mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) (10/03/86)
Mike Huybensz writes: >Religion is simply a form of social behavior (in the anthropological sense.) >It provides certain services which can all be provided by secular sources. >Different people can select different services. One may use the crutch of >belief in a caring god; another may use the church as a meeting place for >meeting marriageable women or business deals; and another may seek moral >instruction to deal with life's conflicts. There's a large list of non- >supernatural services. Let us be more accurate: the external signs of religion are, by and large, evidenced by the behavior of its adherents. (Even we admit that obvious mirales are exceedingly rare to the point where their existence can never be assented to scientifically.) This means that one can easily make up all sorts of psychological explanations for everything. By the same token, it means that there are three essentially indistinguishable possibilities: 1) That all of these things are purely psychological in origin. 2) That some are and some aren't. 3) That none of them are. I don't think you can make a case for 3, especially when even the religious texts are arguing against you. I happen to believe in (2). THis, however, is very difficult to distinguish from (1). I do have a purely procedural problem with (1) in that you need to be able to enumerate all the different psychological motivations and show that at least one holds in all cases. If you have one that is reasonable, that tends to reduce faith in (3), but it's always possible that (2) is true BUT the number of "non-psychologicals" is small enough to where you've never seen one, or that your psychological explanation is plausible but wrong. >It's amazing the lengths people will go to fantasize that somebody important >has taken an interest in them. Uh, Mike, I hate to break it to you, but there is no way on earth you can demonstrate that this is in fact a real motivating factor-- and Auden, for one, argues against it, so I have to conclude that it is, at best, an explanation for only part of christianity. Which means that you'll have to concoct some other rationalization for the rest. C. Wingate
mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz) (10/06/86)
In article <3662@umcp-cs.UUCP> mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) writes: > Let us be more accurate: the external signs of religion are, by and large, > evidenced by the behavior of its adherents. (Even we admit that obvious > mirales are exceedingly rare to the point where their existence can never be > assented to scientifically.) We can be more accurate still by a slight reordering. Religion is an abstraction derived from the real actions (and perhaps thoughts) we call behavior. We are concerned with how well our abstraction conforms to reality, especially the parts we can't observe directly. (Perhaps we shouldn't trivially assume conformation to the aspects of reality that we CAN observe directly.... :-) > ... there are three essentially indistinguishable possibilities: > > 1) That all of these things are purely psychological in origin. > 2) That some are and some aren't. > 3) That none of them are. "Indistinguishable" is the key word. From the scientific viewpoint, you are adding unnecessary invisible agents that Occam suggests we ignore. Even if psychology in its current state can't explain all the events (and I'm first in line to criticize most psychology as pseudoscience), adding an untestable invisible agent is not the scientific solution. > >It's amazing the lengths people will go to fantasize that somebody important > >has taken an interest in them. > > Uh, Mike, I hate to break it to you, but there is no way on earth you can > demonstrate that this is in fact a real motivating factor-- and Auden, for > one, argues against it, so I have to conclude that it is, at best, an > explanation for only part of christianity. Which means that you'll have to > concoct some other rationalization for the rest. I think quite a few Christians want to believe that their important God has taken an interest in them, to the point that they will construe all sorts of normal things to have divine significance. Anybody who has been in love ought to understand that sort of bizarre behavior. I agree that it is a factor for only some Christians: there are large numbers of motivations for belief, including the perennial favorite: hellfire. -- "There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths." Bertrand Russell in "Human Society in Ethics and Politics". -- Mike Huybensz ...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!cybvax0!mrh