“Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question …” — Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and linguistics at Yale and author of Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human and How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (The Atlantic)