We are lacking a tennis-ball sized piece of our earlier brain (and it might even be God-shaped).
Could you clarify for me what this means, exactly? I mean the bit in parentheses in particular; I’ve heard the phrase “god-shaped hole” before but I’m not sure what relevance it has to the topic at hand. Are you postulating a claim that if we were smarter by the brain volume of a tennis ball, we would be more aware of God?
The important question is—Did we lose any functionality since then? Are we dumber? Are we less sane in some way? (The palaeolithic humans did not seem to do any really insane religious stuff)
If the shrinking brain volume has been confirmed, what about, say, the amount of folding in the cerebral cortex? Wikipedia says that that area of the brain seems to be responsible for a lot of the stuff we associate with intelligence.
Re: the bit about paleolithic humans not doing insane religious stuff: I think the really kooky stuff stems from oversized communities more than the intelligence difference between us and our ancestors. Yes, the brain architecture is what makes any of it possible in the first place, but I see no real reason to think that our paleolithic friends would have done any better in our modern, decidedly non-ancestral environment.
Not even that… the God hypothesis aside, religions are full of things that make absolutely zero sense.
Regardless of whenever there is or isn’t God (or Gods), it is pretty insane to e.g. kill a blood relative for good luck. That kind of thing. Not even the God hypothesis. The extreme gullibility. If you are being bombarded by extremely insane propaganda all your life, you will be affected no matter how smart you are. But you don’t need to be so much affected as to preserve this insanity over the generations or evolve this insanity to even greater levels. If each next generation is even a little bit less religious, the religion just decays.
Could you clarify for me what this means, exactly? I mean the bit in parentheses in particular; I’ve heard the phrase “god-shaped hole” before but I’m not sure what relevance it has to the topic at hand. Are you postulating a claim that if we were smarter by the brain volume of a tennis ball, we would be more aware of God?
If the shrinking brain volume has been confirmed, what about, say, the amount of folding in the cerebral cortex? Wikipedia says that that area of the brain seems to be responsible for a lot of the stuff we associate with intelligence.
Re: the bit about paleolithic humans not doing insane religious stuff: I think the really kooky stuff stems from oversized communities more than the intelligence difference between us and our ancestors. Yes, the brain architecture is what makes any of it possible in the first place, but I see no real reason to think that our paleolithic friends would have done any better in our modern, decidedly non-ancestral environment.
He was claiming the opposite: if we were more intelligent, then we would not have use for a God hypothesis.
Not even that… the God hypothesis aside, religions are full of things that make absolutely zero sense.
Regardless of whenever there is or isn’t God (or Gods), it is pretty insane to e.g. kill a blood relative for good luck. That kind of thing. Not even the God hypothesis. The extreme gullibility. If you are being bombarded by extremely insane propaganda all your life, you will be affected no matter how smart you are. But you don’t need to be so much affected as to preserve this insanity over the generations or evolve this insanity to even greater levels. If each next generation is even a little bit less religious, the religion just decays.