The Vagaries of Religious Experience

Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Director of the Social Cognition and Emotion Lab, recently posted a piece up at Edge called The Vagaries of Religious Experience. He theorizes that "God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind." He begins by positing that people believe in God, not (completely) because they are told to do so, but also because of their experiences. Becuase of experiences, he maintains, people's brains try to put the best spin on things, try to explain them despite there being no substance to the spin/explanation. Examples of our brains putting an empty spin on something:

For instance, when experimenters approached people who were standing in line at a photocopy machine and said, "Can I get ahead of you?" the typical answer was no. But when they added to the end of this request the words "because I need to make some copies," the typical answer was yes. The second request used the word "because" and hence sounded like an explanation, and the fact that this explanation told them nothing that they didn't already know was oddly irrelevant.

In another study, experimenters approached people in a library, handed them a card with a $1 coin attached, and then walked away. Some people received the card on the top, and some received the card on the bottom. Although the two extra questions on the bottom card — "Who are we?" and "Why do we do this?" — provide no information whatsoever, they do give one the sense that puzzling questions have been posed and then answered. The results of the study showed that the people who received the bottom card were, in fact, less curious and less delighted twenty minutes after receiving it than were people who received the top card because only the latter felt that something wonderful and inexplicable had happened. In short, what William Paley did not realize is that statements such as "God made it" can satiate the appetite for explanation without providing any nutritional value.

He goes on to talk about how "highly ordered phenomena can and do emerge from random processes" and that people's perceptions of chance are greatly skewed. He says: "When people look out on the natural world and declare that there must be a God because all of this could surely not have happened by chance, they are not overestimating the orderly complexity of nature. Rather, they are underestimating the power of chance to produce it."
BI can't do it justice here so go read it. It's very interesting plus you get to ogle a Nesker cube.