We are lacking a tennis-ball sized piece of our earlier brain (and it might even be God-shaped).
Could you clarify for me what this means, exactly? I mean the bit in parentheses in particular; I’ve heard the phrase “god-shaped hole” before but I’m not sure what relevance it has to the topic at hand. Are you postulating a claim that if we were smarter by the brain volume of a tennis ball, we would be more aware of God?
The important question is—Did we lose any functionality since then? Are we dumber? Are we less sane in some way? (The palaeolithic humans did not seem to do any really insane religious stuff)
If the shrinking brain volume has been confirmed, what about, say, the amount of folding in the cerebral cortex? Wikipedia says that that area of the brain seems to be responsible for a lot of the stuff we associate with intelligence.
Re: the bit about paleolithic humans not doing insane religious stuff: I think the really kooky stuff stems from oversized communities more than the intelligence difference between us and our ancestors. Yes, the brain architecture is what makes any of it possible in the first place, but I see no real reason to think that our paleolithic friends would have done any better in our modern, decidedly non-ancestral environment.
I’ve heard similar stories (each one at least second-hand); there seems to be a binary split in the kind of people who go on to study theology in university: those who believe hard and those whose faith is already teetering.
It’s also similar to my own experiences; while I never took a university-grade theology class, I did go through the Finnish school system and the associated nine years of exposure to religion.
I’ll say this for religion and teaching it at school in a predominantly secular country: it’s a great way to get people thinking. It was because of those religion classes that I first went out to find out about (read: “scratch the surface of”) logical argumentation and fallacies of reasoning.
If only there were a way to predictably accomplish the same effect without all the collateral damage.