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I must comment on this.
But before I do, please tell me what "religion" means to
you and McCauley.
-rjh
At 06:56 PM 01/28/2001 -0500, you 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
>
====================================
- - - - - - Russell J. Hamilton, Ph.D. - - - - - -
- - - - - - The University of Chicago - - - - - -
- - - - - - Radiation & Cellular Oncology - - - - - -
- - - - - - phone: 312-996-3630 - - - - - -
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