Guybrush

Just a nitpick, Duce, but the brain doesn't release opiates. Opiates are only found in the poppy from which extracts like morphine is made. Rather, the brain releases opioids like endorphine. They connect to opioid receptors and produce a sense of well-being. Morphine (an opiate) connects to those same receptors, hence the confusion.

When I see religious groups on television partaking in excorcisms, speaking in tongues and other (for me) abnormal behaviors, I notice a lot of group pressure, suggestion and hypnosis techniques. Crowds are whipped up into emotional frenzy, the preacher gets very loud, forceful and aggressive in behaviour and people are commanded to act a certain way. For a poor social mammal, it's just too much to resist.

If these religious experiences were "real", they shouldn't have to depend on psychological trickery like peer pressure, suggestion and hypnosis/self-hypnosis.

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Something Completely Different

Howard the Duck

^^terminology error, then

obviously opiods, like beta-endorphins (released after strenous exercise)

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Malaise is THE dominant human predilection.

blastingas10

Can anyone explain why humans would be hard-wired to believe in a god? Why is that necessary? It doesn't seem like such a trait would help us survive in any way - so how would it make it through natural selection? But I suppose that isn't a valid point if it is hard-wired in our minds and isn't in our genes. Still, if we are just creatures whose main purpose in life is to survive, why would we be equipped with such a feature?

Howard the Duck

i don't thin there's enough research into that, i don't think the whole neuroscientific explanations about God have been looked into properly, and a lot of our brain's functions are still pretty much an enigma

just for argument's sake, i found a link to some ideas from the "other side" - the Creationists:-

Can Evolution Explain Our Origins?

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Malaise is THE dominant human predilection.

blastingas10

It talks about irreducible complexity. Our entire universe is irreducibly complex. Have you ever read the book the science of god? It's quite an interesting read. It talks a lot about how finely tuned the universe is for life and that if the big bang would have been slightly different in any way, this life wouldnt have been possible.

To quote Stephen Hawking:

"The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. ... The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life."

Howard the Duck

^^as again, i say it's like that because we force our own athropological conception on it

a Helium-based lifeform might say that the precise amount of quarks facilitate life for them therefore there must be the Helium equivalent of a God on some alien planet

we impose our own order upon the Universe by our own computation, calculation and theories

a Helium-based lifeform would probably not survive on our world and not be able to live in our constructs, which we construct only because our own perception of reality

as for irreducible complexity, it is still a "catch all" explanation for things we don't understand yet - i don't really subscribe fully to Dawkins' scientific atheism but i do concur with his furnishing of the "paradigm shift" - long ago, we thought the earth was flat, then it was found to be not so - just because at that point, we have no means to see that the Earth is round, doesn't mean it's "irreducibly complex" to be unable to deduce the Earth is really flat or not - people just thought it was flat because we see the horizon as a straight line - if it were round, shouldn't we be rolling?

then it was discovered Earth was round, then gravity was discovered - by application of "irreducible complexity", the Creationists would say isn't it finely tuned for life that God made the world round AND God made gravity - it's just going round in circles - can't we subscribe to gravity is there because it's there? maybe there are life-forms that don't rely on gravity?

i'm saying that it's only paradigms we're going through, just because now they seem irreducibly complex, doesn't mean in the future, we can't create instruments that measure or take apart these irreducible complexities

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Malaise is THE dominant human predilection.

blastingas10

That's true. Someday we may prove that the universe isn't irreducibly complex. I'm sure some would argue that science already has. But it's also possible that we may some day prove that it is irrecucibly complex.

Howard the Duck

then you see what a "catch-all" term it is, considering there are so many facets of science that describes the Universe as it stands now

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Malaise is THE dominant human predilection.

Paedantic Basterd

Maybe it's essential to our survival, to keep us from ending the pointlessness when we realize that we're born, we reproduce, we die, and that's all there is to it.

SIRIUSB

I think the answer lies in our natural evolution, instead pf being 'hard-wired' (which would admit there was someone that did the wiring), I believe our need for comfort, consolation, and community played an evolutionary role in our creating religious devices.