In a comment a post below Oran Kelly states:
The findings are interesting, but I don’t think the populace at large is going to have to rethink their assumptions about life.
Sometimes you need to be explicit, so here I will make clear what I believe is implicit in many of my posts because it is important in framing how I view people, and how I believe they think. For example, consider evolution. To some extent Science Blogs might be called Evolution Blogs, not only is there is a strong bias toward biology, but there is a strong bias toward discussing evolution and the Intelligent Design movement. Why is this? Because it is a controversy which is in the public eye. Does this mean evolution is important to people?
Perhaps. But, it is not important to people in the way that chemical engineering, or solid state physics or agronomics is. This is not to denigrate evolutionary science, I’ve already come clean and said I’d be sly in her service. Rather, I am pointing out that many fields of science are extremely important in a proximate sense to the human life, but, they do not warrant attention like evolutionary science. This reminds me of the fact that I was once chided by someone that in the end evolution wasn’t important, and they were far more concerned with public misconceptions about the laws of thermodynamics. To which I responded, “Well, I invite you to start up a weblog devoted to clearing up the confusions on the laws of thermodynamics!” This invitation was not taken up. In fact, I would bet that there is more discussion of the laws of thermodynamics in the context of biology than in relation to physics! I was irritated in part because the individual in question was an active participant in the message boards of a weblog devoted in large part to evolutionary science…surely if it was not a subject of great interest they could profitably spend their time elsewhere?
Though I believe one can make a practical argument about the relevance of evolutionary science to our lives (medicine, animal breeding, etc.), it might be conjectured that the interest that it elicits and the storm it generates in the public forum is derived not from proximal concerns, but rather from ultimate and existential yearnings. This is apropos, as to some extent evolutionary science is specially preoccupied with ultimate explanations in the context of the adaptionist paradigm. Its grand nature is highlighted by claims made by its proponents such as Daniel Dennett, that evolutionary theory as elucidated by Charles Darwin is the most important discovery of the human species! In The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins asserted that evolutionary biology allowed one to be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist.” The philosopher of science Michael Ruse has been making the case of late that for many evolutionary science has become a religion of sorts.
What to make of all of this? I would offer that the reality is that for the vast majority of human beings’ deep existential crises, the “God Shaped Hole” in our brains which looks back toward us with its thousand faces, leaves a minor cognitive footprint. I say this because I assent to the conclusions reached by cognitive anthropologists that the majority of our basal religious sentiments and beliefs are rooted in offline mental processes which are not culturally dependent or reflectively analyzed. It is in religion that one generally locates the nexus of ontological theorizing within a society, and from which individuals draw upon for the water that sates their existential anxiety. But, I would assert that for the vast majority of believers such existential anxiety is a nonissue. An individual like Soren Kierkegaard looms large in the pantheon of thinking believers, and so he leaps out from the texts of religious history, yet it is the more prosaic aspects of simple supernatural agency scaffolded by familial community, ritual and worship which are the true grounding for religion. The explicit formalized creeds enforced by clerics and the cogitations spewed forth by theologians are so much epiphenomena swimming on the surface of a far deeper pool of inuitive religiosity which is nonverbal and innate.
Did I just assert above that Islam, Christianity and Buddhism are lacking in substance, just word games generated for the benefit of a narrow and elite caste of specialists and dabblers? Yes. And yet sometimes the sheer and flimsy garb which we don has great significance, and so it is that the dry confressions and unintelligible formulae drawn up by a cognitively atypical elite have become group identity badges for the masses. I believe the God that resides within the minds of the believers is basically the same entity irrespective of confession and creed. But the reality is that individuals will kill on the basis of nonsensical formulae. Lack of substance does not imply a deficit of deadly style.
As a systematic complex of ideas and set of assumptions modern evolutionary theory is in some ways a counterpoint to axiomatic deduced theologies and creeds. Additionally, evolutionary theory is to some extent blatantly counterintuitive, it violates our sense of kinds, our natural folk biology. Of course to some extent Newtonian Mechanics violates our folk physics, but there are no great public controversies as to its veracity. I believe the contrasts are manifold. Unlike evolutionary science Newtonian Mechanics is easily verifiable, it is not historically embedded, and there is less scaffolding by framing assumptions (ie., the compelling logic of evolutionary biology is derived from a wide array of axioms and inferences). Additionally, evolutionary science tends to challenge many more of our folk intuitions than Newtonian Mechanics, ranging from folk biology to our Theory of the Mind, because it implicitly includes us within its rubric and confounds our category biases. Of course, this can be counteracted, the cognitive psychologist Paul Bloom has reported that many children who have Creationist intuitions can be trained into accepting the basic postulates of evolutionary science as they mature.
The problem is that many individuals do not accept the scientific consensus as they mature. I have offered a few reasons above, but, note that I left off any deep existential tensions or crises, rather, they are more banal and non-reflective variables. There is a wide variance in acceptance of evolution across nations, so that suggests that cultural factors are at play. I doubt, for instance, that FIlipinos have had their deep existential worries assuaged, or that they have studied evolutionary science to a greater degree than Americans. Clearly it seems that particular forms of institutionalized religion piggyback upon intuitive doubts as to the nature of evolutionary science to forward an alternative explanatory paradigm. Note that above I suggested that religion is basically satisfaction of mundane biases, beliefs and preferences. Nevertheless, there is also a powerful group identification tendency in human beings, and we organize according to easy to memorize creeds, or around communal rituals and forms. Many of the latter are tied to religions, ergo, there is a powerful identification with religion based on a host of disparate vectors which are bundled together in a relatively compact and emotionally appealing cognitive package. For whatever reason one of the vectors bundled together in the suite of traits within American conservative Christianity is a rejection of evolutionary science. Because to a great extent the public does not think upon evolutionary science, and ultimate explanations, it is not particularly difficult for it to reject Darwin’s child if they believe it is a contradiction of their religious beliefs, which they do prize for a variety of reasons.
So, evolutionary theory is important, at least as a topic of discussion…but it is, at the same time, not important, not worth consideration, and so dismissible when viewed in the broad context of all values and priorities.
Update: A comment from another blogger. re: the commenter who complains about my typos…when someone pays me by the word, I do reedit copiously, but as I have other things going on, I only do one reread normally for a blog post. If you would like to sponsor me by offering a large donation:
(on the order of thousands of dollars so that I don’t need to work for several months), then I guarantee you’ll see a change.
Addendum: I have stated before that one of the major problems with many religionists is that they imbue their beliefs about the world with excessively deep ontological significance so that they are driven to rash action. I will have to modify what I exaclty mean by “ontological significance” in light of my blatant assertion that most people don’t really address existential issues much in their everyday life. First, many of the religious extremists may be psychologically abnormal, in other iterations they might have been mystics. But, I think that’s too pat, I think many people make ontological claims, and take affront putatively based on ontological grounds. Nevertheless, I suspect the real root of their offense is that the attack on their religion is an attack on their community, a group of people and a suite of values which they have emotional, rather than reflective, attachment toward.
Comments are closed.