Thursday, March 14, 2013

Memes, Demons, and Dawkins

It is not entirely clear how it is that positing unseen and undefined entities that infect human minds by unassessed processes involving the entities’ own quest for transmission and that cause people to do things that transcend their genetic imperatives is fundamentally different from medieval demonology or, in any case, qualifies as an empirically grounded explanation in terms of natural causes.

Jeffrey Schloss & Michael Murray, eds., The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion (Oxford 2009), 24.

1 comment:

  1. Although I might point out that we have more evidence of demonic possession than we do of the spontaneous generation of self-reproducing DNA.

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