Quote from: Tusk on July 26, 2015, 11:58:56 AM

Atheism is a superstitious religion just as much as any other theist belief system

Incorrect.

Superstition and scientific skepticism are mutually exclusive patterns of thought. Our primate brains are imperfect pattern-recognition machines, which all too often finds nonexistent signals in the background noise of life. It's a classic signal-to-noise problem. Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. This capability is association learning--associating the causal connections between A and B--as when our ancestors associated the seasons with the migration of game animals. We are skilled enough at it to have survived and passed on the genes for the capacity of association learning.

Unfortunately, the system has flaws. Superstitions are false associations--A appears to be connected to B, but it is not (the baseball player who doesn't shave and hits a home run). Las Vegas was built on false association learning.

Consider a few cases of false pattern recognition (Google key words for visuals): the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich; the face of Jesus on an oyster shell (resembles Charles Manson, I think); the hit NBC television series Medium, in which Patricia Arquette plays psychic Allison Dubois, whose occasional thoughts and dreams seem connected to real-world crimes; the film White Noise, in which Michael Keaton's character believes he is receiving messages from his dead wife through tape recorders and other electronic devices in what is called EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is another version of what I call TMODMP, the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon--if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not.

Anecdotes fuel pattern-seeking thought. Aunt Mildred's cancer went into remission after she imbibed extract of seaweed--maybe it works--maybe it doesn't. Either way, there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science. Only when a group of cancer patients taking seaweed extract is compared with a control group can we draw a valid conclusion. We evolved as a social primate species whose language ability facilitated the exchange of such association anecdotes.

The problem is that although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the overall phenomenon of superstition has endured the winnowing process of natural selection. The Darwin Awards (honoring those who remove themselves from the gene pool) will never want for examples. Because anecdotal thinking comes naturally, while science requires training and discipline.