With this background in mind, one route to belief in a designer-god probably proceeds roughly as follows, undergirded by the basic processes of splitting/inversion. First, human beings are incessant planners. We envision desired results and contrive means of achieving these goals. Second, and most importantly, each of our choices has unintended consequences, both good and bad. A good example is my decision to attend a particular university. While I certainly had in mind a vague set of goals I hoped to achieve through that choice, one happy and completely unexpected consequence was the meeting of my wife. Third, there is a tendency to look backwards along the length of the chain of contingency that led to such happy results, recognize the inability of oneself to have foreseen and consciously planned for them, and, coupled with a feeling that the result is the “right” one, experience a feeling that some sort of invisible hand was at work the whole time, leading you blindfolded through a maze. My guess is that this perception of some larger “plan”, so common among American Christians at least, represents a splitting of a generalized construct of a “plan” drawn from our own experience as planning creatures, which is then inverted to become the “real” plan “out in the world”, which our own personal plans merely (and often vainly) attempt to track. As you mention, this may be an outgrowth of a “mind-reading” function in the brain, or perhaps the “intentional stance”, as Daniel Dennett calls it, by which we explain the behavior of objects through ascribing mental states to them. Because our experience with planning is limited to humans, this higher plan is comprehended in terms of an anthropomorphic intelligence which is cognitively located in the individual’s conception of the universe, or “real world”. By insuring (faith in) the ultimate contribution of all events to some greater good, this construct insulates the mind from existential angst, or feelings of purposelessness.

[[Aside: Interestingly, this notion of our lives having purpose — unfolding according to an unknown but progressively revealed design — can be attacked on the merits. The best argument I can think of is one from multi-finality: Because of the presence of both good and bad (unintended) consequences, and the overwhelming cognitive salience of actual events as opposed to hypothetical or “alternative” universes, every life-history will be full of intricate and seemingly improbable chains of contingency which result in some ultimate good. (“If I hadn’t sat with that ex-teacher at the elementary school banquet, I wouldn’t have taken that class in high school, and if I hadn’t taken that class, I wouldn’t have attended that college, and if I hadn’t attended that college, I wouldn’t have met person X, and if I hadn’t met person X, I wouldn’t have joined organization Y, and if…”) In hindsight, a sense of inevitability and design is seductive for the constructivist reasons I’ve outlined above. But the key point of multi-finality is that any such life-history, including those that are products of blind contingency, can generate this feeling, simply because of the mixed consequences that result from both single events and their aggregation. An inference of design faces the intractable problem that this sense-of-purpose is just as compatible with randomness (non-design and blind contingency) as it is with actual design. Occam’s razor therefore suggests, but does not require, a shave.]]

Now that I’ve sketched an explanation for the origins of belief in a higher-plan(ner), we can examine the effect of this one belief on an individual’s larger belief-architecture. Once accepted, this belief creates what I’ll call a “coherence-crisis” when combined, in a single brain, with other received knowledge about the world. (I assume that the impulse towards coherence of belief is a basic organizing principle of the mind, which seeks to eliminate overt contradiction of belief and perhaps even thorny doubts, by fashioning internally consistent narratives to explain events. Furthermore, a coherence-crisis, as I’ve called it, may never rise to the level of consciousness, but rather predispose an individual to credit certain factual claims consistent with more fervently held beliefs.) For example, there is a tension between the belief in a designer-god and standard scientific narratives describing our origins, which are at best agnostic. I.e., Big Bang – galaxy formation – solar system formation – planetary formation – chemical origins of life – biological evolution – humanity. Three constructivist strategies are available to preserve the belief in a designer-god in the face of conflicting narratives. First, the two stories can be dialectically fused to generate a single narrative. For example, the instance of design and creation may be located just prior to the Big Bang, and the scientific account understood as describing the means employed by the designer-god to achieve its purposive ends. Second, the scientific narrative can be discredited. Young-Earthers come to mind, as do arguments that dinosaur fossils were “planted” by a designer-god to create the appearance of antiquity, perhaps as a test of faith. Third, the scientific narrative can be systematically ignored. (Because our understandings of reality are constructions, the failure to transmit narratives from one generation to the next results in their disappearance.) I believe the American Amish have adopted a strategy similar to this one.

A fourth possibility, however, would be for coherence pressures to purge the designer-god belief itself. The less fervently this prior belief in a designer-god is held (underwritten by the perception of “purpose” in one’s own life), the more likely it is that the belief itself will be jettisoned in the teeth of alternative narratives. Furthermore, the greater the degree of exposure to agnostic scientific narratives, and the greater explanatory scope of those narratives themselves, the greater degree to which coherence pressures will push against belief in a designer-god as an implausible incoherence. That was my own personal experience: The universe simply seemed so vast, human lives so inconsequential and ephemeral when measured against light-years and cosmological time (perhaps even no more than a mere waystation in biological evolution), that I couldn’t believe it all existed “for us”. And if a putative designer-god had a multitude of other purposes, why should humanity rank so highly or deserve lavish attention like salvation or personal communion? Ultimately, my own personal coherence-crisis resulted in a rejection of the god meme. The more I learned, the more plausibly contingency and blind chance accounted for our existence, and the more contrived designer-god narratives, trying desperately to reach dialectically across the light-years and the epochs, grew.