Understanding Religion

One of the more interesting recent books on psychology was Paul Bloom’s “Descartes Baby“. The title comes from Bloom’s belief – backed by an impressive range of experiments on infants – that we’re pretty much hard-wired to react differently to animate and inanimate objects. We expect objects we see as inanimate to behave in certain ways, but have entirely different expectations for objects we believe to have intentions and purpose. So, in effect, body-soul dualism is a function of the way our minds work – and modern philosophy of mind consists of increasingly convoluted attempts to get our minds – sorry, our brains – to think differently.

In this long article (via) Bloom sums up his position on the question of religious belief. It’s not exactly a revolutionary theory, but Bloom writes well, and makes a powerful argument:

Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry.