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
"Cognitive biases explain religious belief, paranormal belief, and belief in life’s purpose"
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. These findings provide evidence that differences in ToM-related activations are associated with supernatural believers’ tendency to interpret random phenomena in mental terms. Thus, differences in ToM processing may contribute to differences between believing and unbelieving [emphasis added]."
"Cognitive biases explain religious belief, paranormal belief, and belief in life’s purpose"
http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manusc...ive_Biases.pdf
"Cognitive theories of religion have postulated several cognitive biases that predispose human minds towards religious belief. However, to date, these hypotheses have not been tested simultaneously and in relation to each other, using an individual difference approach. We used a path model to assess the extent to which several interacting cognitive tendencies, namely mentalizing, mind body dualism, teleological thinking, and anthropomorphism, as well as cultural exposure to religion, predict belief in God, paranormal beliefs and belief in life’s purpose. Our model, based on two independent samples (N = 492 and N = 920) found that the previously known relationship between mentalizing and belief is mediated by individual differences in dualism, and to a lesser extent by teleological thinking. Anthropomorphism was unrelated to religious belief, but was related to paranormal belief. Cultural exposure to religion (mostly Christianity) was negatively related to anthropomorphism, and was unrelated to any of the other cognitive tendencies. These patterns were robust for both men and women, and across at least two ethnic identifications. The data were most consistent with a path model suggesting that mentalizing comes first, which leads to dualism and teleology, which in turn lead to religious, paranormal, and life’s-purpose beliefs. Alternative theoretical models were tested but did not find empirical support [emphasis added]. "
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