Imagination ..... the what, where, how, and especially the "why" of it.

[xmas1997]

Albert Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

[Koolaid_Man]

Albert Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

does that explain why he was an incestuous Pedo who married his first cousin...

[xmas1997]

Why science needs imagination and beauty
Science & Environment

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131127-secret-to-thinking-like-a-genius

Albert Einstein famously said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” They’re both important, says physicist and Nobel Prize recipient Frank Wilczek, but knowledge without imagination is barren. Take his subject of theoretical physics. As Wilczek says a lot of what you do is to try to understand Mother Nature’s mind and her sense of beauty to see how the laws of physics could be more beautiful.

Not many people truly appreciate what happened in physics in the last part of the 20th Century. We understood at a level whose profundity would be difficult to exaggerate what matter is. We really have the equations for the different fundamental building blocks of matter – the different particles have mathematical characterisations that are precise and elegant. They have no secrets, in principle we have the equations.

The bad news, however, is we are not so good at solving them. There are still gaps in fundamental understanding, we have very good equations or practical purposes, but they are kind of lop-sided; they are beautiful but not quite as beautiful as they should be given they are close to God’s last word in some sense. We’re trying to think of better ways to solve the equations, which takes a lot of imagination because they describe an unfamiliar world – it’s a very small world and things behave differently in it. The only way to get experience is to play around with the equations and imagine how they might behave in different circumstances, it’s more like imaginative play than anything else.

The laws we have discovered, especially in the quantum world are so strange you have to play with them in your mind. Usually what you envision is wrong, but its mind expanding and every once in a while you see something that may be right. Sometimes it even is right.

The questions we are now able to ask are so compelling, so extraordinary. What is most of the Universe made of? Are the laws of physics ultimately unified? What was the Big Bang like? You just say them and they have such grandeur. The more you learn about the equations, the more you learn about physics, the more you learn how beautiful it is. That’s the real value, it’s an ornament to the human mind.

[Koolaid_Man]

Behind Closed Doors... (rumor has it he was banging his step daughters)


When he wasn't sciencing the shit out of everything, Einstein spent his time postulating his wiener into as many women as possible (http://www.chowk.com/articles/9433). Even though he was married twice (once to his cousin), he cheated on both of his wives with about 10 different women. Though in his defense, he presented his first wife with a list of rules, one of which was "expect neither intimacy nor fidelity."


Before Einstein finally settled on his cousin Elsa, he apparently almost married her 22-year-old daughter instead (Elsa was his first cousin through his mother's side AND second cousin through his father's side. In addition to the theory of relativity, Einstein was the only human capable of conceptualizing the branches of his own family tree that he had sex with). Then he supposedly got some side action from Elsa's sister when they were younger, which he defended in a letter to Elsa by pointing out "You can't blame me; we were young and she was willing."
We imagine he used the same defense when he was caught boning his best friend's niece years later.


Einstein would also write to his stepdaughter and wife to tell them which women he was currently sexifying, and sometimes had his stepdaughter act as a messenger to deliver letters to his mistresses (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/einsteins-theory-of-infidelity-407498.html), because if you're going to not give a fuck you might as well go all the way.


Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18559_6-famous-geniuses-you-didnt-know-were-perverts.html#ixzz3B3iSebHT

[ohmwrecker]

I don't really see spirituality and science as mutually exclusive.

[xmas1997]

I don't really see spirituality and science as mutually exclusive.

Nor do I.

[xmas1997]

Imagination in Science
Melissa Stone October 2, 2010 1
Yale Scientific Magazine

http://www.yalescientific.org/2010/10/from-the-editor-imagination-in-science/

“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.” — John Dewey

Welcome to Issue 83.3 of the Yale Scientific Magazine!
Countless great advances in science have contained elements of luck and skill but for the most part were consumed by imagination. We cannot discover what we do not know or explain what we do not understand without the creativity of envisioning what we cannot see. From Joseph Priestley’s finding of oxygen in the 1770s to Mendel’s rules of heredity in the 1850s coupled with the discovery of oncogenes in 1975, these breakthroughs exemplified great imagination but scientific researchers at Yale have been taking it a step further.

Despite that these aforementioned discoveries are deemed some of the most important research of our time, it took many years until this knowledge could be used to help human kind or our environment. There seems to be a progression of science where there is the starting discovery, extensive research in between, and then finally, the innovation that leads to something tangible and profitable. In many fields, we have seen much progress for the research that lies in between and are at the verge for the ending advance.

In science, much recognition is lost for everything in between. For example, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Drs. de Duve, Palade, and Claude for their discovery of the ribosome in 1974. 35 years later, Drs. Steitz, Yonath, and Ramakrishnan received the Nobel Prize for their work elucidating the structure and function of the ribosome which has lead to the development of Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, a business that develops commercial antibiotics for highly-resistant bacterial infections. Thousands of researchers must have worked on the ribosome in that 35 year time span, making vital discoveries that each unveiled one more piece of knowledge but they were never awarded Nobel Prizes. Perhaps it is imagination that enables a scientist to make that starting or final advance and separates his or her research from all the rest.

Melissa Stone
Editor in Chief

[SnakeBoy]

http://realneville.com/txt/imagination.htm

[Trainwreck2100]

Congratulations you can use google.com

[xmas1997]

Science IS imagination
By Phil Plait | April 6, 2009 7:30 am

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/04/06/science-is-imagination/#.U_ZcFKONq70

"The mind that’s afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never create the brilliantly original…"
–David Brin, Brightness Reef

People don’t understand science.

And I don’t mean that your average person doesn’t understand how relativity works, or quantum mechanics, or biochemistry. Like any advanced study, it’s hard to understand them, and it takes a lifetime of work to become familiar with them.

No, what I mean is that people don’t understand the process of science. How a scientist goes from a list of observations and perhaps a handful of equations to understanding. To knowing.

And that’s a shame, because it’s a beautiful thing. It’s not mechanical, not wholly logical, and not plodding down a narrow path of rules and laws.

But it appears to me that this is how Douglas Todd, author of an article in the Vancouver Sun called ‘Scientism’ infects Darwinian debates: An unflinching belief that science can explain everything about evolution becomes its own ideology, thinks of science. He likens it to religion, an unflinching belief that science can explain everything. He calls this — as many have before him — scientism:

Scientism is the belief that the sciences have no boundaries and will, in the end, be able to explain everything in the universe. Scientism can, like religious literalism, become its own ideology.

[...]

Those who unknowingly fall into the trap of scientism act as if hard science is the only way of knowing reality. If something can’t be “proved” through the scientific method, through observable and measurable evidence, they say it’s irrelevant.

Scientism is terribly limiting of human understanding. It leaves little or no place for the insights of the arts, philosophy, psychology, literature, mythology, dreams, music, the emotions or spirituality.

Right from the gate he’s using a strawman argument. There are many things science can’t explain currently, and no real scientist brushes those fields off as "irrelevant". And he’s wrong in saying that science leaves no room for all those other studies; it’s our study of human evolution that brings fantastic insight into why we have art, dreams, and mythology in the first place. What a strange notion, that science plays no role in those fields or our understanding of them!

But it’s in his understanding of science where Todd goes completely off course. What he says about science is exactly backwards, and it seems to me that he doesn’t understand the process of science, of how it’s done by real scientists in real life.

First off, there is no such thing as scientism. What he is describing is simply science, because science by its very nature is an attempt to explain all things using natural processes. And he seems to think science has no imagination.

That’s insane. Without imagination, all we can do is categorize the world. Assigning names and numbers, statistics and categories. And while that sort of thing is important in the scientific process, it’s not science itself. Without imagination, science is a dictionary.

And in fact the opposite of what Todd is saying is true. It takes no imagination at all to insert a supernatural explanation in some spot where you don’t understand the process. It’s all too easy to say "the bacterium flagellum could not have evolved," or "The Big Bang theory doesn’t explain why the Universe is homogeneous everywhere," and therefore "God did it." But it takes imagination, soaring, incredible, wonderful imagination, to look beyond the limitations of what’s currently known, and see what could possibly be… and even more imagination to make sure this venturing beyond current understanding still stays within the bound of reason and known rules of science.

You can always insert magic or belief or some supernatural power, but in the end that is a trap. Because someone else who is more imaginative than you will see the actual steps, the process reality made, and then you are left with an ever-narrowing amount of supernatural room in which to wiggle. And once that gap starts to narrow, the squeeze is inevitable. Your explanation will be forced to fill zero volume, and you’re done. Your explanation will be shown to be wrong for everyone to see, and your only recourse will be to abandon it, far too late to save your credibility.

Or to run for the Texas State Board of Education. But that’s certainly not science.

It took a vast leap of imagination for Max Planck to think of gas molecules in the Sun behaving like little springs, oscillating away, able to eject only specific colors of light. It took a leap of imagination for Alan Guth to think that the Big Bang theory wasn’t wrong, but incomplete, and to add inflation to explain why the Universe looks so smooth. It took Darwin’s breadth of imagination to correlate the vast amount of data he collected, and see that it was the unthinking mind of nature that forced species to adapt or die.

It’s all too easy to poopoo science, and to say that scientists are black and white automatons who go through the motions of the scientific method, rejecting anything with sparkle or color or surprise. But that conclusion itself lacks imagination. Science is full of wonder, of surprise, of leaps of imagination. If it were anything else, we wouldn’t have probes orbiting other worlds, we wouldn’t have vaccinations capable of wiping out scourges like smallpox, we wouldn’t have digital cameras, the Internet, ever-faster computers, cars, planes, televisions. We wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves, support our population, or look ahead to see where our decisions are taking us… and to see if these decisions are the right ones, and what to do to make them better.

Without imagination, even after all these centuries, we’d have learned nothing.

Science is imagination.

[SnakeBoy]

Science IS imagination


Well the link I posted said God is imagination. So that must mean God is Science and Science is God.

Keep flushing this out xmas and I'm sure ST members will get this shit figured out once and for all.

[xmas1997]

Religion a figment of human imagination

00:01 28 April 2008 by Andy Coghlan

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13782-religion-a-figment-of-human-imagination.html#.U_ZjgKONq71

Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.

That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.

Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died.

Once we'd done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

"What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," Bloch writes.

"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it," says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, "whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead."

Modern-day religions still embrace this idea of communities bound with the living and the dead, such as the Christian notion of followers being "one body with Christ", or the Islamic "Ummah" uniting Muslims.

Stuck in the here and now

No animals, not even our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, can do this, argues Bloch. Instead, he says, they're restricted to the mundane and Machiavellian social interactions of everyday life, of sparring every day with contemporaries for status and resources.

And the reason is that they can't imagine beyond this immediate social circle, or backwards and forwards in time, in the same way that humans can.

Bloch believes our ancestors developed the necessary neural architecture to imagine before or around 40-50,000 years ago, at a time called the Upper Palaeological Revolution, the final sub-division of the Stone Age.

At around the same time, tools that had been monotonously primitive since the earliest examples appeared 100,000 years earlier suddenly exploded in sophistication, art began appearing on cave walls, and burials began to include artefacts, suggesting belief in an afterlife, and by implication the "transcendental social".

Once humans had crossed this divide, there was no going back.

"The transcendental network can, with no problem, include the dead, ancestors and gods, as well as living role holders and members of essentialised groups," writes Bloch. "Ancestors and gods are compatible with living elders or members of nations because all are equally mysterious invisible, in other words transcendental."

Nothing special

But Bloch argues that religion is only one manifestation of this unique ability to form bonds with non-existent or distant people or value-systems.

"Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the sociality of modern human society."

"Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion," he says.

Chris Frith of University College London, a co-organiser of a "Sapient Mind" meeting in Cambridge last September, thinks Bloch is right, but that "theory of mind" - the ability to recognise that other people or creatures exist, and think for themselves - might be as important as evolution of imagination.

"As soon as you have theory of mind, you have the possibility of deceiving others, or being deceived," he says. This, in turn, generates a sense of fairness and unfairness, which could lead to moral codes and the possibility of an unseen "enforcer" - God - who can see and punish all wrong-doers.

"Once you have these additions of the imagination, maybe theories of God are inevitable," he says.

[it's me]

Shit loads of copy paste. Bullshit thread TBH.

[RD2191]

Shit loads of copy paste. Bullshit thread TBH.
You mean the same thing RandomGuy was doing and passing it off as his own knowledge/research? Why didn't you call him out?

[Koolaid_Man]

He fucked his first cousin and all her kids

[Trainwreck2100]

You mean the same thing RandomGuy was doing and passing it off as his own knowledge/research? Why didn't you call him out?

nothing to do with this thread

[pgardn]

It's really called modeling to science types.

And producing good models that have the capability of being TESTED requires some creativity based on knowledge.

And I thank you.
You won't find that in a textbook because I just made it up.
And it's that testing part that really sets science apart from other human endeavors that attempt to explain physical phenomena we observe, directly or indirectly.

[xmas1997]

Alan Moore on science, religion, and imagination

David Pescovitz at 12:00 pm Tue, Dec 27, 2011

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/alan-moore-on-science-religio.html

I would prefer a two-state solution. My basic premise is that human beings are amphibious, in the etymological sense of 'two lives'. We have one life in the solid material world that is most perfectly measured by science. Science is the most exquisite tool that we've developed for measuring that hard, physical, material world. Then there is the world of ideas which is inside our head. I would say that both of these worlds are equally real - they're just real in different ways. The concept of a world of ideas, yes it's intangible, it can't be repeated in a laboratory, but pretty much the evidence for it is all around us. In that, every detail of our clothing, our mindsets, of the buildings and the streets and cities that surround us - that started life as an idea in someone's head.

[pgardn]

Alan Moore on science, religion, and imagination

David Pescovitz at 12:00 pm Tue, Dec 27, 2011

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/alan-moore-on-science-religio.html

I would prefer a two-state solution. My basic premise is that human beings are amphibious, in the etymological sense of 'two lives'. We have one life in the solid material world that is most perfectly measured by science. Science is the most exquisite tool that we've developed for measuring that hard, physical, material world. Then there is the world of ideas which is inside our head. I would say that both of these worlds are equally real - they're just real in different ways. The concept of a world of ideas, yes it's intangible, it can't be repeated in a laboratory, but pretty much the evidence for it is all around us. In that, every detail of our clothing, our mindsets, of the buildings and the streets and cities that surround us - that started life as an idea in someone's head.

He missed a big part imo, a huge part.
Ideas help us to produce models that can then be tested scientifically. And then basic science is then put to some purposeful use by what we refer to as technology, which also requires a good head of ideas.

Dammit.

[xmas1997]

CS Lewis on Reason and Imagination in Science and Religion
– Dr Michael Ward
April 26, 2013 By Holly Ordway in Apologetics

http://christianthought.hbu.edu/2013/04/26/cs-lewis-on-reason-and-imagination-in-science-and-religion-dr-michael-ward/

On route to Houston, he stopped in New York to do a lecture for Cornell University, on “CS Lewis on Reason and Imagination in Science and Religion.”

From the description of the talk:

Although he was a literary historian, not a scientist or a theologian, C.S. Lewis has much to say of interest regarding the interface between science and religion because of his scholarly study of the sixteenth century and, in particular, of the imaginative effects of the Copernican revolution. He regards science, properly speaking, as a subset of religion. He believes science to be a fundamentally imaginative enterprise. He argues that scientific statements, because they tend to be univocal and strive to be verifiable, are actually rather small statements, all things considered. He argues that there is always a mythology that follows in the wake of science and that both scientists and non-scientists should take care not to put excessive weight on particular scientific metaphors. We should hold our scientific paradigms with a due provisionality, because new evidence may always turn up to overthrow those paradigms. Even the best and most long-lasting paradigm is merely a lens or linguistic stencil laid over reality, not reality itself. This humility in relation to the facts about the physical universe is a virtue similar to the one we should exercise before the mystery of God.

[Avante]

Without imagination we have no...

Hercules
Thongor
Godzilla
The Wolfman
Samson
The Wizard of Oz
Rodan
Kothar
Tarzan
Moby Dick
Sinbad
David & Goliath
Brak
Odin
King Kong
The Hulk
Dracula
Oisis
Thor
The X-Men
Superman
The Fantastic Four
Roland
Kyrik
Milo
The Lord of the Rings
Spiderman
Kane
Frankenstein
Venus
1984
Conan
Paul Bunyan
Achilles
Jupiter
Batman
Aquaman
Apollo
Green Arrow
Mercury
Wonder Woman
Zeus
John Henry
John Jones
Flash

[xmas1997]

How Christianity Created Science
(and Why Atheism Wouldn’t Have)

http://www.str.org/blog/how-christianity-created-science-and-why-atheism-wouldn%E2%80%99t-have#.U_Z6DqONq70

It takes some imagination to grasp how radically different ancient worldviews were from our Western perspective. Much of what we now take for granted as being common sense was not actually common throughout human history. Rather, our particular worldview was built over time on a foundation of unique ideas, and Rodney Stark, author of How the West Won, argued in a recent radio interview that it’s the Western view of God that made the biggest difference for us:

It’s pretty obvious…that the Judeo-Christian concept of God held the key to the rise of the West, and that is the belief in a rational Creator God, because that had the implication, then, that the creation was itself rational—that is to say, it obeys rules. The rules are reasonable, rational. Consequently, since humans have the ability to reason, it might be possible to discover the rules of the creation. And that was the whole basis of science.

Science only happened in the West. And the reason it happened [is] because only in the West was science plausible. Elsewhere, it was thought that the universe was eternal, that it was mystical, that it was beyond understanding and human comprehension. We could meditate on it, but we couldn’t try to discover the rules that made it work.

People like Newton believed that there were rules to be discovered, and the marvelous thing, of course, is there were rules that could be discovered.

So in one sense, the greatest scientific theory of all is that the universe is rational. And it’s been tested again and again, as people have discovered these rational rules by which everything works. That’s the key to the whole rise of the West.

Very often, atheists will lump all ancient religions together, imagining that any belief in the supernatural necessarily conjures up a chaotic, unpredictable universe in the minds of the believers. But it was actually the opposite with Christianity. It was only a belief in the biblical God that rescued people from a chaotic-universe mindset.

Atheists need to use their imaginations to strip away what our culture has unreflectively absorbed from Christianity and think about how they would see the world if Christianity had never existed.

Imagine if at the beginning of human history every human being had a naturalistic understanding of the universe—everything was thought to have come together randomly, as atoms happened to bump into atoms, with no reason for its existence. No design, no purpose to the way the universe developed. That foundational idea would have invoked not the view of today’s naturalist scientist (whose view grew out of our culture’s ancient Christian belief in an ordered universe), but a worldview every bit as chaotic as any that rested on capricious gods. Who, in a culture developing under a belief in a meaningless, random universe where something might at any moment come out of nothing, would have thought to search for rational, predictable natural laws?

An atheistic understanding of the universe does not naturally lead to the pursuit of science, nor does a supernatural view automatically lead there. Only in a culture with a belief in a rational, orderly, sovereign Creator—where it’s believed a reasonable mind is behind things—would science be likely to appear. And a look at world history backs up that conclusion.

Now let’s take this one step further: No worldview other than one with a Creator would likely have brought people to science, and yet it turns out that science is an accurate way of discovering truth about our world—that is, the scientific laws predicted by a worldview with a biblical concept of God, and unexpected in any other worldview, actually exist.

Why is that?

[Fabbs]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVg2EJvvlF8

[Trainwreck2100]

He missed a big part imo, a huge part.
Ideas help us to produce models that can then be tested scientifically. And then basic science is then put to some purposeful use by what we refer to as technology, which also requires a good head of ideas.

Dammit.

dude it's alan moore/

[xmas1997]

Scientists discover that atheists might not exist, and that’s not a joke
By Nury Vittachi | July 6th 2014 08:03 PM

http://www.science20.com/writer_on_the_edge/blog/scientists_discover_that_atheists_might_not_exist_ and_thats_not_a_joke-139982

Metaphysical thought processes are more deeply wired than hitherto suspected

WHILE MILITANT ATHEISTS like Richard Dawkins may be convinced God doesn’t exist, God, if he is around, may be amused to find that atheists might not exist.

Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged.

While this idea may seem outlandish—after all, it seems easy to decide not to believe in God—evidence from several disciplines indicates that what you actually believe is not a decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in stone.

This line of thought has led to some scientists claiming that “atheism is psychologically impossible because of the way humans think,” says Graham Lawton, an avowed atheist himself, writing in the New Scientist. “They point to studies showing, for example, that even people who claim to be committed atheists tacitly hold religious beliefs, such as the existence of an immortal soul.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since we are born believers, not atheists, scientists say. Humans are pattern-seekers from birth, with a belief in karma, or cosmic justice, as our default setting. “A slew of cognitive traits predisposes us to faith,” writes Pascal Boyer in Nature, the science journal, adding that people “are only aware of some of their religious ideas”.

INTERNAL MONOLOGUES

Scientists have discovered that “invisible friends” are not something reserved for children. We all have them, and encounter them often in the form of interior monologues. As we experience events, we mentally tell a non-present listener about it.

The imagined listener may be a spouse, it may be Jesus or Buddha or it may be no one in particular. It’s just how the way the human mind processes facts. The identity, tangibility or existence of the listener is irrelevant.

“From childhood, people form enduring, stable and important relationships with fictional characters, imaginary friends, deceased relatives, unseen heroes and fantasized mates,” says Boyer of Washington University, himself an atheist. This feeling of having an awareness of another consciousness might simply be the way our natural operating system works.

PUZZLING RESPONSES

These findings may go a long way to explaining a series of puzzles in recent social science studies. In the United States, 38% of people who identified themselves as atheist or agnostic went on to claim to believe in a God or a Higher Power (Pew Forum, “Religion and the Unaffiliated”, 2012).

While the UK is often defined as an irreligious place, a recent survey by Theos, a think tank, found that very few people—only 13 per cent of adults—agreed with the statement “humans are purely material beings with no spiritual element”. For the vast majority of us, unseen realities are very present.

When researchers asked people whether they had taken part in esoteric spiritual practices such as having a Reiki session or having their aura read, the results were almost identical (between 38 and 40%) for people who defined themselves as religious, non-religious or atheist.

The implication is that we all believe in a not dissimilar range of tangible and intangible realities. Whether a particular brand of higher consciousness is included in that list (“I believe in God”, “I believe in some sort of higher force”, “I believe in no higher consciousness”) is little more than a detail.

EVOLUTIONARY PURPOSES

If a tendency to believe in the reality of an intangible network is so deeply wired into humanity, the implication is that it must have an evolutionary purpose. Social scientists have long believed that the emotional depth and complexity of the human mind means that mindful, self-aware people necessarily suffer from deep existential dread. Spiritual beliefs evolved over thousands of years as nature’s way to help us balance this out and go on functioning.

If a loved one dies, even many anti-religious people usually feel a need for a farewell ritual, complete with readings from old books and intoned declarations that are not unlike prayers. In war situations, commanders frequently comment that atheist soldiers pray far more than they think they do.

Statistics show that the majority of people who stop being part of organized religious groups don’t become committed atheists, but retain a mental model in which “The Universe” somehow has a purpose for humanity.

In the US, only 20 per cent of people have no religious affiliation, but of these, only one in ten say they are atheists. The majority are “nothing in particular” according to figures published in New Scientist.

FEELING OF CONNECTEDNESS

There are other, more socially-oriented evolutionary purposes, too. Religious communities grow faster, since people behave better (referring to the general majority over the millennia, as opposed to minority extremists highlighted by the media on any given day).

Why is this so? Religious folk attend weekly lectures on morality, read portions of respected books about the subject on a daily basis and regularly discuss the subject in groups, so it would be inevitable that some of this guidance sinks in.

There is also the notion that the presence of an invisible moralistic presence makes misdemeanors harder to commit. “People who think they are being watched tend to behave themselves and cooperate more,” says the New Scientist’s Lawton. “Societies that chanced on the idea of supernatural surveillance were likely to have been more successful than those that didn't, further spreading religious ideas.”

This is not simply a matter of religious folk having a metaphorical angel on their shoulder, dispensing advice. It is far deeper than that—a sense of interconnectivity between all things. If I commit a sin, it is not an isolated event but will have appropriate repercussions. This idea is common to all large scale faith groups, whether it is called karma or simply God ensuring that you “reap what you sow”.

NARRATIVE PRESENCE

These theories find confirmation from a very different academic discipline—the literature department. The present writer, based at the Creativity Lab at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design, has been looking at the manifestation of cosmic justice in fictional narratives—books, movies and games. It is clear that in almost all fictional worlds, God exists, whether the stories are written by people of a religious, atheist or indeterminate beliefs.

It’s not that a deity appears directly in tales. It is that the fundamental basis of stories appears to be the link between the moral decisions made by the protagonists and the same characters’ ultimate destiny. The payback is always appropriate to the choices made. An unnamed, unidentified mechanism ensures that this is so, and is a fundamental element of stories—perhaps the fundamental element of narratives.

In children’s stories, this can be very simple: the good guys win, the bad guys lose. In narratives for older readers, the ending is more complex, with some lose ends left dangling, and others ambiguous. Yet the ultimate appropriateness of the ending is rarely in doubt. If a tale ended with Harry Potter being tortured to death and the Dursley family dancing on his grave, the audience would be horrified, of course, but also puzzled: that’s not what happens in stories. Similarly, in a tragedy, we would be surprised if King Lear’s cruelty to Cordelia did not lead to his demise.

Indeed, it appears that stories exist to establish that there exists a mechanism or a person—cosmic destiny, karma, God, fate, Mother Nature—to make sure the right thing happens to the right person. Without this overarching moral mechanism, narratives become records of unrelated arbitrary events, and lose much of their entertainment value. In contrast, the stories which become universally popular appear to be carefully composed records of cosmic justice at work.

WELL-DEFINED PROCESS

In manuals for writers (see “Screenplay” by Syd Field, for example) this process is often defined in some detail. Would-be screenwriters are taught that during the build-up of the story, the villain can sin (take unfair advantages) to his or her heart’s content without punishment, but the heroic protagonist must be karmically punished for even the slightest deviation from the path of moral rectitude. The hero does eventually win the fight, not by being bigger or stronger, but because of the choices he makes.

This process is so well-established in narrative creation that the literati have even created a specific category for the minority of tales which fail to follow this pattern. They are known as “bleak” narratives. An example is A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry, in which the likable central characters suffer terrible fates while the horrible faceless villains triumph entirely unmolested.

While some bleak stories are well-received by critics, they rarely win mass popularity among readers or moviegoers. Stories without the appropriate outcome mechanism feel incomplete. The purveyor of cosmic justice is not just a cast member, but appears to be the hidden heart of the show.

ROOTS OF ATHEISM

But if a belief in cosmic justice is natural and deeply rooted, the question arises: where does atheism fit in? Albert Einstein, who had a life-long fascination with metaphysics, believed atheism came from a mistaken belief that harmful superstition and a general belief in religious or mystical experience were the same thing, missing the fact that evolution would discard unhelpful beliefs and foster the growth of helpful ones. He declared himself “not a ‘Freethinker’ in the usual sense of the word because I find that this is in the main an attitude nourished exclusively by an opposition against naive superstition” (“Einstein on Peace”, page 510).

Similarly, Charles Darwin, in a meeting with a campaigner for atheism in September 1881, distanced himself from the views of his guest, finding them too “aggressive”. In the latter years of his life, he offered his premises for the use of the local church minister and changed his family schedule to enable his children to attend services.

SMALL DIFFERENCES

Of course these findings do not prove that it is impossible to stop believing in God. What they do indicate, quite powerfully, is that we may be fooling ourselves if we think that we are making the key decisions about what we believe, and if we think we know how deeply our views pervade our consciousnesses. It further suggests that the difference between the atheist and the non-atheist viewpoint is much smaller than probably either side perceives. Both groups have consciousnesses which create for themselves realities which include very similar tangible and intangible elements. It may simply be that their awareness levels and interpretations of certain surface details differ.

THE FUTURE

But as higher levels of education spread, will starry-eyed spirituality die out and cooler, drier atheism sweep the field, as some atheism campaigners suggest? Some specialists feel this is unlikely. “If godlessness flourishes where there is stability and prosperity, then climate change and environmental degradation could seriously slow the spread of atheism,” says Lawton in New Scientist.

On a more personal level, we all have loved ones who will die, and we all have a tendency to puzzle about what consciousness is, whether it is separate from the brain, and whether it can survive. We will always have existential dread with us—at a personal or societal level. So the need for periods of contemplative calm in churches or temples or other places devoted to the ineffable and inexplicable will remain. They appear to be part of who we are as humans.

Furthermore, every time we read a book or watch a movie, we are reinforcing our default belief in the eventual triumph of karma. While there is certainly growth in the number of bleak narratives being produced, it is difficult to imagine them becoming the majority form of cultural entertainment. Most of us will skip Cormac McCarthy’s crushingly depressing “The Road” in favor of the newest Pixar movie.

POPULATION IMPLICATIONS

When looking at trends, there’s also population growth to consider. Western countries are moving away from the standard family model, and tend to obsess over topics such as same-sex marriage and abortion on demand. Whatever the rights and wrongs of these issues, in practice they are associated with shrinking populations. Europeans (and the Japanese) are not having enough children to replace the adult generation, and are seeing their communities shrink on a daily basis.

Africans and South Asians, on the other hand, are generally religious and retain the traditional model of multi-child families—which may be old-fashioned from a Western point of view, but it’s a model powerfully sanctioned by the evolutionary urge to extend the gene pool.

“It’s clearly the case that the future will involve an increase in religious populations and a decrease in scepticism,” says Steve Jones, a professor in genetics at University College London, speaking at the Hay Festival in the UK recently.

This may appear as bad news for pro-atheism campaigners. But for the evolutionary life-force which may actually make the decisions, this may augur well for the continued existence of humanity. (An image of Richard Dawkins and his selfish gene having a testy argument over dinner springs to mind.)

In the meantime, it might be wise for religious folks to refrain from teasing atheist friends who accidentally say something about their souls. And it might be equally smart for the more militant of today’s atheists to stop teasing religious people at all.

We might all be a little more spiritual than we think.

[Franklin]

knowledge is what we know about the past and present, while imagination enables us to know the future.