God Is A Myth - Part 2: Projection

2. Myth provides the best explanation for invoking God to explain order in the universe. During the last four hundred years, scientists have discovered that what was once thought the domain of the deity has been explained without a mind as the organising force.

Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientific mind ever to have lived, argued for a divine hand in the ordering of the solar system: "For while comets move in very eccentric orbs in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in orbs concentric, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted which may have arisen from the mutual actions of comets and planets on one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this system wants a reformation." Yet such ordering has now found to be unnecessary, there's a good understanding of how planets form around a star and how they hold their orbit.

William Paley, foreshadowing many intelligent design proponents, argued for design by way of analogy: "Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation." His application of the design argument to biology: "every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation."

But, as we know, this turned out to be spectacularly wrong. The organising force behind biology has turned out not to have any mind-like qualities at all, and function is emergent from the process. The great biologist and science historian Ernst Mayr put it: "Darwin taught us that seemingly teleological evolutionary changes and the production of adapted features are simply the result of variational evolution, consisting of the production of large amounts of variation in every generation, and the probabilistic survival of those individuals remaining after the elimination of the least-fit phenotypes. Adaptedness thus is an a posteriori result rather than an a priori goal seeking."

Biologist Richard Dawkins put it rather more poetically: "Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye, It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker."

Psychologists have noticed a tendency in children especially to see nature in terms of design. The phenomenon, known as promiscuous teleology, where the world is seen in terms of function. We as adults, Bruce Hood argues in Supersense, would have no trouble in seeing how one could walk down a hill, but a child would see the hill in terms of that function. Most children grow out of such thinking by the age of 10, but it can be carried into adulthood and is affected by cultural religious factors.

In addition to seeing design, it's well established that people, and children especially, anthropomorphise. Children especially have been observed engaging in egocentric projection that stems to inanimate objects. Yet this point was not lost on philosopher David Hume, who 250 years ago observed: "There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, which which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to everything, that hurts or pleases us."

It's well established that people see and attribute agency where there is none. While this doesn't exclude there actually being agency that fits our preconception, it should set the burden of proof as needing to overcome the inherent biases in our cognitive abilities. Ghosts, gods, aliens, cryptids, conspiracy theories, even the way we treat pets - they are all testament to our mind's capacity to shape an understanding of reality in very human terms. It may be that there are other agents akin to us out there, but our minds are wired for seeing such agency irrespective of actually detecting such agency.