The two diaries posted recently by
DarkSydeand
PastorDan bring to mind an article in this month's
Atlantic Monthly titled "Is God an Accident? The premise of the article is this:
Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into this world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental byproduct of cognitive functioning gone awry.
More on the flip:
Reading the article, I might quibble with that word "awry" because the cognitive functioning discussed in the article is quite successful at giving infants the ability to deal with the world and their caregivers. The research referred to in the article shows that infants' early learning is on two levels, the physical world, and the social world. Understanding occurs at different rates, with social learning lagging that of physical learning.
What happens as a result of two tracks of cognition is that we become dualists:
... it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity - a mind or soul - are genuinely distinct. We don't feel that we are our bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them.
... we perceive the world of objects as separate from the world of minds, making it possible to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and an afterlife.
The article also goes into further discussions of cognition and social understanding to show that humans have a predisposition to see purpose and intention in events, even when random. (This, to my mind goes a long way to explaining conspiracy theories ... not yours, of course.) And if we're predisposed to find purpose and intention in life, this finding describes why natural selection is such a hard sell vs. creationism: humans, based on the way we learn to perceive the world, have a hard time believing that everything around them "just happened."
The article ends with the conclusion that religion and science will always clash. Supernatural beliefs will not be vanquished by any amount of scientific research or proof, because they are part of us:
Religious teachings certainly shape many of the specific beliefs we hold: nobody is born with the idea that the birthplace of humanity was the Garden of Eden, or that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception, of that martyrs will be rewarded with sexual access to scores of virgins. These ideas are learned. But the universal themes of religion are not learned. They emerge as accidental byproducts of our mental systems. They are part of human nature.