[extropy-chat] 'a process of non-thinking called faith' 2 (2)

[Keith Henson]

At 03:47 PM 11/17/2006 -0600, Acy wrote:

>Human children naturally believe most everything their parents tell them.

That not entirely true, as anyone who has raised a few kids can tell 
you.  Also see below.

>This is obviously adaptive as it is something of a prerequisite for the 
>transmission of human culture and also allows children to learn from rare 
>experiences their parents or tribe have had (eg 'Call for help if you see 
>a lion') before they have had a chance to experience things for themselves.
>
>Religion is a memetic virus which rides on top of this. Faith is the 
>component which teaches that to question the nature of things is bad and 
>that to accept what you are taught is true and complete. It's basically an 
>immune system for religious memes.

I agree that religions are memes and that the religious meme receptor site 
is remarkably PROM like.  But that characteristic (the result of gene based 
mental mechanisms) was either directly selected or a side effect of 
something that was directly selected.

So you need to account for this capacity.  Like virtually all psychological 
trait is must be rooted in the way stone age hunter gatherer bands lived 
and relative reproductive success.  So how do you account for people having 
the capacity to have religions? Note that people don't pick up religions 
(and faith) as young children.

>Dawkin's new book "The God Delusion" is quite informative and well written 
>and I recommend it to all here.

Dawkins is one of the most influential people in my life.  But I think he 
is going off in the wrong direction in directly fighting religions without 
making an effort to understand why the capacity for religions was adaptive 
in the past.  I find the result like being against fevers when that is not 
the root cause of the problem but a symptom.

Keith Henson

******

Young children don't believe everything they hear

Childhood is a time when young minds receive a vast amount of new 
information. Until now, it's been thought that children believe most of 
what they hear. New research sheds light on children's abilities to 
distinguish between fantasy and reality.

Through conversation, books, and the media, young children are continually 
exposed to information that is new to them. Much of the information they 
receive is factual (e.g., the names of the planets in the solar system), 
but some information is not based in truth and represents nonexistent 
entities (e.g., the Easter bunny). Children need to figure out which 
information is real and which is not. By age 4, children consistently use 
the context in which the new information is presented to determine whether 
or not it is real.

That's one of the major findings in new studies conducted by researchers at 
the Universities of Texas and Virginia and published in the 
November/December 2006 issue of the journal Child Development.

In three studies, about 400 children ages 3 to 6 heard about something new 
and had to say whether they thought it was real or not. Some children heard 
the information defined in scientific terms ("Doctors use surnits to make 
medicine"), while others heard it defined in fantastical terms ("Fairies 
use hercs to make fairy dust"). The researchers found that children's 
ability to use contextual cues to determine whether the information is true 
develops significantly between the ages of 3 and 5.

Moreover, when new information is presented to children in a way that 
relates the information in a meaningful way to a familiar entity, they are 
more likely to use the contextual cues to make a decision about whether the 
new information is true than if the new information is simply associated 
with the entity.

"These studies provide new insight into the development of children's 
ability to make the fantasy-reality distinction," explains Jacqueline D. 
Woolley, lead author of the studies and a professor at the University of 
Texas. "It is clear from the present studies that young children do not 
believe everything they hear, and that they can use the context surrounding 
the presentation of a new entity to make inferences about the real versus 
fantastical nature of that entity."

Source: Society for Research in Child Development
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-11/sfri-ycd110906.php