Frank Mayhar writes:
>This seems to me to be a terribly bleak view of humanity. That we as a
>species cannot but continue to cling to superstition to "explain" things
>that we don't understand.
There's a major falacy here -- supersition is one of the trappings of
religon, but you don't need religon to have superstition (last time I
did X, bad things happened, so I'll avoid doing X even though it was
unrelated to the bad things, frex), and you certainly don't need
superstitions to have a religon.
>when those patterns don't really exist), but why does that preclude an
>ability to overcome that innate predisposition?
Why? It's possible that we'll evolve less theistic, and more
holistic religons over time...but rituals and even axiomatic beliefs
are psychologically -useful-.
For that matter, there's no inherent bias toward making speculations
about the "unprovable" category any more than there is toward assuming
that "nothing" is in that category. It's astronomicaly unlikely that any
given guess is correct...but the simple "something" and "nothing"
speculations are about equally likely past that event horizon.
--
Joshua Kronengold (mneme at io.com) "I've been teaching |\ _,,,--,,_ ,)
--^--him...to live, to breathe, to walk, to sample the /,`.-'`' -, ;-;;'
/\\joy on each road, and the sorrow at each turning. |,4- ) )-,_ ) /\
/-\\\I'm sorry if I kept him out too late"--Vlad Taltos '---''(_/--' (_/-'