#76 – Origin and Evolution of … morality and religion

Evolution produces organisms who find more and more ways to work with each other to survive: the origin of the agape love we’ve been talking about?

As soon as life appeared on earth roughly four billion years ago, its survival was driven by two opposing forces.

One was entirely self-oriented, and commanded things like:

• kill or be killed
• steal in order to survive
• fear and hate “the other”
• think only about self

The second force was other-oriented. It found strategic value in cooperating, and promoted very different outcomes:

• live in symbiosis (at the cellular level [mitochondria; chloroplasts] and at the whole organism level [far too many examples to cite here])
• mutual interdependence 
• altruism and compassion
• “it’s better to snuggle for survival than to struggle for survival”

These two forces were operating long before living organisms developed a level of self-awareness that we would call consciousness, and continued as those life forms progressed into higher and higher cognitive levels.

Dr. Jeffrey Schloss will talk about how these two subliminal driving forces rose to the conscious level in our emerging agape-capable beings … the newest branch on the evolutionary tree of life … hominids. We’ll also look at hominids as inherently teleologists (we see a purpose in/for everything) with a twitchy agency detection (we sense beings lurking everywhere) and pattern recognition (we connect dots that aren’t there).

More importantly, we’ll see how those characteristics, together with some powerful cognitive abilities (language; memory; abstract thinking and symbolism), helped us hominids begin to develop a religious streak.

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Jeffrey Schloss, go to his webpages at Westmont or at Biologos or at the Faraday Institute.

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