Wired for religion

Overview

There is strong evidence that humans are wired for religion – in other words, that many of our innate instinctual habits-of-thought lead us to be receptive to religious ideas. This idea is often described more metaphorically as being a "God-shaped hole" that humans need to fill.

While some might argue that this proves humans need God, or indeed may have been created specifically to serve God, it is at least as likely that the concept of God has evolved over the millennia to fill an existing "hole" (or set of needs and predispositions) and to dig its claws in just the right places to make it almost impossible to extract.

Links

Articles

• 2005-12 Is God an Accident? by Paul Bloom argues that the "wiring" in question is an "accidental" by-product of human evolution, possibly the result of an over-generalization of pre-civilization survival traits
• 2005-11-22 Wired for Creationism?, an interview with Paul Bloom
  • Note that Richard Dawkins was apparently listening to Bloom, because Bloom's "wired for religion" argument features prominently in Dawkins' subsequent book The God Delusion