Spain’s huge Christmas lottery spreads riches worth almost €3bn
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The top prize, known as *El Gordo *or the Fat One, was won by ticket
holders in the northern city of Logroño
Players with winning tickets in Spain’s huge...
32 minutes ago
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YES STILL The BEST Selling BOOK of all Books, ..... Still, despite the view of professional philosophers and world-class scientists, religious beliefs have a universal appeal. What explains this?
ReplyDeleteGenes and environment explain human beliefs and behaviors—people do things because they are genomes in environments. The near universal appeal of religious belief suggests a biological component to religious beliefs and practices, and science increasingly confirms this view. There is a scientific consensus that our brains have been subject to natural selection. So what survival and reproductive roles might religious beliefs and practices have played in our evolutionary history? What mechanisms caused the mind to evolve toward religious beliefs and practices?
Today there are two basic explanations offered. One says that religion evolved by natural selection—religion is an adaptation that provides an evolutionary advantage. For example religion may have evolved to enhance social cohesion and cooperation—it may have helped groups survive. The other explanation claims that religious beliefs and practices arose as byproducts of other adaptive traits. For example, intelligence is an adaptation that aids survival. Yet it also forms causal narratives for natural occurrences and postulates the existence of other minds. Thus the idea of hidden Gods explaining natural events was born. Religion’s smart-people problem: The shaky intellectual foundations of absolute faith http://www.salon.com/2014/12/21/religions_smart_people_problem_the_shaky_intellectual_foundations_of_absolute_faith/ via @Salon