Metaphysical thought processes are more deeply wired than hitherto suspected
It's a mistake to confuse 'metaphysics' with 'religion', and another mistake to imply that 'religion' means 'theism' (or that'theism' means 'monotheism').
Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged.
I think that it's probably true that human beings have innate cognitive propensities for what often becomes religious-style thinking. Of course that doesn't mean that atheism is wrong, let alone that it's impossible for human beings to be atheists.
This line of thought has led to some scientists claiming that “atheism is psychologically impossible because of the way humans think,” says Graham Lawton, an avowed atheist himself, writing in the New Scientist.
I don't believe that Graham Lawton is a cognitive scientist is he? He doesn't seem to be a philosopher or to be trained in the study of religion either. He's a
journalist, one of the deputy editors of
New Scientist. My impression is that he's personally interested in the philosophy of religion (he writes about it a lot in the magazine) and is trying to interpret the cognitive science of religion for
New Scientist's readers, arguably without fully understanding it himself.
“They point to studies showing, for example, that even people who claim to be committed atheists tacitly hold religious beliefs, such as the existence of an immortal soul.”
Some atheists do believe in a dualistic distinction between spiritual and physical substance, but most probably don't. That kind of view is rather out of favor these days, except among a large faction of philosophers of mind who insist that their "qualia" somehow prove the explanatory inadequacy of physicalism. But they often seem to shy away from a full-blown substance dualism, opting instead for what they argue is a property dualism (a form of 'neutral monism' I guess).
But that's more an issue for metaphysics and for the philosophy of mind. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with God or the belief in God.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since we are born believers, not atheists, scientists say.
I've long felt that the presence of the word 'quantum' in laypeople's non-technical writing indicates that what follows is likely to be bullshit. Unfortunately, in the last few years the phrase 'scientists say' seems to indicate that the reader is about to be bullshitted as well. It's just inserted in there as an appeal to authority, a warning to laypeople that they had better accept everything that follows the phrase or be denounced as 'anti-science' or as a 'denier'.
Just Shut Up and Believe.
Humans are pattern-seekers from birth, with a belief in karma, or cosmic justice, as our default setting. "A slew of cognitive traits predisposes us to faith," writes Pascal Boyer in Nature, the science journal, adding that people are only aware of some of their religious ideas."
I'm inclined to agree with most of that and believe that it's probably true. But it's a huge leap to imagine that cognitive predispositions to religious-style thinking implies that people are born 'religious', that everyone remains 'religious' in adulthood, let alone that people are born monotheists with an innate knowledge of "God" (whatever that word means).
I certainly agree that ethics, our human sense that some things are 'right' and others 'wrong', probably does arise from innate human social instincts. We come from the factory already optimized to behave appropriately in social groups. (The precise details of what is considered right and wrong depend on the particular social group in which we are raised, so that's probably 'socially constructed'.)
What's more, I have long speculated that human beings are optimized in other ways to live with other human beings. There's our language instinct (again, we are born with a propensity to acquire language, but the particular language we learn depends on the circumstances in which we are raised). We attribute mental states to our companions and have the ability to read and reconstruct their mental states from very subtle clues of tone, wording and gesture. A great deal of that seems to be innate since children naturally do it without any explicit instruction. New babies naturally seek out things shaped like faces in their visual fields. (Baby monkeys do the same.) Adults often experience pareidolia where they imagine that chance arrangements of features in the natural environment look like human faces.
Kids find it much easier (and more pleasurable) to hang out interacting with their friends than to do algebra homework, even though the algebra is a far simpler data-processing task. People just naturally socialize with each other, interpreting the behavior of those around them in terms of intentions, emotions and purposes. It comes so naturally that we are typically unaware that we are doing it.
What's more, we have a tendency to overlook gaps in our own understanding. Everyone generally feels like they have most things figured out. I expect that paleolithic cave-people felt the same way sitting around their campfires telling their stories. They had it all figured out too. So most people (except the philosophers, which more or less defines philosophy) simply ignore the gaps and cognitive voids in their own understanding. Or if the voids are too large they fill them in imaginatively, often without being aware they are doing so. Given what I said in the paragraphs immediately preceding, I'd speculate that people will typically fill in the voids by attributing unseen mental states and purposes to events in the physical environment when they lack better explanations. And that kind of projection in turn suggests that people will be imagining unseen personalities with extraordinary powers who wield those purposes. Thunder and lightening display the raw angry emotion of some super-powered personality in the sky and so on.
But that doesn't really suggest monotheism, which seems to be a fairly late arrival in the history of religious thought. It's probably more likely to generate some kind of animism, the idea that the physical environment is inhabited and animated by unseen spirits psychologically rather like us.
While I'd agree that human beings do have innate propensities to think in that kind of way, I don't think that there's any necessity that they must. It's obviously possible for people to be physicalists and materialists and to think of their surroundings (apart from other people and perhaps animals) in a far less personalized way.