You can listen to it here: - http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/ne ... 745514.stm
At a Cambridge University lecture, Dr Justin Barrett will argue it is the natural default position of children to believe in God. This challenges the view of some atheists that religion is learned through family indoctrination. Dr Barrett, from the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, discusses whether religion or atheism is learned with scientist and writer Professor Lewis Wolpert.
Dr. Barrett, a byproduct theorist, thinks that belief in a god or gods is a byproduct of several cognitive tools our brain uses to help us survive. Briefly, these tools are: agent detection, the tendency to believe that the motion you see out of the corner of your eye is a real person or animal (priming us to believe in things we can only catch the faintest glimpse of), causal reasoning, the tendency to explain everything using cause and effect (leaving us open to divine explanations when no empirical one seems to fit), and social cognition, the ability to anticipate others’ actions and assume the existence of minds that we cannot see or feel (from which it is a short step to assuming the existence of minds or souls that are unfettered by a body) - http://www.cogito.org/Interviews/Int...ontentID=16509
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So here's a question from me:
Is the belief in God(s) a result of a inborn reality of life, or is it the result of being "taught" by parents, peers, the community, or even society as a whole?
Example: If there is no sensory input coming in from your external environment or from internal bodily sensations, does it even exist at all beyond an abstract thought in your mind? Wouldn't belief in such a thing be, A.K.A. = Delusion.
Please note, this in no way assumes that there can be no higher being than yourself, omnipotent or not. Some have said primitive peoples who believed in basic animistic, naturalistic, or pantheistic gods did so to make sense of unexplainable phenomena they witnessed. And the basic religions evolved from those, and that could explain the evolution of the historical and culturally rich religions that exist in this modern world.
Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed a "God module". - http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 65,00.html,
Some say once the need the for affiliation that most poeple have is explained there will be no more ground for for faith based believers to stand on. - http://scienceandreligiontoday.blogspot ... eting.html
For arguments sake: People used to explain a wide variety of phenomenon like earthquakes, thunderstorms, maggots in rotting flesh, and rain itself as the result of a supernatural (unknowable to humans) force. Now that we know these are caused by natural forces, such as seismic activity, electric conductivity/resistance, flies laying their eggs, and the water cycle.
Some people could then say: "That is way that our God(s) made things to work".
But I say this:
We would no longer need a God(s) to make these things "work", because we can explain these phenomenon, without needing to presume a higher cause. In other words, we already have a determination of the cause, and wouldn't need any unnecessary extra "steps" to explain anything. It would not be the result of me seeing, hearing, touching or in any way knowing a God(s) was the cause. It would me "thinking" that was the reason.
Isn't a rule of thumb is simplicity? So like Occam's Razor, wouldn't it be completely illogical to defer causation to another unknown entity, without justification of something tangible?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here are some following Q&A's for fun...
Q: What about the origin of the universe? Some people think that God is the best explanation for the big bang--the beginning of space and time.
A: God is not necessary. God is not even an explanation.
Q: What about religious experience? Some people have experiences that they think are best explained by the existence of God.
A: But these experiences can be produced in a laboratory by ordinary mortals.
Q: God clearly remains a live option in terms of explanation. Isn't it just a tad arrogant and cocksure, not to mention dogmatic, to state that we can just explain everything.
A: No, it's just stating a fact. We can explain all of the mysteries that were used as evidence of "god" by theologians before the 19th century. What is left for god to do?