Wow, I've been trying to sum that very idea up for my whole life! I've always been frustrated when I disagree with someone on an issue and they are a religious person and base their arguement on "what's natural." I once spoke with someone who was against homosexuality because it was "unnatural."

Religion can be seen as a cause/effect question: Is life an effect of the existance of God? Or is religion a falsity caused by our limited understanding of life?

hmmmm....
=)
-Joey

Eric Weeks wrote:
> Hi SII-mailing list folks,
>
> I heard an interesting talk this weekend by Robert N. McCauley,
> a professor of philosphy at Emory University. The talk was
> entitled "Examining the cognitive foundations of the conflicts
> between religion and science."
>
> He was arguing that religion (not theology, just religion)
> comes "naturally" to humans, in terms of our innate cognitive
> functioning, and that science, in particular the scientific
> method, is "unnatural" and hard to learn. He was careful
> to say he doesn't attach values to either of these facts,
> although after the talk he told me that he personally feels that
> "science" is the most important human creation, period.
>
> His argument for religion is that humans inherently look for
> agents who are causing things to happen, apparently this is
> observable even in 1-yr-olds. So, supernatural agents are
> just an extension of this built-in agent-finding part of us.
> Further, once we assume an agent is causing something to
> happen, that brings along a whole bunch of assumptions and
> knowlege, making it easy to construct explanations of stuff.
> He also pointed out that religious behavior is universal,
> that is, particular religions do come and go but that no human
> population has ever really been without religion. If you
> include burying the dead as religious behavior, then even the
> Neanderthals would be counted as having religious behavior.
> One conclusion he drew from this is that science is no threat
> to religion, that science will never stamp out religion.
>
> The more interesting argument was about the unnatural-ness of
> the scientific method. He says that the scientific method is
> all about having theories and then looking hard for concrete
> evidence to refute or support them. Further, scientists do
> share the innate human tendencies to fool themselves, so as
> a whole you see things like peer-review that are mechanisms
> to help us do the unnatural, that is, really strenuously test
> the theories. He pointed out that it is hard to learn science
> and that people have to train for years and years to really
> become good scientists. Also, whereas religious behavior
> started as far back as we can tell, the scientific method is
> relatively new in human history. The basic point is that being
> curious, wanting answers, may be innate, natural behavior,
> but the scientific method as a way to produce answers is hard,
> unnatural stuff for humans. One quick point -- he does put
> theology in a similar category of unnaturalness, as opposed to
> "religion".
>
> His conclusion is that we *do* have to fear science dying
> out some day, because it's not something innate, and thus
> would be easy to lose somehow. At least, possible to lose,
> as opposed to religion which seems built-in.
>
> One last minor point -- in his talk he did not attempt to
> answer the question about nature -vs- nuture for these topics.
>
> Anyway, I thought y'all might be interested.
>
> --Eric