Think Science .

We can observe the evolution of “magical thinking” throughout the child ages.

Unfortunately, some of this childrens grow up to be adults who still can’t properly apply the scientific method, or a rigours structural thinking, to discard God or supernatural phenomenon as an adequate model for reality.

I think, from Genetic Epistemology point of view, such an adult would never (from his adulthood on) be able to re-structure his position and stop believing in the supernatural (stop “believing” as a hole, since believing implies not using a controlable model of knowledge).

I had always the two modes of thinking: fascination with structures, patterns, and nature on the one hand, and a rich fantasy-oriented imagination on the other. My training as a mathematics student was largely what spurred my turning away from religion: I saw that my beleifs had a very poor standard of support compared to my profession. But what would have happened if I had deconverted later in life? Would I be more strongly split down the middle in my theinking tendancies?

Assuming that one could arrive at a useful metric for the degree to which someone’s thinking is magically-oriented — it’s probably feasible; I strongly suspect that similar models or metrics exist in how U.S. advertising agencies and similar businesses devise their ads — one could in principle perform psych experiments to test the degree to which magical thinking persists over age in different demographics (in particular, religious versus irreligious).

It’s worth noting that allowing magical thinking (i.e. accepting ideas without reflecting on how they could be possible, and accepting statements without decent explanations) is probably productive overall for learning about one’s environment, and even for being taught new things. If you don’t question your elders, you accept things more quickly.

The problem, of course, is when the teaching of the elders is heavily biased towards garbage.

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