Anthony A.C. Grayling - Does Evolutionary Psychology Undermine Religion?

Anthony and trying to discern the nature of reality you have to deal with the theistic hypothesis that there is some transcendent being and when we're to look at that is to see religion and to see what its claims are but it's important to if we're looking at religion to see how it developed and the claim is from evolutionary psychology that one can explain the totality of religion and thus it would be at least to a large degree undermine how does that process work how do you begin to look at religion today and see how evolutionary psychology can explain the phenomena I don't think evolutionary psychology by itself is going to tell us the whole story it's going to tell us a very very important and central part of the story about the way that the human cognitive structures are built and how they work and this relates to the fact that because we have a long maturation process a long childhood we need to be very prejudiced we need to believe everything we need to impose interpretations even on random plots as in a psychological test we need narratives we need structures and we're doing this all the time what we're looking for explanations and we're looking for frameworks and that means that in in ages and they've been most of the human story today to say in the last few centuries that we've had proper science in all those ages those attempts to find structure and explanation have led very naturally and readily to the religions and religions have a deep metaphysical aspect to them proportioning to give us explanations so in the structure of the human psyche itself we find reasons why we have some propensity to believe but there are also historical and sociological reasons which I think have to do with just the accidents of history you began your question by saying we have to take the theistic hypothesis seriously I might say well it's only for historical reasons that we do only for historical reasons that we're not now taking the astrological hypothesis seriously or the magical hypothesis seriously over time we found that things which for many many centuries many millennia indeed in the case of astrology were regarded as powerful tools of explanation have come to be abandoned or comfortably marginalized just because the credibility of them has been lost this may very well happen to religion itself but because of the way that the religious and temporal powers over time in history a found mutual support so significant that these institutions have survived so they've evolved you know a Christian today in the 21st century would not recognize the Christianity of medieval times and certainly not vice versa because the churches and the religions themselves have evolved added on new things and lost other things in order to survive so it's a twin-track story human psychology the credulity the need for stories and the institutional historical story about how the regions themselves have evolved so if we if we look at the historical development of religion why has has it taken such forms in different countries where one of the big problems of religion is that the contradictions and diversity of religion in the world everybody has to face that maybe the Buddhists don't because they have less of a claim on some absolutism but most religions have to deal with that contradictory nature so taking an evolutionary psychology approach how do you see the different emergencies of a fairly you know they all believe in something transcendent but they have radically different expressions of it well it's true they have radically different expressions at as it were a super structural level but at a slightly deeper level it's I think reasonably clear that they share commonalities and the commonalities in question that these are efforts to make sense their efforts to provide an explanation to impose a kind of conceptual grid on things that organizes it for us so that we can we can think about it we can we can comprehend it I mean the idea of indefinite margins that we don't know where they end of time going on forever before us and time again forever after us for example infinities of space and you know loose ends troubling to most people not to scientists but but to most people they are oh I think the scientists - well I'm troubled by and I at least I think I'm a scientist of my background you're not troubled by the loose ends of infinity in all direction I think they're terribly exciting and this is this is the you know they drive behind well your your exciting is my trouble right now but the drive behind looking for better explanations or offer greater understanding and indeed what's so interesting is that the the force that we might be able to get incrementally by really hard work deeper and deeper insights into nature let us say seems to me it's so different from from the one that says here is a truth about nature which we can receive and which we can premise in our lives and we can trust so you see that as a commonality of all these religions even though this superficial superstructure looks like they're contradictory that the contradiction is even are not that great actually cuz you think about judeo-christian tradition and Islam which Springs from an aspect of culture that that tradition is a very young tradition in human history and for many many tens of thousands years beforehand we had a form of animism I suppose which was this imputation of agency to things in the world you look at what what the 19th century colonists came to call Hinduism which in fact it's a great family of different quasi animistic religions in the sense that they talk about agencies powers and truths in nature which are may be expressions of the same one you know the many armed goddess in fact doesn't have many arms just as many powers that that kind of idea you look at Buddhism or Jainism which are in their purest origins not religions at all but philosophies they don't have transcendent beings and there are quite different to prove they do have a transcendent consciousness of sorts well in the case that in the case of tera vaada Buddhism there is the idea that you your own consciousness might be reimburse you can escape that cycle and merge back into the great oneness of things the great wonders of things of course is not conscious that's exactly the enticement that you can escape having to think about anything will feeling really but but they're all of them they're all of them share that one deep commonality which is an attempt to make sense and and that is distinctive of us as human beings we to make sense of things what you're doing is actually quite consistent with a number of philosophers of religion believers who attempt to deal with the contradictions between religions in the argument that you're giving me now is precisely the ones they give to say where each of the great religions are somehow sensing a different form of the ultimate thing the ultimate real in some way of course you're coming using that same data and coming to a different conclusion that they're all deluded or they're all expressing humans evolutionary psychology but others would take that same data and conclude that they that there is not a contradiction in religion which other people used to attack religion yourself included they would take that data and say no there is this commonality that forget the contradictions there is this this deep transcendent kernel that they all have in common so it's the same argument and then split at the end to a different conclusion but with respect is not quite the same argument because then my argument starts from the thought that human beings sharing a bit of basic human nature our sense making explanation seeking creatures and that prior to the rise of science a very natural way to do this was to do it in terms of their being agencies and whereas what what your theologians I think are all saying is that actually these are different approaches to the same truth which is that there is a transcendent entity in some way and but that by the way and again it's a historical or sociological fact this is quite a recent move on the part of theologians wanting to be Irena cand and make peace between what historically of course have been very very competing views of things even to the point of war and bloodshed that the others had false gods and mine is the true God now they're all the same role but just sort of dead in different ways and so this is a convenience I think of a globalized world

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 3,675

Rating: 4.8723402 out of 5

Keywords: Anthony A.C. Grayling, Closer To Truth, Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Social Psychology, Religion, Evolution

Id: RWbZJZlYJrI

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2016