Anon: “being religious is probably an ineradicable fact about the human species (one of our apparently characteristic behaviors like music, language, genocide and so on) — not all of us have the tendency but most do, apparently.”
Scott Atran, would agree, but the question is, what is the trait? “Religiosity”? Isn’t that just one symptom of an adaptive tendency toward other-mind-reading, overstretched to animism? plus everybody’s mind/body problem? plus the fact that everyone had omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent god-parents once? and that no one experiences either mortality or eternity? and the rest is just rampant rumor and hearsay (which serves us well where it matters, and otherwise is just a bit of nonfunctional overflow)?
“It is not just a cultural artifact, in other words. I keep pushing this idea but so far get mostly blank stares from people. Glad to see a heavy hitter like Dennett (who looks simply marvelous in the photograph, btw) thinks so too.”
But the devil’s in the details. Earthly totemisms and cults and creeds themselves are not in the genes, just the animism and reliance on (satisfieciently [sic] reliable) hearsay is. You can build both veridicality and voodoo on that self-same foundation: there’s at least as much nonreligious hokum too, flowing from the same fountain.
“But reading the interview and looking at the questions focused another, possibly deeper trait: people for whom it makes perfectly good sense to say that pleasantness (hopefulness) is a better reason than truth to believe in something, and those who think that the only reason to believe something is whether it is true.”
It’s the difference between knowledge and wishful thinking. Not restricted to religion. Smokers, for example, have the syndrome in full bloom; so did Dr. Hwang and his faithful crew; and people who are going postal have it in spades…
“There are a lot of people who not only believe stuff because it is comforting or hopeful, etc. (which of course all of us do until we look critically at ourselves), but who know they do, and see no problem with it. What do you think?”
I think most people think extremely uncritically and unrigorously: “Do I contradict myself? Well then I contradict myself.” The reason it doesn’t matter that much is because most of our believings and thinkings and doings are simply inconsequential. Nothing hangs on them one way or the other. We just need to be rational enough to meet our daily bread needs, and not be led into conflagration (more than once)…
Stevan Harnad