From: Timothy Bates (tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au)
Date: Thu Feb 25 1999 - 22:04:04 MST
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
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