{"id":585,"date":"2009-02-12T16:56:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-12T16:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2009\/02\/how-your-brain-creates-god-or-maybe-not\/"},"modified":"2009-02-12T16:56:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-12T16:56:00","slug":"how-your-brain-creates-god-or-maybe-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2009\/02\/how-your-brain-creates-god-or-maybe-not.html","title":{"rendered":"How Your Brain Creates God\u2026 or Maybe Not"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

New Scientist<\/em> magazine has an interesting article titled \u201cBorn believers: How your brain creates God<\/a>.\u201d I encourage you to go read it \u2013 it\u2019s not particularly long. Here are some excerpts with my commentary:<\/p>\n

It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.<\/p>\n

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s pretty obvious. But why are humans innately religious? Why do we believe in God or Goddess or gods and goddesses?<\/p>\n

One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation \u2026 shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have a hard time with this. The bonds of family and the instinct to pass your genes down to the next generation are enough to forge those tightly knit groups, something we also see in other species who don\u2019t have our brain capacity.<\/p>\n

An alternative \u2026 is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.<\/p>\n

The mind has \u2026 an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none. \u201cYou see bushes rustle, you assume there\u2019s somebody or something there,\u201d Bloom says. This over-attribution of cause and effect probably evolved for survival. If there are predators around, it is no good spotting them 9 times out of 10. Running away when you don\u2019t have to is a small price to pay for avoiding danger when the threat is real.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is obviously true. But is it enough to explain the origin and persistence of religion? Only if there aren\u2019t any gods or spirits, something that can\u2019t be proved one way or the other.<\/p>\n

children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention: \u201cThey rely on their everyday experience of the physical world and construct the concept of god on the basis of this experience.\u201d Because of this, when children hear the claims of religion they seem to make perfect sense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now we come to the key point \u2013 experience. All religions began with someone\u2019s religious experience. And as I discussed in the previous entry on the origins of language, that religious experience is frequently incapable of being described with words. Experience leads to beliefs about the experience, and those beliefs lead to practices designed to recreate the experience, put it into practice or both.<\/p>\n

Other studies have looked at brain functions during religious activities \u2013 researchers have done MRIs of Buddhist<\/a> monks in meditation and Catholic nuns in prayer. As with the studies in this article, they show that there are specific areas of the brain that are stimulated during religious activities.<\/p>\n

Perhaps these areas of the brain evolved in response to the stimulus of religious experience. Perhaps they are still very active (even among non-believers) because there\u2019s something in us that whispers there\u2019s more to life than the apparent world. Perhaps the world\u2019s many varied religions are just imperfect attempts to articulate something that can\u2019t be properly described with words.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I need to turn the computer off and go watch the stars come out.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Scientist magazine has an interesting article titled \u201cBorn believers: How your brain creates God.\u201d I encourage you to go read it \u2013 it\u2019s not particularly long. Here are some excerpts with my commentary: It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods. Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Your Brain Creates God\u2026 or Maybe Not<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"New Scientist magazine has an interesting article titled \u201cBorn believers: How your brain creates God.\u201d I encourage you to go read it \u2013 it\u2019s not\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2009\/02\/how-your-brain-creates-god-or-maybe-not.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Your Brain Creates God\u2026 or Maybe Not\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"New Scientist magazine has an interesting article titled \u201cBorn believers: How your brain creates God.\u201d I encourage you to go read it \u2013 it\u2019s not\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2009\/02\/how-your-brain-creates-god-or-maybe-not.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"John Beckett\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-02-12T16:56:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"John Beckett\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"John Beckett\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2009\/02\/how-your-brain-creates-god-or-maybe-not.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2009\/02\/how-your-brain-creates-god-or-maybe-not.html\",\"name\":\"How Your Brain Creates God\u2026 or Maybe Not\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2009-02-12T16:56:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2009-02-12T16:56:00+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/#\/schema\/person\/b4c8980dc36f971434424c304ca429ad\"},\"description\":\"New Scientist magazine has an interesting article titled \u201cBorn believers: How your brain creates God.\u201d I encourage you to go read it \u2013 it\u2019s not\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2009\/02\/how-your-brain-creates-god-or-maybe-not.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2009\/02\/how-your-brain-creates-god-or-maybe-not.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2009\/02\/how-your-brain-creates-god-or-maybe-not.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"How Your Brain Creates God\u2026 or Maybe Not\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/\",\"name\":\"John Beckett\",\"description\":\"Musings of a Druid, Pagan, and Unitarian Universalist.\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/#\/schema\/person\/b4c8980dc36f971434424c304ca429ad\",\"name\":\"John Beckett\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/0f50bfa2a79f70103847fe75540bb29c?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/0f50bfa2a79f70103847fe75540bb29c?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"John Beckett\"},\"description\":\"I grew up in Tennessee with the woods right outside my back door. 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