Born to Believe

I have mentioned before that belief in God is an almost universal element of human culture. As the pastor of my church has said, we are all born to belief. It takes years of training to become an atheist. When secular scientists note this tendency they remark at how evolution has disposed us to believe such things, and they debate the survival value of such beliefs. But I ask, isn’t it just possible that our first instincts are correct, and that they are instilled by God?

Now a new study has been published which says that humans may be naturally disposed to believe in Creation. More precisely, these psychologists have discovered that everyone has an instinctive tendency to ascribe a sense of purpose to the events around them. They have discovered (surprise!) that it is not normal to believe life is a random chain of natural causes with no purpose, no meaning and no direction. Again, they have found that the most highly educated people are the ones least likely to make this "mistake." Yes, they directly call it a mistake. You can almost hear the condescension dripping from their statements. We who are educated "know" that this is a foolish misconception. Naturally, they lump children, the religious and the uneducated together, noting that they are more inclined to this "erroneous" thinking.

I don't have access to the original paper, but in the New Scientist article I linked to above not once do these scientists speak to the possibility that the inborn belief in purpose might be correct. Nor do they realize when they have stepped outside of their field and are discussing philosophy and theology rather than science. It is a testament to their own indoctrination into a particular worldview that they overlook these things. It is more evidence, if we needed any, that the prevailing intellectual mindset today has completely confused natural science with philosophical materialism, according the latter an unassailable position as "fact" that it does not deserve.