God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out – perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.

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"If a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god then people feel like they are willing to sacrifice for the community,"
Theories on the evolution of religion tend toward two camps. One argues that
religion is a mental artefact
, co-opted from brain functions that evolved for other tasks.

Aiding the people

Another contends that religion benefited our ancestors. Rather than being a by-product of other brain functions, it is an adaptation in its own right. In this explanation, natural selection slowly purged human populations of the non-religious.
The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn't spread unreal information.

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.
Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

8Expand

The Neural Buddhists - New York Times

the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.

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the militant materialism of some modern scientists.

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems.
the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.
The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.
This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.
First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.
the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate.
The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.

Salon.com Life | You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber

The integral philosopher explains the difference between religion, New Age fads and the ultimate reality that traditional science can't touch.

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The Book of Creation

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The Observer - Interface of science, faith to be analyzed

Interface of science, faith to be analyzed

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more fromwww.ndsmcobserver.com

Seed: Suspending Life

Suspending Life

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3.06: A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain

A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain

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more fromwww.wired.com

Teilhard de Chardin's Evolutionary Philosophy

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more fromwww.kheper.net

CMC Magazine: Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere

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more fromwww.december.com

TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a visionary French Jesuit, paleontologist, biologist, and philosopher, who spent the bulk of his life trying to integrate religious experience with natural science, most specifically Christian theology with theories of evolution.

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more fromwww.gaiamind.com

God and Science

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more fromwww.godweb.org

Rupert Sheldrake Online - Homepage

Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world’s most innovative biologists, is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory.

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Rupert Sheldrake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

His book, A New Science of Life, was published a week after the New Scientist article. In it, Sheldrake put forward the hypothesis of formative causation (the theory of morphic resonance)[9], which proposes that phenomena — particularly biological ones — become more probable the more often they occur, and therefore that biological growth and behaviour become guided into patterns laid down by previous similar events. He suggested that this underlies many aspects of science, from evolution to laws of nature. Indeed, he wrote that the laws of nature might be thought of as mutable habits that have evolved since the Big Bang.

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