- (Or, how God created your brain)
Fascinating cover story in this week’s New Scientist: Natural Born Believers. Read the full article there, but here’s a taste:
It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. … It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods. … Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. …
The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation … [but] the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.
An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works. … [1] Our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things – things with minds… – and inanimate objects. … [2] an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none.
It’s a nice attempt….
Here’s mine:
- our minds are finely tuned to believe in God because He exists, and “has put eternity into man’s heart” (Ecc. 3:11),
- religous belief is common to all cultures because God exists and “his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20)
- we see purpose and design everywhere, because everything we see is purposed and designed by “God who fulfills his purpose for me” (Psalm 57:2)
Though, I agree: “All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.”
Interesting, though, isn’t it… that “children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention”…
Interesting, yes, but not terribly surprising given how similar the concept of a god is to that of a parent from the perspective of a small child. God is “Our Father”, after all, like a super-parent. Freud wrote a lot on the subject.