Xref: utzoo alt.atheism:7999 alt.drugs:9601 alt.pagan:5562 sci.bio:4465 sci.med:23214 sci.skeptic:9204 talk.religion.misc:36200
Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!orion.oac.uci.edu!ucivax!gateway
From: honig@ICS.UCI.EDU (David Honig)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,alt.drugs,alt.pagan,sci.bio,sci.med,sci.skeptic,talk.religion.misc
Subject: more on what religious states are for
Message-ID: <9102211738.aa19500@ICS.UCI.EDU>
Date: 22 Feb 91 01:41:27 GMT
Lines: 59


I got some intelligent email responses to my query, which generated
the following.  (Original respondent's name has been removed)

Someone wrote:

Watch your logic!  It sound to me as though you are not making a distinction
between causality and coincidence.  Just because some trait may be more
convenient for survival, and is demonstrated to be present, does not mean that
the trait has been selected out over an evolutionary process.  For argument, thetrait could have just appeared, as a new mutation, or even more likely, could
be an unassociated coincidence.  For example, if you graph the incidence of
cancer and the per capita consumption of CocaCola, you would find a very
good relationship between those two items.  However, in numerous well
controlled scientific studies, there has never been the slightest
evidence that CocaCola CAUSES cancer.

When you question the "utility", or the "reason" why any particular item
appears to be, (to the best of our abilities to demonstrate the truth of
our observation), you have left the realm of science, and have entered the
realm of religion.  The philosophy of the scientific method does not include
a determination of the reasons why things are the way they are.  Science
is a method for determining what things are.  The reasons are philosophical,
matters of belief (read: religion), and are irrelevant to scientific
investigation.  It is precisely because of that dichotomy that several
nobel prize winning physicists have stated that they see no conflict between
their perception of scientific reality and their religious beliefs.  The
two areas do not conflict, they purport to answer different questions.

In summary, be careful not to confuse science with teleology!  Science does
not address purpose in nature.

To which I responded:


1) either someting is present in organisms becuase its been selected for,
or its artifactual, which is to say, one does not believe it was selected for.

2) teleological explanation (when evolution is understood by thoseinvolved)
is not religion. One can discuss how some trait is "made for" some purpose,
as long as its understood that this is an abbreviation for a description of
how some trait has tended to favor those who carry it.

Re religious states, they may be artifacts, epiphenomenal properties
of some structure otherwise subject to selection pressures, or they may have
favored those who carried genes supporting them.

Artifactual example: clearly looking for explanations of physical
phenomena is useful to organisms that can do it; the same machinery
that finds unifying explanations in everyday physical matters (and is
responsible for e.g., the increase in population that has accompanied teh
development of technology) may go overboard and find unification in
unrelated events.

Direct-selection example: Being able to support a faith or feel
brotherhood may have provided psychological strength that was useful
(in a fecundity sense) to the ancestors of modern humans.

(I agree that to the extent that religion says nothing about the physical world,
it is compatible with science; where they overlap they can conflict).


Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com