The question: Is there a God instinct?As a psychologist, the focus of my work has been on people's reasoning about such things as God, the afterlife, and destiny. I am not a philosopher or a theologian, so I have not considered the actual, outside-the-head existence of these things. Not only do I find the latter ontological question rather dull, but I also start with the assumption – because there is simply no good scientific reason to assume otherwise – that these things do not exist. In my view, atheism is an essential starting point for the psychological scientist, because it enables us to examine the more intriguing and, more importantly, empirical question of why the human mind is so easily seduced by a ubiquitous set of unnecessarily complex claims. For example, that it is so intuitive to so many people that consciousness (which is curiously similar to the "soul", by the way) continues to go about its business perfectly well after death – and therefore completely independent of the now-decomposing brain – is astonishing when you stop to think about it. What, exactly, is the function of the brain if the mind can still happily occur once the brain stops working? In fact, as some of my own research shows, even diehard atheists are not altogether immune to attributing thoughts to the dead – by saying, for example, that a recently dead man must "feel" vindicated because he now "knows" there is nothing after death. So although the explicit idea of an afterlife, and the comfort that often goes along with it, is undoubtedly an important motivator in people clinging tenaciously to belief in psychological immortality once it arises, it fails to account sufficiently for the recalcitrance of the cognitive illusion when we know better.