Author: Derek Beres / Source: Big Think
- Belief systems arise to address the time and social conditions of each era and culture.
- Your relationship to your community and environment is very influential in what you believe.
- Neuroscience explains many of the questions as to why we believe in the first place.
When I was studying for my degree in religion, I was most fascinated by what people believe. The fact that members of the same species could invent such diverse ideas about the invisible speaks volumes about the human imagination. During that period, I recognized how essential place and time were in the formation of religious ideologies. Regardless of your belief system, we can agree that the creation of Christianity today would look nothing like the historical accounts we rely on.
It was neuroscience that stopped me from focusing on what and begin to investigate why. Why do we believe in anything metaphysical? What function do gods play in our psychology? Why do we resist the fact that we might not be right, sometimes to the point where we’ll murder opposing tribes?
Environmental and genetic conditions conspire to create what we feel (or don’t) about the ethereal. I get it: Many religious believers think they’ve got the special sauce, some hidden insight revealed only to their tribe. Yet so many conflicting ideologies cannot be right; there must be something else at play, and that thing is our unique biology.
The first few quotes below are big-picture social questions, while the remaining come from neuroscience and psychology books. They are not all atheistic per se, but they do point to the fact that humans tend to think very highly of themselves and what we believe, and that there are biological explanations for why we feel the way we do. The more we recognize that, the more likely we are to stop thinking there is only one way to discover 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…
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