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ShadowCatboy posted:Well it's important to note that when we commonly encounter organized events of very low probability, we generally infer that these must have been the result of design. For example, it would be very difficult to explain the structure of Stonehenge with appeals to normal geological or weathering forces. Creationist arguments simply try to apply this logic to life itself. I must emphasize "try," of course. This is natural human behavior, though, to the extent that something like that exists. The human mind isn't really that concerned with accuracy, by default. It really focuses more on linking things together to make quick deductions and then sticking to them. This is good when you're a prehistoric scavenger, since there's survival advantages in saying "I saw someone get very sick, it must be because they ate that weird berry earlier" and then never questioning that again since experimentation and self-doubt are dangerous and a waste of energy and you're probably not going to starve if you stop eating that one specific berry. If you were wrong and it was a total coincidence, no big deal, avoiding that berry is probably not going to kill you. That tendency tends to lead to superstition, because our brains tend to want to quickly draw connections to find a cause for everything that happens and that includes actual coincidences, but superstition isn't necessarily so maladaptive that it'll kill more people than the quick conclusion-drawing is able to save, so some undesirable behavior evolves its way in. Similarly, human senses take a number of cognitive shortcuts that make them easy to fool - that's how optical illusions work, by exploiting the escape hatches our brain uses to more quickly and easily evaluate the input it's getting from our eyes. We don't often run into things in the real world where those shortcuts screw us so badly that we die from them, and the time and processing power saved help us make quick decisions to our benefit every day, so we kept those shortcuts despite the occasional mistake they make. Same goes for other senses, as well as subconscious decision-making. They might be wrong sometimes, but when it's prehistoric life-or-death fight-or-flight time, those shortcuts and inaccuracies were probably going to help more than they hurt. Seeing design where there isn't any is relatively harmless evolutionarily, and is a small price to pay for being able to quickly learn how to preserve meat or making the split-second decision of how to respond when a hungry tiger's eyeing you.
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Aug 23, 2015 13:45
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 03:08 |
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