Catallaxy: Frankly, It’s Unnatural

by Will Wilkinson on April 11, 2008

Here’s Yale psychologist Paul Bloom talking with UNC experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe about the evidence for our native bias toward theism. (Don’t worry! The clip’s just 3 minutes.) Everything he says could just as well be applied to folk ideas about planned economies versus spontaneous orders:

Knobe goes on to mention that people seem to revert back to a childlike penchant for intention-based agentive explanation when we become old. Maybe we need to put an age limit on policymakers.

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    I'd like to see more information on the middle study he mentions, of children of "secular parents" attributing creation to God. I can only assume that children of secular parents /= children who have never had anyone tell them about God, because it would be pretty hard to find such children. And does secular parents mean non-fundamentalist, non-religious, or actually atheist? Just seems like maybe this is only showing that children are more credulous than adults.
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    It's really interesting - of course, if there's a God, we'd expect for humans to find it natural to believe in Him and to perhaps have a tendency to attribute agency to nature as a result. (Are people folk Aristotelians?!) So these results don't weigh against belief in God at all. In fact, one of the evolutionary psychologists who works on this stuff - Justin Barrett - Why would anyone believe in God? - is a Christian and thinks that his work substantiates Plantinga's thesis in God and Other Minds that belief in God is much like believe in other minds - its properly basic.
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    It used to be said, and I used to believe, that it was hard to identify any interesting economics principle that wasn't blindingly obvious (e. g., when the price of something increases, the quantity of it purchased decreases.) Over the last several years, I've come to see that the workings of the market economy are profoundly counter-intuitive to people. The human mind evolved to handle simpler face to face transactions. People believe that in order for something to happen, someone must plan for it to happen. If something bad happens, it must be someone's fault, an evildoer, like a oil company, that can be punished to make it stop. Things have a natural price, and deviations from that price are wrong. These are hard notions to dispel.
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    It's the excercise of critical thinking that should be taught to kids not necessarily the origin of life. Kids will catch on once they are older. Seeking out the evidence, growing comfortable with the idea of delayed gratification, having to research before finding an answer are important skills to learn for secularist and creationist alike. The logical conclusions will come as they evolve.

    Monica
 

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