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Originally Posted by randilover
I get your thinking here. The herd instinct arguement. There's also the self preservation one. So the idea would be, for example, if you hear a man calling for help who's drowning in a river, you can either go help him (herd) or stay away to make sure you don't get hurt (self preserve). Do I have that right? I have a counter for this, but don't have teh time right now.
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Kind of, but not exactly. Again, I'll preface my statement with "I really have no idea." That said, it's not exactly the herd mentality or self preserverance. More subtle than that, and with more societal forces. Say, there is a man calling for help in the river (again, we're talking prehistoric times with people living in small groups). Someone goes and saves him. His group is going to reward him, which could possibly be elevated his stature in the group, and thus possibly increases reproduction chances. Say he doesn't help the man in the river, and his group finds out. They could banish him, and he has no chance of passing on his genes. This is just a hypothesis I have no evidence for.
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Originally Posted by randilover
On another note, did anyone watch the PBS special (it was on last night on one of my stations) about Freud and C.S. Lewis, called Questions on God? It is based on the class that a guy named Nicoli teaches at Harvard, and he compares and contrasts the two men, the atheist and the apologist. It's got 2 parts to each section, one is an acted narrative of the two mens view on various subjects (death, suffering, miracles, etc.), and after each one, they cut away to a round table discussion with a collection of smart people with Nicoli, themselves Christians, theists, atheists, skeptics. Really cool show. I love it, but then I'm a fan of C.S. Lewis, so I'm slightly biased. The table discussions are pretty interesting, although some of the people are sometimes squishy and vauge it's kind of hum-drum. Overall it's pretty cool. Any other thoughts?
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I saw promos for that, but I never saw it. I'm not a huge Freud fan, so it didn't attract me as much as if the counter-Christian had been someone I would have been intrigued with. I didn't know they had the round table discussion, that might have interested me more.