From: Scott Badger (wbadger@psyberlink.net)
Date: Fri Feb 26 1999 - 06:53:23 MST
-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy Bates <tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au>
To: extropians@extropy.com <extropians@extropy.com>
Date: Thursday, February 25, 1999 11:25 PM
Subject: Re: Extropianism & Theology
>Aaron Davidson said
>> Since myself and many others do not seem to feel this instinct, I think
it
>> must be more of a conditioned factor.
>
>Well try the same logic out in this sentence
>"Since i myself do not have brown eyes, I think it must be a conditioned
>factor"
>
>I think that God-believing is a heritable neural module present in the
minds
>of the great majority of human brains.
>
>A module which evolved around 150,000 years ago and which served the
>valuable purpose of enabling teleological reasoning (reasoning about
>purposes).
>
>I think myself, with no evidence whatsoever, that about 3,000-5,000 years
>ago, either a mutant variant entered the population or perhaps merely
chance
>selective breeding in a small tribe (of Ionic Greeks for instance) created
>an emergenic phenotype which lacks this neural module.
>
>Those of us on this list who believe in the kind of extropy that I have
been
>discussing lack this module.
>
>I think also that the majority of principles which I espouse follow very
>directly from simply being incapable of explaining events in terms of
>"spiritual" happenings, being constrained instead to operate solely in the
>materialist reductionism space.
>
>I think that we learn Occam's Razor. We learn the fragile culture of
>science. But we are born either able or unable to use immaterial events as
>explanations.
>
>tim
That's the first I've heard of the God gene. Interesting. But if we
actually apply Occam's Razor, how do you come to the conclusion that your
theory is the parsimonious alternative. Say as compared to more
psychologically-based theories? (e.g. cultural conditioning, need for
parent figure, need to explain the unknown, coping woith fear of death,
coping with death of of mate, etc)
Scott B.
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