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"Humans have evolved this tendency to look for explanations, to look for causes," he says in a characteristically dispassionate way. "This ends up giving meaning to life. It forms how we think about the world. Religion and spirituality emanate from it."
But Bering, now a professor in his own right at the University of Arkansas, sounds ready to burn down a cathedral. His hunger for the answers to his mother's questions barely sated, his goal is nothing less than to prove to the world, once and for all, that God is a "cognitive illusion" — a figment of our imaginations.
"My meaning in life is to illustrate that there really is no meaning," he says matter-of-factly from his cabin in the Ozark mountains. "I feel that, for the first time in the history of science, we've been able to answer these questions.
"We've got God by the throat, and I'm not going to stop until one of us is dead."
[...]
Bjorklund calls creationism the "species default." "The notion of creationism is intellectually easier to understand," he says. "It's been only very recently that we get to understand how things emerge without a creator, and it's hard to really live that way. Our minds did not evolve for this."
As famous biologist Richard Dawkins suggests, "It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism and to find it hard to believe."
Bering agrees. "It is clear that when it comes to the big questions in life, our brains have evolved so that science eludes us but religion comes naturally," he writes in American Scientist.
And Bering is the first to admit that this is true even for scientists. "Even for me, it's inescapable. Life may very well be purposeless. All the evidence at this point suggests that these are cognitive illusions."
The irony is, Bjorklund and Bering know that even if they are right, we are all hardwired to disbelieve their results. "There will never be a day when God does not speak for the majority," Bering wrote recently. "As scientists, we must toil and labor and toil again to silence God, but ultimately this is like cutting off our ears to hear more clearly. God too is a biological appendage."
- link to full 'The God Fossil' article -
- CommentAuthorsk8fotofool
- CommentTimeApr 15th 2006
God is a cognitive illusion that humans can't understand, comprehend or prove, but that doesn't mean 'he', or 'it' I should say, does not exist. All of time is only a moment, this moment, right now, the present.
Past present (memory)
Present (sight)
Future present (expectation, contemplation)
Life after death is whatever the individual wants it to be. I used to think that when I die - I'm dead, there is nothing and I don't even know it, "I" don't exist anymore.
Why live that way though, like I said time is an instant - an instant in which you have a choice to make.
Do you want to be one with and embrace eternity or not? We are all still here because were not ready, we want to see tomorrow.
To quote Richard Kellys' movie 'Donnie Darko' - "I know that when I die, I can breathe a sigh of relief because there will be so much to look forward to." -
I definitely have no belief in life after death, of any kind, but in the nature of experience maybe infinity can be reached.
Drugs can seem to stretch a moment of time off into the distance of perception, the human brain is well equipped with the tools necessary to manipulate time as and when doing so would be benificial to survival. Time in this context is just the playground of consciousness, when a moment of sleep can mean a multifaceted, extended adventure in a dream.
The The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) is a text wielded in order to extend the moment of death into infinity. As the last dying embers of life sizzle out the perception as expounded by the human brain is said to 'stretch off' into the perceived distance. Perhaps this is what the 'light at the end of the tunnel', near death experience tells us. What if that last moment of life were to delve into infinity as it ebbed away. Then the life you led would seem a distant memory to the eternal dreamlike finality of your 'death existence'. That moment would appear closer to 'God' than any in your consciously lived life.
Who knows...
I don't wish for eternal bliss after I die, or even for a stretching of the final moment off into the abyss. An end to consciousness is a wonder in and of itself. To imagine it is impossible. To experience it is an oxymoron in reality consumption. That it will occur is enough wonder to keep death from ever being something I will fear, God or no God. -
- CommentAuthorsk8fotofool
- CommentTimeApr 17th 2006
touche -
Reminds me of the Voyager episode with the suicidal Q.
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