Conversations with a loud, poorly informed religious person leading to interesting thoughts

So a religious person I knew from back when I was still living with my parents and still religious got announced his irritation with Stephen Hawking's recent statements about God being not necessary, on his facebook status.  I defended the idea - it's not a new one, but it's worth saying: at no point in the ever expanding scheme of scientific understanding of the universe has god as a hypothesis been required to explain anything.  Ever.  And that trend now seems to be continuing into the theories that are behind the big bang - it would be surprising if it was otherwise given how much has been learnt over the last few hundred years without using God.

This is a curious milestone, though - the big bang has been for quite a few years a starting point in popular culture.  And as humans we need something to put before the big bang in our minds eye.  If "strings" (or anything) produce a theory that perpetuates through time and predicts the universe, then where is God for believers of science and religion?  Well, exactly the same place he's been since we knew about the big bang for all practical purposes.  A deist god.  Same old same old said by someone famous.

But a different person who also objected to an areligious view on life took the conversation to what he viewed as the central aspect of an atheist view on human life (a different topic, but one I like) and said something along the lines of "atheists think all humans are good for are eating and shagging".  I replied, saying something like that insulting belief statements with a trivialising misrepresentation is a fairly odious habit and that I don't really want a conversation involving things like that*.  I've not read the replies, on account of the whole not wanting that conversation.

The thing with the shagging and eating is that it's not just insulting, it's obviously wrong and lacks creativity.  2 out of the 3 I can deal with - insulting and wrong, if it's creative, great, and the same for the other combinations really.  But all 3 and it gets fairly dull.  Also he was arguing in the guise of his proselytising belief system, which I'm confident in taking as a proselytising fail.

I do wonder what goes through peoples heads - "atheists think that humans are just about shagging, we're obviously about more than shagging, so atheists are wrong."  Do they not think that perhaps there have been intelligent people considering the theory before that, seen the difficulty and explained it?  A damn sad lack of thought and curiosity really.

And it's wrong.  The statement, though I'm not fantastic about these things, would be something relating to the successful propagation of genes.  And then it gets really fascinating, massively, because from this simple very reductionist argument comes, readily understandable through common sense and logic, an explanation for lots of stuff.  It explains the curious colony behaviour of ants and bees, the colour changing behaviour of bottom dwelling river fish, the oddness of peacocks and other loudly displaying animals (those tails are a huge survival disadvantage and there are lots of similar less well know examples), why animals take so much care over their offspring, the tameness of dogs (weirdly, the floppy ear look of tame dogs is intimately related to their tameness - example of a gene having multiple effects) and many other things, those are the examples I can remember off the top of my head.

If you extend it to evolutionary psychology it explains huge amounts of human behaviour.  Our tendency to form groups, our tendency to demonise other groups (and through that go to war), explains us taking care of our children, willingness to sacrifice ourselves for others, altruism, our inclination to seek wealth and status, the tendency to cuckold each other, that we specialise in tasks and trade between groups, that we try to exploit those who let us and that we won't exploit those who don't let us.  As a start, there's more.

This is a fascinating subject, well worth reading about if you have any curiosity about why humans behave as they do - makes so much so clear from such a simple starting argument.  The reasoning is sometimes tough but almost universally understandable with a smidgen of effort.  The Origins of Virtue and The Red Queen by Matt Ridley and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins** are all great books around the subject of what it means to have genes that propagate.

And bringing it back to the start, yes it does also explain why we seek to shag and eat, obviously.

The final comment of said poorly informed religious person was along the lines of "you cannot know anything without God."  This struck me as stupid, I clearly know things, so I asked one of my intelligent friends† who studied philosophy.  She explained he's using a variant of "justified, true belief" in that you know something if you believe it and if it is true, which I'd come across, but with that statement you also add in revealed by God as the same thing as true.‡

This is amusing.  He clearly didn't have any clue about what it means to think evolution is the mechanism behind human development.  Apparently I can't know things because I don't believe in God.  He doesn't know things because he doesn't care to learn.  I know which I prefer.


*in my first reply I did the same back, under the guise of a worked example.  But I was being rude, deleted the comment and apologised.  The delete key is a wonderful thing, an easy test of sincerity of apologies.  Of course if someone has already replied then it gets more complicated, removing the context of the conversation.  Though the trivialising is easy, it you don't mind insults against Jesus, Zombie Jesus is a good and different example.  I like this one because it's pretty funny.  It is also fairly offensive and representative of how you can trivialise Christianity through partial misrepresentation.

**he does biology very well, irrespective of his angry old man appearance

†Also good looking.  Socially able, too, for a foreigner in the UK.

‡ Wiki:

In psychiatry, the term neologism is used to describe the use of words that only have meaning to the person who uses them, independent of their common meaning. This is considered normal in children, but a symptom of thought disorder (indicative of a psychotic mental illness, such as schizophrenia) in adults