More On: religion
10 quotes by atheists that will make you think twice about religion
Why some people think they hear the voices of the dead
Can medical detection dogs sniff out coronavirus?
From NASA to your table: A history of food from thin air
Scientists confirm quantum response to magnetism in cells
'There is one logical way of solving the riddle... But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.'
When I was getting my degree in religion, what people believe was what most interested me. The fact that people of the same species can come up with so many different ideas about things that can't be seen says a lot about their creativity. During that time, I realized how important place and time were to how religious ideas were formed. No matter what you believe, we can all agree that the beginning of Christianity today would be nothing like what we know from history.
It was neuroscience that made me stop thinking about what and start looking into why. Why do we believe in things that don't make sense? What role do gods play in how we think? Why do we fight against the idea that we might not be right, even to the point of killing people from other tribes?
The way we feel (or don't feel) about the ethereal is a result of both our environment and our genes. I get it. A lot of religious people think they have the secret sauce, some hidden knowledge that only their tribe knows. But so many different ideas can't all be right. Something else must be going on, and that something is our unique biology.
The first few quotes are about big-picture social issues, and the rest are from books on neuroscience and psychology. They are not all atheist, but they do show that people tend to think very highly of themselves and what they believe, and that there are biological reasons for why we feel the way we do. The more we realize that, the more likely we are to stop thinking there is only one way to find the truth.
On ego
“How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?” — Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Here comes logic
“Monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: To argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe—and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.” — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
The difference is often language
“In America, belief in the unreal seems to be very fungible. Individuals don’t so much abandon religious fantasy in favor of reason as find different fantasies that better suit their particular excitement and credulity quotients.” — Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire
A Buddhist approach
“Mindfulness accepts as its focus of inquiry whatever arises in one’s field of awareness, no matter how disturbing or painful it might be. One neither seeks nor expects to find some greater truth lurking behind the veil of appearances. What appears and how you respond to it: that alone is what matters.” — Stephen Batchelor, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist
Enter Darwin
“Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other.” — Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
The physical can be spiritual
“Evolution simply happened—foresightless, by chance, without goal. There is nobody to despise or rebel against—not even ourselves. And this is not some bizarre form of neurophilosophical nihilism but rather a point of intellectual honesty and great spiritual depth.” — Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self
Superego
“Supernatural thinking is simply the natural consequence of failing to match our intuitions with the true reality of the world.” — Bruce M. Hood, The Science of Superstition: How the Developing Brain Creates Supernatural Beliefs
Out of body is still in the body
“Out-of-body flight “really happens,” then—it is a real physical event, but only in the patient’s brain and, as a result, in his subjective experience. The out-of-body state is, by and large, an exacerbated form of the dizziness that we all experience when our vision disagrees with our vestibular system, as on a rocking boat.” — Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts
Randomness produces beautiful (or efficient) results
“If you let something tumble long enough, it comes out almost perfect. Such is the power of random collisions and patience, and that constitutes the sum total of nature’s intelligence. All the rough edges, the flaws, the things that don’t work are systematically dispatched by natural selection. What remains and carries on into the next generation and the next after that and so on are the advantageous aspects, what does workwhat makes survival easier. And survival is the fuel of natural selection.” — Rodolfo R. Llinas, I of the vortex: From Neurons to Self
“Everything happens for a reason”
“A long line of research in cognitive science has documented that people make causal attributions about events as a means of maintaining personal control. It is the feeling that things are spinning out of control that motivates the human brain to find a pattern in events and try to predict what is going to happen next. The left-brain interpreter thus will be activated whenever the individual senses a lack of control. Superstitions and conspiracy theories can be seen as the societal consequences of the interpreter’s drive to find a causal explanation for events that are seemingly out of control.” — Ronald T. Kellogg, The Making of the Mind: The Nueroscience of Human Nature
