Well, whether or not you are a nice person is probably influenced by culture, too.
Miguel Farias of Coventry, who was lead author of the paper, said in the statement: “We don’t think people are ‘born believers’ in the same way we inevitably learn a language at an early age. The available sociological and historical data show that what we believe in is mainly based on social and educational factors, and not on cognitive styles, such as intuitive/analytical thinking. Religious belief is most likely rooted in culture rather than in some primitive gut intuition.”
Whether Mozart writes classical (in the strict sense) music, or classical Chinese music, is clearly influenced by culture.
This study is presented with a sort of "No shit, Sherlock!" frame:
The fact that more intelligent people do not profess a belief in god or religion has been known for long, both through historical evidence and modern data collected through surveys. And social scientists have often tried to explain this curious connection by evoking religion’s supposed links with intuition and rationality, but a new study finds the link does not really exist.The idea that "intelligent people do not profess a belief in god or religion" is as old as the 19th century, which ain't exactly that long ago in a European history that reaches back millennia. The very idea that "intelligent" people discard God at the first chance is belied by St. Augustine and St. Aquinas, two of the pillars of Western culture, as well as so many important thinkers in Western history (not overlooking Lemaitre, who proposed the Big Bang theory, or Gregor Mendel, the monk), is just a laughable assertion. And what is valued as "intelligence" is a matter of culture, not "primitive gut intuition" (which is itself a cultural standard).
And I don't think I'd discard culture's importance to humanity and simply "being human" as cavalierly as these scholars do. It's not like culture is some set of clothes one puts on and takes off within a lifetime. Even the pursuit of science is a cultural artifact, after all, and all the standards of science are creations of culture, not gifts from the universe which are the true keys to knowledge.
Knowledge itself is an artifact of culture. "Cognitive styles" are as culturally bound a concept as any expression of religious belief (and no more a hard reality than IQ. A stone is a reality; "intelligence" itself is a concept, and therefore a cultural artifact.). It's rather absurd to argue as if you stand on a promontory apart from and above the very culture you are examining. Anthropologists, the scientists of culture, know better than this; or should. There has been a powerful critique and examination of anthropology going on in Continental philosophy and anthropology for at least half a century. Why haven't the authors of this paper caught up with that?
These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand.
That's the one with the paper asserting they can tell something about belief in God and their assigned task of choosing which container to choose to try to get a colored instead of a clear bead from, isn't it? I read the paper and it is such complete nonsense that all it shows is how stupid an assertion that people in the soc-sciences can get published in Nature. I was going to write about it but couldn't muster the interest.
ReplyDeleteI think much of this kind of stuff founders on the assertion that things that have no connection, especially ridiculous assigned tasks dreamed up by alleged researchers and complex, varied and variable real life phenomena and experiences. The rational response to this study and those like it is that it is ranker superstition than a belief in astrology.
You know, I didn't even read far enough to get to the original study. The article in Newsweek (via Rawstory) was enough to convince me it was a waste of time, based solely on that quote from the lead author. Religion is a result of culture? Wow! Who knew?! Except any student of religion in the world, ever!
ReplyDeleteThe question is not: is religion human? The question is: is being human to be religious? The cave paintings at Lasciaux (sp?) are deep underground; they are hard to get to and hard to see and were damned hard to paint without modern lighting. Why did they bother? The paintings are accepted as expressions of religious belief (culturally acquired, no doubt!), but what of Maslow's hierarchy: did they have adequate food, shelter, clothing, etc., so they could recreate or spend leisure time this way? Not by our standards, and yet....
You know, this stuff isn't esoteric or impossible to grasp or beyond consideration, and yet so many people follow the footprints in front of them and think they are being clever to do so. Hell, scholarship doesn't require creative and inventive thought, but it requires more thought than the crap in this paper.
"It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. "
ReplyDelete--apparently not-so-intelligent-as-we-thought Francis Bacon
There do seem to me to be an increasing number of conventionally intelligent people uninvolved with traditional religion. But most seem to me to be in thrall to two half-religions, Hegelianism and a species of Darwinism.
The first group, more common on the political left, substitute History for God, or rather the unfolding of human purpose in History (i.e., Progress). Hegel's assertion of the coming-to-fulfillment of Freedom generally expressed as an increate in Equality.
On the right, especially the white nationalist alt-right, which might now be called the Unreligious Right, it's a kind of Darwinism made into a morality based on Racial Survival. The aim of life is survival of one's group (for them, the Nation or the Race), with life as a zero sum game against the Others.
I don't know if these can properly be called religions. But they are systems of thought and value far removed from either science or spare reason.
Hegelianism I'd never considered, so sincerely, thanks for that.
ReplyDeleteAre these "religions"? No, but they act as such by the definitions used by the people who accept them as the basis for rejecting religion. Seems that way to me, anyway.
Adding: I see in Bacon's words the work of many philosophers of religion I've read and learned from. Not so much a conversion, as bringing their minds about to it.
ReplyDelete