Some research explain how religious believers can come to see design and intentionality where there isn't any [background: theory of mind, in laymen's terms, involves attributing mental states to stuff (such as other humans)]:
"Supernatural believers attribute more intentions to random movement than skeptics: An fMRI study"
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...6#.Vekai_lViko
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http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manusc...ive_Biases.pdf
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...6#.Vekai_lViko
"A host of research has attempted to explain why some believe in the supernatural and some do not. One suggested explanation for commonly held supernatural beliefs is that they are a by-product of theory of mind (ToM) processing. However, this does not explain why skeptics with intact ToM processes do not believe. We employed fMRI to investigate activation differences in ToM-related brain circuitries between supernatural believers (N = 12) and skeptics (N = 11) while they watched 2D animations of geometric objects moving intentionally or randomly and rated the intentionality of the animations. The ToM-related circuitries in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) were localized by contrasting intention-rating-related and control-rating-related brain activation. Compared with the skeptics, the supernatural believers rated the random movements as more intentional and had stronger activation of the ToM-related circuitries during the animation with random movement. The strength of the ToM-related activation covaried with the intentionality ratings. [emphasis added]."
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http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manusc...ive_Biases.pdf
[emphasis added]. "
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