Originally posted by Kbertsche
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"The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of Science"
https://static1.squarespace.com/stat...of-science.pdf
"Compared with scientific categories, those in religion lack theoretical depth. Contrary to first impressions, religious accounts of things differ little from everyday accounts. Religious systems import all of our familiar, commonsense psychology about agents' intentions, beliefs, desires, and actions for the explanation of phenomena throughout the natural and social worlds. Whether applied to other drivers on the road or to the rulers of the cosmos, this system performs quite nicely most of the time for understanding and anticipating agents' actions and states of mind. The rationale underlying an explanation of someone's illness as the result of an ancestor's interventions based on that ancestor's displeasure with the victim's conduct is as readily comprehensible to a child as it is to the most experienced religious official.
In the absence of cultural forms that foster the collective growth of humans' critical and imaginative capacities, human beings rely upon their natural cognitive dispositions, which often appear to be domain specific and comparatively inflexible in their application. CPS agents, stories about them, and rituals for controlling and appeasing them are the inevitable outcomes of a cognitive system that simultaneously seeks explanations, possesses an overactive agent detector, and, perhaps, most importantly, lacks scientific traditions. As Daniel Dennett (1998, p. 122) has remarked, " . . . until science came along, one had to settle for personifying the unpredictable--adopting the intentional stance toward it--and trying various desperate measures of control and
appeasement." (26-27)"
In the absence of cultural forms that foster the collective growth of humans' critical and imaginative capacities, human beings rely upon their natural cognitive dispositions, which often appear to be domain specific and comparatively inflexible in their application. CPS agents, stories about them, and rituals for controlling and appeasing them are the inevitable outcomes of a cognitive system that simultaneously seeks explanations, possesses an overactive agent detector, and, perhaps, most importantly, lacks scientific traditions. As Daniel Dennett (1998, p. 122) has remarked, " . . . until science came along, one had to settle for personifying the unpredictable--adopting the intentional stance toward it--and trying various desperate measures of control and
appeasement." (26-27)"
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