Quote:
Originally Posted by troutman
Interesting - here is a Scientific American article on the research.
Perhaps they way we perceive the world is hard-wired into our brains. Some of us are more intuitive, some of us are more analytical. Neither is crazy.
Losing Your Religion: Analytic Thinking Can Undermine Belief
A series of new experiments shows that analytic thinking can override intuitive assumptions, including those that underlie religious belief
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...dermine-belief
The researchers, for their part, point out that both reason and intuition have their place. "Our intuitions can be phenomenally useful," Gervais says, "and analytic thinking isn't some oracle of the truth."
Greene concurs, while also raising a provocative question implicit in the findings: "Obviously, there are millions of very smart and generally rational people who believe in God," he says. "Obviously, this study doesn't prove the nonexistence of God. But it poses a challenge to believers: If God exists, and if believing in God is perfectly rational, then why does increasing rational thinking tend to decrease belief in God? |
This is why I put a moratorium lately on neuroscience books, I was hooked for a long while on it. The more we learn, the less we are actually determining our own beliefs, and that our brains as they become less mysterious are starting to resemble a probability machine.