damerell

I'm fairly sure it was in ozarque's Livejournal that I found the suggestion that the evolved process of learning to recognise objects as people and attribute will to them provides the basis of unfalsifiable religion. This only explains origin, rather than persistence, but is a data point. Another is that rationality usually only goes so deep: late in The Red Queen the author recounts an experiment from which results indicated that people understood logically identical problems far far better when framed as social contracts than as bald puzzles. Even people whom one would expect to be able to regard as fundamentally intelligent. (You have a personal footnote by email to chiark.)

Is your copy of the Dawkins book handy? Or has oneplusme definitively claimed it for this week?

(There are Still Thursdays?)