Atheists Intuitively Believe in God and this is Bad News for them

Three studies at Boston University found that atheists acknowledge a Creator God before their conscious mind has a chance to kick in:

• The findings "suggest that there is a deeply rooted natural tendency to view nature as designed," writes a research team led by Elisa Järnefelt of Newman University. They also provide evidence that, in the researchers' words, "religious non-belief is cognitively effortful."

This means that denying the existence of God requires effort. However, the effort is not exerted against an enemy or even an external task but against themselves, their own intuitions.

Such an internal struggle has serious consequences. When our mind is fighting itself, there can be little peace or even clarity but an obsessive tug-of-war - a costly  auto-immune response.

How were these studies able to arrive at such surprising findings?

• Researchers attempted to plug into the automatic or "default" human brain by showing subjects images of natural landscapes and things made by human beings, then requiring lightning-fast responses to the question on whether "any being purposefully made the thing in the picture," notes Pacific-Standard.

• "Religious participants' baseline tendency to endorse nature as purposefully created was higher" than that of atheists, the study found. But non-religious participants "increasingly defaulted to understanding natural phenomena as purposefully made" when "they did not have time to censor their thinking," wrote the researchers.

• The results suggest that "the tendency to construe both living and non-living nature as intentionally made derives from automatic cognitive processes, not just practised explicit beliefs," the report concluded. The results were similar even among subjects from Finland, where atheism is not a controversial issue as it can be in the US.

Not only is the atheist at war with himself, but these findings also represent a blow to his naturalistic theory of evolution, which holds that our traits evolved as such because they give us a survival advantage. This would suggest that the belief in God also confers a survival advantage. However, the atheists insist that belief in God is irrational and ruins everything. Some even advocate outlawing religion as a form of child abuse or as something even worse.

However, these experiments suggest that, on an intuitive level, they know better, at least on one level - the level they are trying to eradicate. While this is not child abuse, it might qualify as suicide.