Throughout history, the vast majority of people around the globe have believed they have, however defined, a “soul.” While the question of whether the soul exists cannot be answered by science, what we can study are the causes and consequences of various beliefs about the soul and its prospects of surviving the death of the body. Why are soul and afterlife beliefs so common in human history? Are there adaptive advantages to assuming souls exist? Are there brain structures that have been shaped by environmental pressures that provide the foundation of body/mind dualism that is such a prominent feature of many religions? How do these beliefs shape the worldviews of different cultures and our collective lives? What is the role of competing afterlife beliefs in religion, science, politics, and war? This course explores several facets of this relatively unexplored but profoundly important aspect of human thought and behavior. The course consists mainly of 70 to 80 minute lectures, typically broken up into 3 segments, recorded from a course offered by Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences. These videos include slides and some embedded video clips. Most lectures are accompanied by slides used during the lecture, also including recommended reading assignment which may provide additional opportunities to reflect on your studies. Due to the lengthiness of this class and natural progression, the online course has been separated into 3 units, this is Unit 1.
Religion Under Attack Part II
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From the course by Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences - Unit 1: Historical Foundations
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Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
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Meet the Instructors
Prof. Daniel M. OgilvieProfessor of Psychology
Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. HamiltonProfessor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
He's joined now on the podium or
joined now on the author's list later on by Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins was famous in his own right.
He's an evolutionary biologist who wrote a book in
the 60s, 68, something like that called The Selfish Gene.
And it revolutionized how people thought about Darwin thought about evolution.
He went down to the gene and talked about the goal of the gene is to survive.
You are carriers of genes that have been around for
tens and thousands of years, possibly millions of years and
those genes that you're carrying around, that we all carry around.
And they are winners because they've continued to survive.
Now, for a gene to survive it has to form partnership with other genes so
that they pretty much survive as a group.
And if genes produce something that
counteracts our survival, that gene will disappear along with its carrier.
So the genes that are passed on are genes that have survived and
genes that have enhanced our survivability.
He wrote about that.
He made it very clear.
I'm sure something that young evolutionary biologists is required reading.
Over the last ten years has become
a vociferous opponent of religion.
He is one of the more articulate critics of religion.
And here's one quote.
There will be a selective advantage of child brains that possess the rule of
thumb: believe, without question, whatever grown-ups tell you.
Obey your parents, obey the tribal elders,
especially when they adopt a solemn minatory tone.
Trust your elders without question.
Now, Harris made the same point.
There's lots of other quotes from Dawkins that could go in different directions,
but it's interesting in these two they are heavily reliant on and
agree that we are bred, we are born,
we have genes that enable us to listen to what our elders tell us.
And sometimes what elders tell us,
it's the passing on of a myth, of a story, and
sometimes those stories interfere with our understanding
of the scientific understanding of the world as it is.
So here's a talk from Dawkins.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> That's very kind.
Thank you very much.
Now, it's sometimes said that humans need religion, even if it isn't true.
They need to comfort of religion.
I think there's something rather patronizing about that,
rather condescending about it but that's what people say.
Often atheists say it.
Of course, you and I are too intelligent to need religion.
But what about those poor people out there who need the comfort of religion?
Humanity's need for comfort is of course real.
But isn't there something childish, something infantile,
in the belief that the universe owes us comfort,
in the sense that if something is comforting that must kind of make it true.
Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience
is just as applicable to religion.
He said, inspect every pseudoscience and
you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.
And it is astonishing how many people are unable to understand that
x is comforting, does not imply x is true.
A related plate concerns the need for a purpose in life.
To quote one Canadian critic, the atheist may be right about God, who knows.
But God or no God, it's clear that something in the human soul requires
a belief that life has a purpose that transcends the material plane.
One would think that a more rational than though empiricist such as Dawkins,
would recognize this unchanging aspect of human nature.
Does Dawkins really think that this world would be a more humane place if we all
looked to the God delusion instead of the Bible, for truth and comfort?
Actually, yes.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Since you mentioned humane.
Yes I do, but I must repeat yet
again that the consolation content of the belief does not raise its truth value.
I can't deny the need for emotional comfort and I can't claim
that world view adopted in my book offers any more than moderate comfort.
If you're afraid of death for example, you might superficially
think that a priest who tells you that you're not really going to die,
would be more comforting than a scientist who tells you, it is highly implausible
that our individuality could survive the decay of our brains.
But I have heard I have heard experienced nurses,
who worked all their lives in old people's homes,
say that the ones who are most terrified of death tend to be the Roman Catholics.
>> [LAUGH] >> All that guilt fed from the cradle up
and the terror of purgatory and hell.
As for eternal nothingness, is it really all that frightening?
As Mark Twain said, I do not fear death.
I've been dead for billions and billions of years.
Before I was born and have not suffered the slightest inconvenience.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> In any case,
I don't think I've ever met anyone at a funeral who dissents from my view,
that the nonreligious parts.
The eulogies, the deceased favorite poems or music,
those nonreligious parts are always more moving than the prayers.
I want to end by reading the opening lines of a previous book of mine,
Unweaving the Rainbow.
These are lines that I've long earmarked for my own funeral.
We are going to die.
And that makes us the lucky ones.
Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born.
The potential people who could've been here in my place, but
who will in fact never see the light of day out number the sand grain of Sahara.
Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats,
scientists greater than Newton.
We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so
massively outnumbers the set of actual people.
In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and
I in our ordinariness that are here.
We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds,
how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state
from which the vast majority have never stirred.
Thank you very much.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> In the personal story segment tonight,
do you believe in God?
Increasingly fewer Americans do.
According to a pew poll, 12% of us do not have a belief in a higher power,
up from 8% in 1987 and that group includes agnostics.
In Europe, the rise of atheism and of agnosticism is stunning.
According to a Zuckerman study in Sweden as many as 85% of the population
are non-believers.
Japan 65%, France 54, and in Britain 44% did not believe in God in Great Britain.
With us now is the man who understands that position, Richard Dawkins,
the author of the mega-selling this book, The God Delusion.
I think it takes more faith to be like you, an atheist, than like me,
a believer and it's because of nature.
You know, I just don't think we could have lucked out to have the tides come in,
tides go out, sun go up, sun go down.
Don't think it could have happened.
>> We have a very full understanding of why the tides go in and
the tides go out, of why the continents drift apart, of why life is there.
Science is evermore piling on the evidence, piling on the understanding.
>> But it had to get there.
I understand that the physiology of it,
if you will, but it had to come from somewhere.
And that is the leap of faith that you guys make.
That it just happened.
>> Well, a leap of faith, you don't actually need a leap of faith.
You're the one who needs a leap of faith because you are actually,
the onus is on you to say why you believe in something.
There's an infinite number of Gods you could believe in and
I take it you don't believe in Zeus or Apollo or Thor.
You believe in presumably the Christian God.
>> Jesus.
>> Jesus.
>> Jesus was a real guy.
I can see him.
>> Yeah. >> I know what he did.
And so, I'm not positive that Jesus is God, but
I'm throwing in with Jesus rather than throw it in with you guys,
because you guys can't tell me how it all got here.
You guys don't know.
>> We're working on it, physicists are.
>> When you get it then maybe I'll listen.
>> Well now, if you look at the history of science over the centuries.
>> Yeah. >> The amount
that's gained in knowledge in each century is stupendous.
In the beginning of the 21st century we don't know everything, we have to be
humble, we have to in humility say that there's a lot that we still don't know.
>> And, being humble is a Christian virtue.
>> Well, yes, it is.
>> All right, when you guys figure it out, then you come back and tell me,
because until that time I'm sticking with Judeo-Christian philosophy and
my religion of Roman Catholicism because it helps me as a person.
>> That's different.
If it helps you as a person [CROSSTALK] that doesn't mean it's true.
>> Well it's true for me.
You see I believe it.
>> You mean true for you is different from true for anybody else.
How can something be true for you.
>> Absolutely because I can't prove.
>> Something's either got to be true or not.
>> No, no.
I can't prove to you that Jesus is god, so that truth is mine, and mine alone.
But you can't prove to me that Jesus is not.
So you have to stay in your little belief system.
>> You can't prove that that Zeus is not,
you can't prove that Apollo is not, or I can't.
>> We saw Apollo man, he was down there and he's not looking good.
Now, we also differ in a sense that you feel that religion has been a bane,
B-A-N-E, to civilization, and I feel atheism has, and
I will point to the worst mass murderers in modern times,
Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
All confirmed atheists.
All people who wanted to wipe out religion.
Now I know you can point to the Crusades, and you can point to Al-Qaeda right now.
I mean, it's there and there's no question.
But I say I'm thrown in with the founding fathers of the United States which saw
religions spirituality as a moderating influence,
as a good thing that people embrace the true tenets.
>> The Founding Fathers of the United States were secularist above all.
Some of them were religious, some of them were not, but they were above all
secularists who believed in keeping Church and State separate.
>> They had to because of the oppression in Europe.
>> That is what they were precisely.
>> Almost all of them.
They all said a prayer before their deliberations in their letters, and
I have almost all their letters, they all reference the deity,
our Declaration of Independence references heavily.
But, they saw it as a moderating influence because the federal government,
at that point, couldn't control the country.
And they say, if people follow Jesus, then the country is gonna be better.
>> It may well be a moderating influence.
As for Hitler's dying.
I mean, of course Hitler, by the way, was a Roman Catholic.
>> Okay. So, on and on it goes.
They would in earlier interview that's really more interesting.
They were yelling at each other and interrupting each other.
Bill O'Reilly was particularly just really nasty.
But you can see, you stay over there, and I'll stay over here, and
let's not intrude on each other's area.
Now, I think Dawkins, he
likes this sort of thing much more than giving a talk at Berkeley.
Because he is preaching to the choir there, say I didn't
know you see the whole, everybody is standing up and applauding sort of thing.
His views are compatible with the views of the audience,
but he prefers to give talks to audiences where his views
kind of violate their assumptions, makes them angry, annoys them.
So, I think that's his preference but it's interesting to me.
I didn't know that I was gonna bring this point up at this point, that
Dawkins, and Dennit, and Harris, and
Hitchins, we'll get to Dennit and Hitchins in just a moment.
Guess what they did?
They formed a tribe.
They formed a tribe.
I don't know that it's a become a viable thing,
but they started calling themselves the Brights.
Now, how in-your-face can you get?
They call themselves the Brights!
Well what's the opposite, Brights, well, it's the Stupids, isn't it?
Or the dim-witted or the dulls and Dennis said no,
no you could call yourself the Supers, like superstitious.
But it was fascinating to me that one of the initial things when they all saw that
they were on the same page they formed a mini tribe, and we know all about that.
All right I need to go to William Paley.
And Paley let me give you some information about him.
He became, he's a good introduction to Daniel Bennett.
Paley, he was the high ranks of the Anglican Church.
In 1794, he wrote a book, A View of Evidence of Christianity,
became required reading at Cambridge University for 100 years.
Whoa, what a thrill that would be, to write something and
have every student in Cambridge read it for 100 years.
He wrote another book on Natural Theology in which he
introduced the metaphor of the watchmaker.
An here, in brief,
is the metaphor of the watchmaker.
If you're out in a field, and you hit a rock, you say, "Well,
how did that rock get there?" You say, well,
you know it's probably been there for, who knows, how it got there, but
if you stumble upon a watch, pick up the watch, how did this come into existence?
How did it get here?
Well, obviously, somebody, to say, they dropped it.
But, how did it get here in the first place?
Well, somebody made it.
Somebody had to have made that watch.
And they had to comprehend its construction.
They had to design it, and they had to make it,
and they had to make sure that it worked and that it fulfilled its purpose.
So anything that's the slightest bit complex, somebody made.
Somebody designed it.
So human beings are complex.
So somebody must have designed us.
I talked about last time or maybe the time before called agency.
Some agent created us.
And so Paley became a very well known or promoted, he was well known anyway.
Promoted the idea that we are created by the creator.
The marks of design are too strong to be got over.
Design must have had a designer, and the designer must have been a person, and
that person is God.
Became a Modern day hero we still refer to, the father of Intelligent Design.
Now, there's where the lines are formed.
The people who believe in God created us,
he designed us because we're so complex, that's how it had to happen.
Nature could not have done it.
But there are people who say no, no, sorry.
Nature could have done it, through the process of natural selection.
And one of the heroes of that Is Daniel Dennett.
He wrote probably the best book ever written on Darwin,
he called it Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
What makes Darwin's idea so dangerous is it's so easy to understand.
It's so easy.
Natural selection is an easy, easy to understand.
However, it might be counter intuitive the way we generally have been taught to
understand things, but once you've got it, it's very easy to comprehend.
And then he wrote a book which made him part of this group,
called Breaking the Spell.
And breaking the spell he said, let's stop not talking about religion.
Let's take the wraps off and look at it seriously argue about it, and
see if we can bring up the point where we can reason about it.
There's essentially between subjective feelings and reason.
And sometimes we will not reason because
subjectively we think something else is correct.
And so why look into it?
This is a lecture or maybe two lectures I'm gonna give later on in the course.
But anyway, Breaking the spell.
Why do people disbelieve in evolution?
We come back to that theme again because we were told not to believe in evolution.
We're told by people with this minatory tone.
People who in authority and
we learn the trust that evolution is false, and
that's a problem, because it can stop thinking.
There might be real problems with evolution, but
we won't discover what the problem is until we take it seriously and do the kind
of research that either provides evidence for it or evidence against it.
>> I'm going around the world giving talks about Darwin,
and usually what I'm talking about is Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning.
Now, that title, that phrase comes from a critic, an early critic,
and this is a passage that I just love And would like to read for you.
In the theory with which we have to deal, absolute ignorance is the artificer so
that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system
that in order to make a perfect and
beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it.
This proposition will be found on careful examination, to express,
in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and
to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange
inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified
to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in the achievements of creative skill.
>> [LAUGH] >> Exactly.
>> [LAUGH] >> Exactly.
And it is a strange inversion.
A Creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it.
Test Two.
Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder?
Yes, no.
>> [LAUGH].
>> Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter?
Yes, no.
Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker?
Yes, no.
If you answered yes for any of the above, give details.
>> [LAUGH].
>> It really is a strange inversion of reasoning.
You would've thought it stands to reason
the design requires an intelligent designer.
But Darwin shows that it's just false.
>> Okay, he goes on talks about sugar.
It's a really, really interesting thing.
But, again, I want to make sure that we have 15
minutes at the end to show another video of something else.
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