Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[The Grand Nudger]

On the contrary, I think inscrutability and mystery is likely the primeval perception of underlying cause of things.   The main human perceptive framework for inscrutability and mystery derived from social cognitive mechanism evolved to handle complex unpredictable behavior by fellow humans or closely associated animals.   So humans primevally and reflexively associate unpredictability of nature with inscrutability and mystery of capricious, but interactable, beings with whim and will. 


The split is recent, because for much of the time prior to the split there was no perception of the existence any such thing as a nature separate from whim and will of capricious beings that that is the underlying  motivators for things to happen.

Yeah, we see ourselves everywhere, in everything - but the idea that the concept of nature is new is wholly and completely wrong.  Gods were invented to bargain with sacred nature, which was our religious focus before we invented those gods for that purpose, and there have been atheists for at least as long as the written word who tend to comment on some variation of the theme "it's just nature, this shit is for the benefit of worldly priests".  

They found explanations for everything - we'd call them wrong - but, to them, the world they were trying to interact with wasn't mysterious or inscrutable, nor was a god.  They played by rules, they were subject to nature, they had a limited range of interests and influence.  They could be bound.  

Mystery and inscrutability popped up when the cults around gods had become so elaborate and divorced from their basis in life that the articles of belief could not be maintained.  Those two things stand in, in contemporary belief, for why their beliefs seem wrong on their face - but are still somehow right.