Atheism's brilliant often counter-intuitive rewiring.

[Edwardo Piet]

On h3rod's introduction thread Tiberius mentioned something interesting I thought worth talking about.
Tiberius mentioned how atheism is often a rewiring of the way we think about things. As people are often rewired wrong, or something to that effect.
About the rewiring that Adrian mentioned, I think whats interesting is that Darwinian evolution by natural selection is counter-intuitive and yet so natural and correct.
And also whats interesting is I believe that Einstein once said something like : "Of course the only really valuable thing is intuition".
In a lot of cases I agree with Einstein but I certainly disagree with the idea that intuition is indeed THAT valuable. For I think evolution by natural selection is extremely true and extremely profoundlyvaluable - and yet its counter-intuitive.
It isn't once you understand it, or to everyone, but at least when evolution was first discovered it was very counter-intuitive.
I find this interesting.

[Tiberius]

Well the thing about evolution is that it doesn't have a goal, so I can understand why you think it's counter-intuitive but it really isn't. It's like claiming throwing paint at a wall randomly isn't "painting" when the end product could actually look rather good (well...to some people). If a system doesn't have a goal, it doesn't mean that it's counter-intuitive, simply because it had no intuition to begin with.

[Jason Jarred]

Isn't intuition the sub-conscious recognition of a pattern based on prior experience? That would be my definition, and I'd take it further by hypothesising that intuition possibly correlates with factors such as personality, intelligence, education, emotional intelligence etc.
My reason for this is that as I've aged, and my experience has increased, I have found that my intuition has also increased. However I've also noticed a direct correlation between my peace of mind (linked to frequency of meditation) and intuition, but I don't see this as anything metaphysical. One possible explanation is that meditation quiets my conscious mind, enabling me to pay more attention when my sub-conscious recognises or 'intuits' a pattern it has seen before, warning me of the potential consequence based on prior experience.

Now that I got that out of the way - I don't believe Evolution could *ever* be intuitive (based on my own definition of intuition) simply because we don't live long enough for us to absorb what evolution truly is or means, regardless of the fact that we can understand it scientifically and know it as the most workable scientific theory of human development that we currently possess.

If humans could expand their lifespan by 1000's of years, then perhaps theories such as evolution could be 'intuited' more easily as the conscious and subconscious come to understand how species evolve and change over a large span of time.

[Edwardo Piet]

Yeah, well its certainly not counter-intuitive to me, God is more counter-intuitive because I find the whole "God" and "Supernatural" thing absurd.
I just mean when the idea first arrived, when Darwin and Wallace first talked of it, it went against a lot of people's intuition.
And a lot of people don't understand it today.
It may not be against our intuition, I find at least the basics very easy to understand, but its not like that for everyone.
'It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe..' - Richard Dawkins.