Posted: Mar 06, 2010 2:24 pm
Simon_Gardner wrote:New Scientist wrote:Ironically, sociologists, psychologists, economists and, particularly, cognitive anthropologists have become so skilled at explaining why humans seem to have such a widespread bias towards theistic beliefs that a new question readily presents itself: if religion comes so naturally to us, why are so many people, especially in western Europe, apparently resistant to it? In the UK, for example, a sizeable 43 per cent said they had “no religion” in the 2008 BSA survey. If religion comes naturally to us, why are so many people resistant to it?
This is is such a dumb question. When they talk about "theistic" beliefs what they really mean is supernatural beliefs. Obviously belief in anthropomorphic deities doesn't come "naturally", it's a cultural construct. For example, ancient China was not theistic but there was plenty of superstition. Superstition was universal until modern science.
So the question they are asking (in a science magazine!) is why do some people reject superstition. What kind of a dumb question is that?
...What we need now is a scientific study not of the theistic, but the atheistic mind. We need to discover why some people do not “get” the supernatural agency many cognitive scientists argue comes automatically to our brains. Is this capacity non-existent in the non-religious, or is it rerouted, undermined or overwritten - and under what conditions?
Of course we "get" it. We couldnt understand ghost stories or fairy tales if we somehow didnt understand the concept of the supernatural. We just see no reason to believe that supernatural agency is actually present in the world.
The writers reveal themselves as religious believers here by talking about atheists as if they were strange, unfathomable creatures. They are attempting to change the terms of the debate by impying that not being religious is something peverse or even pathological.
Psychologically, we need to know how the self functions without theistic belief, and how our emotional resources might be altered by its absence.
Only a particularly unquestioning and unimaginative theist could have written that sentence.
Anthropologically, we need to understand how people without religion make sense of their lives, how they find meaning, and how non-theistic systems of thought are embedded in, and shape, the different cultures in which they are present.
"Non-theistic systems of thought". That would be the vast majority of systems of thought in the modern world.