Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
is this really needed?
well religion,
is an interesting topic because um...
religion is universal.
all human societies believe in the supernatural,
all human societies have a religion one way or another
which, for the biologist,must mean that religion has some advantages, offers
some advantages to a society otherwise
we wouldn't have that strong tendency to develop it.
and so for me, that's actually a far more interesting question of
whether god exists or doesn't exist- those sort of questions i cannot
answer.
but the question of
"why we have religions?" is an interesting question. and my view is that morality,
our human morality,
is older than religion, so instead of
saying morality comes from God, our religion gave this morality, for me
that's a big no-no. our current religions are just two or three thousand years old
which is very young
and our species is much older and i cannot imagine that, for example, a hundred
thousand years or two hundred thousand years
our ancestors did not have some type of morality. of course they had rules about
how you should behave.
what is fair, what is unfair,
caring for others, all of these tendencies were in place already so they
had a moral system,
and then at some point we developed these
present-day religions
which i think were sort of tacked on to the morality that we had
and maybe they serve to codify them,
or to enforce them, or to steer morality in a particular direction
that we prefer,
and so
religion comes in for me secondarily. im struggling with
whether we need religion.
so personally, i think we can be moral without religion, because we probably had
morality long before the current religions came along
so i think we can be moral without religion,
but the large-scale societies,
where we're not all keeping an eye on each other because we don't-
in societies with a thousand people, or several thousand, or millions of people,
we cannot all keep an eye on each other, and that's maybe why we installed religions,
in these large-scale societies, where God kept watch over everybody.
and then the question becomes,
is this really needed?
now, in northern Europe (I'm from the Netherlands),
there is basically an experiment going on. in northern Europe,
the majority of people are not religious anymore. when you ask them they say they're
non-believers.
and they still have a moral society, as far as i can tell.
and so there is a sort of experiment going on there
can we setup a society where religion is not dominant at least
it may be present, just not dominant anymore
that is still in moral society
and until now, i think that experiment is going pretty well,
and so i'm optimistic that religion is not strictly needed
but i cannot be one hundred percent sure because
we've never really tried- there is no human society where religion is
totally absent, so we will really have never tried this experiment.