Michael Shermer (about whom I have written much) had an article published in Scientific American—no, note the peer reviewed science journal but their blog—titled Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World, June 1, 2009 AD.
He begins by noting, “Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?” For some strange reason he does not state words to the effect of “Unguided evolution, unguided laws of nature, natural selection, cosmic accidents that lead to humans writing articles and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?”
He has decided to term one explanation (read as subjective and Atheistically biased interpretation) “patternicity” whereby he claims “the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.” He gives the examples of “the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music.” Well, he must not listen to much rock because the genre is, in fact, saturated with openly and explicitly satanic messages. Here is merely one mere example from the band Mercyful Fate’s song “The Oath” which has in the middle of it an actual oath that the listener can take to Satan which is, in part, “Our Lord Satan, and no other / In the name of Satan, the ruler of Earth…”
Well, certainly Shermer notes that “some patterns are real” and that avoiding “hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.” Yet, he then parrots Carl “Non-Sequitur” Sagan (about whom I have written much) in stating, “The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns.” Well, I am certainly beginning to detect a pattern of baloney at this point.
Michael Shermer notes that we make errors such as “believing a pattern is real when it is not” such as Shermer thinking that an unknown, un-evidenced, unproven, crypto-zoological mythological chimera termed “common ancestor” became some ape-like animal then some ape-man and then a guy who claims to be a skeptic. This is as opposed to the error of, “not believing a pattern is real when it is.”
He then notes that “we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call ‘agenticity’: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents.” I hinted above it is fascinating to note that Atheists, such as Michael Shermer, claim that it is ignorant and superstitious to believe that the universe has an omniscient and omnipresent personal administrator titled God but believe that is it rational and scientific to believe that the universe has an omniscient and omnipresent impersonal administrator titled Law of Nature (thermodynamics, etc.). Thus, Shermer believes that “the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents” or perhaps not “intentional” but certainly “controlled by invisible…agents” granting an impersonal definition of agent in this case much as the agent of the flag blowing is impersonal wind.
In fact, he mentions that some hold to control the world which is “bottom-up causal randomness.” He concludes that “Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms” and I will add Atheism.
Much as with his miss on rock music, he also states that “Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world” as “Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance” and while there is much amiss in discerning just who such powerful personages are the fact is that the very purpose of a government is to work in front of and behind the scenes as puppet masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance.
Interestingly, he references that “President Barack Obama being touted as ‘the one’ with almost messianic powers who will save us” which is actually word for word accurate, see Is Barack Obama the anti-Christ? No, but…
The Atheist Shermer ends his article very abruptly by simply stating “We are natural-born supernaturalists” about which you can also hear a lecture by Justin Barrett.
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