Just to show you that our UK government can be just as irrational as that in the US-
Quoted from -The Times October 11, 2005
Belief in higher power may have been key to mankind’s survival
By Lewis Smith
SPIRITUALITY and a belief in God may be a result of evolutionary pressure, Lord Winston said yesterday.
The Labour peer stepped out of line with mainstream scientific thinking to suggest that religiosity may have a genetic basis. He argued that, in life or death situations, belief can be the key to survival and for this reason has become programmed into human genes. “I take the view, which is quite controversial among scientists, that religious values are worthwhile,” Lord Winston said at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival.
“There may be a selective reason why we have become religious. Evolutionary pressure may have meant it was an advantage to us. My premise is that man was a deeply threatened species from the savannah. I think that having a feeling there’s something above you may have been a powerful help to survival.”
The belief in some form of spirituality led, in time, to the development of organised religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam, he said.
He dismissed, however, the idea that the identification of a gene that predisposes people to believe in God would get science any closer to answering the question of whether there is a God. It would, though, reduce the gulf that exists between scientific thought and theology because they would cease to be seen as diametric- ally opposed. “My contention is we cannot explain the universe,” he said. “Religion and science are different views of looking at uncertainty. I don’t think they are opposed.”
Lord Winston will present his theory in a new book, The Story of God, published later this month, and a three-part television series to be broadcast at Christmas. In them he will contend that “transcendentalism” may help to explain how it was that prehistoric man took on such tasks as building Stonehenge.
“My key point is the transcendentalism,” he said. “How is it ancient people took blocks of stone all the way from Wales to dump them at Stonehenge? It can only be explained by the search for transcendentalism. The effort, the sheer exasperation of doing that, must have meant they were driven by something higher than themselves.”
The existence of a religiosity gene could have been an important factor in man’s struggle for survival but would by no means have been an over-riding consideration. “It would be a side issue in evolution,” he said after giving a talk to children about the workings of the human body. “If it wasn’t, we would all be wholly religious or wholly unreligious.”
He said that there is already some limited evidence to support his ideas, such as the correlation between twins and religiosity even when the twins have been separated since birth.
Lord Winston said that research by Dean Hamar, who sparked controversy when he announced the existence of a gene for homosexuality, suggested the existence of a “God gene”.
This, he said, is linked to neurotransmitters in the brain that can engender feelings of wellbeing and may be “related to religiosity”.
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