The philosophical and scientific beauty and elegance of Darwinian logic is its simple ability to place the whole of life within a framework of cause and effect. The Darwinian attitude to causality effectively excludes any literal supernatural belief, while recognising that symbolic use of supernatural language can have strong selective benefit, even more so when the symbolic language pretends to be literal.LanDroid wrote:I don't think that's True. Darwin spoke to how life evolves, not to the supernatural.Mr. Tulip wrote: Darwinian logic means there is no actual heaven or hell, contrary to fundamental longstanding teachings of the Christian religion.
Evolutionary principles such as cumulative adaptation have a universal application, seen in the constant slow ratcheting up of ecological systems from simple to complex as organisms gradually filter through to fill available niches more effectively. Adaptation is a universal process that is punctuated by catastrophic collapses which make the whole complex system start again from a new simple base.
Darwinian logic as applied to heaven and hell looks to how the cultural ideas have been adaptive. The only evidence we have for heaven and hell is social belief, which has strong evolutionary relevance as a mechanism of social control and direction, but no apparent evolutionary meaning against the supernatural premise that the mythology has any literal truth.
Ockham’s Razor excludes the supernatural: humans have evolved to use fantastic stories as seen in the Bible as an essential component of social evolution, indoctrinating myths to weld society into a cohesive and stable whole. The purpose of stories about heaven and hell is to provide symbolic explanation of how society will evolve under selective pressure that is good or evil. Good selective pressures make earth more like heaven, while evil selective pressures make earth more like hell. Rather than depictions of an afterlife, heaven and hell depict what our world could become. That is a more simple and parsimonious explanation of how supernatural ideology evolved than any literal theory of divine revelation.
It is pretty sad that the author of this thread has such a weak grasp of causality, which should be recognised as a central moral and epistemic principle of human existence. The logic of causality underpins the elegant simplicity of the theory of evolution.
My effort in my previous post was aimed at imagining what it is like to exist inside a creationist bubble in satirical terms. I am not going to even try to understand what person123 is on about, since personal religious commitment to the political ideology of creationism is the only seemingly coherent reason to question evolution, and s/he rejects that as well.
I disagree. Memetics applies the principles seen in genetic evolution to the evolution of culture, in order to study how myths such as the crucifixion came to have such stable and durable and fecund cultural sway. Only an evolutionary model of human existence can have any coherent plausible hypothesis about why people believe such weird magic.LanDroid wrote: Yes the theory of evolution renders heaven, hell, and the supernatural unnecessary to explain the diversity of life. However it does not address abiogenesis, life after death, or the magic that's involved with Jesus' crucifixion and the forgiveness of current sins.
For example, Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism provided an evolutionary argument for belief in life after death, that the belief enabled people to be more productive, improving reproductive success. It may be a challenge to show that belief in forgiveness improves fecundity, but the principle of evolution suggests it must, including at the level of unconscious collective psychology, for example with economic factors such as the shift from tribal to urban life enhanced by the social cohesion that Christianity delivers.