Origins Minus Culture

After spending some time in the origins & creationism board, I have come to realise the impact of cultural upbringing when it relates to origins.

I was simply wondering what ATS thinks an individual, with NO CULTURAL UPBRINGINGS(ie. no cultural deities, no scientific bias, nothing of that sort) would have to say about the origins of the cosmos? Would they come to the conclusion that it must have been created? Or, would they otherwise come to the conclusion that it must have spontaneously begat itself.

What say you?

A2D

reply to post by Agree2Disagree


A person with no cultural background would probably not be especially curious about it. he'd instead be wondering where the good and wimmins are.

reply to post by TheWalkingFox


So, you think if he/she was questioned about it...they'd just respond with an ill-"I don't know" or "who cares?"?

reply to post by Agree2Disagree


Actually I think they would feel threatened by your presence, screech a lot, and either try to get away from you or beat you to death with a chair.

A human with no cultural background is basically a naked, feral primate. Even on a good day, not the best person to sit down with and ask deep scientific question.

reply to post by TheWalkingFox


I'm not saying completely void of logic, reason, and incapable of intellectualism. I'm saying...without preconceptions...completely without bias...uninfluenced by others.....

reply to post by Agree2Disagree


Well, obviously, we're not crazy Russians, so we're not going to lock an infant in an isolation chamber and wait for him to grow up to find out what someone with no human biases would be like (the Russians actually DID this, which is partially what my previous statements are based off)

But alright, you want to work with a purely imaginary construct for this, a culture-free human who ISN'T just a funny-looking chimpanzee. Let's work with that, then.

Ask this person where the universe came from. Devoid of science or religion or culture, he will come up with his own mythological story to explain the cosmos - and only the cosmos he can see.

either that, or he'll look at you, go "Don't know" and go back to doing whatever it was he was doing. Such is the case.

The Pirahã of Brazil are pretty close to what you're looking for. I wouldn't call them "culture free" but seeing as they have no history, no mythology, no concept of time, and are a tribe in a jungle... I imagine they're about as close as you'll ever find in reality.

reply to post by TheWalkingFox


Oh c'mon...you can do better than generalisations..of course they will come up with SOMETHING to explain it...I'm looking for whether you think they'll fall back upon something like Atlas holding the world up...a divine creator like christianity....a singularity expanding like BBT...what kind of crazy stories would they come up with?

I think that he would be unable to come to a conclusion.

He would see around him evidence of order (structure and function of living organisms, cycles of nature, etc...) that would suggest a creative and/or controlling force.

On the other hand, he would also witness forms of chaos constantly disrupting order. This could suggest that what he originally perceived as order was possibly a fluke and that things good and bad "just happen" randomly and spontaneously.

Reconciling these contradictions would escape him.

reply to post by Agree2Disagree


So you're asking people inundated with culture and science to come up with specifics about what a person WITHOUT culture or science would think of the universe?

Well that's simple. This imaginary person will believe whatever the writer wants him to believe.

reply to post by GoneGrey


Thank you. This is the kind of answer I was looking for.

So, you think the mixture of chaos and order would just bewilder him...makes sense

Ok, I will try to remember my anthropology class from more than 10 years ago... ugh... brain hurts... ok, I think I got it... lets see...

My teacher described Culture as the product of how man works his environment. So you can't really say someone has no culture. Just a very different one. Eskimos live in an environment much different than the average US citizen, for example. They can see more than 100 different variations of the color White and when you visit them the Eskimo lets you sleep with his wife.

Now, before we humans saw ourselves as individuals, we used to see ourselves as nothing but an extension of the environment around us. The notion of an individual still didnt exist. The moment we start to notice, really notice, the stars, the sun, the moon, etc, we see that we, the group of humans, are small in comparison to all this grandiosity. And thus the notion of the SUPERNATURAL is born.

The notion of individual appears once we understand the notion of death. Then the anthropology class goes on and one to describe the beginning of tribes, families, clans, etc etc...

But now to answer your question, I think it is fair to associate the way one sees the universe with one's culture, since I agree that culture is a byproduct of how one works his environment.

It could vary from that person thinking everything that exists is what he sees, to varied forms of extrapolations about the supernatural...

Sorry, that was the best I could do with my old memory. By the way, I almost failed anthropology, but that class was really cool, so it's the only one I remember. =P

No culture, no science, no bias.

You have to state their quality of life. Is everything handed to them or must they work from dusk till dawn simply to survive ?

One only begins to ask questions, when one has idle time. Postulating the origins of the universe will only begin when they have surplus.

If they are fed and cared for by another, then the "guy" delivering the plate becomes god/creator/father and all would revolve around him.

reply to post by EdCase512


They work to survive...but it's not dusk til dawn...I'd say...like the Native Americans minus their preconceived notions of the gods....

reply to post by Agree2Disagree

You pretty much answer your own question here if you think about it. Preconceived notions are simply notions that have knocked around awhile and become facts...even if they patently are not.

Kinda like the worst urban legends.

reply to post by Agree2Disagree


As others (including myself) have pointed out to you, they would simply come up with their own mythology, most likely. We know this because, well, with very, very, very few exceptions (the Piraha, again) every group of humans in the world has conjured up their own body of myths about pretty much everything. We're still doing it today. The only difference is, these folks would be like our oldest ancestors, starting from a clean slate. The direction htey go from there is completely unpredictable

However, there are probably a few givens.

They will see the universe as terracentric. The sky appears to float around and over the earth, and so this is what they're bound to believe. Galileo was a HUGE revolutionary, as even the highly scientific Chinese, Maya, Inca, Egyptians, Greeks, and Muslim scholars before him believed the heavens revolved around the earth.

If they have any sort of agriculture, they will have a basic concept of heredity. This is rather mandatory for agriculture even as basic as dog breeding. How this expressed in their culture is anyone's guess.

They would very likely be animistic. The human eye is programmed to see human and animal features easily, and so will see them even where there are no humans or animals. A cliff face which looks vaguely like a human face might become an actual being in these people's mythos, perhaps the great Cliff Father or what have you.

They will also very likely have the sense that the mind and the body are separate, and thus the concept of "souls" to some degree. Very likely they will not have a concept of an afterlife - but they may believe in reincarnation, that old souls get new bodies.

These are pretty basic, kind of the "root" of human cultures, due simply to the way humans "work". We have a certain set or witing and programming from the day we're born.

We also have this funny habit where we always want to have an answer, even if we don't actually KNOW the answer. For instance, if you ask this guy, "what are the stars?" he'll definitely have an answer. That answer will be whatever sounds good to him on such short notice. Anything from "holes in the tent that makes night, letting the sunlight through" to "Fireflies that somehow got stuck up there in the big bluish-black thing"

reply to post by henriquefd


Wait, back up just a minute there..... You know any Eskimo's with hot wives?