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… your brain didn’t evolve so as to understand that.
From Alex Rosenberg’s Atheist’s Guide to Reality:
Understanding the science is a challenge because of the way science packages its discoveries. Our brain just didn’t evolve to be able to unwrap the package easily. This is why most people have never been able to deal with science. And it’s the main reason why there have always been far fewer atheists than believers. (p. 4)
And also from a 2012 interview at Talking Philosophy:
You note early on that “the effort to argue most people out of religious belief was doomed by the very Darwinian forces that the most fervent of Christians deny.” Does evolution select for superstition and conspiracy theories? And how can they be dispelled?
Getting us from the bottom of the food chain on the African savannah to the top required mother nature (a.k.a. natural selection) to solve several design problems. Its quick and dirty solutions included ones that exaggerated our tendency to see conspiracies—plots in which there is a motive behind every event in nature. That’s what made religious belief unavoidable. It’s why religion is almost universal. Can these false beliefs be dispelled? Probably not completely, and probably not at all for people who have trouble understanding science.
If his brain evolved to understand it, is he a separate species?
Alex Rosenberg is R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy, Duke University
See also: Dennis Prager on reasons for believing in God