I’ve always maintained that a belief in God is the result of a failure of the imagination: But in Simon Blackburn’s review of John Polkinghorne’s latest attempts to scientifically prove the existence of God, this argument is put a lot more articulately:

When we act and think, we are not conscious of the multitude of causes in the brain or outside it that make our acting and thinking possible. The illusion is to project that lack of awareness onto the universe: to think that instead of being unaware of causes, we are aware that there are no causes. Our own actions and thoughts then become little exemplars of divine self-sufficiency. If we can have minds and make thoughts, just like that, why can’t God have a mind and make worlds, just like that?

It is a melancholy thought that so much of mankind’s long affair with religion springs from an illusion infecting our conception of mind: the illusion that when we do not know what causes us to act and think, we know that nothing causes us to act and think. But it is only this illusion that sustains the argument from design, and it is only the argument from design that sustains belief in a self-sufficient divine agent.

The whole article is worth reading.

[Tue, Aug 06 2002 – 09:16] Matthew (email) on your ‘theory of everything’ diagram, why doesn’t rule 3 iterate?