RDFRS US:
The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.
The Magic of Reality
for the iPad
Sean Faircloth:
Attack of the Theocrats!
I would say that it's a sensory system that works below the conscious level, rather like a pattern recognition system. It's there as a survival mechanism. It's almost like a supersense.
J. Anderson Thomson Jr wrote a book Why we Believe In god(s) which is advertised on this very website on the right of this page, which explains many of these survival mechanisms from a neuroscientific perspective. Well now we have the psychological perspective--it's our intuition.
It's important to understand that we all have intuition, but if we didn't have a rational or scientific understanding of the world, then we would naturally come up with superstitious and supernatural ideas to explain how we sense the world, as do primitive tribal communities.
Permalink Thu, 03 May 2012 01:46:12 UTC | #939233