>> Dr. Andy Thompson. >> Thank you. How many of you here at some point in your life were religious believers? Of course! Most of us are. Why did my mind, why did your mind, why did our minds generate religious ideas, religious beliefs and accept them? Why? And what I hope to show you this morning is the answer to those questions. We're getting tantalizingly close to a comprehensive cognitive neuroscience of religious belief: robust theories, empirical evidence. And my plan this morning is to lay out for you some of the basics for this. And then to give you some of the empirical evidence, and to end on a historical note that think both illuminates the past and the present and may tell us something about the future. The way to think about my talk is that I hope to give you in a sense like a Swiss-army knife. A Swiss army knife of tools that you can take back to your community and the debate that you have with believers. Before I do that however, I need to thank a number of people: Dave for the kind introduction, Ed Buckner and American Atheist for the invitation to be here today.