Jared Diamond - Does Evolutionary Psychology Undermine Religion?

Jarrid and trying to understand religion of recent date evolutionary psychology has been looking at the development of the human species and seeking evolutionary reasons why certain mental functions have developed and religion has been one of the core interests how do you go about that in trying to understand the near ubiquity of religion yes there are some functions of religion that are recent political social functions of religion but humans have been around for five million years and most of those 5 million years were before there were any kings of state government so religion have to have some original functions I see three of those religion original functions as being explanation diffusing anxiety and providing comfort in the face of bad things in the world just to start off with explanation nowadays we have scientific explanation that tells us why the winds are blowing and the tides moving like birds are singing but before they were science people still ask themselves why the winds blowing and the tides moving in the lurid scene but there wasn't science to get the answer so religion provided answers among the New Guinea societies where I work why do birds sing well there are stories that this bird sings because this bird is transformed from a little child who had lost a smaller one and that's them in song the bird so now we know that we know as scientists that the birds sing for different reasons but that explanatory function was wide then in the times of the ancient Greeks or the ancient beats that science but they didn't know why this why they were tides and they talked about Neptune driving tides and faith on driving the Sun chariot and today we talk about meteorology and the heliocentric delta tutor so religion has lost much of its explanatory function for scientific minded people today but there are people who are not scientifically minded who still use the explanatory function of religion which must have been one of the original functions oh and that means that we as human beings seek if not absolutely need explanation that's part of our core being is we demand explanation one way or another we humans make our living as the thing from other animals by seeking explanation the reason that you and I are having this conversation and the chimpanzees are in zoo is is that we are that you and I and all seven billion other humans are good at looking at a a mark in the ground and recognizing that mark is a footprint of a deer pull out the bow and arrow it's a footprint of a mountain lion let's move in the other direction it's a mark of a turtle oh that might mean eggs so we are constantly explaining all the stuff that we see around us okay now reduction of anxiety that certainly sounds like it's an important survival mechanism reduction of anxiety yeah it's an essential sanity preservation mechanism here's an example at the time of the rocket attacks on northern Israel from Lebanon this was highly stressful people living in northern Israel in northern Israel when the siren went off they knew that the Rockets were coming and that the Rockets that they could go into the shelters but the Rockets might destroy the home so what are you going to do to preserve your sanity in the face of these anxiety provoking events it turned out that religious Israelis would recite Psalms and they would recite Psalms when they heard the Rockets coming down recite Psalms or all day there were psychology are a couple of psychologists philosophers who study symptoms either among Israelis who beside its arms or didn't recite Psalms such as do you sleep do you feel anxious to the road you get angry spontaneously and the people who recited Psalms show the fewest symptoms of anxiety and people were doing this like so I would assume the damage to their homes were equal damage to the homes but they don't believe it they thought that the signing songs actually in addition I protected their of their homes and the statistics are difficult so you don't know the true but what certainly is the case of the reciting the song allowed you to preserve your sanity under stressful circumstances that's a model for the value of religion and helping us deal with all the anxieties and so if that's true today arguing that would have been true for for the development of human history and I would think in earlier ages when that would even be more important to personal survival to be able to be the ones to reduce to have reduced stress under circumstances I agree with you on as we've gotten as we humans have gotten more and more control over the world there are fewer uncontrollable and unpredictable threats but for traditional people who have to deal with lions and trees flan damn they were a lot more unpredictable with threats and so religion served a larger function in reducing anxiety and to continue the thread so so we get it to the people who were religious spontaneously say then had less stress and if they had less stress they were more able to cope with life and if they're more able to cope with life they they survive more in order to pass their genes on them and we have to make the linear connection between the initial religiosity and the enhancement of those genes that cause that yes if you are less anxious and less stressed then you're going to be more effective at keeping your cool and cracking down and killing that hippopotamus and bringing home all the meat and feeding your babies and passing on your genes ultimately because you were less anxious and you could kill more hippos okay the third category is is reaction or defense mechanism it went bad things happen including death how does that in the religious nature of the group bad things do happen people died we have a sense of justice but unfair things happen we have what we could call bad luck how do we keep our sanity in the face of all of this it would be easy to be frustrated to give up to commit suicide or to adopt non adaptive behaviors what we do to give ourselves comfort when someone dies or when bad things happen that's an important function of religion that we see today and we know that it was important thousands of years ago at the time in the first writing 250 400 years ago and we infer that it's been around for tens of thousands of years because traditional societies use religion to provide comfort when bad things happen or when you have an accident or when someone dies so that so this provision of comfort is another one of these long-standing benefits of religion you don't see the latter in the animal kingdom there may be hints of it with elephants or whales there's nothing but in general you don't but what is it about human beings that need that type of comfort when bad things happen we need it because we ask questions forth for for a whale a whale probably does not have a concept of death whale does not know that it is going to die yes there is this other whale that gradually turns cold and floats down to the bottom but the whale does not have a conception of death we do have a conception of death and that makes us ask riding questions that haunt us but don't want whales when we became intelligent enough to have big brains and to ask these questions we then needed some way of answering questions and that was religion

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 9,588

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: Jared Diamond, Closer To Truth, Evolutionary Psychology, Psychology, Evolution, Agnosticism, Atheism, Religion, Christianity, Social Psychology

Id: iRNKiIuO-l0

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2016