...to paraphrase Pascal.  Or maybe it was Neil Diamond...?  No, that was "I am, I said".  Anyway, it's not often the retroidal collective gets to wax philosophical on religion (without getting rabid), so we shall attempt to straighten up and get serious.

Now serious bloggers, like Richard Grant over there at Nature Blogs, have written on the nature of faith, and how scientists don't understand science, nor the religious, theology - and done a damn good job.  So if you want debate and reasoned, detailed arguments from an accomplished scientist, go there.

And now for ours...

Andy Coghlan, writing in the New Scientist of 14th March 2009, reports that "Our sophisticated minds gave us religion".  In his words:

"THAT a complex mind is required for religion may explain why faith is unique to humans. Now brain scans support this idea, revealing that the parts of the brain that process religious belief are those that evolved most recently and give us sophisticated cognition.

These regions include ones involved in our theory of mind. We share this ability to recognise that other people have intentions and thoughts independent of our own with only a few other species, including chimpanzees. Other regions involved in religious thought are ones used for language and metaphor."

Right, that's pretty straightforward, then: we invented deities because we are capable of envisaging minds outside of and separate from our own - and we put them in charge of us because, like all good primates, we are still afraid of the dark. 

"[The researchers] asked 40 monotheistic believers whether they agreed with statements relating to three core elements of belief: whether God intervenes in the world; how to interpret God's emotional state; and how to relate to abstract doctrinal teachings or imagery. The researchers scanned the believers' brains as they answered.

While considering the first two statements, volunteers relied on areas such as the lateral frontal lobe and frontal gyri, which are required for a theory of mind. For the doctrinal statements, they used areas devoted to linguistics, decoding metaphor and recalling images...."

This last is especially interesting to us: conceiving of a god requires a theory of mind; interpreting its teachings [as revealed to the enlightened, obviously] requires decoding of metaphors and interpretation of imagery.  An appreciation of fiction, perhaps...?

Going to the source, in the very august Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, we find one Dimitrios Kapogiannis et al. saying the following:

"We propose an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Our analysis reveals 3 principle [sic]psychological dimensions of religious belief (God's perceived level of involvement, God's perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge), which functional MRI localizes within networks processing Theory of Mind regarding intent and emotion, abstract semantics, and imagery. Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions."

Powerful stuff...which is why we take perverse delight in seeing the [obviously deliberate] spelling mistake.  But we draw your attention to the bolded bit at the end - and we leave you [sorry!] with the obvious development of our theme at the beginning, which is:

You think - therefore I am....