Meh, I might say neither are actually evil though (white lies to protect someone; ignorance isn’t evil, it just needs work to correct).

But I keep coming back to the notion that smart people, even today, are willing to believe weird things. Or even things that aren’t so weird. Astrology, channeling, clairvoyance, telepathy, alien abductions, ghosts, demon possessions, and lucky charms are but a very few things that even very smart people in modernity are willing to believe in.

Even when rational explanations are provided and even when the believer acknowledges that evidence is not forthcoming, these are all things that they are willing to subscribe to.

Still, your perspective is one that merits consideration.

I think you are failing to put yourself in the mindset of the cultures you are talking about. You are forgetting exactly how ignorant — not unintelligent, but ignorant — they were, and how many even elemental scientific discoveries required at least basic instruments.

They all had nuch the same experiences, a Universe, to them vast, that covered a few hundred miles, those two lights in the sky that appeared in alternation, both apparently small and nearby, one which constantly changed from sliver to circle and back, those other, totally inexplicable little lights that peppered the night sky. All of them experienced weather, and sudden outbreaks of disease. Each of them, in battle, sometimes unexpectedly triumphed, sometimes unexpectedly failed. All of them experienced the growth of crops, and the sudden, unpredictable failures of them, the times when game was prevalent and when it was scarce. They experienced the weirdness of a woman’s menstrual cycle, of births of twins and stillbirths.

And not one of these things could be explained correctly without clocks and calendars, record-keeping, telescopes, measuring devices, and all the things they did not have yet.

But they wanted, needed, answers to ‘why.’ They had the experience of lesser animals that they manipulated, for food, work, companionship, why shouldn’t there be greater beings that did what they did to them, for reasons as inexplicable as the tribes actions to oxen? They had tale tellers who could create wonderful worlds of ideas, stories of experiences of places different from home that some traveler may have visited.
You call their answers ‘magical thinking.’ Yes, top us that is what it was, but we have the tools they did not, the tools that let us understand and test. Their tales of gods and demons, and all the rest were wrong, yes, but they fitted what they knew. And wherever you looked, what the cultures knew was much alike, and the answers they came up with were similar. Analogies to animals, explanations for disease, for birth and death, changes in fortune. We can find better answers, but they came up with the best they could.

The shame is that once they did, the ideas were fixed in their beliefs so that better information could not purge them, that so often they forced their new discoveries into the framework of their beliefs, rather than changing the framework to represent the new knowledge.

Thanks for commenting!

1) religion is a human activity that finds itself in nearly single culture on the planet. The differences are sometimes stark and opposite, but their are some common attributes, like a perceived notion that the supernatural must be appeased or appealed to and you can almost always find some separation of the sacred and profane (or secular);

2)Magical thinking is pervasive in every culture regardless of (and sometimes in spite of) religious beliefs.

It may simply be that magical thinking and credulity are evolutionary adaptations. Perhaps our prehistoric and early hominid ancestors used credulity to survive in the wild. If you’re scavenging or gathering in the Pleistocene and hear a rustling off in the brush, believing that you are about to become the meal of a saber-tooth cat is a belief that may be wrong, but it would be more beneficial in this instance to be credulous rather than rationalizing that there are more herbivores than carnivores in the woods.

I concede, however, that I’m offering my opinion and speculation, however educated it may or may not be. But I think its hard to argue that magical thinking isn’t “hardwired” given the pervasive nature of it.

I have a hard time accepting this. In my opinion we are no more hardwired to engage in magical thinking than we are hardwired to be wrong.

It is relatively recent, historically speaking, that rules of critical thinking have been formalized. Rules such as “confirmation bias” or “spurious relationship”. It was inevitable that as our earliest ancestors grew into the ability to reason abstractly that they would often make mistakes.

This is very different that saying that we evolved a religion gene because magical thinking was an evolutionary advantage any more than to say we evolved a mistake gene for the same reason.

Richard Dawkins commented that earliest man needed a supreme being to explain the rising sun. The fact is that we face mysteries today that baffle us as profoundly such as the origins of the big bang or the causes of the laws of nature. The need for god then was no more than it is now.

But this mistake is understandable.

If there are studies that specifically disprove this thesis of mine I would appreciate knowing about them.