It seems the human mind has a “purpose” bias in learning about entities in the environment. It’s not enough for a human to simply be aware of the existence of things without ascribing a purpose. Other animals do not speculate upon the purpose of common things they find in the environment. Their only subconscious question is likely “Is it edible or have I eaten this before successfully.” They do not seek “purpose” in their natural world encounters. Trying to find the purpose of something is equivalent to trying to find its “use” and there is only one species, Homo sapiens, the information/tool-maker and tool-user that would have evolved to see the world in this way. In a primitive situation and carried forward into modern society, everything would be questioned as to its purpose or use as a tool, an enzyme, an object of leverage to be used in some way. Humans even look at themselves teleologically to determine their own “purpose”. Most belief that they are productions of God, maker of heaven and earth and the human purpose is to serve God. It is a bias of the human mind in its RNA tool-using capacity to see God as a maker. It’s not surprising that this strong bias towards discovering the purpose of things would exist in an organism’s brain that is curious, inventive and always ready to find out how something new can be applied to the gradients and their resultant dissipative structures. Searching for the purpose for things must be the mother of invention for humans. Searching for purpose is like trying to distinguish substrate from enzyme (tool).

What is their “purpose”? Most people become familiar with the purpose of hundreds of tool in a lifetime. These are “hand” tools, one end bonded to human bonding organ and the other bonded to some other substrate.

Tool: A physical item that can be used to achieve a goal.

The following long excerpt is taken from this essay and provides evidence of the “purpose” finding inherent to humans (and perhaps a few other hominids and dolphins.”)

The work of psychologist Deborah Kelemen and her research colleagues may enable us to now fill the explanatory gaps I have described. Drawing on her own and others’ research programs, Kelemen, director of the Child Cognition Laboratory at Boston University, has found that children around the world “evidence a general bias to treat objects and behaviors as existing for a purpose” (Kelemen 2004, 295). There is now overwhelming evidence that children are innately prone to “promiscuous teleological intuitions,” preferring teleological, purpose-based rather than physical-causal explanations of living and nonliving natural objects (Kelemen et al. 2013).

For example, young children do not see raining as merely what a cloud does but as what it is “made for.” If asked why prehistoric rocks are pointy, children will greatly prefer “so that animals could scratch on them when they got itchy” over “bits of stuff piled up for a long time.”

Early parenting or explaining makes little difference to this strong tendency. It appears to be modifiable only from around ten years of age. For example, the children of both religious fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist parents, when asked why a certain animal exists, favor “God made it” or “a person made it” over “it evolved” or “it appeared.” This tendency declines only after eleven years of age and only in the children of non-fundamentalist parents.

Much research supporting and developing this hypothesis has been undertaken. From infancy, humans are excellent “agency detectors,” sensitive to others’ mental states. Even twelve-month-olds will follow the gaze direction of symbolic faces. Children’s complex imaginary companions, like supernatural agents, occur cross-culturally (Taylor 1999).

Kelemen’s explanatory hypothesis is that this generalized default view, that entities are intentionally caused by someone for a purpose, is a side effect of a socially intelligent mind that privileges intentional explanations.

It is not difficult to posit the evolutionary advantages of such “attribution of agency” among infants and children. An infant’s entire world comprises an intentional agent—its parent. The sooner and more thoroughly an infant can develop a “theory of mind” and respond accordingly, the better for it. It must attach. The parent must bond. It must anticipate and manipulate its world on the assumption of purposeful agency occurring all around it. An absence of such is starkly illustrated by the autistic child, to whom its parents are just another set of shapes in its visual field. No attachment occurs, and in less affluent, protected, aware times than we have now, such children rarely survived. They could not control their (almost entirely interpersonal) environment and starved, ate poison, or just wandered away.

The tendency to attribution of agency extends beyond the world of man-made artifacts to the natural world. Children intuitively identify people as the designing agent of artifacts and God as the designing agent of nature (Kelemen 2004, 299). “All known folk religions involve nonnatural agents and intentional causation—the substrate of intuitive theism” (Kelemen 2004, 297).

Reasoning about all aspects of nature in non-teleological physical-reductionist terms is a relatively recent development in the history of human thought (Kelemen 1999a), and contemporary adults are still surprisingly bad at it. For example, evolution is generally misconstrued as a quasi-intentional needs-responsive designing force (Kelemen 2004). But our brains did not evolve “to enable consciousness.” Our brains evolved, and consciousness resulted. No purpose, just causes.

Aristotle distinguished “efficient” causes (the antecedent sources of objects and events) from “final” causes (the ends, goals, functions, or purposes of objects or events). Unfortunately, his focus was on the latter. He applied teleological explanations to all living and nonliving natural phenomena. For example, leaves exist on a plant to provide shade, and water exists on Earth to sustain life (Kelemen et al. 2013, 1074). Since the Renaissance, physical scientists have overtly rejected teleological explanation in search of physical-causal, “efficient” explanations. However, under psychological stress even physical scientists will tend to revert to default teleological explanations such as endorsement of “trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe” (Kelemen et al. 2013).

So promiscuous teleological explanation is almost universal among children but is also a developmentally persistent cognitive default position. For example, the tendency returns in strength if a person develops Alzheimer’s disease later in life (Lombrozo et al. 2007).

Kelemen et al. (2013) concluded that the teleological tendency is robust, resilient, developmentally enduring, arises early, and becomes masked with cognitive maturity and education but is not replaced. Hence religious belief is cognitively natural and culturally resilient. “Notions of purpose are central underpinnings of the world’s religions” (Kelemen et al. 2013, 1081).

The rise and persistence of the intelligent design argument for God in the wake of the demolition of creationism’s simplistic claims is an illustration of this resilience (Kelemen and Rosset 2009). Children naturally see lions, mountains, and icebergs as “made for something” (Kelemen 1999b), irrespective of parental explanations (Kelemen et al. 2005) or ambient cultural religiosity (Kelemen 2003). Later in life they will still tend to assume that “Mother Nature” or “Gaia” is a goal-directed, self-preserving organism (Kelemen and Rosset 2009)—another “attribution of agency.” “As evidenced by many religions, artifact design represents a powerful analogical base that children and adults use to understand the natural world” (Kelemen et al. 2012, 440).

The human developmental sequence must have begun with an analog mind without tools nor God, something shared with other animals but later the analog mind was greatly enhanced in humans to facilitate tool-use, a positive adaptation. The greatly enhanced analog mind and tool-use likely set the stage for the “God” neural adaptation which provided death anxiety relief, a purpose and explanation for human existence and through religion, a hierarchical structure of energy resource flow assured by moral codes, sacrifice rituals and potential damnation for stepping out-of-line.

The tool/information using RNA in cells function perfectly well without any need of God, purpose or religion. They bounce around until they make a favorable connection just by feel. Human RNA can’t make the metabolic connections or make their tools etc. without the analog mind and a facsimile of themselves moving about therein. That works great for the metabolism of civilization, but when the work is done and the human RNA passes away, to where does the facsimile in the analog mind go? If you believed that the facsimile disappeared and the body decomposed after death, would you work so hard as an RNA knowing that the here and now are all you have? Perhaps you have no choice. Perhaps there is no other purpose.