In Misfires of Moral Psychology, a post prompted by Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, I commented:
Haidt’s mistake is a common one: observe modern or relatively recent cultural formations and then uncritically project them back into the ancestral or evolutionary past. This mistake has other [...]
Tags:evolutionary psychology·evolved morality·John Gray·Jonathan Haidt·moral psychology·naive rationalism·The Righteous Mind
Scholars have long been fascinated by the idea that something like the primordial or original religion existed until recently and may in fact be curated by a few people even today. If such “religions” could be identified, scholars hoped they could sketch the historical development or genealogy of religions. For old-time cultural evolutionists this amounted [...]
Tags:Aboriginal·Australian religions·Bushmen·dreaming·Edwin Wilmsen·Emile Durkheim·Max Charlesworth·Mircea Eliade·primitive religion·primordial religion·San
In this powerful interview with Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, Philip Pilkington poses the following question:
If what you say is true – and I believe the evidence is unquestionable in this regard – then economics is not a science whatsoever. It more so resembles a school of morality or even a philosophical cult. [...]
Tags:Azande·Evans-Pritchard·impervious ideology·non-falsifiable·superstition·tautology·Voodoo economics·Yanis Varoufakis
It is fashionable these days to argue that “religion” is an adaptation that evolved through group level selection. There are mathematical models which show this is possible. Whether these models capture or describe anything real is another story.
For it to work, the group level selection story first requires a kind of systematic and organized “religion” [...]
Tags:group level selection·Hamza Kashgari·Islam·modeling·religion as adaptation·Saudi Arabia·Sunni·supernatural surveillance·Wahhabism
Old Aristotleian habits die hard and the human penchant for bifurcating or othering is alive and well. In this handy primer on the distinctions between analytic and continental philosophy, we learn that “philosophers in one camp discount the work of those in the other simply because of their personal distaste for [analytic] symbolic logic [...]
Tags:analytic philosophy·continental philosophy·Nietzsche·physics·psychology
As a native Nebraskan, I was a bit surprised to see this headline in the Lincoln newspaper: “Minister’s Lecture to Examine How Ignorance of Scripture Hurts America.” I’m naturally interested in any story which connects ignorance with pain. I soon discovered the minister wasn’t talking about the ignorance of not knowing at all (which is [...]
Tags:bible·biblical studies·discourse·hermeneutics·interpretation·interpretive strategy·Reverend Jim Keck·rhetorical slippage·what the bible really says
Physicists may soon confirm the actual existence of the Higgs boson or God particle. It must exist or their models don’t work and the math is all wrong, which can’t possibly be the case. Or perhaps it can. Stranger things have happened. The elusiveness of the God particle, which is needed for mass to exist, [...]
Tags:conformity·Emile Durkheim·God particle·Higgs boson·moral order·network analysis·religiosity·religiosity effects·Rodney Stark·sociology
What is the meaning of this dubious concatenation? I’m not sure but am sure that it should be bracketed with scare quotes at all times.
I first became aware of “theological anthropology” while browsing the Evolution of Religion website, which is a Templeton funded project devoted to finding God’s plan in evolution. Here is the announcement [...]
Tags:creationism·Dominic Johnson·intelligent design·Templeton Foundation·theistic evolution·theological anthropology
Jerry Coyne has been on a tear lately; even if I don’t agree with everything he says I admire his willingness to tackle the big issues and talk straight. He recently posted on free will and made a case for strict determinism, along with these assertions:
Therefore, even if determinism reigns (and, if it does, there’s [...]
Tags:Daniel Kahneman·Daryl Bem·determinism·free will·Freeman Dyson·Jerry Coyne·psi·quantum entanglement·spooky action at a distance
If I understand my Catholic friends and scholars correctly, God created the cosmos, earth, and life. This God sparked the original organism and designed an evolutionary process that has resulted in endless forms most beautiful and wonderful. But of all these forms, one stands out and one was the goal from the beginning: humans. When [...]
Tags:adaptation·Catholic·Christian·creationism·design·evolutionary theism·Gobekli Tepe·God·intelligent design·John Haught·Klaus Schmidt·Matt Rossano·Michael Blume·Panglossian Paradigm·Simon Conway Morris·teleology·theology
