There was a time in history when religion was completely eliminated from the social and scientific life—the Soviet period, roughly from 1920s to 1980s.
I’m not informed well enough to judge the effects the removal of religion had on the Soviet science. Granted, the country went from rubble to Sputnik and nuclear weapons, but it is hard for me to untangle the causes of this—there were other powerful factors at work (e.g. “if you don’t do good science, we’ll send you and your family to GULAG”).
One thing, however, is certain—after the Soviet Union collapsed, religion conquered its lost positions back in a matter of a few years. The memetic sterilization that has been going on for several generations didn’t help at all.
Now, about 20 years after the collapse, we see quite a lot of academics publicly mentioning God in their TV interviews, and you’ll never hear a public politician mentioning that he is an atheist—after doing so, his career would be instantly ruined.
To sum up, I have to agree with the posters suggesting that the ‘God-shaped hole’ wanting to be filled is innate. Figuring out whether religion is an epistemic need, a signaling tool, or both of these mixed in some proportion is another story.
It doesn’t have to be a ‘God-shaped hole’—there probably is a hole, and over the past few millennia, the Goddists have learned some excellent strategies to fill it, and to exploit it for the replication of their memes. People like Sagan and Dawkins have spent their lives trying to show that science, properly understood and appreciated, fills the hole better, fits it more truly, than do the ideas of religion.
Bottom line: we’re not selling Sweet’n’Low here. If we slap “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Christ!” on the jar, if we act as though religion is the “real thing,” and we’ve got a convenient stop-gap, people are going to want to go back to the “real thing” every time.
Agreed, the term ‘God-shaped hole’ is misleading. Actually, I didn’t mean any specific monotheistic God, but rather ‘One or more anthropomorphic entities with supernatural powers who created the observable world’.
Yes, the Goddists learned to exploit the Hole quite well, but couldn’t it be because the Hole provided a better environment for survival of memes involving powerful anthropomorphic entities than for other kinds of memes?
As for science filling the hole better, I of course agree with this, but a layperson may have a different definition of ‘better’ for this context. You, Dawkins, Sagan and most OB/LW readers define ‘better’ as ‘more closely corresponding to reality’, while a layperson may define ‘better’ as ‘making me feel more comfortable’.
(Also, I don’t quite understand what part of my post can be interpreted as suggesting to “act as though religion is the “real thing,” or that scientific worldview is a quick-and-easy hole filler—it obviously isn’t. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough—I’m not a native English speaker.)
(Also, I don’t quite understand what part of my post can be interpreted as suggesting to “act as though religion is the “real thing,” or that scientific worldview is a quick-and-easy hole filler—it obviously isn’t. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough—I’m not a native English speaker.)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you were implying that religion is epistemically the real thing. More that...our sense of sweetness is supposed to detect sugar. Sugar is the real referent of our pleasure in sweet-tasting things, while something like sucralose is simply a substitute, a way of replacing it. I worry that by saying “God-shaped hole,” we imply that the supernatural—whether or not it exists—really is the original referent of the desires which religion exploits. This could be true, but I do not think it is, and I do not think it is a point we should concede just yet.
There was a time in history when religion was completely eliminated from the social and scientific life—the Soviet period, roughly from 1920s to 1980s.
I’m not informed well enough to judge the effects the removal of religion had on the Soviet science. Granted, the country went from rubble to Sputnik and nuclear weapons, but it is hard for me to untangle the causes of this—there were other powerful factors at work (e.g. “if you don’t do good science, we’ll send you and your family to GULAG”).
One thing, however, is certain—after the Soviet Union collapsed, religion conquered its lost positions back in a matter of a few years. The memetic sterilization that has been going on for several generations didn’t help at all.
Now, about 20 years after the collapse, we see quite a lot of academics publicly mentioning God in their TV interviews, and you’ll never hear a public politician mentioning that he is an atheist—after doing so, his career would be instantly ruined.
To sum up, I have to agree with the posters suggesting that the ‘God-shaped hole’ wanting to be filled is innate. Figuring out whether religion is an epistemic need, a signaling tool, or both of these mixed in some proportion is another story.
It doesn’t have to be a ‘God-shaped hole’—there probably is a hole, and over the past few millennia, the Goddists have learned some excellent strategies to fill it, and to exploit it for the replication of their memes. People like Sagan and Dawkins have spent their lives trying to show that science, properly understood and appreciated, fills the hole better, fits it more truly, than do the ideas of religion.
Bottom line: we’re not selling Sweet’n’Low here. If we slap “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Christ!” on the jar, if we act as though religion is the “real thing,” and we’ve got a convenient stop-gap, people are going to want to go back to the “real thing” every time.
Agreed, the term ‘God-shaped hole’ is misleading. Actually, I didn’t mean any specific monotheistic God, but rather ‘One or more anthropomorphic entities with supernatural powers who created the observable world’.
Yes, the Goddists learned to exploit the Hole quite well, but couldn’t it be because the Hole provided a better environment for survival of memes involving powerful anthropomorphic entities than for other kinds of memes?
As for science filling the hole better, I of course agree with this, but a layperson may have a different definition of ‘better’ for this context. You, Dawkins, Sagan and most OB/LW readers define ‘better’ as ‘more closely corresponding to reality’, while a layperson may define ‘better’ as ‘making me feel more comfortable’.
(Also, I don’t quite understand what part of my post can be interpreted as suggesting to “act as though religion is the “real thing,” or that scientific worldview is a quick-and-easy hole filler—it obviously isn’t. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough—I’m not a native English speaker.)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you were implying that religion is epistemically the real thing. More that...our sense of sweetness is supposed to detect sugar. Sugar is the real referent of our pleasure in sweet-tasting things, while something like sucralose is simply a substitute, a way of replacing it. I worry that by saying “God-shaped hole,” we imply that the supernatural—whether or not it exists—really is the original referent of the desires which religion exploits. This could be true, but I do not think it is, and I do not think it is a point we should concede just yet.