Origins of Religion and Nietzche's Challenge
A thought provoking post over at the Coming Anarchy blog regarding the potential biological foundations for religion. This actually correlates to a number of posts over at Darwinian Conservatism. I raise a question in the first comment to the Coming Anarhy piece and then the debate takes off. If you have time, it is worth persuing the entire thing, but my core issue is summed up in my comment which I reproduce below.
"By destroying faith, we run the risk of leaving man unmoored from responsibility. You refer to this in this post yourself in the below quote. Isn't this a problem for those who are dedicated to trying to "rationalize" everything?
'And religion also boosts reproduction of their members, the evidence of which we can see today looking looking at the low replacement rates of the rich and casually religious societies of Western Europe (Spain: 1.3, Czech Republic: 1.23) and East Asia (Macau: 0.9, South Korea: 1.2, Japan: 1.22) compared to the high fertility of many devoutly religious Islamic societies that are otherwise chaotic (Afghanistan: 7.07, Somalia: 6.04, Nigeria: 5.2)."'"
I do not believe that biologic explanations for faith explain away or resolve Nietzsche's challenge.
From the Darwinian Conservatism post on this issue:
"'As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness--there can be no doubt of that--morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe--the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles."'Thus declares Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals (third essay, sec. 27).
Nietzsche's prediction of the gradual disappearance of morality over the 20th and 21st centuries was based on his claim that this would follow from the decline in the belief that morality was founded in some eternal, divine order of the universe. Traditional morality could not survive once human beings saw the truth that all morality was only a human invention with no support in divine will or natural order."
The Darwinists seem to think that morality can be advanced by "cooperation through reciprocity." However, it does breakdown as it attempts to become universalized as this quote from the same Darwinian Conservatism post indicates:
"Rather, morality arises from the emergent evolution of human nature. If Darwin is right about the evolution of human morality as a process of evolutionary group selection, then human morality is not absolutely disinterested or universalizable, because it is biased in favor of insiders and against outsiders.
Consequently, in a "big picture" manner, any morality not grounded in the transcendent can at best only be parochial and essentially "tribal." This means, to me, that Nietzsche was right, "morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe"
I do not think this is a hopeful spectacle as Nietzsche might hope. Man is incapable of making it such. The current quest for secularized human rights will fail as resources become depleted and societies worldwide become increasingly atomized. "Tribal" relations, the love of "one's own" will guarantee persistent conflict absent the transcendent.
"By destroying faith, we run the risk of leaving man unmoored from responsibility. You refer to this in this post yourself in the below quote. Isn't this a problem for those who are dedicated to trying to "rationalize" everything?
'And religion also boosts reproduction of their members, the evidence of which we can see today looking looking at the low replacement rates of the rich and casually religious societies of Western Europe (Spain: 1.3, Czech Republic: 1.23) and East Asia (Macau: 0.9, South Korea: 1.2, Japan: 1.22) compared to the high fertility of many devoutly religious Islamic societies that are otherwise chaotic (Afghanistan: 7.07, Somalia: 6.04, Nigeria: 5.2)."'"
I do not believe that biologic explanations for faith explain away or resolve Nietzsche's challenge.
From the Darwinian Conservatism post on this issue:
"'As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness--there can be no doubt of that--morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe--the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles."'Thus declares Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals (third essay, sec. 27).
Nietzsche's prediction of the gradual disappearance of morality over the 20th and 21st centuries was based on his claim that this would follow from the decline in the belief that morality was founded in some eternal, divine order of the universe. Traditional morality could not survive once human beings saw the truth that all morality was only a human invention with no support in divine will or natural order."
The Darwinists seem to think that morality can be advanced by "cooperation through reciprocity." However, it does breakdown as it attempts to become universalized as this quote from the same Darwinian Conservatism post indicates:
"Rather, morality arises from the emergent evolution of human nature. If Darwin is right about the evolution of human morality as a process of evolutionary group selection, then human morality is not absolutely disinterested or universalizable, because it is biased in favor of insiders and against outsiders.
Consequently, in a "big picture" manner, any morality not grounded in the transcendent can at best only be parochial and essentially "tribal." This means, to me, that Nietzsche was right, "morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe"
I do not think this is a hopeful spectacle as Nietzsche might hope. Man is incapable of making it such. The current quest for secularized human rights will fail as resources become depleted and societies worldwide become increasingly atomized. "Tribal" relations, the love of "one's own" will guarantee persistent conflict absent the transcendent.
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