This is an interesting essay from The Edge by Daniel Gilbert about how several quirks of our psychology can lead us to explain things in terms of supernatural powers, even though there are other entirely natural interpretations of what we’re seeing. He talks about the way our minds interpret order, find empty explanations satisfying, and try to find the best interpretation of ambiguous situations. It’s surprising and fascinating to learn about the ways our mental machinery works, and to recognize some of our weaknesses in analyzing the situations in which we find ourselves.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert05/gilbert05_index.html
I’m reminded of this quote from Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience: The unity of knowledge:
All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental process in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.
