IT'S JUST A REACTION TO GOD:

Confirmation bias is the tendency to ascribe greater significance to information which supports our pre-existing theories and lesser significance to information which contradicts those theories. We often do this subconsciously. For example you get a new car, and suddenly you notice that type of car on the road with a much greater frequency than you had noticed before. But though confirmation bias generally refers to the inclusion or exclusion of data, there are other ways we can shoehorn the obvious to make it fit within our world view.

Last month in The Atlantic, Matthew Hutson wrote a fascinating article titled: "The Science of Superstition: No One Is Immune to Magical Thinking." Actually as an article it's really not that fascinating, but as an illustration of the mental contortions one must make to defend atheism, it is Olympic. Hutson cited a number of studies which demonstrated that "...even physicists, chemists and geologists at MIT and other elite schools were instinctively inclined to attach a purpose to natural events." Hutson illustrates the point through research which subjected scientists to time pressure, thereby getting a more honest, reflexive response to questions, rather than a response filtered through reflection and vetted for consistency with conscious beliefs. They were asked whether they approved of statements like: "Trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe." When asked under time pressure, scientists were twice as likely to approve of such statements.

Of course modern theories about the evolution of plants and animals posit that the capacity of plants to produce oxygen is merely an accident that just so happens to facilitate the breathing of animals. To say that plants produce oxygen for the purpose of supplying animals would imply design, and therefore God. Physicists, chemists and geologists are very familiar with this reasoning, and yet with a high frequency, they assented to statements that placed things within an ordered framework and were implicitly teleological. For Hutson this demonstrates the persistence of "magical thinking." Here were scientists, most of whom were decidedly non-religious, assenting to statements that implied an architectonic and therefore religious framework.

Skeptics call this patternicity, or projecting pattern where there is none. But for religious thinkers, the persistence of this type of thinking in non-religious scientists is evidence not of a logical lapse, but rather of irrepressible natural faith. C.S. Lewis famously said that when he was an atheist he did not believe in God, and he was angry at God for not existing. In his inimitably ironic way, Lewis pointed to the fact that there really are no such things as atheists.

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