Born believers: How your brain creates God

Interesting and occasionally irritating: despite the attempts at various points to remain neutral or agnostic about religious claims and their counterparts, this article keeps (as the title does) leaning to atheism-lite. That said, I think that we need to think about this stuff. As a God-botherer (though actually I don't think God is 'bothered' by me, though probably about me), I am one of those who is comfortable in principle in recognising that the processes of this world are part of God's activity, in a sense. This means that the mechanisms by which we come to be are part of that creative activity poetically presented in different ways in Hebrew and Christian scriptures, variously as fiat, dust of the earth being breathed into, chaos being defeated, building blocks being assembled and held together and so forth. This means that the questions being asked in this article and the attempts to answer them in terms of normal cause and effect are not really at issue for me (unlike for those who feel that scripture compels them to 6x24hours of special creation). So do have a look at it: Born believers: How your brain creates God - science-in-society - 04 February 2009 - New Scientist.

One quote may get us into the matter (pun not intended but allowed to stand): "So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it."
I guess I think that this is a good illustration of how apparently objective study vears into smuggling conclusions in premises. The latter bit is the sop to the 'religious'. However the 'damage' is done by the way the first-quoted sentence is framed; by summing up the findings in terms of "religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work" the dice are already loaded. Let's not be detained by defining religion (which is one problem with the article, which does pop up implicitly in the comments -which are not on the whole edifying reading). I rather think that the sentence in question is a bit like saying, "since seeing other people is a natural consequence of how our eyes and brains work, where does that leave society?", or possibly, "since speaking is a natural consequence of how our larynx and brain works, where does that leave language?". The latter may be appropriate since it may well be that language is a side-consequence of the body doing other things, so to speak and so may provide a rough parallel at that point. I guess the obverse of that point is that if the kind of theistic claims I think that I am making are about right, then we would expect to see the processes of development of life (which produce emergent properties at an oblique to the main 'purpose' of some developments, for example) produce effects which might obliquely enable relating to God. And if you're puzzled by why I seem so darn keen on 'oblique' read more here or here.

We should hold that together with what (atheist) scientist Scott Atran is quoted as saying a bit further on: ".. [religion] arises as an artefact of the ability to build fictive worlds. I don't think there's an adaptation for religion any more than there's an adaptation to make airplanes." If I could tweak that a bit to give my own spin: "scientific theory arises as an artefact of the ability to build fictive worlds ..." In other words metaphor and imagination are the main tools of religious ideas and of invention and theory. I think that perhaps what is actually being said in this theorising is that the things that enable religion are present in human beings and like every other higher order thinking ability (including those driving scientific discovery and theory), derive from basic somatic and psychological facts of human being. That does not rule out facticity: it merely allows us to appreciate how we might be able to perceive something...