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polymathwannabe comments on Religious and Rational? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Covered before. Beliefs don't pop up spontaneously in the mind without some external origin.
As a question of neuroscience, I'm not sure this is actually true. If people can be more easily conditioned to be afraid of snakes than cars, is the implied underlying belief that snakes are scary of external or internal origin?
(If one says 'external, because it's genetic,' well, the whole brain is genetic in the same sense. If one says internal, what difference between a predisposition to believe snakes are scary and a predisposition to believe the divine exists?)
I agree with you about the dynamics of correct thought; I don't agree that this is necessarily how actual minds work by default.
Humans are genetically hardwired to be afraid of snakes, but the programmed part of this trait involves automatic response behaviors; it doesn't always have to translate into a conscious belief.
Believing in the divine is an extension of the pattern-recognition and agency-detection skills. Those are innate traits, but the kind of phenomena that elicit such a conclusion are in the physical world.