Keep in touch

Grades are in!

I submitted grades for everyone yesterday, so if you're curious as to what you got, you can always e-mail me to find out. Or you could just wait for them to be published, whatever floats your boat.

As I mentioned in class last time, it's been a real pleasure introducing you all to the weird and abstract world of ideas, and I hope you keep in touch and apply your newly learned critical thinking skills to your everyday life.

For those of you who do end up in jail, I can always try to hook you up with a good lawyer, or try to prove to you that you are not really in jail, so either way you might benefit.

Keep in touch.

By the way, for those interested, and I know there are a few, here is a link to my personal blog. It's a fun source for self-education that's not dry, since most of it contains cool documentaries and the occasional hilarious entry (this would be an example). I'm sure everyone will find something interesting there. If you do like it, you can always subscribe to it just like you did for this class blog. Feel free to share with others as well. I always welcome submissions of cool stuff as well.

Bye!

EMAILS

Yeah - I highly doubt that anyone will check this anymore - but I promised to start a post that we can put our emails on...I may be the only one. This way we can stay in touch since we were a cool fuckin' class. :) Just list it in the comment section.

Notes from Mary

Here they are, good luck.

Cosmides & Tooby

Hello everyone - I just had an issue with finding the Cosmides & Tooby paper that we will be tested on tomorrow - apparently I didn't pay very much attention to that part of the blog. Oh well. If anyone else is having a problem finding it, it's posted along with the Dawkins video as a link. I believe we will be tested on the first 16 pages (out of 33) - up until the five principles of evolutionary psychology.

If anyone wants to meet before 2 tomorrow, let me know. :)

~Mary

STUDY GROUP & POOL!

Hello everyone - just wanted to let you know that the only thing I remembered on Cinco de Mayo was that Karan & Angel said we should have the study group meet earlier (very surprised I even remembered that!) - so, the group will meet at the library at 2pm on Thursday. I'll try to post notes on the blog by tomorrow, or the latest on Wednesday morning - so try to read them before the group (or at least print them ahead of time.)

Also - since this is our last class :( I was hoping that we can all go out after the test. We should meet at the pool hall on Dolson Ave - I'm pretty sure a few people have said that it is still open. If it's not - can someone post other suggestions? Good luck, and I'll see you at the study group.

~Mary

Final Test

For Prof. Ruiz or anyone else who knows:
Are the rules of identity the same thing as the 4 criterion for establishing identity (reflexive, symmetry...)?
Also, Cosmedis and Tooby..what do we need to know specifically?

Thanks and good luck everyone!

Prospects for a Transhuman Mind

This is a presentation by Leda Cosmides (from the reading on evolutionary psychology) talking at a conference of people concerned with human immortality through the uses of present and future state-of-the-art technology.

The talk is interesting in and of itself, but I thought you guys might find it useful to understand the relationship to human consciousness and its evolutionary roots from the expert herself.

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The Extended Phenotype

We'll talk about the idea of free will tonight in class to some extent as we explore the question of consciousness and its relationship to evolutionary theory. In the meantime, check this out:

Gordian worms live inside crickets for long periods, feeding on the cricket's diet. Once fully grown, they inject chemicals into the cricket's brain brainwashing it and forcing it to kill itself by jumping into the water. Once in water, the worm wriggles out of the writhing body and swims off in search of a mate.

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Richard Dawkins

For those of you not familiar with Richard Dawkins, here is an interesting lecture he gave about two years ago. Not much specifically related to what we are doing this semester (except perhaps in relation to Hume and Berkeley's epistemology). He is currently receiving a lot of media attention for his latest book, The God Delusion, but his more substantial work has been in evolutionary biology.

Here is the link to the article that we'll start covering this week (after Dawkins) and will continue next week. I'm trying to upload an audio lecture recently given by Leda Cosmides, which I'll post tomorrow. It should help you give you a clearer idea of the implications of the findings of evolutionary psychology and the question of consciousness.

Term Paper

Due date: Thursday, May 3rd (earlier papers will be accepted, and appreciated)

Font: Verdana
Size: 10 (this is the same as Times New Roman 12, but easier for me to read)
Double Spaced
Margins: One inch top, bottom, left and right
Header: Your name
Footer: Page Number

Write a 8-10 page paper on any philosophical issue of your choice. This paper requires no outside sources. In fact, I am discouraging them. I am not interested in what other people think about this issue, but in how you can support your claims through well reasoned and clearly articulated arguments.

If you do end up having to reference something (like the material we have covered during the semester), be sure to acknowledge that in citations. Plagiarism, defined as the use of sources other than your own ideas, whether in verbatum copying or in paraphrasing, is a very serious academic offence, which will not be tolerated. I am very good at catching instances of plagiarism, and will fail papers that are plagiarized, so just be honest with your work.

The assignment is for you to take a position on the philosophical issue you choose and attempt to convince your readers that your point of view on the matter is the one they should adopt themselves. Throughout your college career you will very seldom get the opportunity to write about something purely based on your own beliefs. Take advantage of this opportunity to express yourself and your take on reality, as well as to test how reasonable your beliefs are.

This is an exercise in rational persuasion, which means that you must provide well thought out arguments that reasonable people would be willing to entertain, and possibly even adopt, considering your arguments are good. In other words, you must attempt to explain why your position is correct by providing reasons and well constructed logical arguments.

This assignment requires, as one of its purposes, that you think hard about some idea and provide some sort of principle (or set of principles) that justifies your position. Does using the principle you propose deductively entail some logical consequence that you would not be willing to accept? If so, then that is probably not a very good principle, and may require modification or rejection. Are there counterexamples someone can bring up to show your principle does not account for all possible scenarios? Are there counterexamples someone can bring up to show your principle is probably false? How would you respond to such objections?

Before you start writing your papers, run your topics by me for approval. I’d like to have an idea of what you’re working on, and how you’re approaching your papers, so that you don’t waste your time doing something that will not help your paper, like write a paper on a topic that is not actually philosophical…

Order of Oral Presentations

Here is the order in which we'll do the oral presentations.

Presentations are to last about 10 minutes. Remember, you must present on the day you are scheduled; no exceptions.

If you haven't done so already, go to the original entry and in the comments enter the presentation you'll be doing, providing no one has already chosen it.

Let me know if you don't see your name below.

Week 1

1. Karan
2. Pam
3. Jennifer
4. Helen

Week 2

1. Violeta
2. Tad
3. Ben Newberg
4. Angel
5. Ian

Week 3

1. Ryan
2. Benny
3. Christian
4. Alexandra
5. Jumel

Week 4

1. Michael Shore
2. Mary
3. Joseph Cain
4. Joe Masuck
5. Valerie

Notes for test

Class, Mary has asked me to post a link to this file containing the notes she's put together for tonight's study group session so that everyone can print it. The link will take you to a file hosting service. Simply click on the "start download" button on the right hand side; it's safe.

By the way, tonight we are choosing the order in which the oral presentations will be given.

Exam Questions

Could someone please post the list of what topic areas are on the exam for tommorrow;I have a list Iwrote, but I feel as though I am missing something. I can not make the study group

Thanks Pamela

Notes for Test

Hey guys - I was just wondering if anyone would be able to bring their notes on Hume to the study-group tomorrow? It would be massively appreciated. Also wanted to let you know that I am working on a master note-sheet that will help us in the group tomorrow for the test. It's a combination of most of the notes given in class (minus Hume) and other main ideas from the text that I added.

See you tomorrow. :)

~Mary

Oral Presentations

Below are the choices available for oral presentations. Click on the "comment" link below this entry, then choose something that has not already been chosen by someone else.

Make sure you write your name in the body of the comment so that I know who you are; otherwise it's open game.

For choice 20, two people would be required, since it's a debate.

Here are the choices:

1. Plato - Apology (9)
2. Milgram - Obedience to authority (22)
3. Vihvelin - Time travel: the rules of the road (75)
4. Kolak - The man who mistook himself for the world (86)
5. Reid - Critique of Locke and Hume on behalf of common sense (117)
6. Martin - Personal Identity from Plato to Parfit (124)
7. Parascandola - Trans or me? (139)
8. Augustine - Freedom of the will (148)
9. Hume - Liberty and necessity (158)
10. James - The dilemma of determinism (169)
11. Moore - Free will (177)
12. Taylor - Freedom and determinism (183)
13. Russell - Perception, knowledge and induction (240)
14. Armstrong - The infinite regress of reasons (254)
15. Clifford - The ethics of belief (271)
16. James - The will to believe (277)
17. Hume - God and evil (283)
18. Adams - Must God create the best? (290)
19. Martin - The elusive Messiah (298)
20. Plantinga - Philosophy, the Bible, and God: a debate (requires two participants) (308)
21. Wiredu - Religion from an African perspective (325)
22. Rey - Does anyone really believe in god? (335)
23. Einstein - Considerations on the universe as a whole (361)
24. Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (365)
25. Nozick - Fiction (368)
26. Kolak - Quantum cosmology, the anthropic principle, and why there is something rather than nothing? (372)
27. Parfit - The puzzle of reality: why does the universe exist? (396)
28. Kant - Percepts and Concepts (422)
29. Dretske - How do you know you are not a zombie? (434)
30. Thomson and Turetzky - A simple guide to contemporary philosophy of mind (444)
31. Zuboff - The story of a brain (471)
32. Nagel - What is it like to be a bat? (477)
33. Plato - Death and immortality (498)
34. Hume - Of the immortality of the soul (506)
35. Martin - Survival of bodily death: a question of values (510)
36. Clark - Death, nothingness, and subjectivity (526)
37. Kolak - The wine is in the glass (535)
38. Tolstoy - My confession (540)
39. Camus - The myth of Sisyphus (546)
40. Taylor - Is life meaningful? (550)
41. Martin - A fast car and a good woman (556)
42. Bennett - The conscience of Huckleberry Finn (575)
43. Rees - Reclaiming the conscience of Huckleberry Finn (only available if 42 is already taken) (581)
44. De Silva - Buddhist ethics (592)
45. Kolak - Morality and the problem of the other: from Sidwick to Rawls and Parfit (604)
46. Moore - Intrinsic value (658)
47. Mill - On Liberty (665)
48. Marx - Alienation and the power of money (675)
49. Chandavarkar - Philosophy and economics: issues and questions (684)

How our memories ultimately are not us...

So - Prof. Ruiz was right when he had said the video on his blog was from Dawkins and not an excerpt from Waking Life (I must've listened to both in a row and mixed up the two)...

Anyways, this is taken from his blog and makes an interesting point on what our brains' interpret as our reality and an interesting note that in our memories we are not the same person, as matter changes in our make-up over time. That part occurs around 10 1/2 minutes in...but nevertheless, it is a very enlightening video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADPc3ZF5Yok

What boat is the original

Im a little confused about this story with Theseus and his boat. I believe "his boat" is the one he is in.. possession is 9/10th's of the law. As far as originality goes, that is where its clouded there can't be one

Fingerprints

So - I know that I promised a post on how thought can be photographed - and I may have leaned a bit far out on a limb believing a book that I read without first checking the exact sources and researching the science behind it...however, in my own research last night I did find something similar to back up my theories - so please be patient...and I will post my findings within the next few days.

I did find an answer to whether identical twins' fingerprints are structurally the same - and unfortunately, that is not the case.

So, do identical twins have identical fingerprints? The basic answer is NO. Identical -- or monozygotic -- twins form when a single fertilized egg splits in two after conception. Because they form from a single zygote, the two individuals will have the same genetic makeup. Their DNA is virtually indistinguishable.
However, fingerprints are not an entirely genetic characteristic. Scientists love to use this topic as an example of the old "nature vs. nurture" debate. Fingerprinting, along with other physical characteristics, is an example of a phenotype -- meaning that it is determined by the interaction of an indivdual's genes and the developmental environment in the uterus.
The ultimate shape of fingerprints are believed to be influenced by environmental factors during pregnancy, like nutrition, blood pressure, position in the womb and the growth rate of the fingers at the end of the first trimester. Thus, you will find similar partterns of whorls and ridges in the fingerprints of identical twins. But there will also be differences -- just as there are differences between the fingers on any individual's hands.
Taken from Pamela Prindle Fierro,Your Guide to Parenting of Multiples on www.multiples.about.com

In the next few days I will post my findings on energy and the "soul", though I'm not sure that what I believe can be considered a soul as it is not ethereal, only existing in the physical realm. We shall see...

Spirit/Soul/Ghost.

I started to question the existence of "souls" after class, but then when Prof. Ruiz said something about how we can't see air but we know its there because we can measure it. I immediately remember this show called "Ghost Hunters". This shows a couple of different ways we can measure a soul and its pretty interesting...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH7KrjIFV6s

Logic take home test

Click here to download the test. For those of you who were absent tonight, this is an opportunity for you to improve your grade for the first test. Just print it out, complete it and hand it in next Thursday.

Second item of business. As I mentioned in class, there will be one surprise test this semester. Whoever can figure out the exact date of the test will automatically get an A. The reason for this is that figuring out the correct answer is a rational project, so if you think about this hard enough, you should be able to solve this problem. You will hand in your response to this riddle next Thursday, so hand in your answer on a piece of paper with your name on it.

I'm sure there's more stuff I'm forgetting about right now, so I'll have to post later when it comes back to me.

Nymphos

Now related to the post below if the woman has sex during her pregnancy the experiences and sensations the fetus has shared could that develop the need and behavior of nymphomania in the fetus after birth, Much like mothers who do heroine or coke during the pregnancy the fetus is born with that addiction so if thats the case then Yes Fetus do experience Orgasms..

Fetil Orgasms

Now if a woman is pregnant, if she experiences an orgasm would the fetus experience similar sensations.

Spacetime Continuum & Gravity

If gravity fails due to the sun not being present in the space time continuum and that would create a ripple much like throwing a rock into a pond how would that ripple send planet earth off course imagine a boat in the water or a raft it surfs the wave or ripple and the ripple just travels under the object the planet stays in its course like a boat would. Also if you have the sun weighing down on that point ant the earth and planets are surfing those curves what keeps the planets from just sliding into the sun so shouldn't the planets be traveling closer to the sun.

christianity V.S. islam

There's one thing I have never understood about religion, for the most part they all support goodwill toward men, not to go out of your way to harm others and so on and so forth for the most part.. Not to commit evil upon each other yet here we are having mass casualties on both ends if god is good why would most of these attacks Muslims make against us be in his name or visa versa. It just doesn't make sense i find more sense in xenon's theory of movement being an illusion anyone have anything to say?

Islam Vs. Christianity

I found this today, and thought you might find it funny as well.

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I just found the article reposted below in The New York Times Magazine, and thought it was interesting enough to share with everyone. It explores the evolutionary reasons why belief in God may have evolved. By the way, the group-selection theoriest mentioned in the article, David Sloan Wilson, taught me most of what I know about evolution. If anyone ever decides to study in Binghamton, make sure you take as many courses as you can with him, no matter what your major is... the man is utterly interesting. Anyway, here is a link to the article, or you can read it below:

Darwin’s God

By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

God has always been a puzzle for Scott Atran. When he was 10 years old, he scrawled a plaintive message on the wall of his bedroom in Baltimore. “God exists,” he wrote in black and orange paint, “or if he doesn’t, we’re in trouble.” Atran has been struggling with questions about religion ever since — why he himself no longer believes in God and why so many other people, everywhere in the world, apparently do.

Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as Atran does, “belief in hope beyond reason” — whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. “Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?” asked Atran when we spoke at his Upper West Side pied-à-terre in January. Atran, who is 55, is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, with joint appointments at the University of Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.

If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

Atran first conducted the magic-box demonstration in the 1980s, when he was at Cambridge University studying the nature of religious belief. He had received a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University and, in the course of his fieldwork, saw evidence of religion everywhere he looked — at archaeological digs in Israel, among the Mayans in Guatemala, in artifact drawers at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Atran is Darwinian in his approach, which means he tries to explain behavior by how it might once have solved problems of survival and reproduction for our early ancestors. But it was not clear to him what evolutionary problems might have been solved by religious belief. Religion seemed to use up physical and mental resources without an obvious benefit for survival. Why, he wondered, was religion so pervasive, when it was something that seemed so costly from an evolutionary point of view?

The magic-box demonstration helped set Atran on a career studying why humans might have evolved to be religious, something few people were doing back in the ’80s. Today, the effort has gained momentum, as scientists search for an evolutionary explanation for why belief in God exists — not whether God exists, which is a matter for philosophers and theologians, but why the belief does.

This is different from the scientific assault on religion that has been garnering attention recently, in the form of best-selling books from scientific atheists who see religion as a scourge. In “The God Delusion,” published last year and still on best-seller lists, the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins concludes that religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. “Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful,” Dawkins wrote. He is joined by two other best-selling authors — Sam Harris, who wrote “The End of Faith,” and Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University who wrote “Breaking the Spell.” The three men differ in their personal styles and whether they are engaged in a battle against religiosity, but their names are often mentioned together. They have been portrayed as an unholy trinity of neo-atheists, promoting their secular world view with a fervor that seems almost evangelical.

Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.

Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there?

In short, are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?

“All of our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs . . . are equally organically founded,” William James wrote in “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” James, who taught philosophy and experimental psychology at Harvard for more than 30 years, based his book on a 1901 lecture series in which he took some early tentative steps at breaching the science-religion divide.

In the century that followed, a polite convention generally separated science and religion, at least in much of the Western world. Science, as the old trope had it, was assigned the territory that describes how the heavens go; religion, how to go to heaven.

Anthropologists like Atran and psychologists as far back as James had been looking at the roots of religion, but the mutual hands-off policy really began to shift in the 1990s. Religion made incursions into the traditional domain of science with attempts to bring intelligent design into the biology classroom and to choke off human embryonic stem-cell research on religious grounds. Scientists responded with counterincursions. Experts from the hard sciences, like evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience, joined anthropologists and psychologists in the study of religion, making God an object of scientific inquiry.

The debate over why belief evolved is between byproduct theorists and adaptationists. You might think that the byproduct theorists would tend to be nonbelievers, looking for a way to explain religion as a fluke, while the adaptationists would be more likely to be believers who can intuit the emotional, spiritual and community advantages that accompany faith. Or you might think they would all be atheists, because what believer would want to subject his own devotion to rationalism’s cold, hard scrutiny? But a scientist’s personal religious view does not always predict which side he will take. And this is just one sign of how complex and surprising this debate has become.

Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories. Charles Darwin noted this in “The Descent of Man.” “A belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies,” he wrote, “seems to be universal.” According to anthropologists, religions that share certain supernatural features — belief in a noncorporeal God or gods, belief in the afterlife, belief in the ability of prayer or ritual to change the course of human events — are found in virtually every culture on earth.

This is certainly true in the United States. About 6 in 10 Americans, according to a 2005 Harris Poll, believe in the devil and hell, and about 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and of life after death. A 2006 survey at Baylor University found that 92 percent of respondents believe in a personal God — that is, a God with a distinct set of character traits ranging from “distant” to “benevolent.”

When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success. In many ways, it’s an exercise in post-hoc hypothesizing: what would have been the advantage, when the human species first evolved, for an individual who happened to have a mutation that led to, say, a smaller jaw, a bigger forehead, a better thumb? How about certain behavioral traits, like a tendency for risk-taking or for kindness?

Atran saw such questions as a puzzle when applied to religion. So many aspects of religious belief involve misattribution and misunderstanding of the real world. Wouldn’t this be a liability in the survival-of-the-fittest competition? To Atran, religious belief requires taking “what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be false.” One example of this is the belief that even after someone dies and the body demonstrably disintegrates, that person will still exist, will still be able to laugh and cry, to feel pain and joy. This confusion “does not appear to be a reasonable evolutionary strategy,” Atran wrote in “In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion” in 2002. “Imagine another animal that took injury for health or big for small or fast for slow or dead for alive. It’s unlikely that such a species could survive.” He began to look for a sideways explanation: if religious belief was not adaptive, perhaps it was associated with something else that was.

Atran intended to study mathematics when he entered Columbia as a precocious 17-year-old. But he was distracted by the radical politics of the late ’60s. One day in his freshman year, he found himself at an antiwar rally listening to Margaret Mead, then perhaps the most famous anthropologist in America. Atran, dressed in a flamboyant Uncle Sam suit, stood up and called her a sellout for saying the protesters should be writing to their congressmen instead of staging demonstrations. “Young man,” the unflappable Mead said, “why don’t you come see me in my office?”

Atran, equally unflappable, did go to see her — and ended up working for Mead, spending much of his time exploring the cabinets of curiosities in her tower office at the American Museum of Natural History. Soon he switched his major to anthropology.

Many of the museum specimens were religious, Atran says. So were the artifacts he dug up on archaeological excursions in Israel in the early ’70s. Wherever he turned, he encountered the passion of religious belief. Why, he wondered, did people work so hard against their preference for logical explanations to maintain two views of the world, the real and the unreal, the intuitive and the counterintuitive?

Maybe cognitive effort was precisely the point. Maybe it took less mental work than Atran realized to hold belief in God in one’s mind. Maybe, in fact, belief was the default position for the human mind, something that took no cognitive effort at all.

While still an undergraduate, Atran decided to explore these questions by organizing a conference on universal aspects of culture and inviting all his intellectual heroes: the linguist Noam Chomsky, the psychologist Jean Piaget, the anthropologists Claude Levi-Strauss and Gregory Bateson (who was also Margaret Mead’s ex-husband), the Nobel Prize-winning biologists Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob. It was 1974, and the only site he could find for the conference was at a location just outside Paris. Atran was a scraggly 22-year-old with a guitar who had learned his French from comic books. To his astonishment, everyone he invited agreed to come.

Atran is a sociable man with sharp hazel eyes, who sparks provocative conversations the way other men pick bar fights. As he traveled in the ’70s and ’80s, he accumulated friends who were thinking about the issues he was: how culture is transmitted among human groups and what evolutionary function it might serve. “I started looking at history, and I wondered why no society ever survived more than three generations without a religious foundation as its raison d’être,” he says. Soon he turned to an emerging subset of evolutionary theory — the evolution of human cognition.

Some cognitive scientists think of brain functioning in terms of modules, a series of interconnected machines, each one responsible for a particular mental trick. They do not tend to talk about a God module per se; they usually consider belief in God a consequence of other mental modules.

Religion, in this view, is “a family of cognitive phenomena that involves the extraordinary use of everyday cognitive processes,” Atran wrote in “In Gods We Trust.” “Religions do not exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them.”

At around the time “In Gods We Trust” appeared five years ago, a handful of other scientists — Pascal Boyer, now at Washington University; Justin Barrett, now at Oxford; Paul Bloom at Yale — were addressing these same questions. In synchrony they were moving toward the byproduct theory.

Darwinians who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that are byproducts of adaptations, like the redness of blood. There is no survival advantage to blood’s being red instead of turquoise; it is just a byproduct of the trait that is adaptive, having blood that contains hemoglobin.

Something similar explains aspects of brain evolution, too, say the byproduct theorists. Which brings us to the idea of the spandrel.

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels — that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”

The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent — which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior — is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.

A classic experiment from the 1940s by the psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel suggested that imputing agency is so automatic that people may do it even for geometric shapes. For the experiment, subjects watched a film of triangles and circles moving around. When asked what they had been watching, the subjects used words like “chase” and “capture.” They did not just see the random movement of shapes on a screen; they saw pursuit, planning, escape.

So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently. This usually operates in one direction only; lots of people mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.

What does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic. “The most central concepts in religions are related to agents,” Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, “people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world.”

A second mental module that primes us for religion is causal reasoning. The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random. “We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us,” Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.” The ancient Greeks believed thunder was the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Similarly, a contemporary woman whose cancer treatment works despite 10-to-1 odds might look for a story to explain her survival. It fits better with her causal-reasoning tool for her recovery to be a miracle, or a reward for prayer, than for it to be just a lucky roll of the dice.

A third cognitive trick is a kind of social intuition known as theory of mind. It’s an odd phrase for something so automatic, since the word “theory” suggests formality and self-consciousness. Other terms have been used for the same concept, like intentional stance and social cognition. One good alternative is the term Atran uses: folkpsychology.

Folkpsychology, as Atran and his colleagues see it, is essential to getting along in the contemporary world, just as it has been since prehistoric times. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at the heart of everything from marriage to office politics to poker. People without this trait, like those with severe autism, are impaired, unable to imagine themselves in other people’s heads.

The process begins with positing the existence of minds, our own and others’, that we cannot see or feel. This leaves us open, almost instinctively, to belief in the separation of the body (the visible) and the mind (the invisible). If you can posit minds in other people that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of “Descartes’ Baby,” published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.

The traditional psychological view has been that until about age 4, children think that minds are permeable and that everyone knows whatever the child himself knows. To a young child, everyone is infallible. All other people, especially Mother and Father, are thought to have the same sort of insight as an all-knowing God.

But at a certain point in development, this changes. (Some new research suggests this might occur as early as 15 months.) The “false-belief test” is a classic experiment that highlights the boundary. Children watch a puppet show with a simple plot: John comes onstage holding a marble, puts it in Box A and walks off. Mary comes onstage, opens Box A, takes out the marble, puts it in Box B and walks off. John comes back onstage. The children are asked, Where will John look for the marble?

Very young children, or autistic children of any age, say John will look in Box B, since they know that’s where the marble is. But older children give a more sophisticated answer. They know that John never saw Mary move the marble and that as far as he is concerned it is still where he put it, in Box A. Older children have developed a theory of mind; they understand that other people sometimes have false beliefs. Even though they know that the marble is in Box B, they respond that John will look for it in Box A.

The adaptive advantage of folkpsychology is obvious. According to Atran, our ancestors needed it to survive their harsh environment, since folkpsychology allowed them to “rapidly and economically” distinguish good guys from bad guys. But how did folkpsychology — an understanding of ordinary people’s ordinary minds — allow for a belief in supernatural, omniscient minds? And if the byproduct theorists are right and these beliefs were of little use in finding food or leaving more offspring, why did they persist?

Atran ascribes the persistence to evolutionary misdirection, which, he says, happens all the time: “Evolution always produces something that works for what it works for, and then there’s no control for however else it’s used.” On a sunny weekday morning, over breakfast at a French cafe on upper Broadway, he tried to think of an analogy and grinned when he came up with an old standby: women’s breasts. Because they are associated with female hormones, he explained, full breasts indicate a woman is fertile, and the evolution of the male brain’s preference for them was a clever mating strategy. But breasts are now used for purposes unrelated to reproduction, to sell anything from deodorant to beer. “A Martian anthropologist might look at this and say, ‘Oh, yes, so these breasts must have somehow evolved to sell hygienic stuff or food to human beings,’ ” Atran said. But the Martian would, of course, be wrong. Equally wrong would be to make the same mistake about religion, thinking it must have evolved to make people behave a certain way or feel a certain allegiance.

That is what most fascinated Atran. “Why is God in there?” he wondered.

The idea of an infallible God is comfortable and familiar, something children readily accept. You can see this in the experiment Justin Barrett conducted recently — a version of the traditional false-belief test but with a religious twist. Barrett showed young children a box with a picture of crackers on the outside. What do you think is inside this box? he asked, and the children said, “Crackers.” Next he opened it and showed them that the box was filled with rocks. Then he asked two follow-up questions: What would your mother say is inside this box? And what would God say?

As earlier theory-of-mind experiments already showed, 3- and 4-year-olds tended to think Mother was infallible, and since the children knew the right answer, they assumed she would know it, too. They usually responded that Mother would say the box contained rocks. But 5- and 6-year-olds had learned that Mother, like any other person, could hold a false belief in her mind, and they tended to respond that she would be fooled by the packaging and would say, “Crackers.”

And what would God say? No matter what their age, the children, who were all Protestants, told Barrett that God would answer, “Rocks.” This was true even for the older children, who, as Barrett understood it, had developed folkpsychology and had used it when predicting a wrong response for Mother. They had learned that, in certain situations, people could be fooled — but they had also learned that there is no fooling God.

The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics. It is a little like language acquisition, Paul Bloom says, with the essential difference that language is a biological adaptation and religion, in his view, is not. We are born with an innate facility for language but the specific language we learn depends on the environment in which we are raised. In much the same way, he says, we are born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up believing — whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven or occupies another animal after death — are culturally shaped.

Whatever the specifics, certain beliefs can be found in all religions. Those that prevail, according to the byproduct theorists, are those that fit most comfortably with our mental architecture. Psychologists have shown, for instance, that people attend to, and remember, things that are unfamiliar and strange, but not so strange as to be impossible to assimilate. Ideas about God or other supernatural agents tend to fit these criteria. They are what Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist and psychologist, called “minimally counterintuitive”: weird enough to get your attention and lodge in your memory but not so weird that you reject them altogether. A tree that talks is minimally counterintuitive, and you might believe it as a supernatural agent. A tree that talks and flies and time-travels is maximally counterintuitive, and you are more likely to reject it.

Atran, along with Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia, studied the idea of minimally counterintuitive agents earlier this decade. They presented college students with lists of fantastical creatures and asked them to choose the ones that seemed most “religious.” The convincingly religious agents, the students said, were not the most outlandish — not the turtle that chatters and climbs or the squealing, flowering marble — but those that were just outlandish enough: giggling seaweed, a sobbing oak, a talking horse. Giggling seaweed meets the requirement of being minimally counterintuitive, Atran wrote. So does a God who has a human personality except that he knows everything or a God who has a mind but has no body.

It is not enough for an agent to be minimally counterintuitive for it to earn a spot in people’s belief systems. An emotional component is often needed, too, if belief is to take hold. “If your emotions are involved, then that’s the time when you’re most likely to believe whatever the religion tells you to believe,” Atran says. Religions stir up emotions through their rituals — swaying, singing, bowing in unison during group prayer, sometimes working people up to a state of physical arousal that can border on frenzy. And religions gain strength during the natural heightening of emotions that occurs in times of personal crisis, when the faithful often turn to shamans or priests. The most intense personal crisis, for which religion can offer powerfully comforting answers, is when someone comes face to face with mortality.

In John Updike’s celebrated early short story “Pigeon Feathers,” 14-year-old David spends a lot of time thinking about death. He suspects that adults are lying when they say his spirit will live on after he dies. He keeps catching them in inconsistencies when he asks where exactly his soul will spend eternity. “Don’t you see,” he cries to his mother, “if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It’s just an ocean of horror.”

The story ends with David’s tiny revelation and his boundless relief. The boy gets a gun for his 15th birthday, which he uses to shoot down some pigeons that have been nesting in his grandmother’s barn. Before he buries them, he studies the dead birds’ feathers. He is amazed by their swirls of color, “designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture.” And suddenly the fears that have plagued him are lifted, and with a “slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

Fear of death is an undercurrent of belief. The spirits of dead ancestors, ghosts, immortal deities, heaven and hell, the everlasting soul: the notion of spiritual existence after death is at the heart of almost every religion. According to some adaptationists, this is part of religion’s role, to help humans deal with the grim certainty of death. Believing in God and the afterlife, they say, is how we make sense of the brevity of our time on earth, how we give meaning to this brutish and short existence. Religion can offer solace to the bereaved and comfort to the frightened.

But the spandrelists counter that saying these beliefs are consolation does not mean they offered an adaptive advantage to our ancestors. “The human mind does not produce adequate comforting delusions against all situations of stress or fear,” wrote Pascal Boyer, a leading byproduct theorist, in “Religion Explained,” which came out a year before Atran’s book. “Indeed, any organism that was prone to such delusions would not survive long.”

Whether or not it is adaptive, belief in the afterlife gains power in two ways: from the intensity with which people wish it to be true and from the confirmation it seems to get from the real world. This brings us back to folkpsychology. We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them, an adaptive trait that allowed our ancestors to outwit potential enemies. But when we think about being dead, we run into a cognitive wall. How can we possibly think about not thinking? “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in “Tragic Sense of Life.” “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.”

Much easier, then, to imagine that the thinking somehow continues. This is what young children seem to do, as a study at the Florida Atlantic University demonstrated a few years ago. Jesse Bering and David Bjorklund, the psychologists who conducted the study, used finger puppets to act out the story of a mouse, hungry and lost, who is spotted by an alligator. “Well, it looks like Brown Mouse got eaten by Mr. Alligator,” the narrator says at the end. “Brown Mouse is not alive anymore.”

Afterward, Bering and Bjorklund asked their subjects, ages 4 to 12, what it meant for Brown Mouse to be “not alive anymore.” Is he still hungry? Is he still sleepy? Does he still want to go home? Most said the mouse no longer needed to eat or drink. But a large proportion, especially the younger ones, said that he still had thoughts, still loved his mother and still liked cheese. The children understood what it meant for the mouse’s body to cease to function, but many believed that something about the mouse was still alive.

“Our psychological architecture makes us think in particular ways,” says Bering, now at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. “In this study, it seems, the reason afterlife beliefs are so prevalent is that underlying them is our inability to simulate our nonexistence.”

It might be just as impossible to simulate the nonexistence of loved ones. A large part of any relationship takes place in our minds, Bering said, so it’s natural for it to continue much as before after the other person’s death. It is easy to forget that your sister is dead when you reach for the phone to call her, since your relationship was based so much on memory and imagined conversations even when she was alive. In addition, our agent-detection device sometimes confirms the sensation that the dead are still with us. The wind brushes our cheek, a spectral shape somehow looks familiar and our agent detection goes into overdrive. Dreams, too, have a way of confirming belief in the afterlife, with dead relatives appearing in dreams as if from beyond the grave, seeming very much alive.

Belief is our fallback position, according to Bering; it is our reflexive style of thought. “We have a basic psychological capacity that allows anyone to reason about unexpected natural events, to see deeper meaning where there is none,” he says. “It’s natural; it’s how our minds work.”

Intriguing as the spandrel logic might be, there is another way to think about the evolution of religion: that religion evolved because it offered survival advantages to our distant ancestors. This is where the action is in the science of God debate, with a coterie of adaptationists arguing on behalf of the primary benefits, in terms of survival advantages, of religious belief.

The trick in thinking about adaptation is that even if a trait offers no survival advantage today, it might have had one long ago. This is how Darwinians explain how certain physical characteristics persist even if they do not currently seem adaptive — by asking whether they might have helped our distant ancestors form social groups, feed themselves, find suitable mates or keep from getting killed. A facility for storing calories as fat, for instance, which is a detriment in today’s food-rich society, probably helped our ancestors survive cyclical famines.

So trying to explain the adaptiveness of religion means looking for how it might have helped early humans survive and reproduce. As some adaptationists see it, this could have worked on two levels, individual and group. Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves. As William James put it, religion filled people with “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life . . . an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.”

Such sentiments, some adaptationists say, made the faithful better at finding and storing food, for instance, and helped them attract better mates because of their reputations for morality, obedience and sober living. The advantage might have worked at the group level too, with religious groups outlasting others because they were more cohesive, more likely to contain individuals willing to make sacrifices for the group and more adept at sharing resources and preparing for warfare.

One of the most vocal adaptationists is David Sloan Wilson, an occasional thorn in the side of both Scott Atran and Richard Dawkins. Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, focuses much of his argument at the group level. “Organisms are a product of natural selection,” he wrote in “Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society,” which came out in 2002, the same year as Atran’s book, and staked out the adaptationist view. “Through countless generations of variation and selection, [organisms] acquire properties that enable them to survive and reproduce in their environments. My purpose is to see if human groups in general, and religious groups in particular, qualify as organismic in this sense.”

Wilson’s father was Sloan Wilson, author of “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” an emblem of mid-’50s suburban anomie that was turned into a film starring Gregory Peck. Sloan Wilson became a celebrity, with young women asking for his autograph, especially after his next novel, “A Summer Place,” became another blockbuster movie. The son grew up wanting to do something to make his famous father proud.

“I knew I couldn’t be a novelist,” said Wilson, who crackled with intensity during a telephone interview, “so I chose something as far as possible from literature — I chose science.” He is disarmingly honest about what motivated him: “I was very ambitious, and I wanted to make a mark.” He chose to study human evolution, he said, in part because he had some of his father’s literary leanings and the field required a novelist’s attention to human motivations, struggles and alliances — as well as a novelist’s flair for narrative.

Wilson eventually chose to study religion not because religion mattered to him personally — he was raised in a secular Protestant household and says he has long been an atheist — but because it was a lens through which to look at and revivify a branch of evolution that had fallen into disrepute. When Wilson was a graduate student at Michigan State University in the 1970s, Darwinians were critical of group selection, the idea that human groups can function as single organisms the way beehives or anthills do. So he decided to become the man who rescued this discredited idea. “I thought, Wow, defending group selection — now, that would be big,” he recalled. It wasn’t until the 1990s, he said, that he realized that “religion offered an opportunity to show that group selection was right after all.”

Dawkins once called Wilson’s defense of group selection “sheer, wanton, head-in-bag perversity.” Atran, too, has been dismissive of this approach, calling it “mind blind” for essentially ignoring the role of the brain’s mental machinery. The adaptationists “cannot in principle distinguish Marxism from monotheism, ideology from religious belief,” Atran wrote. “They cannot explain why people can be more steadfast in their commitment to admittedly counterfactual and counterintuitive beliefs — that Mary is both a mother and a virgin, and God is sentient but bodiless — than to the most politically, economically or scientifically persuasive account of the way things are or should be.”

Still, for all its controversial elements, the narrative Wilson devised about group selection and the evolution of religion is clear, perhaps a legacy of his novelist father. Begin, he says, with an imaginary flock of birds. Some birds serve as sentries, scanning the horizon for predators and calling out warnings. Having a sentry is good for the group but bad for the sentry, which is doubly harmed: by keeping watch, the sentry has less time to gather food, and by issuing a warning call, it is more likely to be spotted by the predator. So in the Darwinian struggle, the birds most likely to pass on their genes are the nonsentries. How, then, could the sentry gene survive for more than a generation or two?

To explain how a self-sacrificing gene can persist, Wilson looks to the level of the group. If there are 10 sentries in one group and none in the other, 3 or 4 of the sentries might be sacrificed. But the flock with sentries will probably outlast the flock that has no early-warning system, so the other 6 or 7 sentries will survive to pass on the genes. In other words, if the whole-group advantage outweighs the cost to any individual bird of being a sentry, then the sentry gene will prevail.

There are costs to any individual of being religious: the time and resources spent on rituals, the psychic energy devoted to following certain injunctions, the pain of some initiation rites. But in terms of intergroup struggle, according to Wilson, the costs can be outweighed by the benefits of being in a cohesive group that out-competes the others.

There is another element here too, unique to humans because it depends on language. A person’s behavior is observed not only by those in his immediate surroundings but also by anyone who can hear about it. There might be clear costs to taking on a role analogous to the sentry bird — a person who stands up to authority, for instance, risks losing his job, going to jail or getting beaten by the police — but in humans, these local costs might be outweighed by long-distance benefits. If a particular selfless trait enhances a person’s reputation, spread through the written and spoken word, it might give him an advantage in many of life’s challenges, like finding a mate. One way that reputation is enhanced is by being ostentatiously religious.

“The study of evolution is largely the study of trade-offs,” Wilson wrote in “Darwin’s Cathedral.” It might seem disadvantageous, in terms of foraging for sustenance and safety, for someone to favor religious over rationalistic explanations that would point to where the food and danger are. But in some circumstances, he wrote, “a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.” For the individual, it might be more adaptive to have “highly sophisticated mental modules for acquiring factual knowledge and for building symbolic belief systems” than to have only one or the other, according to Wilson. For the group, it might be that a mixture of hardheaded realists and symbolically minded visionaries is most adaptive and that “what seems to be an adversarial relationship” between theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor that “keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel.”

Even if Wilson is right that religion enhances group fitness, the question remains: Where does God come in? Why is a religious group any different from groups for which a fitness argument is never even offered — a group of fraternity brothers, say, or Yankees fans?

Richard Sosis, an anthropologist with positions at the University of Connecticut and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has suggested a partial answer. Like many adaptationists, Sosis focuses on the way religion might be adaptive at the individual level. But even adaptations that help an individual survive can sometimes play themselves out through the group. Consider religious rituals.

“Religious and secular rituals can both promote cooperation,” Sosis wrote in American Scientist in 2004. But religious rituals “generate greater belief and commitment” because they depend on belief rather than on proof. The rituals are “beyond the possibility of examination,” he wrote, and a commitment to them is therefore emotional rather than logical — a commitment that is, in Sosis’s view, deeper and more long-lasting.

Rituals are a way of signaling a sincere commitment to the religion’s core beliefs, thereby earning loyalty from others in the group. “By donning several layers of clothing and standing out in the midday sun,” Sosis wrote, “ultraorthodox Jewish men are signaling to others: ‘Hey! Look, I’m a haredi’ — or extremely pious — ‘Jew. If you are also a member of this group, you can trust me because why else would I be dressed like this?’ ” These “signaling” rituals can grant the individual a sense of belonging and grant the group some freedom from constant and costly monitoring to ensure that their members are loyal and committed. The rituals are harsh enough to weed out the infidels, and both the group and the individual believers benefit.

In 2003, Sosis and Bradley Ruffle of Ben Gurion University in Israel sought an explanation for why Israel’s religious communes did better on average than secular communes in the wake of the economic crash of most of the country’s kibbutzim. They based their study on a standard economic game that measures cooperation. Individuals from religious communes played the game more cooperatively, while those from secular communes tended to be more selfish. It was the men who attended synagogue daily, not the religious women or the less observant men, who showed the biggest differences. To Sosis, this suggested that what mattered most was the frequent public display of devotion. These rituals, he wrote, led to greater cooperation in the religious communes, which helped them maintain their communal structure during economic hard times.

In 1997, Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay in Natural History that called for a truce between religion and science. “The net of science covers the empirical universe,” he wrote. “The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.” Gould was emphatic about keeping the domains separate, urging “respectful discourse” and “mutual humility.” He called the demarcation “nonoverlapping magisteria” from the Latin magister, meaning “canon.”

Richard Dawkins had a history of spirited arguments with Gould, with whom he disagreed about almost everything related to the timing and focus of evolution. But he reserved some of his most venomous words for nonoverlapping magisteria. “Gould carried the art of bending over backward to positively supine lengths,” he wrote in “The God Delusion.” “Why shouldn’t we comment on God, as scientists? . . . A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?”

The separation, other critics said, left untapped the potential richness of letting one worldview inform the other. “Even if Gould was right that there were two domains, what religion does and what science does,” says Daniel Dennett (who, despite his neo-atheist label, is not as bluntly antireligious as Dawkins and Harris are), “that doesn’t mean science can’t study what religion does. It just means science can’t do what religion does.”

The idea that religion can be studied as a natural phenomenon might seem to require an atheistic philosophy as a starting point. Not necessarily. Even some neo-atheists aren’t entirely opposed to religion. Sam Harris practices Buddhist-inspired meditation. Daniel Dennett holds an annual Christmas sing-along, complete with hymns and carols that are not only harmonically lush but explicitly pious.

And one prominent member of the byproduct camp, Justin Barrett, is an observant Christian who believes in “an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good God who brought the universe into being,” as he wrote in an e-mail message. “I believe that the purpose for people is to love God and love each other.”

At first blush, Barrett’s faith might seem confusing. How does his view of God as a byproduct of our mental architecture coexist with his Christianity? Why doesn’t the byproduct theory turn him into a skeptic?

“Christian theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship with him and other people,” Barrett wrote in his e-mail message. “Why wouldn’t God, then, design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?” Having a scientific explanation for mental phenomena does not mean we should stop believing in them, he wrote. “Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me — should I then stop believing that she does?”

What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism.

This internal push and pull between the spiritual and the rational reflects what used to be called the “God of the gaps” view of religion. The presumption was that as science was able to answer more questions about the natural world, God would be invoked to answer fewer, and religion would eventually recede. Research about the evolution of religion suggests otherwise. No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition.

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Gravity vs the Spacetime Continuum

Here is Brian Greene, author of the best seller The Elegant Universe, explaining how our experience of a "force" of gravity is ultimately an illusion, since there is no actual force. Don't worry if you don't quite follow; we'll go over this in more detail later on in the semester.

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Good 2 Go

Is there going to be a study group before Thursday at the library again. I have lab until 4 but after that I'm able to go.. ? Anybody?

Hey guys I got it now ^_^ .. I guess you had to add your email as your name or something I dunno but Are we still having the study group before class on Thursday before class?

Makeup date

I have just received word that the makeup date for our missed class is going to be on Friday, March 7th, so start clearing your calendars for that night... it's going to be two days of philosophy in a row... woo-hoo! or boo-hoo... whatever the case may be.

I should have an updated class calendar by tomorrow, so check back on that later.

No school today!

Class, be advised that there is no school meeting tonight; school has been closed. I'll post a new entry letting you about schedule changes later. Please pass the word around to those students you know. I'll send out an e-mail to everyone I can in a moment.

Complex Argument Examples

Ok - here are three examples of complex arguments. The first one (if you follow the link) actually has the answer at the bottom of the page and it happens to be a little different from what we have gone over in class (hint: it may have more than one conclusion!) I followed the professor's guidelines on how to find complex arguments, surfing a few white-supremacist web-sites...waste of time (plus I feel like my retinas are burning to cleanse themselves from the hate I read) - no clear stated premises - barely any of them have truth value to them...so I decided to poke fun at evolution instead! :) So, print them out, give them a try, and we'll go over them tomorrow at the Study Group to see if we're on the same page.

The theory of evolution is not acceptable. It is just a hypothesis that has very little supporting evidence. It contradicts commonsense, the Bible, and the 2nd Law of thermodynamics. It is impossible to believe that something so complex as the eye can come about through random processes. That leaves creationism as the only viable theory of the origin of life. This of course means that God exists. It also means that many biologists are just dead wrong.
(Borrowed from: http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/arg/complex.php)

While a good deal has been written about the potential threat of hate online that targets youth, this is often framed around the issue of “recruiting” young people to join white supremacist groups. To me, this is an unlikely outcome and a misguided concern. The much more likely, and pernicious, threat is an epistemological one. That is, the epistemological threat of cloaked websites is the ability to change how we know what we say we know about issues that have been politically hard won, such as civil rights for African Americans. Because search engines have replaced libraries for young people (and, they have), young people find information about race, civil rights, and white supremacy online. Teaching critical digital media literacy has to be combined with teaching critical thinking about race and racism.
(Jessie Daniels: The Epistemology of White Supremacy 11.17.06)

There are 2 or 3 types of evolution. The first would be "guided" from above. Certainly this is possible, and we have many examples in the world (cars have "evolved" tremendously during the 20th Century, with the guiding hand of engineers and designers). Many believers ascribe to such theories, but they still compromise the literal Genesis record. Secondly, there is what is termed: "micro-evolution", which I prefer to call: "genetic remnant variation". This refers to changes made within a biological "kind", i.e. mutations and other changes related to natural selection and environmental adaptations. Let's say that two calves are born and the one with longer fur survives the harsh winter allowing it to breed the next Spring, thus perpetuating longer fur in the herd. Sure, this is scientific. Within the DNA coding God has placed varying factors; thank the Maker for his forethought in allowing for automatic adaptability! But the third type (related to the first, but with no God "guiding" the outcome), as best as I understand, is unbiblical and also unscientific. There are no fossils which prove any transitional life forms have ever come about through "natural selection" or otherwise. The third type of evolution is what is believed and preached to our children in the public schools today, but to the best of my understanding there is no scientific evidence to support its tenets.
("A Defense of Creationism" by Paul Abramson)

Rumsfeld and Epistemology

As I mentioned last week, ex-secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld was perhaps a bit more philosophical and smart than we are used to giving him credit for. In a Department of Defense news briefing in February 12th of 2002, Rumsfeld had a bit of an epistemology lesson for us. This is the relevant part (broken up for easier understanding):

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

This breakdown suggests a fourth possibility: unknown knowns. But why stop there? There are other possibilities once you get to the next meta-level (combinations of three clauses): unknown known unknowns, for instance.

I'd love to see some discussion arise out of this fairly short lesson on knowledge, and by discussion I don't mean insulting Rumsfeld and talking about how poor a job he might or might not have done as defense secretary (that would be a fallacy of relevance).

I'd love to see people:

• Provide concrete examples that illustrate what each of the different possibilities entail,
• Describe what combination possibilities are actually meaningful, and why,
  
• Analyze Rumsfeld's conception of knowledge with respect to the definition of justified true belief Plato offered in the Theaetetus,
• Offer new insights into what constitutes knowledge, etc.

Participation on this very specific entry will receive extra points for your blog participation grade, so get those brains working!

By the way, don't forget we have a logic test this week and that the reading is an excerpt of Descartes' Meditations. Check the online class calendar for details.

Answer key to logical fallacies

Class, click here to access the document where I have saved the answers to the logical fallacies exercises. If anyone has a problem with any of the answers, post a comment below. I know there are some cases where more than one fallacy could be identified, so it's possible that I may have missed something while rushing to get this done this morning (I think I lost my answer key, ha ha).

By the way, thanks for the reminder, Jen.

Study Group - Take Two

Another attempt at the study group will definitely be held this Thursday (weather permitting) at 5 pm at the Library. Find me or Angel - we'll be there! No need to post any comments to let me know if you'll be there...I learned my lesson. :)

Pascal's Wager

Click here to listen to an interesting Logically Critical podcast presenting a bit of a comical breakdown of Pascal's wager. The narrator doesn't explicitly state the problem with the logical structure of the wager, as I did in class, but he does show the practical implications of betting on any given characterization of God as not being rational, so the point is ultimately still the same.

Study Group

It seems as though some people are having trouble fully grasping the logic diagrams that we are going over in class. I do not claim to be an expert on the subject, but I have a pretty good handle on how to dissect an argument and figure out the conclusions, etc. So - in an effort to help anyone that might be having problems in class - let me know if it would be conducive to meet before class this Thursday, at approximately 5:00 in the library, to go over anything people may have questions about and we can all figure it out together. I know that Angel said that she might help, and there were a few people outside who had expressed an interest, so let me know by responding to this post if you intend to go - and I'll be there. If anyone has any questions in regards to the group, you can email me at 'maryparish@yahoo.com'.

~Mary

All about mormons...

http://www.southparkzone.com/episode.php?vid=712

Don't mean to offend any mormons out there, but this is funny stuff, and relevant to our class discussion about God.

Happy Birthday Angel!

Logic from the Dilbert Blog

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon, is not only a creative person; he is extremely intelligent, and in many cases rather philosophical. His thoughts in free will, for instance, are very well supported.

Below is an entry he posted yesterday in an attempt to define intelligence. See if you can find any logical fallacies with his arguments:

I wonder how you can tell if an alien is “intelligent life.” Is there a test that fits all situations? For example, suppose we found a blob on Mars that moved under its own power and wasn’t a carbon-based life form. How could we tell if it was intelligent?

One way we could tell is if it did something that you associate with intelligent creatures. If it started a conversation with you (and passed the Turing test), that would seem intelligent. But there’s no reason to think that all intelligent beings use language. You’d need more tests of intelligence than just the ability to hold a conversation with a human.

Suppose the blob on Mars beat you at chess. That would tell you that the blob can “compute,” but it wouldn’t tell you if the blob was intelligent “life.” A computer can beat you at chess if it’s so programmed, and no one thinks your computer is intelligent life.

What if the blob authored a book?

Don’t answer too quickly because it’s a trick question. Remember, a trillion monkeys with typewriters can write a book if you wait long enough. So let’s up the ante and say that the blob on Mars writes lots of different books. And let’s say it composes some music, designs some evening gowns, and paints some lovely pictures too. Now do you conclude that the blob is intelligent?

It’s a trick question because atheists believe that the Big Bang did all of those things and more. The Big Bang caused the sequence of events that culminated in the Bible, the Koran, and most important – Dilbert comics. If the blob on Mars created literature, we would surely consider it intelligent.

I suppose some of you will argue that the Big Bang started a natural series of events that led to a chance development of intelligent life. And then the life did all of the intelligent stuff. But what is the logic behind arbitrarily picking a tiny slice of time and acting as if it’s the only important part of a process that requires many steps?

Consider the simple act of picking up a pencil. It requires your brain and your muscles, but it also requires you to exist in the first place. And that means that your mother and father are part of the process, as well as their parents, etc. Once you existed, and within your body, there was a vast sequence of cause and effect between your brain and your muscles to make it all happen. You might say that “you” picked up the pencil, but I look at the big picture and say the Big Bang picked up that pencil – with or without the existence of free will – because without the Big Bang, none of it would happen.

If you reject the Big Bang as being intelligent – after acknowledging that it created so many books and other works of art, it leaves you with no test for intelligence.

I take the practical approach – that something is intelligent if it unambiguously performs tasks that require intelligence. Writing Moby Dick required intelligence. The Big Bang wrote Moby Dick. Therefore, the Big Bang is intelligent, and you and I are created by that same intelligence. Therefore, we are created by an intelligent entity.

I don’t see how an atheist can think otherwise.

Then today he posted a list of objections people raised in response to his proposal, and his answers to them:

I got lots of thoughtful comments to yesterday’s post on whether the Big Bang was intelligent by definition. I wasn’t planning on following up on the topic, but I feel I owe it to you. Here are the top objections that people raised, along with my replies. If you didn’t read yesterday’s post, read it first.

Objection 1: The Big Bang is an event, not a thing.

I think most people realized I was referring to both the universe and what it did. People are the sum of their matter plus their actions. The universe is a sum of its matter plus its actions. To keep things simple and colorful, I’m going to call the universe and everything it does the Big Bang.

Objection 2: The Big Bang had no intentions. Intelligence requires intention.

You can’t have intentions without free will. And free will is an illusion, according to plenty of prominent scientists and big thinkers. At best, free will has never been defined in any way that would not apply equally to a human or a coin sorting machine. The coin sorter “chooses” which tube to redirect the nickel to in a deterministic fashion. Your brain chooses what to have for lunch in the same way, just more complicated, and with the illusion of intention. The Big Bang (okay, the universe) has no intentions, but neither do you, because it’s a nonsense superstition. You only have the illusion of intentions. So intentions must not be a necessary component of intelligence.

Objection 3: According to evolution, unintelligent processes can cause emergent phenomena, such as intelligence. The Big Bang was an unintelligent process, and the intelligence emerged later. (Implied: Duh!)

By this reasoning, people are not intelligent either. People are a collection of dumb molecules. The intelligence we exhibit is an emergent property of people, not a quality of the people themselves. No molecule in a human body is itself smart. Yet we still say the person as a whole is intelligent. And we generously include as “the person” all of his body parts that are not directly involved in producing intelligence. Your lungs, for example, are every bit as important as your brain in supporting the emergent intelligence you produce. They are both 100% necessary.

If I build a computer and the computer creates a spreadsheet, we don’t credit the computer with the creation. We credit the one who created and programmed the computer. People are every bit the machines as computers, but more complicated and moist. The Big Bang created people, and is therefore the ultimate author of what we in turn create. (Remember, we have no free will. We’re just like the computer in that way.)

Objection 4: But what created the Big Bang!

If there was a “before” to the Big Bang, I have no problem including it in the process and calling it intelligent. But there is no evidence to persuade me that time even existed before the Big Bang, so “before” might be a nonsense concept. And I certainly have no evidence for a sort of God with a personality and a to-do list.

Objection 5: It’s just semantics. All you did was say that whatever produces intelligent results must be intelligent. It’s a circular definition.

Of course it’s semantics. That’s the whole point. We’re trying to figure out what the word “intelligent” means. If the best definition that anyone can offer is circular, then it’s silly to say the universe does or does not have an intelligent designer. The phrase would have no meaning. But if we CAN define intelligence in some meaningful way, then we might be surprised to find that the definition applies equally to humans as to the Big Bang. (After you remove your superstition about intentions, and clear up your thinking about emergent properties.)

Objection 6: Dawkins said, “An intelligent life is intelligent enough to speculate on its own origins.”

My cat has intelligence, but I doubt she’s doing much speculating on her origins.

I think those were the best objections I got. Let me know if I missed any objections that are better than the ones I listed.

Did you find anything wrong with his arguments? Can you name any logical fallacies he might have committed?

I'd love to see some student interaction here.

Quanta and emotions

Posted by... not sure....

I have two Arguments to post.

1. Since the most elemental piece of energy is the quantum, everything that we know of is built from it. Considering this, every quanta has the potential to create its own universe. Since there are an infinite number of quanta, are there an infinite number of universes?

2. As we know from Pavlov's experiments, humans are conditioned to respond to things like sounds, smells, sights, and so forth. These senses release hormones that trigger human emotion. Does human emotion exist the way we like to believe, or is it merely a chemical reaction?

Reading Assignments

Class, whenever you are not sure about what the reading for the following class consists in, because you lost your hard copy of the syllabus, or your dog ate it, or whatever, you can always check the class calendar links on the top right hand corner of this blog. The link will take you to a monthly calendar, which shows all events related to our class in blue. Clicking on any specific day will provide you with the details concerning that day. Since this calendar is online, it will be easy for me to modify it as much as necessary throughout the semester, and for you to be up to date with the latest changes to the syllabus.

So, for those of you not sure what the specific pages you are supposed to read for next time are, just find them in the calendar to avoid confusion.

By the way, here is an audio version of Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God, most of which are similar to those found in the reading. If you work best by listening to something, this might help you understand Aquinas better.

The Atheist Delusion

Here is one more for you guys to dissect. How many of the logical fallacies we learned can you identify? Can you identify fallacies we did not cover in class?

A couple of Bush videos

Logical fallacies are bad, but they can also be the source of some great humor. Enjoy the following clips:

How many fallacies did you recognize?



What was the fallacy here?

Equivocation

Posted by Mary

This is the "Who's On First" video that is the perfect example of Equivocation. A bit archaic...but still classic

Achilles & Tortoise Blog

Posted by anonymous

I understand Zeno's theory that there is no such thing as motion due to not being able to reach all half-points on that linear direction towards your destination. However, I do not understand how the Achilles & Tortoise "race" cannot be answered from a simple math problem. If Achilles' rate (speed) is 2x that of the Tortoise, the Tortoise's speed can be represented by X, and therefore Achilles' as 2X. If you assign distance variables on the line, and even make up dummy numbers to represent the distance, eventually Achilles will win. Isn't it the same premise as those old SAT questions, "two trains leave the station at blah blah blah...what time do they meet?" Even though the tortoise has a head start, eventually there will be a distance where two times the speed of the tortoise will win. Can anyone help me with this?!

Logic package

Class, follow this link to get the full logic package. Remember, your assignment is to e-mail me, print out all the exercises starting on page 14, and actually complete the exercises on pages 14 through 16. See you next week.