All belief points to a spiritual capacity

Detail from art by Lia Halloran A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

New Scientist magazine has a series of articles on the topic of "Effortless thinking". One is titled "The god-shaped hole in your brain". 

The profound implications on the issue of the mind having a spiritual capability beyond what the brain produces are clear when the author writes:

If God designed the human brain, he (or she) did a lousy job. Dogged by glitches and biases, requiring routine shutdown for maintenance for 8 hours a day, and highly susceptible to serious malfunction, a product recall would seem to be in order. But in one respect at least, God played a blinder: our brains are almost perfectly designed to believe in him/her.

This is akin to the point of the famous passage from man-of-the-world Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions in which he states:

Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we men, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you – we also carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. 

The New Scientist writer also goes into the kindred matter of " the powerful and very human attribute we call belief":

Beliefs define how we see the world and act within it; without them, there would be no plots to behead soldiers, no war, no economic crises and no racism. There would also be no cathedrals, no nature reserves, no science and no art. Whatever beliefs you hold, it’s hard to imagine life without them. Beliefs, more than anything else, are what make us human. They also come so naturally that we rarely stop to think how bizarre belief is.

In 1921, philosopher Bertrand Russell put it succinctly when he described belief as “the central problem in the analysis of mind”. Believing, he said, is “the most ‘mental’ thing we do” – by which he meant the most removed from the “mere matter” that our brains are made of. How can a physical object like a human brain believe things? Philosophy has made little progress on Russell’s central problem.

The writer of this series reveals in one article that he is an atheist, but he does his readers a service by stating clearly key elements of what humans have experienced of the spiritual world.  

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