Evolving Thoughts

I got the responses to my ARC grant application that will, if it comes through, pay for my eating and sundry living costs for the next three years. It's on the evolution of religion, a recently hot topic. One of the commentators thought that I was wrong to say that it's hard to find a religion that lacks supernatural beings, and instanced Buddhism, Confucianism and Jainism. A quick trip to the Encyclopedia of Religion sorted that mistake out: there's a common distinction between popular and elite religious forms, and just like you can find Catholicism without the saints, you can find Buddhism without the devas, Brahmin, or various family gods, etc., but it isn't the popular religion. And that got me thinking...

I have criticised PZ Mangle and others for attacking the popular forms of religion and not dealing with the intellectual (read: elite) forms. Here I am being criticised in the same manner. Poetic justice, perhaps? It raises an important point about my project: in order to understand religion, you absolutely must not deal with the "pure" philosophical forms alone. In fact, they are very often the province of the "clergy": those whose lives are devoted to the religion, and who are supported by the popular religious. It's hard to envisage a church of Tillichs, for example.

So I must consider (not critique, this is not that project) all forms of religions, and not fall into the philosopher's trap of dealing solely with the philosophical. Nor shall I do the reverse, and reject the elite forms as irrelevant. We want to know how the whole kit and kaboodle evolved (always wanted to use that phrase here).

Moving on, read the delightful Kate Devitt on memory here. Richard Sever has a letter in Nature on the abuse of the term "design" in biology. I agree with him and go one further - all talk of design in biology, outside of genetic engineering or selective breeding, is a hangover from the natural theology days (even Darwin fell prey to it). Stop it now. There is not even the appearance of design in biology, just assertions of it.

That apostate Carl Zimmer notes a new blog by Mark Siddal on leaches. It was a badly needed gap in the blogosphere (no, just kidding. It will be awesome).

If they give me wireless where I'm staying, I may blog me some conference, but don't hold your breath...