New Athiest Needs Help

[Rampant.A.I.]

A logical person - when confronted with the sheer number of conflicting claims of various religions - would first look at the claim and eliminate those whose story includes things that do not agree with known reality - and the bible contains enough of that to be a comic book - not of use.

Scientists are logical and they don't eliminate claims that disagree with known reality. The fact that people have been recognizing and worshiping a higher supernatural being since the beginning of known human history shows that we have recognized his existence all along.

It shows people have an innate need to believe in something that isn't necessarily there.

In 2006, during a symposium in Istanbul, Herman van Praag, a professor of biological psychiatry, taking his lead from the 95 percent of believers in the United States, tried to convince me that atheism was an “anomaly.” “That depends on who you compare yourself to,” I replied. In 1996 a poll of American scientists revealed that only 39 percent were believers, a much smaller percentage than the national average. Only 7 percent of the country’s top scientists (defined for this poll as the members of the National Academy of Sciences) professed a belief in God, while almost no Nobel laureates are religious.
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Moreover, meta-analysis has shown a correlation among atheism, education, and IQ. So there are striking differences within populations, and it’s clear that degree of atheism is linked to intelligence, education, academic achievement, and a positive interest in natural science.

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Scientists also differ per discipline: Biologists are less prone to believe in God and the hereafter than physicists. So it isn’t surprising that the vast majority (78 percent) of eminent evolutionary biologists polled called themselves materialists (meaning that they believe physical matter to be the only reality). Almost three quarters (72 percent) of them regarded religion as a social phenomenon that had evolved along with Homo sapiens. They saw it as part of evolution, rather than conflicting with it.
It does indeed seem that religion must have afforded an evolutionary advantage. Receptiveness to religion is determined by spirituality, which is 50 percent genetically determined, as twin studies have shown. Spirituality is a characteristic that everyone has to a degree, even if they don’t belong to a church. Religion is the local shape given to our spiritual feelings. The decision to be religious or not certainly isn’t “free.” The surroundings in which we grow up cause the parental religion to be imprinted in our brain circuitries during early development, in a similar way to our native language.

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Chemical messengers like serotonin affect the extent to which we are spiritual: The number of serotonin receptors in the brain corresponds to scores for spirituality. And substances that affect serotonin, like LSD, mescaline (from the peyote cactus), and psilocybin (from magic mushrooms) can generate mystical and spiritual experiences. Spiritual experiences can also be induced with substances that affect the brain’s opiate system.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/in...ligion.htm

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/04/this_is_...of_belief/

PS: arguments ad populum are fallacious.