New Book - No, we're not hard-wired for belief.

[onager]

Atheism is not a modern invention from the western Enlightenment, but actually dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally predisposed to believe in gods...

(The book) is, according to its author, partly “an attempt to excavate ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of Christian opprobrium”.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/17/atheism-has-ancient-roots-claims-new-study

[Act_of_Reparation]

1. I've never been particularly impressed with the "hard wired" argument, no matter the subject.

Too often the arguments are really just unsupported post-hoc rationalizations for bad behavior... nevermind that the whole genetic determinism thing is just one big naturalism fallacy.

We aren't hard-wired to wear shoes, but we do. And I'd argue wearing shoes is better than not wearing shoes. Anyone who has tried to cross a gravel parking lot barefoot on a hot summer's day would probably agree.

[trotsky]

2. Well, what we're "hard-wired" for is to look for agency in everything.

The problem comes when we make up an agent and then want to believe it's real.

[edhopper]

3. Steven pinker talks about the evolutionary

trait to love ice cream. Of course we didn't evolve to love something that was invented a few hundred years ago.
But what ice cream does is hit many wants and needs that we did evolve, fat, sweet, cool, etc...
I think religion is like that, there is an evolutionary component, but it isn't an instinct.

[Curmudgeoness]

4. What we are hard-wired for

is questioning, awe, fear...and all of these things are answered by religion. Sadly, when you lean on religion for all your answers, you never experience these things totally. And if you use religion for all your answers, you will never seek answers. We might still be sacrificing virgins to volcanos if there were not people who looked into what caused them to erupt, or how to know when they might.

[progressoid]

5. That's going on the request list at our local library!

Thanks Onager!