Wired for Creationism?
November 29, 2005
It’s just not fair! I ran across this teaser in The Atlantic, but to see the entire article they wanted me to pay for a print subscription. I have since discovered that there may be a way around that restriction, but for now I’ll go with what I’ve got.
Bloom takes note when his children, or any other children, wax philosophical about the body and the soul. As a rationalist and a self-declared atheist, he rejects all notions of spirits, deities, and the afterlife. As a researcher, however, he has discovered that children are predisposed to divide the world into two categories: the physical and the immaterial.
The general idea seems to be that we are hard-wired from birth with a yearning for the supernatural and a need to worship something beyond ourselves. Many religions try to satisfy this built-in yearning for the supernatural, but only the biblical narrative of God’s redemptive history from creation to the present consistently and completely satisfies this yearning. We can be at peace with ourselves only by discovering peace with God.
To some, that assertion is very suspect because it is scientifically unprovable. For me and countless others it is supernaturally self-evident. Deal with that as you will.
Dave, telling but not preaching.
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