Free Republic

In Hebrews 11:1 in the Bible, faith is described as the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Now, according to a new study by Georgetown University neuroscientists, the strength of one's faith in God is likely linked to the brain.In their study, Implicit pattern learning predicts individual differences in belief in God in the United States and Afghanistan, published this month in the journal Nature Communications, the neuroscientists found that an individual’s ability to unconsciously predict complex patterns, through an ability known as implicit pattern learning, had a strong correlation with the strength of their...

Does God exist? Most scientists would probably prefer to avoid confronting this question in their professional lives, but the growth of the "intelligent design" movement makes it harder for them to maintain such distance. Intelligent design appears to be a rediscovery of the 19th-century argument from design, which perceived the manifest hand of a Creator in complex biological mechanisms such as the eye. The fallacy in this view is well exposed in, for example, Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker, which details how evolution can yield living structures of almost arbitrary complexity from a basic set of building blocks. The genetic...