Why Creationism Evolved?
People have always wondered about complicated beauty of nature. We want to understand everything around us, and have since times immemorial.
Enter God, because early humans could not understand nature's great events (they didn't yet have the means to see the smaller, even more peculiar events), they invented a god. As a matter of fact, they invented many gods. One per event.
Some time passed and we began to understand more and more, and made many of the gods obsolete. Well, at least some of us did. For some reason there's still few oddballs who think that God is, and has to be, behind everything. Why is it that some people simply cannot ”update” their brain and thinking to 21st century? Is there something elementary wrong in these people, or in their brains?
The left hemisphere in our brain seeks to find patterns, order and reason, in everything, even if there is none to be found. That's why it continually makes mistakes. It tends to overgeneralize, frequently constructing potential past as opposed to a true one. (It is even suggested that this same quality is responsible of false memories). To put it in another way:; left hemisphere tries so hard to find patterns that if there is none it makes them up.
Thousands of years ago this would have given (and did) rise to a better survival. Anyone who sees causation knows next time when the same thing happens what will follow, thus getting away from possible danger.
The false causations and generalizations helped our ancestors to invent gods. The very same thing that helped our species to survive is now causing us trouble called creationism. But just because our brains have evolved to see patterns in everything, it's not to say that we can't help it. It's just because we now know that these kinds of processes exist so that we can be aware of them. Just like addict who doesn't acknowledge that he is an addict can't start to heal. But in the minute he acknowledges his addiction, he has an opportunity to start the healing process if he wants to.
After I wrote this I read Nicholas Humbrey's essay (Conciousness:
The Achilles Heel of Darwinism? Thank God, Not Quite) from the Intelligent Thought where he concluded: ”So, here's the irony. Belief in special creation will very likely encourage believers to lead biologically fitter lives. Thus one of the particular ways in which consciousness could have won out in evolution by natural selection could have been precisely by encouraging us to believe that we have not evolved by natural selection.”
Enter God, because early humans could not understand nature's great events (they didn't yet have the means to see the smaller, even more peculiar events), they invented a god. As a matter of fact, they invented many gods. One per event.
Some time passed and we began to understand more and more, and made many of the gods obsolete. Well, at least some of us did. For some reason there's still few oddballs who think that God is, and has to be, behind everything. Why is it that some people simply cannot ”update” their brain and thinking to 21st century? Is there something elementary wrong in these people, or in their brains?
The left hemisphere in our brain seeks to find patterns, order and reason, in everything, even if there is none to be found. That's why it continually makes mistakes. It tends to overgeneralize, frequently constructing potential past as opposed to a true one. (It is even suggested that this same quality is responsible of false memories). To put it in another way:; left hemisphere tries so hard to find patterns that if there is none it makes them up.
Thousands of years ago this would have given (and did) rise to a better survival. Anyone who sees causation knows next time when the same thing happens what will follow, thus getting away from possible danger.
The false causations and generalizations helped our ancestors to invent gods. The very same thing that helped our species to survive is now causing us trouble called creationism. But just because our brains have evolved to see patterns in everything, it's not to say that we can't help it. It's just because we now know that these kinds of processes exist so that we can be aware of them. Just like addict who doesn't acknowledge that he is an addict can't start to heal. But in the minute he acknowledges his addiction, he has an opportunity to start the healing process if he wants to.
After I wrote this I read Nicholas Humbrey's essay (Conciousness:
The Achilles Heel of Darwinism? Thank God, Not Quite) from the Intelligent Thought where he concluded: ”So, here's the irony. Belief in special creation will very likely encourage believers to lead biologically fitter lives. Thus one of the particular ways in which consciousness could have won out in evolution by natural selection could have been precisely by encouraging us to believe that we have not evolved by natural selection.”