what your thought experiment attempts to show: that we are also all born superstitious and absent any culture already in place, we will invent our own supernatural explanations for things we don’t understand. I’m not aware of any indigenous cultures that both survived long enough to be studied and were also atheists.
Evolution selected theism over atheism. Isn’t that ironic?
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Evolution isn’t finished. 🙂
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Another place where science comes in second place to religion. God? Done in 6 days. Evolution? Over 4 billion years … and still struggling to get it together.
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Haha! There’s a really funny post in all these comments – I think you should pull it all together.
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I’ve been mulling this over for a couple of days, and you know, I think you’re right. Maybe I will. 🙂
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Excellent! Look forward to the results!
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Did you read The Language Instinct? I need to pick it back up.
This isn’t from that book but my own thoughts, I think …
Language is an instinct but maybe we just got unlucky with the whole god thing. Extremes are much more likely in a small sample size. So, what if one of your groups happen to be predominantly mathematically inclined? A different culture would certainly emerge.
What if, when human beings got down to like, what was it 20k, like 50k bc … What if we had gotten lucky and that group was over 50 percent math minds? We would be living in a different world I bet.
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Maybe that would affect the speed of development but the process in each of the three areas would be the same. I know I’m right about this, because it’s my experiment. 🙂 (You know I’m joking, right? I’d hate to think that anyone actually took me seriously.)
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Yes, of course.
But, I still thinking I’m making a good point.
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Something you might enjoy!
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/angier-on-dragonflies/
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Cool, thanks! I’ll watch the videos later tonight. By the way, I’m still waiting on your serious straight-as-an-arrow sex post. Not chickening out are you?
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Oh, dear…go read the intro to the In The Pub Post from this afternoon….
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I also think atheism doesn’t come naturally. I can’t prove it, though! Many children have a religious phase when they are around 8 years old. At that age, they seem to be a lot more susceptible to belief, be it in fairies, Santa Clause or some other guy. Maybe that makes evolutionary sense in some way.
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That’s really interesting, I’ve never heard that before. I’m going to look out for it in a bunch of friends’ kids coming up to that age. I’m glad you agree, because it’s one of those notions that does the rounds but it’s a bad argument and therefore irritates me. So, if one more person agrees (you) then it’s clearly fact!
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Yes, the beauty of it is that each of us can now refer to the other as an authority. 😉 And since you’ve even done an experiment involving three other planets….
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Well, I think that says it all. 🙂
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