Human beings would appear to be unique amongst the animal kingdom in having awareness of their spiritual nature.
Sounds madey-uppy to me Alan, though unsurprisingly self-regarding.
There is abundant evidence that belief in a soul which survives the death of the body is a perfectly natural feature of the human race.
The problem with your thesis is that beliefs aren't static - they come and go, ebb and flow. New ones arise and old ones die out. If you had conducted a survey anywhere in Europe at any point in history up to about a century ago you
could have concluded, if you were unaware that you were committing a massive logical fallacy (several of them, actually), that belief in God was 'natural' because so widespread. The more chuckleheaded would adduce this as evidence for the correctness of god-belief.
But your three-fallacies-for-the-price-of-one post goes so badly awry in three main areas of which you're evidently wholly unaware.
Firstly, the mere fact that something is natural tells us nothing of its rightness. This fallacy is the
appeal to nature.
Secondly, raw numbers count for nothing with regard to the correctness of a belief. Numbers tell you about numbers - that's it. The suggestion otherwise is the
ad populum/ad numerum fallacy.
Thirdly, lurking in the shadows behind the preceding fallacy is the implication that the age of a belief - how long it has managed to survive in people's minds - says something about its rightness. This is the
ad antiquitatem fallacy. Age is age is age, and, er, that's it.
There's a pretty comprehensive lack of historical sense in your thesis, Alan. You treat beliefs as fixed and immutable, whereas as I've already said they come and they go. We've not only seen but continue to see the thoroughgoing collapse of belief in gods and death-surviving immortal souls in the First World (the two are distinct and discrete categories but of course you often find them hand-in-hand; "the irreducible minimum of theology" as Bertie Russell put it). For so long the USA was an eccentricity and an anomaly in religious terms compared to Europe, yet here too the same processes are well underway. Who knows where we're going to be in another hundred, two hundred, five hundred years? I don't like guesswork - as a deep thinker once said, predictions are very difficult, especially about the future - but if we model the future on existing trends then we can make a reasonable case that the trend is one-way.
If God gave us this awareness, it was for a reason.
We always have to be on the look-out for these oh-so-small but oh-so-telling ifs of yours, Alan
