Reply #79: I've been thinking about this point, about why, if the godless universe is so obvious [View All]

[BurtWorm]

humans are so prone to worshipping god/s.

Daniel Dennet talks about this prevalence in Breaking the Spell, which strongly influenced my thinking about this question. I think he makes an excellent point about the illusion of intentionality in the universe at large.

When we witness nature going wild and wreaking havoc on us and our loved ones, it's "natural," for lack of a better word, to wonder why? Why me? Why did this happen? It's the way our minds work, to wonder why. Nature has rewarded our species for wondering and postulating reasons why. Why did the volcano rain stones and ash on our village and kill so many of us? The volcano must be angry. We must have made the volcano angry. Maybe if we offer it something, the volcano will stop harming us. We don't know, but we'll try. So we start to make the volcano offerings, and the volcano rumbles but doesn't rain stones and ash, so we continue and continue to make offerings. And pretty soon, we've got a religion going and faith in the power of our offerings to propitiate the volcano. We take the intentionality of the volcano for fact. But that doesn't change the more basic fact that we don't know why the volcano did what it did. The volcano is ready at any moment to contradict our faith that we can propitiate it with our religious offerings.

To me it seems clear that *all* religion stands so ready to be contradicted by the objects of its worship, because essentially, all religion worships what it doesn't understand but what it faithfully believes is interested in human well-being.