Recent studies have pointed to evidence that humans are born with the inclination to believe in a deity. The many variations of religions all over the world give evidence to this human desire. Religious believers are often caught using this inclination to seek a higher being as proof of the existence of a god. Logically, this argument is full of holes. Humans are also gifted with a tendency towards storytelling (Cinderella, Santa Clause, etc), but our need to tell stories and pass them on does not make the characters in those stories real.
A better explanation of this propensity towards religion lies in the studies of the human brain as an organ. Having evolved over billions of years, the brain has acquired a unique characteristic for its size. Comparable to body size, the only animal with a bigger brain is the blue whale. Humans possess a powerhouse of a brain capable of self awareness, compassion, memory storage, hypothetical thinking, abstract thinking and much more. From the day your brain began to function, it has only known what it feels like to be ‘in function’ or conscious. If your brain, which controls your thoughts, hypothetical and abstract processes were to stop being self aware, you would be dead. In other words, humans have no concept of what not BEING feels like. It is impossible for us to experience nothingness. Your heart functions in much the same way, however it does not posses synapses to let it worry about not beating or wonder if it will go on pumping abstractly after it stops pumping physically. It simply is not self aware like the brain is self aware.
This quality of the brain to be self aware and abstract in thinking is what many religions claim will live on after the material part of the brain has died. It is almost expected that an animal with such an organ as the human brain would create a scenario in which it did not simply stop BEING because it is incapable of knowing what that would be. The brain cannot imagine a time at which it was not self aware because for all of its existence it has been self aware and therefore must always be self aware or ‘eternal’. This is where religion steps in to bridge the gap between the logical part of the human intellect and the human brain’s desire for eternity. In other words, religion and gods are a side effect to having such an evolved brain, capable of self awareness.
A scientific study by Bering, Blasi and Bjorklund explored the development of ‘afterlife’ beliefs in religiously and seculary schooled children.
Children aged from 4;10 to 12;9 attending either a Catholic school or a public, secular
school in an eastern Spanish city observed a puppet show in which a mouse was eaten
by an alligator. Children were then asked questions about the dead mouse’s biological
and psychological functioning. The pattern of results generally replicated that obtained earlier in an American sample, with older children being more apt to state that functions cease after death than younger children (11- to 12-year-olds . 8- to 9-year-olds . 5- to 6-year-olds), and all children being more likely to attribute epistemic, desire, and emotion states to the dead mouse than biological, psychobiological, and perceptual states. Although children attending Catholic school were generally more likely to state that functions continue after death than children attending secular school, the pattern of change with regard to question type did not differ between the Catholic and secular groups. The results were interpreted as reflecting the combined roles of religious instruction/exposure and universal ontogeny of cognitive abilities on the development of children’s afterlife beliefs.
The younger children in the study were quick to make ‘errors’ about the dead puppets saying that the puppet could no longer eat food, however he may still feel hungry. Older children were more inclined to say that only ontological properties of the puppet still exists after its death (such as love, anger, sadness).
However, by virtue of experiencing their absence during waking life, some
psychological states (e.g. seeing, taste) are more amenable to cessation attributions to dead agents than states that the self is never consciously without (e.g. thinking, wanting). For example, perceptual states may be generally amenable to materialist reasoning when individuals contemplate the minds of dead agents, since people frequently experience the absence of such states (e.g. being in a dark, quiet environment).
The study concluded that “because knowledge about the fate of mental states after death
cannot be informed by firsthand experience, theoretical constructs dealing with the self and others’ minds after death suffer from the logical impoverishment of hypothesis
disconfirmation.”
Ideas about an afterlife seem to develop through an organized cognitive base. This self awareness promotes belief in psychological continuity after physical death. Younger children seemed to understand that thinking happens in the brain, but were unable to separate the death of the brain tissue with the discontinuation of thought. The study hypothesizes that religious instruction may “encourage children to escape these conflicts by quarantining biological facts from religious beliefs, thus preserving a default stance toward viewing dead agents as having active minds.” Contrarily, naturalistic instruction about the functions of the body and mind encouraged children to link the cessation of brain function with all mental processes, even those that are not directly linked to bodily properties.
