The Hard-Wired God

Personally, I don't see how science can be viewed as a threat to God. God is creator, and science is one of the best ways to study and explore creation. If science can prove that some previous assumption held by religious people is incorrect, that is a people problem, not a God problem. I am not a member of the Flat Earth Society, and I think that Intelligent Design is mostly junk pseudo-science. Whatever science might uncover, there are questions that will remain outside its realm.

As Vox Day has stated in his blog and book The Irrational Atheist, atheists fetishize science as a method to refute the exisence of God. How the study of the natural world is supposed to refute the existence of the supernatural remains unclear to me. Liars use statistics, and Atheists use science.

All this to link to an interesting article in New Scientist Magazine, "Born Believers: How your brain creates God":

Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain. Education and experience teach us to override it, but it never truly leaves us, he says. From there it is only a short step to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and, of course, gods, says Pascal Boyer, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Boyer points out that people expect their gods' minds to work very much like human minds, suggesting they spring from the same brain system that enables us to think about absent or non-existent people.

The second sentence about education and experience teaching us to override our belief in God struck me the wrong way, but besides that line, the writing seemed interesting and fairly objective. The article continues:

Even so, religion is an inescapable artefact of the wiring in our brain, says Bloom. "All humans possess the brain circuitry and that never goes away." Petrovich adds that even adults who describe themselves as atheists and agnostics are prone to supernatural thinking. Bering has seen this too. When one of his students carried out interviews with atheists, it became clear that they often tacitly attribute purpose to significant or traumatic moments in their lives, as if some agency were intervening to make it happen. "They don't completely exorcise the ghost of god - they just muzzle it," Bering says.

and

So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.