{"id":2896,"date":"2009-10-07T09:02:50","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T17:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2896"},"modified":"2009-10-07T09:02:50","modified_gmt":"2009-10-07T17:02:50","slug":"foundations-of-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/foundations-of-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"Foundations Of Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2009\/10\/god-brai\/\">More reinforcement<\/a> for the idea that religious\u00a0belief is a sort of overspill from key brain\u00a0adaptations\u00a0\u2014 adaptations that were selected for improved social functioning.<\/p>\n<p>We got better at being\u00a0social animals by evolving brain processes for guessing our way into other people&#8217;s minds.  Those processes\u00a0unfortunately overlapped with older structures for handling the physical world.  Hence:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,<br \/>\nSermons in stones, and good in everything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m curious to know how a religious person processes these news items from cognitive science.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously the fact\u00a0that the varieties of religious experience can be explained from brain phylogeny does not exclude the possibility that\u00a0religious experiences are apprehending something that exists as other than brain events, something real in the world outside the skull. Binocular vision has an explanatory pathway from brain phylogeny, but the things we see are real (mostly).<\/p>\n<p>Yet if the possibility isn&#8217;t\u00a0excluded, isn&#8217;t it at least weakened? Do religious people feel this?  Well, I&#8217;m sure they don&#8217;t!\u00a0\u2014 but what\u00a0<em>do<\/em> they feel?  Perhaps one of them could tell us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More reinforcement for the idea that religious\u00a0belief is a sort of overspill from key brain\u00a0adaptations\u00a0\u2014 adaptations that were selected for improved social functioning. We got better at being\u00a0social animals by evolving brain processes for guessing our way into other people&#8217;s &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/foundations-of-faith\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2896"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2896"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2897,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2896\/revisions\/2897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}