The Evolution of the God Concept (part 2)

,,,,The assumption that humans are projecting their own attributes is no more supported by the facts than the idea of progressive revelation. It could just be that our conceptions of God have to grow as our understanding of reality grows. How could Stone Age people start out understanding God in terms of quantum theory or transcendence in relation to the space/time continuum? As our understanding has grown our conceptions of God have become more grandiose, they have kept pace with our understanding of the nature of the universe. How could it be other wise? We can’t understand what we have never experienced or that to which we have never been exposed. New psychological research has indicated that children don’t have to understand God’s attributes by first understanding human attributes, but become able to distinguish between different kinds of agents at an early age (six).[1] We might still limit our understanding to our own experience of mind, yet as thinkers we are capable of conceptualizing beyond our own experience. This is born out by research which shows that people often have two understandings of God that conflict, especially in relation to ceremonial uses, they can anthropomorphize when explaining belief but recite doctrines they don’t understand when called upon to state beliefs.[2] That research pertains to Christian children but research has shown the same disparity with Hindus.[3] The real argument against the projection theory has to be the data discussed in the chapter on supernatural, the “m scale” studies by Hood that show universal nature of religious experience. If the concept of God is just the result of psychology how could it be that psychology is universe to all cultures and all times? It is true that the human mind is universal to humans, but it’s also the case that religion is thought of as a cultural phenomenon. The projection idea would be more than just a universal aspect of the human mind it would have to be the product of culture as well because it’s tied to specific cultural ideas of God. Yet all the mystics are having the same experiences regardless of their doctrine.

            Moreover, a positive transformative effect is tied to the experiences that indicates that something more fundamental than just cultural constructs is at work.

Examples of transformative effects

Sullivan (1993) (large qualitative study) The study concludes that spiritual beliefs and practices were identified as essential to the success of 48% of the informants interviewed.[4]  A study by Loretta Do Rozario of the religious practices of the disabled and those in chronic pain, the study demonstrates that religious (“mystical,” or “peak” experience) not only enables the subjects to cope with the trials of the challenges but also provides a since of growth even flourishing in the face of adversity.[5] The study methodology is known as “hermeneutic Phenomenology” it uses both intensive interviews and biographical essays. The Wuthnow study used questionnaires and the sample included 1000 people in San Francisco and Oakland. He asked them about experience of the transcendent, 68% of those experiencing within a year said life is very meaningful. While 46% of those whose experiences were more than a year old answered this way, that life was very meaningful. 82% of those experiencing within a year found they felt they knew the purpose of life, and 72% whose experiences were more than a year old. Only 18% and 21% respectively of those who had not had such experiences felt they cold say the same things.[6]

            Naturalistic assumptions about religion theorized it was explanation for natural phenomena. Linked to magical thinking because they assume it’s primitive and superstitious. Its real origin is found in the actual experiences and their transformative effects. The transformative effects are what links religious orientation with a concept of God. The sense of exercising God or “the divine” with the transformational effects has to be more than just projecting anthropomorphism since it takes us beyond our understanding and into a real that we can’t even express; yet the noetic qualities of the experience that impart meaning and significance to the events indicate that something real and larger than ourselves has been experienced. If we are projecting human qualities we have at least found, through religion, a way that those qualities connect us to come inherent meaning in life. It’s more likely that this something beyond ourselves. The sense that the power is beyond us is often part of the experience. This is a basic aspect of the definition of spirituality.[7]

            Over the last forty years or so the idea of a brain chemistry solution to the concept of God has become fashionable. Scientific research demonstrates a connection between the concept of God and certain aspects of brain function. This has led many theorize a totally naturalistic origin for the God concept.[8] Contrary to wishful thinking along these lines the association between thoughts about God and certain kinds of brain function is no proof that the concept of God originates totally within the brain as a side effect of brain chemistry. First, since we now understand that brain chemistry has to play a role in the communication process there should be no surprise that we find this association between God concept and brain chemistry. We find the same association between any two ideas. This is not proof that the idea of God is purely a side of brain chemistry any more than it is a proof that the ideas of mathematics are purely the result of brain chemistry. Secondly, the notion probably stems from the assumption of skeptics that God is supernatural and brain chemistry is natural and never the twain shall meet. As we have seen in chapter (on supernatural) that term was coined to describe an experience which is toughly a part of naturalistic life. Supernatural describes mystical experience, which we know is a very real experience.

            The idea that ties to brain chemistry are disproof of supernatural assumes that religious experience is seen as a miracle or something is wholly removed form naturalistic functions. This is merely a fallacy. As we discussed in chapter six (on supernatural) God created the natural, God is present in the natural, God is able to use the natural. The idea that the concept of God grows out of an accident or misfiring of brain wiring is merely a fallacious assumption. The probability is totally against any kind of “misfire” producing such an astounding sense of personal growth and transformation of life. Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, after many years of research, specifically rejected that assumption; Newberg cited the realization of religious experience as a reality that connects us to the ultimate.[9] “the mind is mystical by default.”[10] What he means by that is that the same physical processes that carry messages from the body to the brain and make reality meaningful to us would have to be involved regardless of the reality of the external causes. God would have to use the chemical processes of our brains to communicate with us, and if God is real than that’s he made us. The view point that sees religious experience and belief as genetic adaptation is really missing the point about the nature of evolution. As Lee Kirkpatrick points out the simpler concept is the more evolved. Rather than evolving an elaborate structure such as religious experience to deal with anxiety, why would the human brain not just evolve an efficient and simple mechanism for coping with stress?[11]

            There is also an argument to be made that the relation between brain chemistry and God concept is a good justification for belief in the reality of God. The basis for a hard wired God concept need not be evidence of a “God gene.” It could also be the result of a combination of genes working together (Spandrels), either way the odds are against it happening by total accident. That in itself is a good indication of some pre planning on the part of nature or something behind nature. Again the universality argument comes into play. We can’t assume the universal nature of cultural constructs. It would have to be genetic. The problem is evolution and genes can’t really provide for the content of ideas. They couldn’t really account for the universality of the God concept. Some skeptics have been known to argue that universal behaviors are genetic.[12] These pertain to things like men finding symmetrical faces and women’s figures are more attractive. Those are not the content of ideas, they are just behaviors. That’s not instinct not idea. The universality of the God concept draws upon the content of the idea not just a behavior:

In Western Religions and In Hinduism, the higher Being has been called “God.” In all theistic religions God is perceived as the ultimate, externality (transcendent), the ultimate internality, (immanent), and sometimes both simultaneously. Often, God is not perceived simply as a higher being but in many ways has been described as the ground or substance of all being. Thus, God is not only the higher being but also a state of higher being or ultimate reality. In fact, in the mystical tradition of the Western religions, the goal of the practice of meditation is to become intensely united with God and in so doing to become, in a sense, a part of ultimate reality involving release from the cycle of birth and death.[13]

The content of the ideas is what is universal, as well as the experiences (see chapter six—Hood’s argument and data). The way we as a species experience things can’t be genetically heritable especially when that experience has given rise to the content of an idea. That would be like positing the notion of innate ideas, which was supposed to be abandoned in the enlightenment. Innate ideas are assumed to be planted by God and are seen as the old religious way of looking at things. Innate ideas were assailed and dispatched by John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.[14]

            God was not invented by man and then evolves as a fictional concept, but God reveals himself/herself to man in progressive stages of revelation; our knowledge of God is ever deeper as people continue to seek the infinite. We can see the current result of this progressive revelation in the high state to which the concept of God had developed. The theological concepts we propose, sheer guess work in relation to the actual truth of the Holy, are evolved to a high stage of understanding regardless of their origin around the time of St. Augustine (354-430). The basic concept is that of transcendent reality that form the basis of reality as a whole, being itself, the ground of being. The basic attributes of the concept include eternal (timeless), necessary (meaning not contingent—not dependent upon any prior conditions or causes for its being) the ground of being. The secret to the continuing modernity of this concept is that it is no longer a concept about a guy; it’s an equation. It can’t be a maybe it has to be either a certainty or impossibility. There’s no reason why it should be impossible so it must be a certainty. The real kicker is it’s not about a magnified man or a jumped up state of being human, but with great powers added; it’s about a category. That’s what “being itself” or “ground of being” refers to. God is not another guy, God is not one of many others like itself, God is a whole category of being, a category that functions as the basis of all actuality. God might be likened unto the Hegelian dialectic, a form of logic that works by point counter point rather than a linear progression. In fact one of the major schools of thought about revelation (Barth, Bultmann) saw Biblical revelation as a dialectic between reader and the text.[15]

            This high level of philosophical development in the concept of God has culminated in several major theological ways of understanding God. Of course there’s the Tillich view of God as being itself, or ground of being, that understands God as a category of reality rather than an individual. Then process theology (Alfred North Whitehead), based upon the Hegelian concept of progressive revelation already discussed, this view sees God as di polar; in the potential realm God is unchanging because God is the basis of all potential, in the consequent realm God is moving into concrete being by evolving with creation. What God is doing in that state is bringing into and out of existence actual entities (that’s something like sub atomic particles). This doesn’t see God as stable static unchanging reality as a “society of occasions” like a movie made up of individual moments or frames but played fast creates a totally different illusion that of a moving picture show. Process theology is always unrated in its popularity. It is the most popular modern liberal alternative in terms of understanding God. It also spawned a popularized version called “open theology.”  Then there’s  Jurgen Moltmann’s notion of God working backwards from the future. That doesn’t really deal so much with the nature of God as with his orientation toward the future. The idea is not that time is running backwards but only that God’s position in time is to regard the horizon of the future and understand reality from there back (in other words, God is beyond time he can afford to pick his persective). Thus man is constantly moving toward a future horizon that he never actually achieves, but is already there drawing us on.

            These views are only guesses; the reality is beyond our understanding. That’s the secret of God’s success; he’s not only real but inexhaustible. Our best ideas about his nature are inadequate, yet they are modern they are keeping pace with our scientific understanding. We can quantum theory to understand aspects of God. For example the notion that the energy in the big bang is created in the expansion, it is not eternal, that can be understood by reference to quantum theory which would suspend the Newtonian laws at the singularity. Thus, no conservation of energy, so energy can be created. Or the Trinity might be better understood if we understood if we understood wave/particle duality. Yet these are ideas are bound to some day be lost to history and seem old fashioned. The theologies that spin off of them will no doubt pass out of fashion. Whatever comes into fashion will include a God concept and it will keep pace with human advancement. This is not because man is reinventing a concept he made up, but because there is continually more of God to discover. It’s the actual personal experiential discovery that is the secret to God’s success. There’s always more to be experienced in the each moment, in each life, in each generation.

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[1] J. L. Barrett,  R.A. Richert, , A. Driesenga,  “God's beliefs versus mother's: The development of nonhuman agent concepts.”  Child Development, 72(1), (2001).  50-65

[2] J.L.  Barrett, F.C.  Keil, “Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts.” Cognitive Psychology, 31(3), (1996). 219-247.

[3] J.L. Barrett, “Cognitive constraints on Hindu concepts of the divine,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37(4), (1998). 608-619.

[4] W. Sullivan, “It helps me to be a whole person”: “The role of spirituality among the mentally challenged”. Psychological Rehabilitation Journal. 16 , (1993),125-134.

[5] Loretta Do Rozario, “Spirituality in the lives of People with Disability and Chronic Illness: A Creative Paradigm of Wholeness and Reconstitution,” Disability and Rehabilitation, An International Multi-Disciplinary Journal, 19 (1997) 423-427.

[6] Robert Wuthnow, “Peak Experiences: Some Empirical Tests,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, (18) 3 (1978) 66, see also 176-177

[7] K. Krishna Mohan, “Spirituality and well being, an overview,” The following article is based on a presentation made during the Second International Conference on Integral Psychology,
held at Pondicherry (India), 4-7 January 2001. The text has been published in:
Cornelissen, Matthijs (Ed.) (2001) Consciousness and Its Transformation. Pondicherry: SAICE.

Avaivble on-line through website of Indian Psychology Institute. On-line resource. URL:

http://www.ipi.org.in/texts/ip2/ip2-4.5-.php accessed 3/26/13. accessed 3/26/13

Mohan defines spirutality in terms of “experiencing a numinous quality, knowing unity of the visible and invisible, having an internalized relationship between the individual and the Divine, encountering limitless love, and moving towards personal wholeness” which accords with mystical experience in terms of the M scale. He sites: (Canda, 1995; Gaje-Fling & McCarthy, 1996; Decker, 1993; King et al., 1995; Wulff, 1996). That is also in harmony  with Hood’s understanding of mystical experience, (see chapter six, on  supernatural).

[8] Matthew Alper, The God Part of the Brain, Naperville Illanois: Soucebook inc, originally published in 1996 by Rough Press, 2006, 11.

[9] Andrew Newberg, Why God Won’t God Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. (New York, Ballentine Books), 2001, 157-172.

[10] Ibid., 37

[11] Lee A. Kirkpatrick, “Religion is not An Adaptation.” Where God and Science Meet Vol I: Evolution, Genes and The Religious Brain. Westport: Praeger Publishers,  Patrick McNamara ed. 2006, 173.

[12] Anders Rassmussen, “Universal Human Behavior”Anders Rassmussen Blog, Friday, December 39, 2006.
URL:    http://rasmussenanders.blogspot.com/2006/12/universal-human-behaviors.html

[13] Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg, The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experince. Copywright by the estate of Eugene d’Aquili and Anderw Newberg.1999. 3.

[14] John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, Great Books in Philosophy series, 12.

[15] Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation. Maryknoll New York:Orbis Books, Reprint edition, 1992,  84.

I am Determined to Believe in Free Will

Determinism

I'm also determined to make that joke it's become so obsessive I can't decide not to make it. Nevertheless I've been arguing free a lot on CARM lattely. This is one where the atheists seem to think they really have it but the scientific mystique of the philosophical position is just a scam. Atheists cling o a reductionism that has created a pesudo-scinece that tries to erase all human responsibility.On Atheist watch recently (April 4) I quoted from a blog by a 30 year Atheist who is sick of the psued0 scinece of atheism he in turn quotes a famous researcher of neuro-science, Raymond Tallis, who says says flat out most of what atheists talk about when they use that term is just bunk. He says
"If you come across a new discipline with the prefix “neuro” and it is not to do with the nervous system itself, switch on your ...[BS] detector. If it has society in its sights, reach for your gun. Bring on the neurosceptics." He didn't use the term "BS" he used the term BS stands for. They assert that it's born out and proved scientifically but all they are really doing is copying reductionist rhetoric that has nothing to do with scientific fact. One of the major sources for this sort of thinking is still Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett who published in the early 90s. See my summary of my friend's article "The Hard Sell of Human Consciousness,"* by Lantz Miller, published in my Journal Negations[1] (the academic journal I published in the 90s). There also a summary version of Miller's article on my Doxa website.

Atheist guru Sam Harris also has a book arguing against free will called Free Will.

Of course the reason for their insistence upon the scientific basis for the destruction of human experience is to free themselves of the responsibly of sin. They will argue that they can't help anything they do because we are just amalgams of causes, just bundled of effects of thousands of causes and every single thing we do is determined by a cause so don't choose any behavior of our own. While most of them will initially assert a form of compatibility (free will and determinism are compatible) as the argument heats they will rely on determinism more and more in relation to freedom from the guilt of sin.

Their case really turns on two points:

(1) brain damage alters forms of conscoiusness

(2) everything has to have a cause.

They will assert these ideas until dooms day and never listen to the answers. The first point is cleaver and it's a done deal as they think it is. One find the attitude expressed often there's no way around this it's absolute proof. It's obvious we are talking damaging part fo the brain of cousre that's going to effect consciousness. So will death. that proves that consciousness is related to brain, no one questions that. It doesn't prove that's reducible to the brain, that it's nothing more than Brain chemistry. The issue of brain damage could just as easily be one of access. Two analogies: On computer hardware is not software. If you take a baseball bat and beat the fu out of your hard drive you can't access your soft ware. That doesn't' mean the soft ware is just a myth and it's really just hardware. Destroying the hard drive does not in itself change the soft ware. Of a tv set, one might argue the programs originate in the box. They are not broadcast through the air but they are actually products of the box. We know this is foolish but hey if you damage the tv set you don't get the shows anymore. By atheist logic that should prove the programs originate in the tv.

If we have a core conscoiusness of some sort and the hardware of the brain access it then damaging it might alter the access while not changing the actual mind. It might be that mind is produced by the neural net but not reducible to it. This is a subtle concept and atheist just dont' want to hear it, and I have a feeling some of them can't understand it. The brain and the mind are inseparable but one is not reducible to the other. This is like saying the wave and the energy that makes it a wave are the same thing but they are separable either.

There are two major sources one should read to understand the counter arguments to this kind of reductionism. There is not time to go into them deeply but just to offer the sources and hope the reader will follow up. The first and most important one is Philosopher David Chalmers.[2] One of Chalmer's Major arguments is that

The Second second source one needs to counter the reductionsts is Andrew Newberg's Why God Wont Go Away.

Newberg, Why God Won’t God Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. (New York, Ballentine Books), 2001, pp. 157-172.

A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to all spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfiring of a bundle of nerve cells. But …After years of scientific study, and careful consideration of the a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is.

…Tracing spiritual experience to neurological behavior does not disprove its realness. If God does exist, for example, and if He appeared to you in some incarnation, you would have no way of experiencing His presence, except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality. You would need auditory processing to hear his voice, visual processing to see His face, and cognitive processing to make sense of his message. Even if he spoke to you mystically, without words, you would need cognitive functions to comprehend his meaning, and input form the brain’s emotional centers to fill you with rapture and awe. Neurology makes it clear: there is no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain’s neural pathways. Correspondingly, God cannot exist as a concept or as reality anyplace else but in your mind. In this sense, both spiritual experiences and experiences of a more ordinary material nature are made real to the mind in the very same way—through the processing powers of the brain and the cognitive functions of the mind. Whatever the ultimate nature of spiritual experience might be—weather it is in fact an actual perception of spiritual reality—or merely an interpretation of sheer neurological function—all that is meaningful in human spirituality happens in the mind. In other words, the mind is mystical by default. (p 37)

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The medieval German mystic Meister Echkart lived hundreds of years before the science of neurology was born. Yet it seems he had intuitively grasped one of the fundamental principles of the discipline: What we think of, as reality is only a rendition of reality that is created by the brain. Our modern understanding of the brain’s perceptual powers bears him out. Nothing enters consciousness whole. There is no direct, objective experience of reality. All the things the mind perceives—all thoughts, feelings, hunches, memories, insights, desires, and revelations—have been assembled piece by piece by the processing powers of the brain from the swirl of neural blimps. The idea that our experiences of reality—all our experiences, for that matter—are only “secondhand” depictions of what may or may not be objectively real, raises some profound questions about the most basic truths of human existence and the neurological nature of spiritual experience. For example our experiment with Tibetan mediators and Franciscan nuns showed that the events they considered spiritual were, in fact, associated with observable neurological activity. In a reductionist sense this could support the argument that religious experience is only imagined neurologically, that God is physically ‘all in your mind.’ But a full understanding of the way in which the brain and the mind assemble and experience reality suggests a very different view.(Ibid. pp. 35-36)

To the second point about causes the atheists here play off of science and the ideology of physicalism. In the assumption of physicalism/materialism and science everything needs a cause. They they assert that all ideas need causes. Since eveyrthing we think is caused then they assert that all our thoughts are determined, therefore all choices are determined. Thus we are not accountable for what we choose. This idea is based a string of false assumptions.

(1) Ideas must be physical things since they believe consciousness is reducible to chemistry.

(2) The assumption is that since all physical things are caused, thought is a physical thing, thought must be caused by the kinds of external causes that effect all physical things.

(3) They assert that ordinary cause and effect is the same as determinism.

(4) they assert that only one outcome is possible for a cause, one cause = one effect.


These are all false assumptions and they make up the thread of the argument that cause and effect proves determinism and rules out free choice. There is no proof that ideas are physical things and there's a lot of evidence against the notion that consciousness is reducible to chemistry. The evidence above, Miller, Chalmers and Newberg is all against it, as well the wealth of information on Doxa. We do not know what consciousness is, one of Chalmer's major points. So we can't say it's physical, if it is that doesn't mean it's caused in the same sense that thing are caused externally. Ideas in the mind are not necessarily influenced in the way way that causes in the external world are. Ordinary cause and effect is not determinism. Not that one cause necessarily leads to more than one effect at a time, but more than one outcome from a given cause is possible. We don't know all the factors that effect outcomes in our minds.

The way the Dawkinsian atheists/reductionists tell it one would think there is no "I" or "me." There is no actual persona it's just an illusion. The idea of free will deemed to be illusry but the idea of causes fighting it out is taken as the one and only means of understand why we do what we do or think what we think. Everything we think is forced upon us by external forces and genetics so that there is no "I" to think. When Descartes says "I think therefore I am" this is just an illusion. He should say "a set of forces are acting upon biomass and I think what I am determined to think, therefore I am." Of course this ridiculous nonsense would not even satisfy the rational for the cogito in the first place.

What happens when someone stops smoking? One set of causes push against the automaton for years and then finally build to a point that one day there are more of them then there are the influences form the first set of behaviors that d determined smoking? Anyone who has tried to quite smoking knows that without a will, no personal initiative and desire there's no quitting. Of course that would drive the skeptic in to the rant, "what influences imitative?" The desire not to die of cancer is the cause that determines the response." Of course it failed to do so for years, why did it suddenly succeed? why at the when this automaton said "I want to quite?"

It's prefectly plausible to conceive of a set of innate internal thought categories, perhaps put there by God or perhaps emergent properties, that the internal editor uses to decides from among the alternatives and is thus enabled to judge her own behavior and to say "I am not satisfied with this behavior I will change." The basic desire originates within it us in those categories and we able to use that to weight the various influences and choose a response.


The real danger is not just in seeing oneself as well human and less free, although that's enough to motivate opposition, the real danger is that in seeking to avoid responsibly of sin the skeptic is also closing down inner life, but his own and those of others who fool enough to believe the ideology. we no longer understand what it means to contemplate God or commit to truth.



[1]The original article by Miller is in two parts. follow the link then click on "winter 1998" part 2 click on Spring of 2000, you have to scroll through that whole issue for 2000 to get the last article which is part 2. This article is well worth reading as it really trounces Dennett.

[2]David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a theory. England, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. on line version: http://www.scribd.com/doc/16574382/David-Chalmers-The-Conscious-Mind-Philosophy Scribd, David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Theory of Conscious Experience, webstie Department of Philosophy, University of California at Santa Cruz, July 22 1995, visited 3/1/11 on line page numbers apply.

Chalmers is a major philosopher, his book is hard and difficult to read, although he's a good writer but the material is complex. Yet he is also a fun loving guy. He does a spoof of a blues singer on You Tube, "Zombie Blues" about one of his major arguemnts. If you listen to the lyrics he whole issue is put to rest in a few simple lines. The parody is hilarious.

"I act like you act
I do what you do
but I don't know what it's like
to be you.
what consciousness is
I don't got a blue."

Arguing the "God on the Brain Argument."

I made the argument that I put down here on Wednesday, on CARM that same day. I must say this was one of the most civil and enjoyable exchanges I've had with them. I especially enjoyed talking with Hermit. I must say also that I had to repeat my self a lot. That's to be expected becasue everyone doesn't read every post.

The major weakness of the argument seems to be proving that the experience (or the reaction of the brain) is an idea. The argument turns on the notion that the response to God talk means there's an innate idea of God, of course that was resisted most. First they try to confuse the idea with instinct:

Bust Nack:

There is an innate instinct to believe in religion and susceptibility to anthropomorphize everything, there is no innate idea of a God cocnept.

I argue that instinct is primarily behavior. Ideas require intellectual content and cultural constructs.

Meta:


I don't how it would be possible for the brain to react to talk and not be relating to ideas. If every time you say "paint the fence" someone has an censure then you have to figure "paint the fence" means somethign to them that's got a negative connotation. that means they must know what painting is and what the fence is.

God is not an instinct it's an idea. how could he brain brain react to talk about it without knowing what it means at some level?

No it requires that you have it. you can't react to a word by itself unless you have a sense of it's meaning. hearing "God" you never seen one why not just hear "zapaduggfoe"? why react to that word and no other in that way but you don't know what it mean or have a sense of it as a special thing. that makes no sense at all.

when you see Newberg say "they all have the same idea around the world" it's obvious there's an idea, it's universal but it's a product of culture so it shouldn't be universal. your brain lights up when it hears so there must be some level at which there's an idea there.

there wasn't much talk about the tie breakers. Not everyone grasped the distinction in this argument and the mystical experience argument. Three or four of them made intelligent arguments and were willing to listen, including Hermit.

The other major argument they tended to make was about adaptation. They seemed to really by the notion that evolution could give us genetic disposition to reactions to God talk (again, I'm not talking about a conscious response bu the brain responding by stimulation and by correcting problems of health both mental and physical). No surprise there sense that's really the only choice of explanation they have, which not to say it's a bad one. I did find new evidence agaisnt the idea that the reactions of the brain to God talk are adaptions.

in other endowments we don't mustache belief in fantasy and unreal things that just happens to work out to benefit us.

"Religion Is Not an Adaptation" 159
Lee A. Kirkpatrick
In Where God and Science Meet
ed Patrick McNamara
Preager

Finally, perhaps the biggest problem with religion-as-adaptation theories
is that, in virtually every example I have encountered, it seems clear that a
much simpler design could solve the (presumed) adaptive problem at least
as well as religion. Natural selection is a very conservative process that,
starting from the existing design, fashions new adaptations by changing as
little as necessary. Simpler designs are more evolvable designs. Consider, for
example, suggestions that religious beliefs are adaptive because they provide
relief from anxiety or other psychological benefi ts. In addition to other problems
outlined previously as to how religion could represent an adaptation
designed to produce such effects, it seems obvious that a much simpler way
for natural selection to reduce anxiety would be to simply tweak a parameter
of the anxiety system or mechanism to make it quantitatively less reactive
in response to threats or to simply recalibrate it to produce consistently
lower levels. Such a minor change in an existing anxiety system would be far
easier—and thus more likely—for natural selection to produce than all the
complex systems and mechanisms (not to mention group-level phenomena)
required to produce anxiety-reducing religion.

On the whole I it shows potential to be a fine argument. The major problem is going to proving that the reactions constitute an innate idea. The real point of it all was show that there is hard scientific data and readily lends itself to a logical extrapolation for God arguments.