RE: I’m an atheist. So why can’t I shake God?
February 4, 2016 at 10:41 pm
(This post was last modified: February 4, 2016 at 11:08 pm by Simon Moon.)
(February 4, 2016 at 10:10 pm)athrock Wrote: Turns out it's pretty hard to believe in nothing when your psyche is wired for faith.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/postevery...age%2Fcard
After reading the article, my questions are:
Why on God's green earth is the human brain wired for faith when our development is the result of purely evolutionary processes with no supreme being involved at all?
Is it possible that God gave us brains that are pre-wired for receptivity to His existence to make it easier for us to believe in Him?
We are not pre wired for faith in gods. We are pre wired for our brains to be susceptible to believing things on bad evidence and for bad reasons.
Our brains are not one thing. They are kludged together from several parts and systems left over from our ancient evolutionary past, with more recent parts stuck to the front, and not well wired to the rest. Faith based religious beliefs are a side effect of the way our brains are constructed, not the purpose of some god.
We evolved to survive on the African Savannah, where pattern recognition, induction, and inference were among our survival mechanism. These lead to seeing agency where there is none, seeing relations between actions/results where there aren't any, feeling like there is something communicating with us internally when it is just our own minds.
Is it possible a god gave us brains that are pre-wired for receptivity to his existence to make it easier for us to believe in Him? If you mean in the "well, nothing is impossible" way of being possible, I guess the answer would be yes.
But, before you can begin to speculate on whether our brains were pre wired to believe in gods, you have to demonstrate that at least one of them exists. Only then can we begin to speculate on the attributes of one of these gods. Including it's human brain tinkering abilities.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
