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Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

#88: Sept. - Oct. 2010 (Non-Fiction)
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Saffron

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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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Robert Tulip wrote:Mutation is random but natural selection is directional, towards increased complexity.
I am not so sure about natural selection as directional toward increased complexity. I think the only direction to natural selection is toward what ever increases survival rate of the most and healthiest young. Increasing complexity is not always the end result of the evolutionary process. The change in color of a moth is not a change toward complexity. In fact, I suspect that complexity is risky for organisms.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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Saffron wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:Mutation is random but natural selection is directional, towards increased complexity.
I am not so sure about natural selection as directional toward increased complexity. I think the only direction to natural selection is toward what ever increases survival rate of the most and healthiest young. Increasing complexity is not always the end result of the evolutionary process. The change in color of a moth is not a change toward complexity. In fact, I suspect that complexity is risky for organisms.
The overall direction of evolution from microbes to humans has seen a steady punctuated increase in complexity of life on earth. Camouflaged moths are more complex than uncamouflaged moths because a feature of their environment has inserted itself into the genome through selective pressure. Yes, complexity can be risky when an isolated ecosystem evolves into high stable complexity such as a rainforest and is then vulnerable to depredation by external factors. However, other things being equal, such as stability of predation and climate, natural living systems do gradually tend to become more complex, containing more varied organisms that are more sensitively attuned to the signals of nature.

Wright describes a steady increase in the complexity of religious thought from animism to polytheism to monotheism. In one sense, monotheism may seem simpler than polytheism because it has just one God instead of many. However, this reading masks an actual increase in complexity, with monotheism subsuming the earlier beliefs into a new synthesis with greater apparent explanatory power.

Where complexity does reduce is with a breakdown of the complex system, as occurred at the ends of geological periods such as the Permian and the Cretaceous. However, these catastrophes are the exception rather than the rule, punctuation marks in the long sentences of evolutionary grammar. Most of the time things are getting more complex.
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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Thanks y'all for this fantastic discussion.

I was wondering about this complexity question myself. I know many organisms start to resemble a sort of patchwork amalgamation of traits that lead to better compatibility with their environment, but maybe aren't necessarily more complex. Sometimes an organism starts down a certain path it gets stuck with some of the design elements, even if those elements are no longer quite optimal for their survival. But other traits emerge which compensate for the less-than-optimal structure. Look at the flounder with its eyes on its side. It's kind of a mess, but it does the job.

I think the answer is that natural selection doesn't necessarily move towards greater complexity but towards an enhanced ability to adapt to differing environmental conditions. The brown bear, for example, when it became geographically isolated in a colder environment, had built-in adaptive traits that were expressed in the colder climate. In a relatively short period of time, 20,000 years, it developed white fur and its molar teeth changed substantially so that the bear--now a polar bear--could survive in this colder world it now inhabits.

This web site explains this concept pretty well.

An excerpt:
Evolution is the time-cost advantage gained through the discovery of state-space paths that account for a greater number of possible states in that space. The emergence of the ability to innovate is the crux of evolution.

Just as entropy implies the dispersal of energy, evolution implies an increase in diversity as a greater number of possible states are occupied or accounted for. This increase in diversity is the essence of evolution. Increased diversity may mean increased complexity, but diversity and complexity are not the same.
http://www.sklatch.net/what-is-life/complexity.html
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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My son-in-law, who is an archaeologist, came home today with this comment from a professor/colleague: in the cradle of civilisation, it was necessary to man to be smaller (nutrional economy) run faster and have skin that was not sensitive to the sun and environment, but as he left and moved on, these physical attributes were no longer as vitally necessary, especially in what is now Europe. The focus turned to tools and using the mind.
A rather simplistic, in-a-nutshell comment, but it does have something.
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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I hope no one will mind if I suggest that this fine discussion of physical vs. cultural evolution, or the directionality (if any) of evolution be moved to "the parking lot." Sometimes the best conversations end up out there. It might help us to focus on Wright's chapter if we do this whenever we've got onto something that we might not be relating closely to the material. Thanks.

Did anybody find something regarding morality that Wright omitted from his overview? He tells us that in the religion of primitive cultures, there is generally no need for a god to as the source of moral precepts. The society incorporates the rules regarding moral behavior as a matter of course, in order to continue as a functioning social group. So the message is that morality needs no boost from gods, who in any event, judging by their antics, show no interest in moral behavior.

But Wright doesn't mention an area that we would consider important, and that is whether specific cultural practices are moral by our standards. Here I'd be referring to such things as human sacrifice, infanticide, methods of capital punishment, treatment of women, and others. What makes a society work and continue does not necessarily make it a moral one. I'm not saying that such practices are always hallmarks of basic cultures, but surely they sometimes are. These practices are already within the moral circle of the group, so how does it work that those customs become unacceptable over time? It wouldn't seem to be a matter of expanding the moral circle to others outside the group, but of reforming the existing culture.
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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I agree that Wright doesn't mention morals which are important to us, but he has used a huge disclaimer: "Even if religion is largely about morablity today, it doesn't seem to have started out that way."
Granted, it may not have. And religion today is certainly concerned with ethics to the point of believing that if you are not religious, you are not capable of moral or ethical behaviour.
However--Wright spends a lot of time and effort explaining how the environment (literally) has made a huge impact on belief. If you lived dependent on the ocean, you came to believe the ocean was governed by a god who had to be appeased. Okay. So far so good. Wright then goes on to state that religion was not even a word to most pre-historic peoples because it was so intrinsic to their life--every living moment was impermeated with it--that they did not recognize it as a separate entity. Again, so far so good.
He has thus made a catch-all disclaimer and what a huge one! I agree, Dwill, that Wright is neglecting to see the influence that culture itself makes on religion and social identity in connection to religion. Wright even blatantly states that "relation to spirits have no ethical implication." Oh, I heartily agree with that statement, but after all these disclaimers, where is his definition of morality or ethics? In order to claim that they had no influence, he should have defined what it was he thought to have no influence.
I think Wright avoids this as, apart from sparse archaeolgical evidence, it is simply almost impossible for us to discern what constitued moral behaviour in pre-history. We have to take an educated guess.
Gods and spirits are parasitic--Pascal Boyer

Religion is the only force in the world that lets a person have his prejudice or hatred and feel good about it --S C Hitchcock

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. --André Gide

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Robert Tulip

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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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oblivion wrote:where is his definition of morality or ethics? In order to claim that they had no influence, he should have defined what it was he thought to have no influence. I think Wright avoids this as, apart from sparse archaeolgical evidence, it is simply almost impossible for us to discern what constitued moral behaviour in pre-history. We have to take an educated guess.
The first chapter, The Primordial Faith, provides more analysis of the basis of ethics than you suggest here. Primitive culture is defined by the tribe. Religious ethics evolve when the social unit becomes bigger than the tribe. Ethics is not a religious matter for primitive tribes because there is no concept of nature or God or Gods as fundamentally benign, and justice is a human matter. Wright comments that religion evolved in reaction to growing understanding of the world through science (p15). He says of primitive societies that "love and generosity and honesty 'are not preached or buttressed by threat of religious reprisal' in these societies 'because they do not need to be'. When modern societies preach these values, they are worried 'mostly about morality in the larger society outside the sphere of kindred and close friends. Primitive people do not have these worries because they do not conceive of - do not have - the larger society to adjust to." (p26)

Wright sees "a pattern in the change. Religion has got closer to moral and spiritual truth, and for that matter more compatible with scientific truth" (p28). But the problem is that "a hunter-gatherer village is the environment we're built for, the environment natural selection 'designed' the human mind for" (p25). As the economy evolved beyond the clan level, religious ethics emerged to regulate treatment of strangers. Ethical ideas also pointed to the idea expressed by William James, that "there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto" (p27). The tension is that as religious values evolved, the tribal social basis for their natural acceptance was disappearing, to be replaced by dogmatic faith. The question now is how the ancient tribal sense of community may be married to universal ethical principles.
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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Robert Tulip wrote:The tension is that as religious values evolved, the tribal social basis for their natural acceptance was disappearing, to be replaced by dogmatic faith. The question now is how the ancient tribal sense of community may be married to universal ethical principles.
Granted, Wright does touch upon it, but I would still maintain that we today cannot know to what extent moral thinking/ethics were divorced from religion or, as he does indeed state, were simply not thought of as such being an intregal part of just living. The archaeological evidence is lucky to provide an alter here, an overturned stone there, some preserved bones, etc. But our minds--the way we think and deduce today--is really all we have at hand to even attempt an apothesis on their accepted moral behaviour.
Your first sentence in the quote here I do agree with emphatically. It is much the same today in that children, while they can have no concept of religion/god/spirituality are still eager to accept the idea of tooth fairies, Santa Claus, Easter Bunnies, what have you, which do indeed serve as place holders in the brain, ready to be disposed of when the idea of religion can be understood and readily replaced with gods and spirits. They are taught they have to be good because Santa Claus won't come to them if they are not--we don't waste time with a 3 year old attempting to explain ethical behaviour. Then when religion enters the scene, the conditioning is already there making it easier and more acceptable for the older child to believe in god.
Last edited by oblivion on Thu Aug 26, 2010 12:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Gods and spirits are parasitic--Pascal Boyer

Religion is the only force in the world that lets a person have his prejudice or hatred and feel good about it --S C Hitchcock

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. --André Gide

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. --Julian Barnes
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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There could be a danger of uncritically accepting a view that "primordial" peoples enjoyed a natural, unforced morality, that they lived in a golden age, and that they were indeed noble savages. Wright holds up for ridicule the Victorian notions about "savages" being not even human in the same sense that we are. Okay, that is all wrong. It's not true that without gods to enforce order, anarchy prevails. But I agree with oblivion that, so far, Wright doesn't give proof that morality in tribal societies is fine, without religion to mess it up. He doesn't give us much idea of what morality is, does he, besides that the tribes are able to function because there are clear rules and little opportunity to get away with something? Is morality then nothing more than social order? I see no reason to think that the ethic of reciprocation, which may be seen as the key to morality, would not operate when gods were uninvolved with morality, but still, I think we need greater ethnographic information about tribal societies than Wright has the time to give us. And I think it is morally relevant whether beliefs about gods or spirits might affect social customs to the extent, say, that people may be sacrificed to propitiate the gods.

As for primitive people not having a word for their religion, this to me may indicate almost a different phase of consciousness than exists when civilization appears. I don't see this as a desireable state. It's bit scary to me.
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Re: Ch. 1 - The Primordial Faith

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DWill wrote:There could be a danger of uncritically accepting a view that "primordial" peoples enjoyed a natural, unforced morality, that they lived in a golden age, and that they were indeed noble savages. Wright holds up for ridicule the Victorian notions about "savages" being not even human in the same sense that we are. Okay, that is all wrong. It's not true that without gods to enforce order, anarchy prevails. But I agree with oblivion that, so far, Wright doesn't give proof that morality in tribal societies is fine, without religion to mess it up. He doesn't give us much idea of what morality is, does he, besides that the tribes are able to function because there are clear rules and little opportunity to get away with something? Is morality then nothing more than social order? I see no reason to think that the ethic of reciprocation, which may be seen as the key to morality, would not operate when gods were uninvolved with morality, but still, I think we need greater ethnographic information about tribal societies than Wright has the time to give us. And I think it is morally relevant whether beliefs about gods or spirits might affect social customs to the extent, say, that people may be sacrificed to propitiate the gods.

As for primitive people not having a word for their religion, this to me may indicate almost a different phase of consciousness than exists when civilization appears. I don't see this as a desireable state. It's bit scary to me.
The discussion here brings up some rather politically and emotionally loaded terms, especially the distinction between primitive and civilized. The European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was thoroughly racist in its assumption of a linear scale from savagery to civilization. However, as Wright points out, the vast bulk of human evolution occurred prior to the advent of civilization, so the moral frameworks of tribal societies better reflect our neural evolution. It is reasonable to ask what we have lost through the modern social contract of law, in terms of alienation from our original natural identity that can be seen in communities who have continuity with pre-modern culture.

Wright's point is that in small tribes morality is enforced by people not by Gods. He is not saying primitive morality is better, only that it is separate from the later concept of God as the source of morality. Primitive culture has no need to imagine that God will send you to hell if you are bad, because this idea of hell only evolved when society grew big enough to need to regulate ethical relations of strangers through claims of divine sanctions. Part of the cultural evolution of God is that people in civilized life formulated an idea of a universal ethically good God as a means of coping with the loss of tribal community ethics. Often tribal ethics are arbitrary, capricious, unjust and harmful, so Wright seems to be correct in his assertion that the evolution of God involves a steady growth in moral rationality.

To talk of religion as a 'phase of consciousness' raises Wright's observation that primitive culture does not separate religion and life. The primitive outlook in this sense is rather like the mystic ideal of 'every thought a prayer'. This is fine for the mystic or the primitive but is impractical in the modern world. The modern compartmentalization of religion into a Sunday sing-along, with the separation of church and state, is probably necessary as a way to protect against false religion exercising political influence. However, it is inherently unstable, especially where religions hold to false beliefs and their adherents must practice a deliberate schizophrenia to separate their religious and secular identities.
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