1) explain how human beings as the successful top species in the food chain, successfully meeting every environmental challenge which means each evolutionary advance has been successful, come to have their brains hardwired to receive and process spiritual phenomena if spiritual phenomena is non-existent?
Humans have become the top of the food chain due to our intelligence, and the development of culture. Culture in it’s most basic form, I would say, is the set of behaviors which allow many organisms to co-exist together and thrive for the support of all individuals. This is accomplished through communication. What are we communicating to eachother? Patterns that we notice in the environment. Hoof-prints = prey. Water may lead to edible plants, tall grass shifting against the wind may indicate an animal in hiding.
These are natural patterns that we observe, then layer an additional communication layer on top of to encrypt the information to be decompressed by the listener. When I type “Dog” that means something different to you than “lion”. Some irregularities are out there of course.
one of these is a dogg, the other a lion.
But anyway, one of our most successful traits is the identification of patterns and to create narratives that explain to us, and to others what those patterns mean for our survival.
We are such good pattern seekers that it leads to false positives.
http://www.booktalk.org/a-million-cause ... t8841.html?
Which means we are pre-disposed to seeing intent. Why? Because paranoia saves more lives than ambivalence.
The guy who’s ready to run every time he hears a twig snap might look like a fool 99 times out of a hundred, but on that one time when it was a bear, he’s got a head start while you are still laughing at him.
And so when things happen that are not readily explained we attribute stories to them. The more mysterious the event, the more outrageous the story we conjure to explain it away. Some of these stories become religion.
2) explain why there is at least 40,000 years of human beings paying great amounts of attention to these same supposedly non-existent forces if it is a delusional state of mind shared by the vast majority of human beings still today?
For the vast majority of history we were hunter gatherers. We were subsistence livers. We did not gather excess. We had no place to rest. We were immediately concerned with where we would drink fresh water, where we would find food, and where we could shelter from the hazards of the wild environment. In these circumstances there was little time available to conduct rigorous experiments to get to the bottom of things.
Eventually we caught on to farming. This lead to excess of food, and the break-up of labor. It meant that not everyone needed to be immediately concerned with where the food would come from, or where to shelter their family. It left people with time on their hands. Communication gets better, writing begins to develop. Ideas are passed more easily from generation to generation, and with the establishment of trading comes ideas from across the plain, or across the sea.
Like magic, knowledge that you don’t have to work to acquire yourself is available. This village learns about irrigation by digging ditches, this village learns about crop rotation. Combine them together and both are better off than either apart.
In all this time serious inquiry, rigorous inquiry, was hard to come by. Because the daily pressure to survive was too strenuous, and because the method of passing information was too poor, and provincial. (verbal)
In the last few thousand years though, people have stopped moving so much. We’ve had time to think things through. And nearly as soon as that was possible there have been people who compared experimental results with the magical stories people invented to explain the things they could not easily explain. And the people who learned from reality told the people who heard the tales that they were wrong.
Now information is easier to come by than ever before. More and more people have access to information gathered by making inquiries into the way the world actually works, rather than just what everyone always assumed about the world, passed generation to generation.
People still cling to these old stories, for a variety of reasons. Emotional attachment, ignorance, fear of change, indoctrination… But having the real information at hand is having it’s effect. The second largest, and fastest growing demographic in America, for instance, identifies as “non-religious”. Because we don’t have to rely on myths and fairy tales anymore. Because science gives results.
