June 1, 2007

Is it true that man is "genetically hardwired" toward religious conviction? According to Tony Blankley, some neuro-scientists think so. One thing is clear. Man is hardwired with a system of logic. I didn’t understand years ago that computers are hardwired to a logical system that included a language. If you didn’t know the language, you couldn’t do much with the computer. Some friends gave me my first computer. I suspect because they hadn’t been able to make it work any better than I could at first. I turned it on and started pressing keys, but nothing of interest happened. I could make letters appear on the screen, but the letters didn’t do anything.

I sort of felt like the proverbial monkey at a typewriter, banging out random symbols. And then someone told me the magic word: DOS. But what was DOS? Ah, well, there was the rub. DOS means "Disk Operating System." The computer had slots for two disks, so I bought one that said "DOS" and put it in. I still couldn’t do any work. I had to get another disk that had a program. But neither disk would work in just any computer. The computer had to be hardwired with a language so it would understand what was on the disks.

So the term hardwired entered into the language of psychology and neuro-science as a description of that part of the human mind we are all born with. Every child born into the world arrives with a built-in system of logic. We don’t have to be taught it, because it is hardwired into us. The brain itself is "wired" according to a logical system, and the mind operates on that system. We start life with an untrained logical system with enormous potential for development.

What makes this interesting is that, in the absence of true religion and faith in God, man will inevitably make up his own. In primitive societies, they create wooden gods. In intellectual societies, a little more ingenuity is required. Blankley:

There are two things I found of special interest. One is that you can’t eradicate religion from the human being by education. If you could, the French would have done it long ago. Maybe this accounts for the persistence of religious faith in this country in spite of an educational system that is legally hardwired to eradicate it. I also notice the suggestion of religious sensibility in the environmental movement. The idea of a religious instinct is important. Geese are hardwired to migrate. Man is hardwired to make sense out of his world—what Viktor Frankl called a "drive to meaning." And making sense out of the world involves some idea of direction, thus prediction. Or, in biblical terms, prophecy. Now, I pause to reflect on an obvious truth. Man didn’t wire himself. Nor did his system of logic evolve from neurons, anymore than the logic of my computer evolved from a collection of wires. Both are the result of the work of a designer/creator. Any suggestion that man is hardwired to anything is a suggestion of design and object.

There is not enough space here to fully develop this idea. I deeply regret that we can no longer send cassette tapes. Postage on them has increased so drastically that we will no longer be able to offer them. But, you can click here to listen to the program Hardwired to Religion, right now!

Yours in the service of true religion,

Ronald L. Dart