Are we hardwired to believe in God?

Atheism is on the rise worldwide but we may not be able to give up the idea of God so easily. Why? This video explores why we believe in the first place.

Read more:

Religion is the key to civilization

How your brain creates God:

We are all born believers:

[flyingfshsndwch]

This is an excellent presentation of the pragmatic hypothesis for the existence of religion by an atheist. I'm a believer but I don't mind that you are working from the opinion that God doesn't exist so long as your argument is intelligent.

I believe intelligent people will enjoy this, theist or atheist, while ignorant people will take great offense to it or just rant about their opinion of religion. But this is more about psychology than religion. We are fearful and we want comfort. We want to believe we are in control while we cannot control many aspects of our lives. This is about vulnerability and that makes most people uncomfortable. Accept the truth that you don't know everything and you can't control everything. With that self knowledge, humility, you'll be closer to wisdom.

[tellingfoxtales]

Depression rates rising, increasing unemployment, rapidly declining birth rates. Secularism had it's upsides, but the downsides are equally as frightening, if less firey and pitchforky.

[dennistucker]

I like the animation and the subject matter. As to your question "Are we hardwired to believe in God?" my answer is yes and no. The YES comes in because our reasoning minds always seek to explain things. Things like why is there an Earth or Stars or where did things startup? The NO comes in because I think reasoning is hardwired and the notion of God was just a byproduct. Someone tried to explain these hard questions by suggesting there must be a creator blah blah blah. This notion or story became popular and this story started to grow and became accepted as real. This is where things took a turn towards the dark side(religion). One smart person within a tribe came up with a brilliant plan. We would tell the others in the tribe that God spoke to him and commanded this and that. At first, it was all about personal gain and gratification. Then it turned into the first version of government where the person that God talks with began to control the entire tribe.

[duckymomo]

it's arguable that everyone will have a god of their own and it can be anything, it doesn't need be a separate entity but can be as simple as basic idols: wooden figures, a car, yourself, money, power, etc. Some atheists follow themselves as their own god. to this, there is no true atheism but just atheism of 'religious gods.'

[MilitantPeaceist]

Everyone seems to think they can define the properties of a god but as yet, not one single person can define what it is that is supposed to exist, or not exist in a coherent & definitive way. The term god is universal but to define the term god is impossible therefore no 2 people (theist or atheist) are speaking of the same concept when introducing god into a topic.

Not even in the same parish, mosque or any spiritual gathering place will you find 2 people that hold onto the same concept in their heads of what a god or gods are. They will always differ at fundamental levels hence why we have denominations.

How can you have a conversation with someone in any succinct kind of way about something neither have a fundamental understanding of? Imagine being taught math when eventually every student of math will get a different answer from the same question & every teacher marks tests based on what they think the answer is.

This is the definition of a clusterfuck!

[hhhhhht]

actually, smaller numbers coheres more often with stricter rules about sex, propagation being more of an issue when it's harder to sustain the group; the larger a culture becomes the more apparent the 'be fruitful and multiply' notion becomes

[hhhhhht]

'believe in something'- rely on a notion we have no concrete evidence for, like the unconscious, or the external world, or our safety, the idea the universe won't randomly collapse in the next 10 seconds, our personas etc; faith is the universalisation of an idea which can never be factually correct but is as much as observation of cause and effect at the foundation of our intelligence e.g language, numeracy

[jamesa]

Good subject and video , Subscribed !

[AntalMadincea]

People need to believe in something. Since the religion is no longer ”cool”, they find other things to believe. Some in soccer teams. And they come to believe that the ultimate achievement in life is to break the skulls of people just like them, but who believe in another football team. This is an example of involution of mankind.

[samanthatollstam]

Actually original Christianity was based on the understanding of philosophical pursuit. God is "the word" (sound) see cymatics and how sound brings matter to life... This was the old understanding that god was in us and in everything but that we were also present in god. This is also why old hymns were sung at certain. Frequencies thought to bring about changes and why we said we began as clay (a non newtonian fluid with set composition) evidences of these ideas can be seen in mandalas & other areas that found these things sacred and even biblical reference. They used different wordings in the old days but they were much like us. Thinkers... Thinkers without modern day distractions and a hunger for knowledge. Past evidences also support the idea that they were more knowledgeable in many ways then than modern ppl are today. ;) go forth n quest. If u need some cymatics links I have em in my "interesting" section.

[kemarre]

define "a stable society". I'm curious.

[frederickbrown]

God is there to lean on if you need   it/him/her/them.

[pgklada]

a link at the end of the video to subscribe does not work...

[Zeldarw]

I love the animation really cool video!👍

[allanlii]

🤔 An extraordinary claim? How so? To believe life came from abiotic material is an extraordinary claim or that there’s a multi verse is an extraordinary claim. But to believe in a god? I disagree, it’s more ordinary than extraordinary.

[shashikataria]

Sir can u please please make a video on spirits/ghosts
In which u will tell that t ghosts r real ot not. Please make video because you make me understand things that no other one can. Thank you

[RonLWilson]

I am not seeing in your video any evidence that your explanation for why so many believe in God is any better than the one you first mentioned, that being that God in fact exists. The fact that religion has the potential to restrain evil does not necessarily make it untrue . Also, religion has on occasion been in part for bad things to happen as well.

So yes, it is easy to go one in glib generalities with lots of arm waving and that is fine in one sense but in doing so is hardly making any truly credible case for that to be true. For one could have just as easily renamed this video are we hardwired yo believe in God because God made us that way?

At least this later title can explain how that was done in the God being our creator would now how to do that were it is not so obvious just how one would arrange DNA to cause people to believe in God.

For yes, modern science has a reasonably good understanding of how DNA can be used to make proteins and such. But just how these might causes one to believe or for that matter do anything, much less believe in God (a rather abstract idea at that) is not so well understood.

So tossing out ideas is one thing, but making a compelling argument for those ideas actually being true is quite another, that is unless one has a predisposition to believe them and in this case maybe that predisposition is to not believe in God (or at least the true God and not one of their own making) rather than the opposite.

So the moral here maybe isn't s much whether God is real or not but rather one need be mindful of one's own predispositions to believe something to be true or not and that those typically can cut both ways.

[john-ohcr]

good video, I'm unable to believe in god . how. do I get my faith back .

[Grizzly_Lab]

Interesting stuff, indeed ;) although I'm atheist, I did find it very good

[heckler]

Trump/Sasquatch 2016 !!
Was that the secret message at the end?