Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

The Meaning of Life 557matically supply these beliefs from their tacit knowledge of psychology.Believers also avoid working out the strange logical consequences ofthese piecemeal revisions of ordinary things. They don't pause to wonderwhy a God who knows our intentions has to listen to our prayers, or howa God can both see into the future and care about how we choose to act.Compared to the mind-bending ideas of modern science, religiousbeliefs are notable for their lack of imagination (God is a jealous man;heaven and hell are places; souls are people who have sprouted wings).That is because religious concepts are human concepts with a few emendationsthat make them wondrous and a longer list of standard traits thatmake them sensible to our ordinary ways of knowing.But where do people get the emendations? Even when all else hasfailed, why would they waste time spinning ideas and practices that areuseless, even harmful? Why don't they accept that human knowledgeand power have limits and conserve their thoughts for domains in whichthey can do some good? I have alluded to one possibility: the demand formiracles creates a market that would-be priests compete in, and they cansucceed by exploiting people's dependence on experts. I let the dentistdrill my teeth and the surgeon cut into my body even though I cannotpossibly verify for myself the assumptions they use to justify those mutilations.That same trust would have made me submit to medical quackerya century ago and to a witch doctor's charms millennia ago. Ofcourse, witch doctors must have some track record or they would lose allcredibility, and they do blend their hocus-pocus with genuine practicalknowledge such as herbal remedies and predictions of events (forinstance, the weather) that are more accurate than chance.And beliefs about a world of spirits do not come from nowhere. Theyare hypotheses intended to explain certain data that stymie our everydaytheories. Edward Tylor, an early anthropologist, noted that animisticbeliefs are grounded in universal experiences. When people dream, theirbody stays in bed but some other part of them is up and about in theworld. The soul and the body also part company in the trance brought onby an illness or a hallucinogen. Even when we are awake, we see shadowsand reflections in still water that seem to carry the essence of a personwithout having mass, volume, or continuity in time and space. And indeath the body has lost some invisible force that animates it in life. Onetheory that brings these facts together is that the soul wanders off whenwe sleep, lurks in the shadows, looks back at us from the surface of apond, and leaves the body when we die. Modern science has come up