Genetics Influences Whether Someone is Religious Or Not

Let me start off this response with an apology. I did a terrible job connecting my ideas and using clear statements during Round 2. Most of my Round 3 response will be correcting these mistakes. -------------------------------------------------------- LuckyLemon says, “According to your ‘Intelligence genes reveal their complexity’ reference, intelligence connects to how the brain is put together in terms of function, but nowhere in that article did it address that multiple genes influencing that intelligence connects with the same concept of multiple genes influencing your religion.” He’s right. The article does not claim “that multiple genes influencing that intelligence connects with the same concept of multiple genes influencing your religion.” This connection between intelligence and religion is one I should’ve explicitly made in Round 2, so I attempt to make it now. (By the way, I wasn’t trying to introduce evidence to suggest how nontheists may be more intelligent than theists are. That evidence wouldn’t support or invalidate my claim that religiosity is influenced by genetics.) From the article, Something as subtle and complex as intelligence was never going to be pinned on just a handful of genes, as a huge trawl across the human genome seems to confirm. Although it did turn up hundreds of genes that make a contribution, their individual effects are so small that for the most part they are barely detectable. This does not mean, however, that intelligence is not inherited. (1) The word “intelligence” could be replaced with “religiosity,” and we could see some of the similarities between the two, and thus how religiosity could be genetically based. First, intelligence is difficult to define and quantify, just as religiosity is. Second, researchers use questionnaires to help determine how intelligent a person is, just as they use questionnaires to help determine how religious a person is (as the study from my Round 2 response shows). Third, researchers measure and identify behaviors to determine intelligence, just as they measure and identify behaviors to determine religiosity (again, as the aforementioned study shows). Fourth, researchers use brain mapping technology to determine intelligence, just as they use this technology to determine whether or not someone is having a religious experience (2). And fifth, intelligence is a product of a brain and its cognitive functions, thereby making intelligence a genetic product, just as religiosity is (3). I assume these five similarities lead to the following fifth similarity: since “no one even does studies anymore to look at whether intelligence is heritable” because the scientific consensus is that intelligence is heritable (4), we can assume that religiosity is also heritable, and therefore dependent on genetics. (I know I’m dangerously close to committing the slippery slope fallacy. I know there’s more work for researchers to do to state that religiosity’s being based on genetics is a fact.) LuckyLemon says, “religiosity is not quantifiable/quantitative” because “someone's level of ‘belief’ is not quantitative like a number of apples or statistical pie chart from the Census.” He gives this statement as a response to my definition of religiosity, “some quantifiable variable that reflects ‘[actions that indicate] belief in, obedience to, and reverence for a god, gods, or similar superhuman power’ (I used the OED.com’s third definition of “religion”).” He also said that my definition did not match OED.com’s definition. I did not mean to deceive. I assumed the audience would know I altered the definition a bit because I didn’t include the phrase “some quantifiable variable that reflects” in the quotation, and because I used the phrase “Here I’m defining it as” to introduce the definition. Maybe using the following in my parenthetical note would’ve cleared things up: “I derived this definition from the OED.com’s third definition of ‘religion’.” Since my definition of religiosity is difficult to accept, I’ll have change the definition. But I don’t know what to change it to. If, for the sake of this argument, we don’t assume that religiosity can be quantified, then we may be wasting time. Without this agreement, this debate would boil down to something similar a debate began by the claim “The Marvel Universe is more interesting than the Dragon Ball Universe.” Yes, both debates would be interesting (the latter more so than the former), but nothing substantial would be gained from neither one, unless we consider learning about each other’s preferences the top priority for debating. As I’ve previously stated above, religiosity is difficult to quantify, just as intelligence is. But this difficultly shouldn’t stop us, or doesn’t stop us, from quantifying neither one. We’d just have to determine what it is we’re trying to measure. We’d have to agree on a definition. We’d also have to accept, or agree to, making explanations based on educated assumptions. I assumed LuckyLemon and the audience would be all right with these stipulations because this debate is rather informal, and because we’re not making real world decisions based on the results of this debate. I’ve already attempted to define “religiosity,” and now I attempt to quantify it. The article I used during Round 2, “Familial Resemblance in Religiousness in a Secular Society: A Twin Study” (doi:10.1017/thg.2013.3), tries to quantify religiosity by using a survey. Researchers asked respondents about their daily activities and experiences with religion, and the researchers recorded their responses. They assumed higher scores correlated with higher religiosity and lower scores correlated with lower religiosity. Again, these scores may not be accurate representations of the respondents’ religiosity because the scores were based solely on the unverified responses of the subjects, and because controlling variables and making objective measurements are more difficult in a social science than they are in other sciences such as physics or biology (5). -------------------------------------------------------- LuckyLemon says, “I see a deadlock where we need to truly debate. Genes do not determine religion because genes do not truly determine behavior.” I agree with his identifying our deadlock. I agree with the risk-taking scenario and the “openness/susceptibility” claim he makes. Furthermore, I agree with his claim that there is no “God” gene, or any other gene that is single-handedly responsible for a particular behavior. As I stated during Round 1, “I’m defending the much simpler proposition that genetics influences how religious a person is, or can be.” -------------------------------------------------------- LuckyLemon criticized Elizabeth and Caroline’s story. He said, “By your understanding of religious genetic influences through Punnett Squares, both parents being both homozygous for nonreligiousness should have led to a high percentage of their identical daughters becoming nonreligious as well.” Although Elizabeth and Caroline’s probability of becoming religious was low because neither of their parents were religious, neither Elizabeth nor Caroline were not guaranteed to be nonreligious. LuckyLemon also criticized my contradiction when I used the Punnett square. I should’ve made myself clearer. During Round 2, LuckyLemon says, “if genes influenced whether a human being becomes religious or not, there would not be nearly as many ‘rebellious’ atheists in the midst of strictly Catholic family and religious people from nonreligious families.” He seemed to misunderstand how genetics could help explain how religious parents could have nonreligious children and vice versa, so I thought simplifying the problem to demonstrate the Punnett square would help. Of course I understand, as LuckyLemon and I have already stated numerous times already, that one gene is typically not responsible for one phenotype. If multiple genes are responsible for something as simple as tongue rolling or eye color (6), then there should also be multiple genes for something more complex, like behavior, personality, and religiosity. References 1 – http://postbiota.org... 2 – http://science.howstuffworks.com... 3 – http://en.wikipedia.org... 4 – http://motherboard.vice.com... 5 – http://chemistry.about.com... 6 – http://en.wikipedia.org...