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What Is Atheism?
Why most people’s ideas about atheism are incorrect
Most people in most places at most times have believed in one or more gods. It’s one of the great deep constants of human nature. We project our own psychology out into the world in order to account for phenomenon that (to us) would otherwise be inexplicable and overwhelming.
For most of our evolutionary history we lived very tenuous lives, full of disease and early death. We didn’t know about bacteria and viruses, we knew nothing much about meteorology or seismology. Large-scale events like earthquakes and floods and small-scale events like sickness and death were seemingly random and so our pattern-seeking brains sought explanations. What better explanation than that all these events and more were intentionally caused by all-powerful beings that were just like us, only bigger and stronger and invisible?
Hence all the early records we have of gods are essentially anthropomorphic. The gods are us, only larger. The gods are why we are here, why the world is as it is, why things happen.
This is an entirely understandable adaptation to circumstances. Belief in gods therefore is an historical artifact arising from the conditions of the ignorance in which our species lived for most of its evolutionary history.
