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Does Evolutionary Psychology Explain Why We Believe in God?

"In addition to these innate dispositions toward certain kinds of beliefs, we also seem to have cognitive mechanisms that dispose us to crunch sensory inputs in specific ways. We might call these “innate cognitive processors.” Examples of these would include things like contagion avoidance and agency detection.A second processor is our Agency Detection Device. Here, psychologists have identified a cognitive processor that seems to pre-dispose us to form beliefs in the reality and presence of (sometimes invisible!) agents under certain conditions. In these cases, when we look for the cause of certain events, motions, sounds, or structures, we are disposed to think that it was caused by a someone rather than by a something. Our ADD appears to be hypersensitive. It is very good at detecting agency, and in fact is more likely to generate false positives than false negatives. This is often referred to as our hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD), and may be reflected in manifold attributions of ghosts, fairies, forest spirits, and even personalities of machines!

In sum, psychologists have shown that our initial presumption about the contents of our mind was wrong. Our minds are not blank slates, but processing devices that come endowed with a complex operating system.
[biologos.org]

sundug 5 Mar 10
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9 comments

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1

I love this sort of stuff.
I read a book a couple of years back called Inside the Neolithic Mind. They made a point of emphasizing that early human understanding of the world included many unseen entities and forces, with mystical explanations for any and every event. The authors maintain that a triple-realm cosmology, with a sky realm, a middle realm (earth) and an underworld is universal in early human thinking, Possibly this is old enough in our hard-wiring to go back to when protohuman primate species began to walk upright, and our heads became identified with the sky realm, celestial, and heavenly, concerns, while our guts and torsos started to remind us of fertile mother earth, and the lower realms became identified with death, waste, sorrow and loss.

0

I have Epilepsy, and I've had episodes of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. It's not a pleasant experience, since it can induce full-sensory hallucinations of hell, or occasionally heaven that are culturally mediated. It's believed that some religious ecstatics may have had TLE, such as Theresa of Avila. I went the opposite direction, I know my brain can glitch and fool me, so I look for external confirmation of my experiences.

0

So it was advantageous, in a survival of the fittest way, to be programmed to look for some human or non-human animal as the cause of events around us? God and angels have many human like qualities so they would fit into that "life form like" cause we are programmed to look for?

3

Perhaps some are not reading the entire article and misunderstanding my post. Evolutionary psychology explains why people around the world create gods, it was an evolutionary advantage, which I believe is now detremental

1

Very interesting.

Back when I still got PMS, the furniture would deliberately get in my way, doors would stick on purpose, and objects on the floor try to trip me, so I had to yell angrily at them.

1

I can believe that. Just look at how often people name cars or boats and how we see faces in all sorts of places - trees, buildings, toast!

2

Certainly aligns with the data. I suspect this is correct. Humans have a very active HADD. I know that I often think I see people I know only to realize later I was simply imposing my projection of what I "might" see. Also, I have noticed that while hiking in the dark, I become frightened and start to imagine all kinds of terrible things that might happen to me. But if I walk exactly the same path in the bright of day, I'm at ease and even joyful. These are apparently built in protection mechanisms.

Far better to see a few false ghosts and fairies rather than to be eaten by the tiger lurking in the dark that you didn't notice.

1

I don’t believe in any god … nor do I feel cognitively lacking.. Are Atheists in that lengthy piece 😉 I sometimes talk to my little truck ..or thank my navigator.. though smile in the process.

It seems a lack of awareness or understanding of reality would lead humans to formulate mystic answers to puzzling situations. We are inquisitive, perhaps thee trait leading to our current dominance, and when frustrated, needing ‘an answer’ in order to move ahead ..may simply make them up. In a time of fewer and fewer mysteries, perhaps all regions of our brain may move on to more productive thoughts 🙂

Varn Level 8 Mar 11, 2018

It could be both the need to explain what we can not understand and the HADD

0

Huh?

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