Voide Ville Blog

God may or may not exist, but his followers certainly do. Almost every civilization to worship some variety of supernatural power, which suggests that humans are hard-wire to believe in something that by definition is not of this world. But why? Evolutionarily speaking, how can faith in something, in the absence of substantial evidence supporting the survival of early Homo sapiens? Evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of Harvard University proposed that religious thinking is a side effect of trends in particular to help people thrive. Perhaps the most primitive is our “agency detector,” the ability to assume the existence of others. If the grass rustles in the background, our first instinct is that someone or something may be lurking. This tendency is obvious evolutionary advantages: if they do, we have only ourselves to warn nearby predator.
Moreover, people instinctually construction of narratives to make sense of what can be disconnected jumble of events. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Black Swan and a professor of risk engineering, calls this the “narrative fallacy” to think of cause and effect stories to explain the world around us, even the chance circumstances dictated. Gods, empowered and protected by omnipotence nature of the investigation can be used to explain any mysterious case. Finally, people can imagine the thoughts and intentions of others and to imagine that they are different from our own, a trait known as theory of mind.