Sunday, November 20, 2005

Are Humans Genetically Disposed to Pray to the State?

Don Boudreaux asks Are Humans Genetically Disposed to Pray to the State? and looks at Paul Bloom's Is God an Accident?:
Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry.