TTA Podcast 292: The Illusion of God's Presence (with Jack Wathey)

okay here we go stand by three two one action assume nothing rash bald face blasphemy question everything I find it extremely hard to imagine open your eyes it is quite all right to be an atheist the fastest growing group of people in the country has been measured as being those who have no belief or who are atheists you don't have to be apologetic or quiet about it challenge the opposition you see religion on 100 fronts losing the argument and start thinking this is the Thinking Atheist [Music] worldwide I know summer is over but next week's broadcast is going to be about summer camp specifically in some ways we're going to talk about religious summer camp and some of us have some experience with this you're supposed to go and be a kid and have fun and make memor and make friends and blah blah blah and many of these summer camps are put on by churches and religious organizations for the purpose of indoctrinating kids and it ends up being Church Falls Creek is a huge Christian summer camp in Oklahoma Church three times a day I mean you get up you go to church first thing in the morning there's a service there's a service in the middle of the day and there's another service at night and trust me there's an altar call to just about every damn one of them so we're going to talk about that some of the insanity that goes on there and we're going to highlight an alternative to some of this Insanity a wonderful organization called Camp Quest and so that's coming up next Tuesday following that Ain raw's going to join me at the end of September to talk about the foundational falsehoods of creationism which is coming out in a book and then Buddhism is a topic we'll cover the first part of October if you have an opinion a perspective if you want to share your voice on any of these issues the email address to do so is podcast at the thinking atheist. tonight's show revolves around a new book written by a guy named John C Wy it's called the illusion of God's presence the biological origins of spiritual longing are we hardwired to believe in God we're going to talk to the author and talk more about this subject here in just a second first I'd like to thank our show sponsor today it's the Great Courses plus unlimited video learning with some of the world's greatest professors just streamed right into your life maybe you're like me I want to be a sponge I want to learn new stuff every day to discover things to know more tomorrow than I know today with the Great Courses plus your home your office your smartphone can become your classroom on a huge host of subjects everything from astronomy to computer programming how to have a better memory Fitness Nutrition photography I'd mentioned that I had just finished the Neil degrass High course called the inexplicable Universe Unsolved Mysteries it was amazing I started watching on my studio computer here I was out running some erands had some time to kill I actually watched some more of that course by just pulling it up on my smartphone it was awesome if you love learning you will love the Great Courses for my listeners the Great Courses plus is offering a free month of unlimited access to all the Great Courses plus lectures 30 days of use totally free when you sign up at the Great courses plus.com Seth Andrews start your free month and enjoy this wonderful tool for learning the Great Courses plus.com Seth Andrews my conversation on today's show is with an author named John C Wy he goes by Jack he is a smart guy he's a computational biologist and he does a lot of work in areas that would make some of our heads explode stuff like evolutionary algorithms Pro folding the biology of nervous systems back in the 90s John served as a senior application scientist at biosim Technologies he founded his own business called Wy research back in 1996 and has a lot of scientific research funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health he is an expert in neurobiology and he's author of a new book called The Illusion of God's presence the biological origins of spiritual longing and he joins me here John Wy thanks for being on the show oh it's an honor it's my pleasure you come highly recommended I was in conversation with Dr darl Ray who's a friend and someone who's always talking about you know the damage that religion does and we get into some of the belief in the brain conversations with Daryl but he was just raving about this book of yours I do from time to time sort of book rated podcast you know there's a centerpiece that our conversation revolves around and that's the case today but I want to start by introducing you properly to our audience give me some background Jack who are you what do you do well um my I was born in the Bible Belt in Charlotte North Carolina raised by two Christian parents one Catholic the other Presbyterian and I was brought up mainly in the Presbyterian church but my dad was also a chemist and so I was brought up with a lot of interest in science too I went off to college at Caltech got a degree in biology then went to graduate school in Neuroscience so I was very always very heavily interested in science and it was in high school when science and religion started to clash in my brain so somewhere around age 16 I I decided there was something seriously wrong with the religious worldview it just did not seem to jive with reality anymore and by age 16 or 1 17 I was calling myself an atheist and like many people who leave religion for a while I just went through this phase where I could just kind of dismiss it okay this is obviously something false it's uh if if you have an empirical worldview if you're if you depend on evidence to decide what's true it's pretty clear that the religious worldview has to be mistaken and a lot of people just never go beyond that they just dismiss it okay I'll move on now I'll see the world the way it really is but as someone who went deeper into biology and neuroscience and psychology I I started to wonder when I was a graduate student well what was that thing I just came from why why do people do this to themselves where does this come from where do these religious ideas and feelings come from and I started to think of it in terms of ethology which is a a branch of Behavioral biology that is mainly concerned with animal behavior and sort of instinctive behaviors and I could begin to see where religion might come from in terms of ethology in terms of something innate in human nature so that's what got the idea of this book started in my brain long long ago 30 years ago or so so you would have disagreed then with stepen J ghoul's famous line about science and religion being nonoverlapping magisteria you think they're incompatible science and religion religion yes basically I do I do disagree with Steph J G on that point I think there are two fundamentally different ways of making sense of reality and they Clash he and when he said that he was trying to suggest that religion has a sort of a a legitimate domain of of uh human morality and wonder and and and spirituality and stuff like that but all of those things come from the human mind and that means they come from the human brain and the human brain is a product of evolution so so I see all of that stuff as natural phenomenon religion and the beliefs that people have about it are something that comes from Human Nature and human nature is something that comes from our evolutionary history so I see all of that as natural all of that within the province of Science and I think science has a lot more to say about religion than most people realize most people pitching religion say science doesn't apply it's not natural it is Supernatural therefore it defies all the rules so if you're going to take a scientific microscope to it it's not really going to work out religion doesn't really fit in that bubble is kind of the argument that I often hear it's rather convenient I think but I'm sure you hear it quite a bit as well yes yes and it's funny the way people make that argument usually they'll say things like well God is beyond the reach of science God is something that is beyond the Physical Realm beyond the universe Supernatural like you said and when they're saying things like that what they really have in mind is a god of deism a God who created the universe and is distant from it and separate from it and doesn't interact with it and yet those very same people most of them don't believe in such a god at all because such a God is pretty much useless a god like that doesn't answer prayers doesn't love us doesn't watch what's going on in our lives doesn't care about us isn't really a person it's just sort of a creative Force so if that's the kind of God you're talking about a God that's completely detached and is just sort of a thing that got the universe started sure that's beyond the the reach of science but that's really not the god that almost anybody believes in most people want to believe in a god who's a person who cares about them who loves them who follows the events of Their Lives who listens to their prayers and performs Miracles a God Like That must interact with the world and if there if if such a god existed he would not be he or she or it would not be beyond the reach of science because we would see manifestations of it everywhere if the Christian God were true and existed then we would see Christians much healthier than the general population their cancers would be miraculously cured they would have wonderful lives and prosperous lives and so on and so forth but but that's not what we see that's not the reality we see the book that we're centering the conversation around is your latest book it's called the illusion of God's presence the biological origins of spiritual longing and back to the point you were making you're speaking about kind of a parental God right we the helpless child leaning to the parent to meet our needs yes and that has in your opinion an evolutionary origin yes I think so um first of all I should say that um part of the reason I wrote the book is that I think this aspect of religion has been largely overlooked by science especially the scientists who care about religion and who try to make sense of it now which aspect is missing specifically this infantile longing that characterizes so much of religion this feeling that God loves us and that if we just cry out in prayer God will respond and answer our prayers and solve our problems that's something that you just don't see much of in the scientific literature that I wouldn't say it's been completely ignored Freud addressed it in his early works there's a thing called the attachment theory of religion mostly by psychologist Lee Kirkpatrick that addresses it but the bulk of the literature bulk of the scientific literature on religion is concerned with the social aspects of religion how it gets us to cooperate to compete with one another to form groups social rituals all all of that stuff stuff that's what most of the anthropologists and psychologists and cognitive psychologists are concerned with these days and I just I just felt that they were overlooking something very important almost half of what constitutes religiousness I think they've been overlooking so when we see the ubiquity of the baby story in various religions starting with the most obvious the baby Jesus and the manger you think baby imagery or infant related narratives inside religion are that's a pattern there's a purpose for that right yes yes definitely definitely so the essence of my book the main thesis of the book is that humans are born with an innate neural model of their mother it's sort of a a built-in expectation in the in the brain of a human infant that there exists this other being out there somewhere just kind of a vague sense of the existence of this loving powerful caring being out there and the the thing the infant must do is to reach out and connect with that being emotionally physically nutritionally that the the the infant's life depends on that being and of course that being is the infant's mother and this vague sort of sense that of the existence of this being is hardwired into the human brain and after birth it is very quickly filled in and fleshed out with specific information about a real specific person and yet this circuitry that causes this expectation of the mother's existence I think is just so hardwired into the brain that it lingers it's there throughout adulthood but normally lies dormant but under special circumstances often but not necessarily stressful ones that mimic the helplessness of infancy this circuitry can be activated and when it's activated it triggers this feeling this compelling illusion that this other being exists and is out there and and you can almost feel its Presence at a specific place like it was something you could reach out and touch and that I think is at the core of this basic feeling of a loving God being out there somewhere from your perspective then it's nature more than nurture we're hardwired for this and we have evolved a tendency to seek out this sort of other is the only word that really comes to mind you know yes is that accurate or am I misrepresenting it no that's fair um but I would say it's both it's both nature and nurture they're about equally important and one of the main new wrinkles in my book is this emphasis on this innate model of the mother there are many other examples of it in biology by the way it's um it's more the the rule than the exception that a newborn or a hatchling has some innate knowledge of the world it's it's born into or hatched into sea turtle hatchlings for example do not have an innate longing for their mothers because their mother is long gone by the time they hatch out but what they do have is an innate longing for the ocean and they have an innate model of what the ocean is and what it looks like so when they first crawl out of the sand out of their nest on the beach they have an innate longing to get to the ocean and they have this innate model that it it's the brightest thing on the horizon they look for they scan the Horizon with their eyes and look for the brightest place on the horizon and no matter what time of day it is it's usually at night that they hatch out but no matter what time of day it is the brightest thing on the horizon will normally be the ocean because the staright or Moonlight or whatever is glistening off the shimmering water and and that's the glowing thing they need to crawl to so there are many many examples like this I talk about in The Book of animals that have some kind of innate neural model of what it is they're born into and what they need to do but the argument then becomes well this is been planted within us as part of a design we are designed to crave a Divine parents right wouldn't this be evidence for god well some people would say that but of course I just say it's a product of evolution ution it's human infants who did not have this who did not have this intense longing for their mothers would be less likely to survive humans practice what's called um Cooperative breeding humans are different from most of our ape cousins in that we reproduce at a much higher rate than other apes and unlike chimpanzees or gorillas where the the mother will hold the infant exclusively and won't share the infant with other females in the group human mothers have to do that human mothers have to share their infants with other females and solicit the help of grandmothers and aunts and cousins and older siblings because they're juggling too many babies they just produce too many babies and have too many other things to do so we do this Cooperative breeding and it depends on the human infant playing a greater role in the formation of a mother infant Bond the infants have to be aware of where their mother is because their mother is their primary caregiver their primary source of nutrition during the first critical months so um sociobiologist Sarah herie makes this point in in several of her books that human infants must have human infants are are more engaged in forming the mother infant Bond than the infants of other Apes so there's a lot of selective pressure for this so I would say yes it's something something that's evolved and you can easily reason why it would evolve there there are selective pressures for it there's a meme a series of memes I see on the internet that say that all babies are born atheists right we are all born without a specific religious belief attached to us that's usually the product of family and culture yes from your perspective though do we have an evolved need to believe are we really born atheists that's a great question um and I take it up in the book in one place and my answer to it is I like to put it this way that we are all born theistically competent much as we are born linguistically competent although not to the same extent because obviously more people use language than our religious so when I say you that we're born linguistically competent what I mean is that the auditory cortex of a of a human infant has circuitry that specialized for the reception of language there's some fascinating experiments that have been done with this you can measure evoke potentials from the scalp of a newborn infant while playing phones uh little syllables from Human speech to the infant and if you play a single syllable repeatedly you get these waveforms from the brain and if in the middle of this sequence of a repeated syllable you throw in an unexpected one that's only slightly different a very very subtle difference like the difference between PA and ta when the unexpected one comes along if the brain is capable of distinguishing that making that subtle distinction between those two similar phones you'll get a different waveform and you can show by doing these experiments that a newborn infant can make these very subtle distinctions very subtle discriminations between syllables so they they have cortex that is clearly expecting language and is highly specialized for language and can make these very subtle speech specific discriminations at Birth and in a similar way I'm suggesting we have a theistically competent cortex that is expecting something Godlike but that something is not God that Godlike something that this part of the brain is expecting is actually mother it's expecting a relationship with this external savior the mother and for various unfortunate reasons it persists into adulthood and can lead us astray into believing in something truly Godlike truly magical book I think you quote from Matthew you know truly I tell you unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven even the scriptures in Christianity and many other religions command us be child like and depend on your parent or your father for everything you need yeah yes yes religion is dripping with infantile imagery it's it's so appealing it's so like I say it's at the at the core of these emotions that drive a certain aspect of religiousness that some of the most successful religions are the ones that appeal to this infantile aspect of religiousness that that people want to feel like little babies with super parents up in the sky who are looking out for them and taking care of them and it's assuring though isn't it I mean the idea that no matter how chaotic things are no matter how crazy things get no matter how nonsensical it is someone out there is in control that's assuring for a whole lot of people yes it is it's very comforting and I think it explains some of the time course in people's development of religiousness very often people become more religious sort of middle in in their midlife when their parents die and their parents themselves maybe and they're facing a lot of burdens life and suddenly life is a lot more complicated than it used to be back when they were little kids and and it feels comforting to think that well maybe I still can be a little kid in a way and maybe I still do have a parent in a way maybe I do have a heavenly father and gee that that would be nice if that were true maybe it is true I know much of this is It's rather clinical I mean it's much of this stuff dealing with belief in the brain and and how beliefs and perceptions are formed and filtered I realize this is not sexy stuff for a whole lot of people but it's very interesting stuff I think and you know you talked in your book about agency detection in the human brain the fact that we tend to assign agency to inanimate things or things we do not understand or specific patterns do you want to take a second and talk about how we sort of assign agency to whatever out there sure sure sure this is um this is a very popular idea in the cognitive science of religion it's been around for a long time you can see it in the writings of Charles Darwin in believe it was The Descent of Man when he was talking about the evolution of human uh human beings um he talks about the origin of religion in these terms that that we we tend to when we see something complex and hard to understand and hard to explain we tend to think of it immediately as the product of an intelligence because we are intelligent and we see ourselves making complex things and tools and houses and things and and so if we see something we have a hard time explaining like the complexity of nature it's just easy to assume well there must be a mind behind that some thinking being must have created that there's good biological reasons for us to do that also when we're wandering through the jungles or through the Savannah and we hear a rustling in the in the grass should we assume that it's just the wind blowing or is it safer to assume that it's a predator that might be about to LEAP out of the grass and kill us if you make the latter assumption that there's a an intelligence behind this odd sound you've just heard and it turns out to be a leopard then you're more likely to leave Offspring for the future generations and so we're just biased to make that inference that that there is some intelligence behind whatever we don't understand I'm talking here with Jack ay uh the author of the book The Illusion of God's presence you talked a little bit in the book about the deconversion of your wife right she looked around thinking there may be agency thinking there was a God but for her it was the problem of evil or the uh the argument from meaningless suffering yes that caused her to reassess and say hey wait a minute this doesn't look like a divine plan to me and this is probably a common story yeah yeah I think so hers was um she also uh lost her religious belief at about the same age I did at around age 16 she was visiting friends of her family who lived in Switzerland and just by coincidence um when she arrived there she arrived just a day or two after their newborn infant had died of sudden infant death syndrome so um she walked into this terrible situation where the parents were utterly devastated by this and she just just just it was the first time she had seen anything up close and personal that was that tragic that painful and her visceral reaction to it was there cannot be a loving God if this kind of thing happens a loving God would not allow this to happen when the Dan Barker who said all you have to do is visit a children's hospital and you know there is no at least no benevolent God yes yeah it's it's a very powerful argument for some people not everyone some people manage to rationalize their way through anything but well it's probably a coping mechanism for Mom and Dad the idea that one day they will all be reunited that's a powerful illusion for sure yes yes very much so yes are we getting some kind of a drug hit I mean is our brain giving us a a pleasure boost when we believe in superstitious things I mean do people genuinely get high on God have you gone into this at all a little bit yes uh more so in my second book which is still in progress than in the first one but I briefly mentioned it in I think it's chapter 13 in the illusion of God's presence well you you say in the book God's presence is a drug-free hallucination but I was thinking to myself well is the Mind producing the drug the chemical boost for you yes um I think there's something to that there's a part of the brain that's involved in reinforcement learning called the nucleus accumbens it's part of the reward pathway and it's this sort of the epicenter of drug addiction it's the part of the brain where most addictive drugs exert their Effects by increasing the concentration of dopamine and I have reason to think that that's probably also involved in a lot of religious experiences especially the the long the intense longing for for this mystical other the evidence is kind of indirect at the moment I I don't think it's been adequately studied but in the book The the evidence that I draw on has to do with the behavior of rat pups newly born rats they have an interesting Behavior where if they're rat pups by the way are completely helpless like human infants they have to be looked after by their mothers and if they get separated from their mother if they get knocked out of the nest or whatever they'll start crying in ultrasonic cries to summon the help of their mother and if you separate a rat pup from The Nest it will start crying like this and if you briefly put the mother in with the separated rat just for a a minute or so it will calm down because it it senses the mother's presence and then you take the mother away again and leave the infant pup alone it will start crying again but now at about double or triple the normal rate the rate at which it had been crying before so it's as if having a brief sensation of the mother's presence gets the infant's longing for the mother boosted it gets it Amplified so that now the infant is crying even more than it was when it was first taken out of the nest and if you look because now we're talking about rats and not humans you can do experiments with rats that you cannot do with humans like injecting things into the brain and so on and when you do experiments with these rat pups you find that the part of the brain that's critical for this Behavior this acceleration of the crying in response to the mother's presence that is the nucleus succumb that is the epicenter of drug addiction so it's it's almost like the rat pup is responding to the mother's presence as if it were a cocaine dealer about to give them a hit it's something they're they're longing for the way a drug addict Longs for the drug so in that sense of the attachment between infant and mother is is a very powerful almost addictive like attachment and I think the attachment between believer and God may be an addictive like attachment so the next question then becomes what's the harm you know come on it alleviates my fears it calms me it soothes me it gives me a sense of purpose I get a hit I feel pleasure what's the problem if I want to believe in God yeah that's a great question and I think for many people it's it's not only harmless relatively harmless it's it may even be beneficial I've met people who have had very hard times in life I've met people who have suffered a great deal and the feeling that there exists this loving God who's taking care of them and looking out for them gives them so much comfort and stability that it it really makes it possible for them to get through life whereas without it they might not be able to and for people like that I have no problem with with them being religious or spiritual I think it may be a good thing and necessary helpful thing so the problem though is when it results in something actionable I mean normally this belief doesn't exist in a bubble they have offspring of their own then they download this sort of magical thinking to their kids yes or you know they participate in the world using sort of their God glasses seeing everything through a god filter then it becomes a disconnect from reality that is a problem yes exactly and that was going to be my next thought that um this kind of of uh sort of therapeutic aspect of religiousness or spirituality is fine as long as you don't try to force it on anybody else the problem is that most people who are religious do end up forcing it on someone else almost always their own children if they have children religion is propagating right it only survives if it's I don't know do you call religion a virus the god virus like Dr Daryl Ray does or yes I I talk about that a little bit in in my chapter 3 and I think that's a legitimate way to think of it it does it does sort of propagate mind to mind it has that quality to it I think that's a legitimate and useful way to think about it Jack since you're plugged into neuroscience and this is one of your interests have you followed the god helmet you've been around for years and years the work of Michael Persinger the neuroscientist and this helmet that they put on their heads the heads of a subject and stimulate parts of the brain I guess using magnets I mean have you dipped your toe into these Waters what do you think I have and uh again that's something I talk about in my second book but I'm very skeptical of persinger's work he's an interesting guy uh he's a little eccentric and the main thing though that makes me skeptical of him is that someone else another group in Sweden tried to replicate his results and they collaborated with him they tried to duplicate his equipment and setting and tried to make their setup the same as his as closely as they could and what they found was that the magnetic fields had no influence whatsoever on whether a person reported a sensed presence in this isolation chamber where they have the subjects people did report having sensed presence experiences but the only factor that correlated with that was the suggestibility of the subjects not whether or not the magnetic feels were on so this is reporting by the subject a subjective verbal account of what they think they feel this isn't a hard measurement of the brain itself that's correct that's correct so essentially it's iwit it's just eyewitness testimony is what they're having to go with yeah pretty much so and and and that's pretty much what person gear has to go with too except that he claims that when he flicks the switch and turns on these magnetic fields that it increases the probability of these experien but a separate study failed to replicate that and another point that should be made is that his method of inducing magnetic fields into the brain is very different from what most neuroscientists use who do magnetic stimulation it's about a millionfold weaker than the magnetic field strength necessary to induce a visual spot visual illusion in visual cortex or muscle twitching in motor cortex so that raises some alarm Bells it's it's a very unconventional very uh weak magnetic stimulation I used to invoke the god helmet story a lot more when I first got into you know the movement when I was first speaking out against the subjective nature of belief and how we each have our own Gods and they often look like us kind of thing you know and uh but the more I begin to see the criticisms and the skepticism of well no one else can really replicate this and it's it's not NE necessarily being accurately measured I don't really do it anymore but I am fascinated by the idea of having parts of the brain stimulated with magnets and sensing a presence in the room I mean it is fascinating stuff for sure oh yes very much so and I don't dismiss it in principle it's it's um entirely possible that it it could be made to work I'm just not sure that personer has accomplished that what do you want to accomplish with the book I mean what is it are you trying to speak to Christians to reveal to them that your brain may be tricking you there's even a section of the book called trick of the mind I mean is this the end zone or is it for the general population I mean who are you going for I'm definitely trying to reach a general readership um the book is is not written for academics although I've tried to write it to a very high standard of scientific scholarship and and if if any if any academics want that aspect of it if they want to to see the scientific literature that's that's behind my ideas I I I push all that into the endnotes so it's there it's it's something the lay person can really get into but it's a thick little number you got it's not a light read you know what I'm saying yes yes it's it's kind of a thick book but it's only actually only it's only 300 pages of the main text that it's got a lot of endnotes and references like I said for the academics but the normal people don't have to read that I've tried very hard to write it in a way that's reader friendly and fairly jargon free and where I have to use technical terms I I try to explain them and Define them but I'm I the people I had in mind when I was re writing the book are mainly people like me who who got out of religion who who were separated from it and could see it as false but we're still puzzled by it where what is it that makes us do this where does this come from why why do humans do this to themselves but also I wanted to reach believers who are wrestling with doubt I'm I'm very empathetic towards people like that because I was in that situation myself once and I appreciate that people who are committed Believers are very hard to reach that humans are very skillful at rationalizing almost anything to fit their their preconceived notions and their beliefs but once once that starts to break down down once you've had the experience like my wife had with the seeing the sudden infant death syndrome or had some prayer that should have been answered that was not answered um some terrible cancer or other disaster in the family when when you have when you're when your worldview is shaken and you begin to face the possibility that okay maybe this isn't true then you need help then I think you you could use a little help and and I've tried to provide that to people who who are who are wrestling with that kind of situation this is a movement so often I think in need of empathy we have the data we have facts we have evidence we have all this ammunition that we bring but so often we just forget to bring empathy and compassion into the discussions I've seen many people assert outright religious people aren't just victims of bad ideas that they are operating with damaged brains they're brain damaged people and of course I I was once a Believer myself I was the idea that you know I was I was brain damaged I I was a victim of bad ideas and so you're not talking about a defective mind you're talking about natural workings of the brain yes fueled by environmental concerns yes and in fact I'm glad you brought that up because um I struggled very hard to find a good title for this book and I've had lots of criticism and praise for the title and ultimately settled on um some people tell me it's sounds too much like uh Richard Dawkins The God Delusion but I specifically chose the word illusion rather than delusion because delusion suggests exactly what you were just talking about a defective brain some some schizophrenia or something and I strongly disagree with with that you could you can find schizophrenics who have religious delusions but but most people who are religious are not that they're people with normal healthy brains who are experiencing an illusion not a delusion and I talk about a thing called cognitive impenetrability which is an aspect of many many kinds of Illusions not just a religious one but sensory Illusions like the ases room where you see this what looks like a normal rectangular room with two people standing in the distant corners and they can be identical twins and one of them is half the size of the other and if they walk across the room and change places you can see them shrinking and growing as they change so if you see this illusion and even if you know how it works you completely understand the illusion even if you built the room yourself with your own two hands you still see the illusion and this is what psychologist called cognitive impenetrability our conscious understanding of the workings of the illusion are not enough to penetrate the illusion so I think this illusion of God's presence is that kind of Illusion it's a it's it's cognitively impenetrable and once you've experienced it it's it's very hard to see it as anything other than real evidence for the existence of this mystical Godlike being there's a show I enjoy on Netflix it's called brain games where they talk about perception in the brain and memory and and how easily we are fooled and I'll tell you after watching a dozen or so episodes of brain games I I just just look around and think you know perception isn't reality necessarily we are easily fooled I mean our brains are hugely useful certainly but those who know how to manipulate the system certainly those who are pitching some sort of woo or you know you can see how the mystics and the prophet preachers and those who know how to manipulate the eager and the vulnerable and the the uh the gullible you can see how they can manipulate perception to cell re it quote unquote reality oh yes yes very much so the the the human brain takes a lot of shortcuts to make sense of reality to interpret the the world around us and if you know what those shortcuts are you can trick the brain very easily and if you know that someone's trying to trick the brain perhaps you can reason your way past and uh and how do I even phrase that Jack um if you're aware then that these tricks exist perhaps it's a ventive measure to keep yourself from being duped yes I think so I um and it's not just sensory illusions that are involved here we we we have a tendency as as human beings to decide what's true or false based on intuitive feelings that's kind of the natural mode we work in we depend on intuitions a lot to make decisions what foods are appealing what foods are safe what foods are not what people we should choose as friends and whom we should marry those very complex decisions are so complex So Many Factors go into them that we can't really reason our way to a decision and very often when we're trying to make a decision like that an answer will just come to us and we'll suddenly wake up one morning and say oh yes this woman Sally that I've been dating she's the one I'm going to marry her I just know this it's going to work and this is going to be right and very often it works out then that kind of of decision making based on intuition comes from the unconscious mind we have a whole lot of stuff going on below Consciousness that we're not aware of where all kinds of of things and factors are being weighed and compared and and and we just get this emotional feeling that Wells up into Consciousness it gives us a decision and that works for a lot of what we have to do to survive but the whole point of intuition is just that survival and reproductive success that's what it's aimed at it is not aimed at optimal truth finding so if you start using intuition for truth finding to try to understand how reality really works you're likely to be led astray and so if you just are aware of that if you know about human intuition and you know that these feelings that come to us intuitively are there for Reproductive success and not for truth find finding if you're just aware of that much then you're way ahead because then you can start deliberately ignoring your intuitions when it comes to matters of fact and matters of Truth John C Wy author of the book The Illusion of God's presence I will include a link to this book in the description box of this broadcast or you can just find it on Amazon or is there another website where people can find you in your work sir yes uh Wy research.com is the website I have set up for the book there's a lot of um interesting little stuff in there some overview and discussion and links to where you can buy the book that's w a t h ywy research.com that's it thank you so much for your time and for having this discussion I think it's it's really interesting stuff understanding how belief and the Brain sort of tie together and we'll turn everybody onto the book and all success with it my friend thank you so much Seth I really enjoyed this Follow The Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter watch dozens of original videos on The Thinking Atheist YouTube channel and visit our website for resources links contact information the editor's blog and more the thinking atheist.

Channel: TheThinkingAtheist

Views: 69,921

Keywords: atheist, atheism, The Thinking Atheist, Seth Andrews, religion, secular, The Illusion of God's Presence, John C. Wathey, Jack Wathey, biology and belief, science

Id: 6kOTVYKAilQ

Length: 44min 48sec (2688 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2016