[ExI] Prisoner of bad philosophy: Carl Sagan couldn?t allow himself to hope

[Keith Henson]

Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

snip

>Atheists think they know that there is no evidence for God, and therefore
that belief in God is without basis.

It is more complicated.  The question is not about a particular
belief, but why people believe in *anything:*  The only reason
acceptable to current science is evolution.  I.e., over some
considerable stretch of our ancestral past the ability to have beliefs
must have had a survival advantage over those who did not have this
ability.

I have argued the ability to have beliefs at all was selected as one
of the psychological features of making war.  But the ability could
have been selected for some entirely different reason.  Not all human
psychological selection is as obvious as capture-bonding.

> For some atheists it is upsetting that
so many base their lives around religious belief given this, and they feel
obliged to tell them why they are wrong at every opportunity; for other
atheists peoples? stupidity doesn?t bother them.

You wonder a bit why the behavior was selected of telling a person
when they have stupid beliefs?  It's not a direct survival trait.