Religion, science denial, and our evolutionary roots!

Why do so many of us actually believe in homeopathy, crystal healing, astrology, clairvoyance, psychics who speak with the dead, ghosts, numerology, Japanese reiki, and all kinds of pseudoscientific woo-woo - when scientific evidence shows clearly they have no basis in fact?

We treasure our 'opinions' on everything - on sport, politics, history, religion, climate change, and the full gamut of social topics. When beliefs become deeply 'personalised' we reject all contrary evidence. The most dramatic examples come from the vulnerable (and gullible) people trapped in countless mind-altering religious cults - shown vividly in Going Clear, a documentary on the totalitarian Church of Scientology.

We need to understand WHY we are inherently irrational.

If we go back (briefly) to the Savannah of Southern Africa - several million years ago - we can begin to understand how our modern brain developed, and why our early 'social and survival' mechanisms can now be counterproductive.

We know that our ability to 'reason' is frequently flawed, and this relates back to our earliest hominid ancestors - from the Australopithecines of 4 million years ago, evolving through Home habilis, Homo erectus, and many other intermediaries to Homo sapiens – ourselves – around 200,000 years ago.

Our distant ancestors had a notably smaller brain case which housed a basic and less evolved limbic brain. We became 'modern humans' much later, when our brain had fully evolved to include large frontal and temporal lobes. This gave us the capacity to 'visualise' people and places, to imagine past and future events, to plan more efficiently, to use language effectively, and gain an ability to use logic and reason.

BUT we still retain the 'primitive' part of the brain that we shared with our earliest cousins. It includes the limbic brain - which incorporates the amygdala and hippocampus - responsible for highly "personalised" emotions and inherent defence and survival instincts. This academic article explains the limbic system.

How the limbic brain can subvert 'reason'.

Our earliest ancestors developed a broad range of survival skills which gave them a reactive defence against predators! Without that our species would not have survived, but it's left us with a legacy which is often in conflict with the new and more highly evolved parts of our brain equipped for 'critical thinking'. There's a constant clash between an emotive and reactive limbic system and the rational prefrontal cortex.

Religion and pseudoscience are prone to this limbic influence.

One limbic auto-defence mechanism is Hyperactive Agency Detection (HAD), as this Michael Shermer video explains. That rustle in the long grass - is that the wind, or a predator about to kill you? We still retain this survival system to detect 'agency' and danger today - it includes the 'fight or flight' response we all share. Is that loud bang a gunshot? Do we stay or run? It's part of our emotional reactive tendencies.

But HAD also allows us to imagine agencies where none exists. To see 'natural' events as 'supernatural agents'. Our forebears would see earthquakes, lightening and thunder as powerful gods that need to be appeased. Was this a creator of our world who must be obeyed? Creationists and other religious fundamentalists today still use HAD to reassure themselves of their supernatural gods.