(March 29, 2017 at 1:40 pm)Flavius Wrote: You could throw those idiotic monkeys back in time to observe the very earliest occurrence of biological life and they will still manage to substitute their deity into the story to make it fit their standards. It's called confirmation bias, and it's imbedded so deep into their skulls.
That "conformation bias" is deep rooted, but it is evolution, not just our species. "confirmation bias" is a term humans use. In evolution we see other mammals and other species as well create groups, and by cooperating they develop patterns. Life at the same time, even solitary species as well as social species like ours, can base their patterns on completely false perceptions. It is because life evolved not always having the time to slow down and test and confirm what it senses. So our brains gap fill.
Why is it a predatory insect wont eat a butterfly with the big eyes on the back of it? Because the predator falsely sees the pattern of the butterfly as being real eyes. As Dawkins describes falling for false perceptions in his book "the God Delusion" as being akin to "the moth mistaking the light bulb for the natural moonlight".
In our early species we did not have our modern scientific knowledge, we didn't even have written language 150,000 years ago. So back then the world was scary, like a volcano, or storm, or animals. So we ended up projecting human qualities on those things, on nature and animals, and created rituals in order to bargain with what we thought was controlling those things. Early gods/spirits/deities were earthy. When humans learned how to farm in one place, and started building cities, the gods became more human like, then of course some created monotheism, and the God of Abraham was not the first attempt at monotheism.
Today worldwide most confirmation bias is due to the young being indoctrinated at birth. Since we evolved to be social humans end up defending that which is local and that can still be totally based on a falsehood. Just like the Egyptians were successful for 3,000 years centering their society around completely false gods. Unfortunately today most humans are not introspective enough to see that even today, they are still making the same mistake the Egyptians did.
