R.K.: Alright. I was continuing the conversation all by myself talking about my approach to bottom-up and how I believe we are transitioning from a top-down world to a more bottom-up world and that we've come from that and what is really exciting to me is what you say is basically that this bottom-up way of being has been around. It's deep in our DNA and in our genes and it goes back a hundred million, or more years. Maybe, if it is birds, how far back do birds go?
F.W.: Well, the split between mammals and birds is like two hundred million years ago.
R.K.: Two hundred million years ago. Amazing!
F.W.: So the bottom-up view is of course very much a biological view and neuroscience is also very much a bottom-up science at the moment. So the thinking is that we see structures from above, so to speak, so we think for example that our behavior is based on reasoning and that we have reasons to do this and reasons to do that, but often our behavior is based on intuitions and emotions that we barely control and we automatically choose this, or choose that and then afterwards we come up with wonderful reasons of why did this, of why we married that person, or we come up with all these good reasons, but actually our decisions are not necessarily produced by that kind of reasoning.
So that's the view, that is becoming very popular, actually also in psychology, that we are sort of bottom-up creatures.
But you asked about religion and atheism, and so on. So the reason the book is called, The Bonobo and the Atheists, is because there's a group of neo-atheists at the moment who are very anti-religion. So religion is all wrong and it's not just that God doesn't exist. That's not the only issue they have. It's that they think religion is really morally corrupt and you should fight against religion and also that science is the answer to everything.
Science will solve all the problems in the world. So in my book, I argue against that in the sense that I think it's fine to be an atheist. I myself am not a believer and I think you can be moral and be an atheist. I think those two things can very well go together, but I don't believe that we should be trashing religion the way they are because for me the puzzle is why do all human societies have religions?
There are no human societies without a religion, or without a belief in the supernatural which to me means that it does something for us, that it's something important to the human species and their societies. So the question for me is not so much does God exist, or not exist, which is not a question that I can answer, but why do we have religions and what do religions do for us? What is the function of them in society? And that's for me the more important issue. So that's an issue that I address in the book also.
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