Damn that limit to a title's length.
The title was sufficiently provocative to make me read this article at the Scientific American web site.
There is far more in that article than I have copied here, but this one observation is worth a separate discussion.
I liked this because it reinforces a belief that I have that we humans are hard wired to believe in a higher being. But it goes well beyond that by inferring that some of us are far more likely to explain events by invoking a higher power than are others. Indeed, as they point out, people with Aspergers’s syndrome are not likely to make such connections at all.In a post on Asperger's syndrome, my fellow blogger Karen Schrock manages to knock both religious believers and nonreligious rationalists in just a few paragraphs. Kudos, Karen! People with Asperger's, a mild form of autism, tend not to attribute events in their lives to a "higher power or supernatural force," Karen reports. Conversely, the tendency of supposedly healthy people to see "intention or purpose" behind random events may stem from an overactive "theory of mind," the innate ability to sense perceptions, emotions and intentions in others. Faith is a pathology, and so is the lack thereof. Basically, we're all nuts. Who could disagree?
Even better, it provides the means to test the idea by associating the tendency with the human trait of sensing emotions and intentions in others.
