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
I have a confession to make. I’ve long denigrated claims that what we today call “religion” originated during the Upper Paleolithic because early supernaturalism fostered altruism. When this argument makes an appearance, it’s often in the service of an evolutionary theism which assumes that because God is behind evolution, religion is the designed outcome of [...]
Tags:altruism·animism·animist·cosmic economy of sharing·evolutionary theism·foragers·Marshall Sahlins·Nurit Bird-David·Original Affluent Society·relational epistemology·relational rituals
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
Over the past decade there has been a sea change in the way we assess moral reasoning, judgment, and behavior. The old view, developed and championed largely by introspective philosophers, was that people actually reason about choices before making decisions that have moral or ethical impacts. While some decisions are in fact made this way, [...]
Tags:ethics·evolution of morals·innate morality·intuitive morality·John Rawls·Jonathan Haidt·Kant·moral judgment·moral psychology·moral reasoning·prosociality
For the holidays I’d like to share this with my theist friends who see hominin evolution progressively unfolding as one adaptation after another, all culminating in the transcendent and numinous splendor of modern humanity:
To tell stories about a world in which all the organic parts are at an adaptive optimum is typical of attempts to [...]
Tags:Davydd Greenwood·Dominic Johnson·Evolutionary Adaptation·evolutionary design·evolutionary storytelling·evolutionary theism·Matt Rossano·Michael Blume·Panglossian·Simon Conway Morris·Templeton Foundation
No one who has ever kept rats as pets (as I have) will be surprised by a study that appeared in yesterday’s Science and is getting major media coverage. In “Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats,” the authors report:
Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether [...]
Tags:altruism·cooperation·group size·Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal·Jean Decety·non-human primates·Peggy Mason·primates·prosocial behavior·rats·reciprocal altruism·religion as evolved adaptation
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
While browsing at my local bookstore yesterday and looking for a diversionary read, I serendipitously discovered The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (1992) by Daniel Richter. Although I’m only halfway through, it seems to be the book for those interested in a comprehensive history [...]
Tags:Cayuga·competition·Daniel Richter·Deganawidah·evolutionary theists·Great League of Peace and Power·Hiawatha·intergroup·Iroquois·Mohawk·Oneida·Onondoga·prosocial·Seneca·The Ordeal of the Longhouse·warfare
At the conclusion of Elaine Pagels’ lecture on the Book of Revelation, the first question someone asked her was why does religion persist? Pagels answered: “I think because this is about emotion. This isn’t conceptual. People who talk about it as if it matters whether you believe in God or not, have got [...]
Tags:attachment·Elaine Pagels·emotions·fear·Future of An Illusion·Revelation·Robert Fuller·separation anxiety·Sigmund Freud·Spirituality in the Flesh
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
