Risto

For many years I've been secular by way of "simple common sense," and until recently I hadn't devoted much thought to the varieties of doctrinal experience. I had never been afforded the time to delve into the psychological and sociological constitution of rationality and theology, but as of late I've forced the luxury of time upon myself, and exposed myself to contemporary atheist literature.

After I finished reading chapter one of The God Delusion I sat on my couch meditating on Dawkins' words. After a while my gaze wandered to the bookshelf and I found Rush W. Dozier's Why We Hate staring back at me -- intently. I unconsciously combined the postulations of the two books, and was left pondering the grounds of the survival and potency of supernatural faith in humans: instinct.

Evolution holds the answer in helping us to ascertain how and why a person's mind may bend towards irrationalism and faith. As Oscar Wilde so aptly phrased it, capturing the nature of our disposition; "The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence." Said another way: the human mind is governed first and foremost by instinct and emotion. Irrational faith, supernatural or otherwise, is able to persevere in the face of overwhelming experiental evidence, as an answer to proclivities that are the result of evolutionary artefacts accumulated within the human brain.

Faith exercises the most basic and feral components of human consciousness. These components are largely incognizant, harbouring perceptions and reactions that have been bred into the psyche throughout our evolution, and operate instinctually rather than intellectually. These instincts and desires react without the benefit of reflection or consideration, and will be familiar to us all: the instinct for self preservation, the pack instinct with its related desire to belong, the desire to find meaning in life, and the desire to succeed that drives our sense of purpose. Fear, altruism, and many other anthropologically significant characteristics are also involved, but aren't necessary at this stage of discussion.

Here we arrive at an impediment to humanity's intellectual development: with its singularly peremptory explanations, faith indulges each of these instincts and desires. Spiritual faith in particular provides for self preservation in the form of the eternal after life, the desire for group belonging is sated by the instant provision of membership within the world's largest and most powerful communities, and sectarian association places you on the winning team while providing those in search of direction and purpose with an abundance of answers and obligations. These are among the most basal, unaware, and unrestrained of our instincts and desires, and the human mind quite naturally responds with acceptance when presented with a simple proposition that addresses these profound concerns. Such congenital motivations are not beyond mental regulation, but often remain unregulated.

Faith is able to assume dominion over the human mind by invoking our primal foreconsciousness, an area within all of us that acts prior to -- and often regardless of -- personal experience. The degree to which we've been educated can be of no help here because faith need not appeal to our highly developed facilities of reasoning, comprehension and self-awareness in order to be accepted; the impulse of faith stimulates primitive structures within the brain prior to being processed by the neocortex, inciting low level neural feedback that immediately manifests itself as an amenable physical response.

"Far down the winding path of time, a few of our hirsute progenitors tried something new. They stood on their hind legs, looked around them, and applied their minds and hands to the exploitation of the world. These were the early hominids. But protohuman aspirations were impractical without the construction of another brain accessory. Nature complied, wrapping a thin layer of fresh neural substance around the two old cortical standbys -- the reptilian and mammalian brains. The new structure, stretched around the old ones like a peach's skin, was the neo-cortex -- the primate brain. This primate brain, which includes the human brain, had awesome powers. It could envision the future. It could weigh a possible action and imagine the consequences. It could support the development of language, reason, and culture. But the neo-cortex had a drawback: it was merely a thin veneer over the two ancient brains. And those were as active as ever, measuring every bit of input from the eyes and ears, and issuing fresh orders. The thinking human, no matter how exalted his sentiments, was still listening to the voices of a demanding reptile and a chattering ancient mammal. Both were speaking to him from the depths of his own skull."

This is not to say that faith-thought is never processed by our superior mental faculties, but simply that any input entering the brain must follow the same sequence. All input must first conduct itself through the most elementary of our neural structures, a place where it has the ability to incite a powerful reaction -- a reaction that has the ability to trump other reactions that may occur during processing further up the line.

(All of this is of course entirely speculative, as all I've done is read a few books.)