Holly Stewart's blog

“The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.”[1] Galileo’s trope is characteristic of the mutual hands-off policy between science and religion—until very recently. Evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists have joined anthropologists and psychologists to make the belief in God the study of scientific inquiry. A recent suggestion exists which states there are three attributes in humans which may result in a belief in God: agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind. [2] These three traits may have had an evolutionary advantage and have been selected for via natural selection. The adaptive advantage of these traits is illuminated by examining human conditions where these traits are absent. Despite the strong evidence that points in favor of this contemporary theory, many questions remain about why these three are so determinate toward religious belief and furthermore to what degree consciousness is involved. The correlation between the evolutionary benefits of these traits and a belief in God demands further inquiry in order to understand how these traits have been advantageous and why these three traits in particular have come together to shape belief.

In metaphysics, time is a fundamental condition of human experience. Immanuel Kant begins The Critique of Pure Reason by exploring the nature of time, identifying it as the most essential element for human experience.(1) Humans are able to recognize the central role which time plays in experience, but still experience difficulty in grasping the essence of time. One of the most difficult attributes of time to understand is the rate at which it moves, since we have no way to measure time objectively. Time moves for everyone, but depending on the situation, time can be a subjective experience. Humans attempt to eliminate the subjectivity of time by using the Earth’s rotation around the sun to dictate years and days and furthermore dividing up these days into arbitrary units of hours, minutes and seconds. But for anything that moves there must be a rate at which it moves. However it is superfluous to measure the rate of time as 60 second per 1 minute. So then, where is it that humans conceive of the nature of time? By looking at two key examples, we can identify aspects of the brain that may in fact provide hints toward not only the human dependence on time, but the nature of time itself.