If I had been raised in a sufficient degree of isolation I suspect the concept of god would never have crossed my mind, much as the concept of “(invent a vacuous unused word; damn ‘postmodernism’ is taken”) has not. Atheism is surely our natural state, until our brains become tarnished (when young, they are extremely malleable, it’s an evolutionary necessity) by received ideas. In other words, atheism does not require one to take a negative position of any sort until its opposite is invented then passed on by word of mouth or scratch of quill. It’s a non-existence of belief, not a rebuttal of it.

This does not, of course, mean that I don’t find the universe incredible, perplexing, wonderful and mysterious – of course I do – rather that it is sufficiently so (understatement) to make the mental conjuring of another layer of complexity (god) redundant and unlikely, at least to my small mind.

Naturally this makes me wonder how religion ever came to arise in the human mind. The disturbingly stubborn longevity of religion (indeed in some quarters it’s actually gathering strength, even in these supposedly enlightened times) strongly suggests to me that there must be (or have been) a survival advantage to harbouring religious beliefs. If there wasn’t, I’d expect natural selection to have weeded it out.

Another school of thought holds that religion is simply an exaptation, an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.

Then there are those who suspect a hardwired religious gene, which may cause a predisposition to episodes interpreted as religious revelation.

Whatever the cause, it’s still very much a prevalent social phenomenon. The conditioning of young children (often by well-meaning parents) into religion when they are at their most credulous is easy and not necessarily a tragedy, though the idea of calling someone a “Muslim child” or “Christian child” before they are old enough to make a rational choice of their own is depressing.

More sinister, however, is that religion is still a perfect tool for nasty people to acquire and prolong a great deal of power, influence and money, often at considerable cost to others.

Still pondering this one, hence the sloppy unfinished feel.

Given that one branch of this pseudoscience maintains that the gravitational attraction of certain planets at the time of one’s birth somehow has a lasting effect on one’s personality, is it not a tiny bit alarming that people may base important decisions on it? Is it also not slightly disturbing that just about every organ in the country enriches a charlatan by carrying a horoscope column, in an attempt to satiate the incredible desire of the dim-witted public for this rubbish? This Scorpio believes so. The only argument in favour of astrology – given the gaping vacuum of empirical evidence in support of it, or explanation of mechanisms by which it might work – seems to be that nobody has managed to disprove it. Hmm, that sounds familiar, vicar.

Actually I’m a bit confused by this dreadful online dictionary’s definition of astrology:

“The study of the positions and aspects of celestial bodies in the belief that they have an influence on the course of natural earthly occurrences and human affairs.”

Clearly the moon is sufficiently close to earth to mess with our sea levels, giving rise to tides. Occasionally Mars gets in the way of the sun and we have an eclipse, and so on. I wouldn’t argue with that, but in my view these are the observations of astronomy, not astrology. Stupid dictionary. However once the celestial bodies are sufficiently far away (obeying the inverse square law) then the gravitational effect they will have on earth is minuscule and outweighed by objects closer to home, such as, in the case of the newborn, a rotund midwife. Are there other mechanisms by which astrologers think the planets etc, interfere with us and if so what? I am genuinely interested, for the next seven nanoseconds, even though I don’t believe a word of it.

Given a sufficiently large set of data you will be able to sift through it in an almost infinite number of ways and eventually find some sort of correlation with something that involves movement/alignment of the stars, planets etc.: it would be a surprise if you didn’t as the permutations and opportunities for curve-fitting are endless. On finding a so-called magic correlation the mistake is to attribute any causality to it.

Coincidences are much more common than we might imagine as there are so many ways in which they can happen. How often does a flushed yummy mummy gracefully dismount her urban tractor to exclaim: “How amazing! I bumped into someone in Waitrose today with exactly the same name as me, her daughter goes to my old school and do you know she’s even wearing exactly the same fur gilet that I bought last month from Agnès B! What are the chances of that?!”

Well, the chances of someone meeting these predetermined conditions would be minuscule, granted, but of course she didn’t predetermine them. It is likely that there would be an immense pool of things the two people might have in common and the three mentioned represent only a fraction. In fact it would be unusual for coincidences like this NOT to happen as there are so many ways in which they can. Put another way, some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place. The paradoxical conclusion is that is would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. (with thanks to Paulos for that, whose excellent book on innumeracy also bewails the fact that it is often a source of pride to people that they are bad at maths).