• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Chimpanzee Religion

Revoltingest

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
Someone asked what I'd accept as evidence of chimp religion.
monkey2.jpg
 
Left Coast

Left Coast

This Is Water
Staff member
Premium Member
cladking said:
Abstractions like "thought", "belief", reductionism, and taxonomies are part of modern languages and these languages are the formatting of thought. We do it by means of a highly complex and symbolic language. Animal languages are neither complex nor symbolic. Like Ancient Language they lack the vocabulary and means to express any sort of abstraction.
Click to expand...

Non-human animals (again, we are also animals) are indeed capable of both comprehending and producing language. Yes, their abilities are obviously rudimentary, as we would expect. You're conceiving religion in its most developed form. If you accept the reality of evolution, surely you have to admit that this complexity and nuance originated from more simple versions, including simpler cognitive processes, emotions, and corresponding behaviors.

That there exists a cause at all is an abstraction. I'm sure all animals see that all effects have causes
Click to expand...

Then you admit that all animals (even I don't know that'd go that far) engage in some rudimentary level of abstraction, by your own definition.

but the the extrapolation that there mustta been an initial cause is an abstraction and that this initial cause is a consciousness is a speculation and circular argument. This is what Homo Omnisciencis does; create circular arguments and then live our lives in terms of these arguments.
Click to expand...

You're making an assumption that religiosity/spirituality can't exist, even in its most rudimentary form, without a belief in a Supreme Creator of all things. There's no rational reason to make that assumption, certainly not from the history of religion.
 
cladking

cladking

Well-Known Member
Left Coast said:
If you accept the reality of evolution, surely you have to admit that this complexity and nuance originated from more simple versions, including simpler cognitive processes, emotions, and corresponding behaviors.
Click to expand...

I not only don't believe in evolution but I don't believe in "intelligence" either. For most practical purposes there's just not much difference in effectiveness of human and animal "thinking". Humans simply have more knowledge made possible not by intelligence but the ability of complex language to allow generational accumulation. I also don' believe that human progress has been linear. It was linear for the first 40,000 years but for the last 4000 years it has been hit and miss. The last 400 years of science has been relatively linear but then the last 40 years has been a movement back toward the dark ages. I call these times a 'grey ages" brought to us by Look and See Science.

I believe language is programming for the brain and the language we've used for 4000 years since the "tower of babel" provides a very poor perspective for understanding things like consciousness, and religion or science. Since "religious precepts" are the province of consciousness (and only human consciousness as programmed by modern language) we don't easily see the causations of religious beliefs. I believe these beliefs are a combination of the awe all consciousness finds for nature and the confusion of language and made possible by the abstractions of language. Modern language has had a linear progress for 4000 years and this certainly means consciousness has "evolved" but obviously this is individual.

Perhaps I should say this more simply. Complexity isn't necessary for much of anything or humans couldn't do it. Accumulated knowledge is complex but rocket science is not because it is broken down into comprehensible bits and pieces. If complexity were necessary to religion, it would not exist. It's not the lack of complexity that prevents animals from having religion it is the inability to form abstractions because they lack words for "belief" "thought", taxonomies, and reductionism; this lack shows they have no ability for abstractions and no evidence exists that religion can exist without abstractions.

Left Coast said:
Then you admit that all animals (even I don't know that'd go that far) engage in some rudimentary level of abstraction, by your own definition.
Click to expand...

I don't think the distinction between cause and effect is so much an abstraction as the root of consciousness itself. The observation of cause and effect can virtually be defined as consciousness. These are merely manifestations of the logical wiring of the brain. The brain is four dimensional just like reality and it is based on logic just like reality. Language is neither.

Left Coast said:
You're making an assumption that religiosity/spirituality can't exist, even in its most rudimentary form, without a belief in a Supreme Creator of all things. There's no rational reason to make that assumption, certainly not from the history of religion.
Click to expand...

Not really. I know no reason an animal or even all animals might not have some level of "spirituality". I would define religion as a search for original causes rather than a belief in (a) Creator(s). Anything that doesn't suggest an initial cause would more properly be called a 'moral code" in my opinion. I doubt chimps have moral codes much more complex than at whom it is OK to fling their feces.
 
Last edited:
james bond

james bond

Well-Known Member
Heyo said:
Click to expand...


He's not fully bipedal. I think bears do a better job. We had a bear who became fully bipedal due to injury. Maybe we should have a bear religion.

If the present is the key to the past, then bipedalism for apes in the past didn't happen either.
 
Last edited:
Bear Wild

Bear Wild

Well-Known Member
Dan From Smithville said:
I am dubious about religious behavior in chimps, but whales sing. Maybe their is a hymn or two somewhere in their set list.
Click to expand...
Now open your mind a little and read the article and give it a thought. Even if you believe in god why would that god include other organisms. More important in the theory of evolution there is the behavioral patterns that create advantages. Humans developed religion as we think of it today but it began at some point. And look beyond just the words associated with religion and consider the behaviors. After all even rabbits should be able to have religion. So can you make a case for chimpanzee religion, think beyond the need for written word.
 
Bear Wild

Bear Wild

Well-Known Member
ChristineM said:
And walking on water, don't forget the walking on water
Click to expand...
I do not think anyone has observed a chimpanzee or bonobo walking on water however they do enjoy a much more amazing miracle. They appreciate an organism that can take water and a gas and make sugar. Not to mention oxygen. Let me know if you can think of a better miracle.
 
Bear Wild

Bear Wild

Well-Known Member
Windwalker said:
I downloaded the PDF and can't wait to read it. The abstract really grabbed me. I have little doubt this is not completely true. We humans think much too highly of ourselves that we completely unique and above all other animals.
Click to expand...
Thank you for having an open mind. We are so humancentric and impressed with our own language that we find it hard to see all of the potential in our amazing world.
 
Bear Wild

Bear Wild

Well-Known Member
Left Coast said:
Non-human animals (again, we are also animals) are indeed capable of both comprehending and producing language. Yes, their abilities are obviously rudimentary, as we would expect. You're conceiving religion in its most developed form. If you accept the reality of evolution, surely you have to admit that this complexity and nuance originated from more simple versions, including simpler cognitive processes, emotions, and corresponding behaviors.



Then you admit that all animals (even I don't know that'd go that far) engage in some rudimentary level of abstraction, by your own definition.



You're making an assumption that religiosity/spirituality can't exist, even in its most rudimentary form, without a belief in a Supreme Creator of all things. There's no rational reason to make that assumption, certainly not from the history of religion.
Click to expand...

Exactly. No one would say that chimpanzees or bonobos (or other ape) have the complex religious beliefs that we have yet the article makes a good argument that they do things that are clearly not for survival that appear to be recognizing the world around them with emotional reactions. They are aware of life and death, They show moral behavioral patterns that support the group. What is more basic to religion than our understanding of our connection with the world, seeing it with wonder, recognizing our own mortality, recognizing altruistic behaviors.
 
Heyo

Heyo

Veteran Member
james bond said:

He's not fully bipedal. I think bears do a better job. We had a bear who became fully bipedal due to injury. Maybe we should have a bear religion.

If the present is the key to the past, then bipedalism for apes in the past didn't happen either.
Click to expand...
Do you know which animals are fully bipedal, not only occasionally? All the surviving dinosaurs. And on top of that they have some weird, almost religious behavior.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top