On religion, and apologies

I don't think the "social glue" theory explains religion in a complete sense, although it certainly covers a major aspect or organized religion, which is to function as an agent of community.

Many of my Taiwanese friends send their American-born Chinese kids to a school run by a Buddhist organization that does many things worldwide to help Chinese ex-pats keep in touch with Chinese culture, in this case ensuring that the kids will be able to read and write Chinese language (no small feat to teach the kids this, since they don't use the skill that much here in their daily life in America, and written Chinese is quite complex).

And we all know how the baptist Church functions among Southerners and in the black community to fulfill many different community functions for its members from social help projects, to education, to arts opportunities, even travel.

So I'll buy the social glue theory, but I think it doesn't answer the deepest question of all about religion.

The deep question is why do humans seek out spiritual experience? We seem to have a driving need to know where we are in life, and how (or if?) we are connected to all life around us, and a need to have some kind of feeling (if not explanations) for all the aspects of existence we can't see, or are not easily explainable just in terms of sensory stimulus and response, like hunger and sex are.

Religion is supposed to also cover that for humans. But more and more, we are seeing people look not to church organizations, but to personal experiences for spiritual fulfillment.

So I am not sure the social glue theory covers the whole question.

We seem to have a driving need to know where we are in life, and how (or if?) we are connected to all life around us, and a need to have some kind of feeling (if not explanations) for all the aspects of existence we can't see, or are not easily explainable just in terms of sensory stimulus and response, like hunger and sex are.

We also have a driving need to ingest mind/brain-altering substances. I submit no theory of religion is complete which does not address that universal component of human psychology.

Those experiments that caused �spiritual experiences� using compounds from mushrooms and other sources must have had an effect on a physical structure of brain cells? Can it be assumed that all humans have that structure to a greater or lesser degree? If it is there, would it not be a result of evolution? A group that held together did better at survival?

Hyperborean? Doesn't that describe 99% of the human race from your perspective?

Can it be assumed that all humans have that structure to a greater or lesser degree? If it is there, would it not be a result of evolution?

On an anatomical scale there is a hypothetical "God locus" in the brain, with some evidence that transcendent experiences may be generated there[Nov 2007 Scientific American Mind]. On the cellular level there are well-known lipid bilayers, ion channels, neurotransmitter receptors, transporters, etc. that are absolutely necessary for any higher functions in the nervous system.

Apropos of this, An Evangelical Dialogue has started a series of posts by an evangelical social psychologist on "The Social Psychology of the Origins Debate." While the introduction is not promising (as indicated by my comment there) I did get to steal ... erm employ the "social glue" meme in the comment. :)

Hyperborean? Doesn't that describe 99% of the human race from your perspective?

He started it. He called me antipodean. Of course, you guys in the northern hemisphere are antipodean from my perspective, but it seemed more appropriate. The Hyperboreans were mythical creatures for the classical geographers.

Wouldn't you say that people don't necessarily need religion, but they benefit from ritual?

Part of the problem of explaining religion is defining or determining what the explicandum is. Social glue explains the social aspects of religion and a lot more besides (like terminology like "brother" for coreligionists, and the insane ideas that have to get taken seriously by the faithful), but it doesn't explain everything.

However, if you have ritual and religious institutions, anything that occurs in the society is liable to be taken up and employed in that milieu (because it is fitness enhancing to do so). So those who have transcendental experiences (and despite rumor, this is a very small fraction of the religious) will interpret that in religious terms. Likewise, political, military and sporting success will be interpreted in religious terms. The actual explanation of these things will vary according to etiology.

Ritual precedes religion to a large degree. We are ritualising animals. We use tribal markers, totems, modes of speech, dress, and small daily behaviours (like the way to make the sign of the cross) to differentiate those inside and outside our community and traditions. Religion is an efficient way to signal this, but it isn't the only one.

"Hyperborean"? Does that mean I'm ultra dull?

Nevertheless, I like it! You get to keep "social glue" if you refer to me from now on by my new title.

Read this Wiki article and you might like it even more. Hyperboreans live to a thousand in perfect happiness.

Explanations that cover the religiosity of all people bother me a bit because it seems to me that there is a discontinuity between folk religions and the historical religions. While in group/out group issues surely date from before Abraham or Buddha, the exclusivity of the historical religions strikes me as different in kind from what you find in, say, Roman era paganism and before. People used to assume that the other peoples they encountered had their own gods, whose reality they acknowledged. Indeed, when one city conquered another in Italy, the conquerors generally took the old gods captive and sometimes built them temples. The historical religions, however, were, so far as I know, the first to be meta-religions, i.e. religions that explicitly defined themselves in relation to other religions as Judaism was defined against idolatry or Christianity saw itself as the fulfillment of Judaism or Mahayana Bhuddhism defined itself as a perfected version of Hinyana. Does the same social glue explanation work in the same way for societies pre and post the Axial Age and the emergence of historical religions?

Jim I have addressed this many times before so I will merely give you the links:

http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2007/10/explaining_religion.php

http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2007/10/explaining_religion_2_…

http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2007/10/explaining_religion_3_…

http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2007/11/explaining_religion_4_…

http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2008/08/agriculture_and_the_ri…

John, I don't mean to be a pest in pushing for a distinction between historical religions and their predecessors that is somewhat different than yours. We both think something important happened during the axial age. It's just that I don't think it was the emergence of large-scale agrarian societies since that happened thousands of years before. I think there was a distinct era--call it paganism or idolatry maybe--between what you call animism and I call the historical religions. I also tend to think of animism (or whatever you wish to call the non economic practices and ideas of stateless peoples) as religious; but perhaps that's just a terminological difference.

Maybe the basic difference in our outlooks is that I tend to start off from historical and philological evidence. Since you're working on an evolutionary theory, it makes sense that you go at things from the other side. I do remain impressed with the way in which all the historical religions define themselves in terms of their predecessors and competitors since, to put things grandly, that testifies to an increasing level of reflection. There are culture heroes aplenty in tribal states and the oldest recorded mythologies, but the voices that sound like they come from an actual individual are associated with names like Zoroaster, Buddha, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul. I also figure the historical religions go along with the emergence of multi-cultural states, i.e. a level of membership much wider than the tribe or even the basic agrarian state.

Or maybe it's just a hobby horse of mine (but not just of mine, of course). You've already assembled a very impressive synthesis. Though I've also read an awful lot on these topics over the years, I never put in the kind of time you have into laying out a general view so I don't have much of an excuse for venturing an opinion. I just think that the history of human religiosity is path dependent in important ways and also that the historical religions, like writing and a few other cultural innovations but maybe not agriculture or husbandry, didn't just happen. They weren't the gift of the Gods, but they did require the intervention of conceptual thought.

I will now shut up. I promise.

Jim, I insist that you do not shut up.

I fully agree on the path dependency of social evolution. For that reason I don't think there is any inherent development of religion that societies must follow (and hence that monotheism is not, for example, the "ultimate" form of religion).

The historical religions, as you call them, are something of an artifact of the evolution of writing - they wouldn't be historical if we didn't have writings about them at their inception or soon afterwards. I think that writing and the other cultural developments you mention are also the result of agrarian sedentary civilisation.

Hi, John! This may be a little late for the party, but I'd love to hear the thoughts of you or your readership on this topic. The COE seems to have been uncharacteristically assertive in talking up how Christians should view Darwin. You may have seen Malcolm Brown's piece:

Jason Rosenhouse, among others, took issue with the Rev. Brown:

I defended Brown at Jason's site, and ended up in correspondence with the latter to get some clarification. I posted what I found, and what I think about the whole thing here.

I hope this proves edifying, or at least entertaining. As always, love your blog!

Thanks Scott. I had read that post of yours, and it seemed that you got it right (in the absence of my knowing anything directly about Brown or the release he sent out).