My view and reasons for them. Atheist and Christians welcome here. (short)

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm not trying to argue that simply being born gives one a predisposition to believing in the christian faith. Not at all. I guess the closest argument I would make a stance on to that is that I think believing in a God or gods is inherent to our development as a species.

If we use the phrase "inherent to our development as a species" very....very loosely..then yeah, sure. More accurately, though, the driving compulsion behind animism is inherent to our development as a species and the manufacture of gods is a cultural and societal development.

As such there is a cognitive bias towards believing in a higher power even in isolation of culture/society.

One might wonder why it took 3.5 billion years to get to a genus that would, in another 2million years or so....come up with animism, and then another 40k years passes until we come up with deism, and another 8k passes until we come up with theism.....if that were the case.  Though..it;s not difficult to "believe" in a "higher power" surrounded by nature. That;s a far cry from god beliefs...developmentally and historically. Hell, I believe in a "higher power". They;re called game wardens. Don;t get caught poaching, those fuckers are monstrous. The earliest fully modern humans also appeared to believe in higher powers..even though we don;t find anything that suggests god beliefs until tens of thousands of years later.

I that regard, not believing in gods is continuity, not a new development......... which leads into this-

I would then have to say that the rejection in the belief God or gods as the arguments are put forth at this point in time are either also an evolutionary process for our species OR it is completely influenced by culture/society because of negative connotations of the belief in God or gods - a reaction, if you will, for the ever growing need to expand our toolset.

There;s still that nagging bit about there not being a theist gene.  It makes no sense to discuss something as evolutionary when it's not heritable.  We also have the problem of all the atheist who lived and died before there was ever a god to have a negative connotation about. That's another amusing thing about god belief...it;s approached as though it were positively ancient...but the gods people are thinking of are younger than a heavy plow. They've only existed for about 4% of our time since full modernity. Even that much larger span of time is still just a percentage of the time that anatomically modern human beings have existed (aprrox 25%).

I guess that is more or less where I sit with atheism at this time. AND this change of view wouldn't be possible without robvalue, Simon Moon, or surreptitious57, so I want to make sure to thank you three for shedding some light on things. And now recently, you have given me something to chew on as well.

Progress, of a sort...I guess.