Sunday, April 07, 2019

Is religion lost at the hands of scientific evolution?


Darwin and natural evolution almost reflected what Saint Thomas said, that human law builds on natural law. But evolution did not really affirm natural law building on Gods laws. And with that the importance of natural law increased until it virtually destroyed the idea of Gods law as ruling nature, replacing it with natural laws, even if Darwin himself didn't quite admit it. Religion and belief in God have steadily decreased since then.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident" the truths he referred to were the best reading of the natural laws at the time determined by reason and science, with a little religion thrown in.

Natural and moral laws are more or less the same across all cultures and religions and are based more on human nature than religious edicts, even though religions have claimed them and have helped in bonding the moral laws. As E.O. Wilson put it, “Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.” And religions have helped in bonding or balancing this behavior.

Across the world human nature is kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual, marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of successful selection, followed by individual selection.

Cultures can operate for a time with behavior that goes against this human nature, with such experiments as Marxism, but culture is eventually pulled back by the biological and genetic leash of real human nature to cultures that better reflect real human nature, and humans then work within and adapt to the environments they find themselves living in.

Is religion lost at the hands of scientific evolution? No, but religion and God are transformed: we evolve toward ascending levels of real Godhood in the material world by applying natural evolutionary laws and building on real human nature and the biological origin of social behavior. This transformation is expanded in the philosophy of theological materialism.

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