Thalia Wheatley - What Causes Religious Belief?

Religious belief is everywhere. Why so pervasive, ubiquitous across diverse human cultures? What motivates the universal belief in things we cannot see? Some say the reason is 'God'—assuming God exists, then surely God would have made it so that humans would have religion.

[MysticDreamer]

She's actually wrong when she says that we can't disprove a God or that we can't disprove a negative. This is obviously true if we allow for a totally ill-defined abstract concept of "god". If the concept is ill-defined then there's nothing to work with. But the fact is that some Gods are very specifically defined by the scriptural dogma that makes very specific claims about them. And those Gods can be proven to be false because their scriptural dogma provide the logical contradictions that can be used to prove that they cannot exist as described by their holy books.

It's not unlike a mathematical proof by contradiction that there can be no rational solution to the square root of 2. In other words, via proof by contradiction we can indeed prove a negative. We can' prove that there cannot be a rational solution to the square root of 2.

In the same way it's actually quite easy to prove that the Biblical God cannot exist as described in the Bible because of the myriad of self-contradictions contained in those descriptions.

So while we can't disprove every imaginable abstract concept of a "God" in general, we can easily prove that certain specific God's cannot exist as described by their religious fables, doctrines, or holy books. And the Abrahamic God is actually one of the easiest to demonstrate to be false as it is described by the Biblical scriptures.

So that God is out. Other, less self-contradictory, concepts of God may be impossible to disprove. This of course doesn't mean that these other concepts of God are true, it just means that we can' t disprove them. But we can disprove the existence of the Biblical God as it is described within the Biblical stories. That's actually quite easy.

[TheBruces]

Since his inception Man has been "hardwired" to know that he has a creator. The various religions throughout history are our way of trying to connect with that creator. They have also been useful in bringing about social order. No one can say what is true but I suspect that the Truth is far greater and stranger than any suspect.

[xeroxxerox-iwwh]

Excellent in 1:30 explaining it - thank you!

[ahmedp]

But can you guarantee me that there won't be an afterlife?
I don't want to be tortured for eternity.

[anaximander]

What part of the brain did God give her her predilection for the genetic fallacy? You won't disprove God with arguments like that.