Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I’m open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
We are overzealous pattern recognition machines.
The proto-hominids who saw a tiger in the bush when there wasn’t one had a higher chance of passing on their genes than the ones who didn’t see a tiger when there was one.
And now their descendants see tigers in the stars.
If LLMs have taught us anything about pattern recognition machines it’s that when they don’t find a pattern to match they don’t say they have no matches… they just pull a somewhat fitting match off their arse, or an outright random one. They hallucinate.
And that’s even before we get to our actual minds. We’ve got pattern recognition machinery in our retinas. What reaches our brain is already highly processed (to make tigers easier to spot), and then it gets into the visual processing part of the brain, which uses sophisticated autocompletion using previously stored patterns to fill in the blanks and highlight anything remotely interesting… often including things that aren’t there (see optical illusions, for instance). That’s what we “see”, and then we get to make up stuff based on that (and the same probably applies to our other senses, too).
Add to that that we’re notoriously bad at recognising randomness (or lack thereof). A coin falls heads up four times in a row and we suspect shenanigans, as if it wasn’t as likely or unlikely as any other pattern.
We see some craters that look like a smiley face (pattern recognition strikes again) on Mars and we think it’s a fake picture (it’s 2024, after all), or a Watchmen reference. And when we learn it’s actually real our hair stands up. We get goosebumps. It can’t be natural. Must be super natural. Aliens. Gods. Ancient civilizations. All while we ignore the thousands of craters that don’t look like a smiley face.
But, hey, at least we’re not getting eaten by hidden tigers, so win some lose some, I guess.