4. EVIDENCE- VS. NON EVIDENCE-BASED KNOWLEDGE.
While science is the quintessential evidence-based system of knowledge, other systems of understanding have been present throughout history and still are part of the human experience. The most well known and pervasive of these systems is what is widely known as religion. While it is not possible to picture all religions with the same stroke, for this discussion I am going to focus on the three major monotheistic religions, namely, christianism, islam and judaism. It is not the objective of this post to discuss any of them in any detail, but only to name them as common examples of a faith-based system of understanding. I.e., a knowledge system that is not subject to the need for scientific proof of the principles in which they are based or the knowledge that they propose.
On the origin of faith and religious belief. In his book "Breaking the Spell", Sam Harris discusses the notion of an evolutionary link between humanity and the development of faith. I would like to go an step further and propose that faith is inherent to the evolutionary development of human-like intelligence. In essence, I submit that any form of intelligence resembling ours, developed by regular evolutionary mechanisms and conferring a survival advantage to the corresponding species would result in the search of supernatural beings, in response to a lack of mechanistic answers for the most basic questions, the development of religions and the development of faith as the factor to hold it together. What I propose is that if we ever were to encounter an extraterrestrial civilation of the kind that we could communicate with, that was able to develop tools and a scientific knowledge about their world, this civilization would be or would have been at a certain stage in its development, religious. The rationale for this assertion is simple, but in my opinion, very powerful. The evolutionary development of intelligence, naturally selected for the survival advantage conferred to its bearers, would consistently result in living entities with larger capacity for asking questions about nature and the universe, than the capacity to answer them. Any intelligent species with a capacity of comunication, learning and teaching would probably be unsatisfied by the lack of answers that would characterize their early development. The mechanistic approach that such intelligence would apply to explain the characteristics of its environment would quickly find extraordinary causes for extraordinary events, such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, death, the regular cycles of their star, etc. This would most likely result in the development of deities, often based on their star, which with time and further sophistication would result in the development of institutionalized religions. It is also possible, that a civilization that would have achieved the scientific understanding necessary for interstelar travel, would by then had majoritarily rejected the idea of a god.
While science is the quintessential evidence-based system of knowledge, other systems of understanding have been present throughout history and still are part of the human experience. The most well known and pervasive of these systems is what is widely known as religion. While it is not possible to picture all religions with the same stroke, for this discussion I am going to focus on the three major monotheistic religions, namely, christianism, islam and judaism. It is not the objective of this post to discuss any of them in any detail, but only to name them as common examples of a faith-based system of understanding. I.e., a knowledge system that is not subject to the need for scientific proof of the principles in which they are based or the knowledge that they propose.
On the origin of faith and religious belief. In his book "Breaking the Spell", Sam Harris discusses the notion of an evolutionary link between humanity and the development of faith. I would like to go an step further and propose that faith is inherent to the evolutionary development of human-like intelligence. In essence, I submit that any form of intelligence resembling ours, developed by regular evolutionary mechanisms and conferring a survival advantage to the corresponding species would result in the search of supernatural beings, in response to a lack of mechanistic answers for the most basic questions, the development of religions and the development of faith as the factor to hold it together. What I propose is that if we ever were to encounter an extraterrestrial civilation of the kind that we could communicate with, that was able to develop tools and a scientific knowledge about their world, this civilization would be or would have been at a certain stage in its development, religious. The rationale for this assertion is simple, but in my opinion, very powerful. The evolutionary development of intelligence, naturally selected for the survival advantage conferred to its bearers, would consistently result in living entities with larger capacity for asking questions about nature and the universe, than the capacity to answer them. Any intelligent species with a capacity of comunication, learning and teaching would probably be unsatisfied by the lack of answers that would characterize their early development. The mechanistic approach that such intelligence would apply to explain the characteristics of its environment would quickly find extraordinary causes for extraordinary events, such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, death, the regular cycles of their star, etc. This would most likely result in the development of deities, often based on their star, which with time and further sophistication would result in the development of institutionalized religions. It is also possible, that a civilization that would have achieved the scientific understanding necessary for interstelar travel, would by then had majoritarily rejected the idea of a god.
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