• Question: is god real if not why is there religion??

    Asked by aoldman to Alison, Artem, Caroline, John, Gunther on 14 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Alison Graham

      Alison Graham answered on 14 Jun 2012:

      One of the theories is that a common belief holds communities together. Early human communities did not have the scientific understanding of the world around them in the way that we do now. Our ancestors may have been comforted by a belief in God to explain illness, etc. By performing rituals to avoid bad things happening they would be trying to take control of a situation that was out of their hands.

      Some people argue that religion was a useful tool to unify a group. By having a stronger group ethic, communities of our ancestors were better able to find food and keep predators away and this gave them an evolutionary advantage. However, other people argue against this – that early human were too pre-occupied with just staying alive to worry about religion!

    • Photo: Artem Evdokimov

      Artem Evdokimov answered on 14 Jun 2012:

      It’s more of a personal question than scientific. In general, I think religion satisfies some people’s need to explain a lot of ‘stuff’ and to feel connected to something larger than themselves. Real or not real – you might want to look at some of the philosophical musings on the subject but it gets quite hairy and complicated very quickly. There is no proof – and according to some philosophies, there cannot be a proof. So one either believes or not.I don’t have a particular belief but I respect the people’s right to believe in what they choose provided that they respect my right not to.

      P.S. religion is to some extent (like other ideology) like a living creature. Many religions propagate by codifying the process of converting people into the faith as a step towards achieving a higher goal of some sort. Religious systems compete (for followers), they can ‘die’, they can also become ‘parasites’ of other systems or mutate and mate with one another. Notably violent forms of religion tend to self-moderate because dead converts are no good to anyone, which is in an eerie way similar to self-moderation of e.g. viruses and phages – if a phage is too good at killing off its hosts then it endangers its own survival…

    • Photo: John Short

      John Short answered on 14 Jun 2012:

      Some people would argue also that religion is almost like a form of government, the laws and rules of religion allowed many societies in history to function, or interact in way by having structure whereby people were “accountable” to a higher power.

      I would also argue that religion in many ways is how humans try and deal with death. We are probably the only animal on this planet that is vividly aware or able to imagine and comprehend our own deaths, suffering etc, and many people are afraid of that prospect. People may find it comforting to think that there is an afterlife, something other than just our bodies and brains switching off when we die and us rotting into the ground – ashes to ashes etc.

Comments

  • Photo: bitsyboo

    bitsyboo commented on :

    I read that Richard Dawkins strongly suggests that there is a behavioural equivalent of a gene called ‘meme’ and is an element of a culture or behavior that may be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation. This means that if a higher rank like a king belives in christianity, meme would take place and it would spread across the nation.

  • Photo: Artem

    Artem commented on :

    Society is a ‘hypercomplex’ system, in the sense that it is composed of interacting entities that are themselves extremely complex. Complex systems demonstrate classes of behavior that are often referred to as ’emergent’ (i.e. unpredictable from basic knowledge about system components). We are able to rationalize what happens in society (that is, we can produce a reasonable-looking model of events that already have occurred)- but we are generally not very good at systematic prediction of what will happen, beyond the generalizations of ‘what has happened before, will probably happen again’ and so on. Meme is a model, and like any model it is limited in its utility (compare the utility of classical physics towards modeling radioactive decay). Sometimes kings who do not demonstrate shared belief with their subjects induce the change in their countries, and on the other hand they also occasionally get their heads chopped off…