I wonder who most sincerely and deeply believes astrology? Lots of people do in a casual, this-is-fun way, of course I've talked to professional palm readers and astrologers and tarot readers, and it's interesting. With some it was obvious upon a little prodding that it was a job and theatrical performance. The level of underlying belief varied from person to person - one palm reader I spoke to clearly didn't believe *at all* (but it was a great way to pay for her psych degree, and we had a great conversation about how a psych student "theoretically" might do readings). Others had some degree of belief, though I don't think it was terribly high for any of them - probably much less than in many of their clients. Of course, I'm not entirely confident in that assessment! Maybe they believed very deeply, but were shielding that from me I'm also very interested in the analogous question for things like the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime, and the Christian Biblical story of Genesis. Who most deeply believes these things? What is their experience? In science, one thing I find very moving is reading Einstein and realizing just how deeply he believed in this approach to making sense of the world. He sensed an underlying order and believed very deeply in the capacity of humans to "know the thoughts of the Old One" as he put it. He was quite elderly when he said that, and he had a more pragmatic approach when younger, but still very grounded in a belief in the comprehensibility of the world

Noticing: I'm most interested in this question for different folk cosmologies and cosmogonies (like Genesis, the Dreamtime etc). What is the experience of someone who believes deeplY? And yet for reasons I don't understand I was hesitant to say that, and framed it initially in terms of astrology, before backing into the cosmogony/cosmology questions

My own experience of cosmology and cosmogony is at one remove. Yes, we understand a very great deal - about the Hubble recession, about the microwave background, about the cosmic distance ladder, and so on. It's a great collage of theories and evidence, which fits together in a remarkable way; however, that fit has sometimes shifted enormously in the recent past, and so one's relationship is quite contingent, a kind of managing of many different kinds of "doubt and uncertainty and not knowing" But underlying that is a deeper kind of belief in a material world model, a mathematical world model, and in some sense of order. Those things are, in me, stronger than in anything specific. E.g., I could certainly imagine a big change in our understanding of the cosmological constant, which would shift our cosmology (and maybe our cosmogony) a great deal, yet which wouldn't change my deeper belief at all

It's quite a priori curious to believe that one type of primate has the capacity to understand cosmology, at least in broad outline, while other types do not

My understanding is that cosmogonies are very nearly human universals (there are a few cultures where it's contested). Which is remarkable. Lots of animals very evidently understand "why" questions - you can simply watch them ponder counterfactuals. And I'll bet a few can do multi-step causal chains. But humans somehow *naturally* make the leap to the unbounded causal chain. Kind of an invention of a very interesting kind of infinity

@ZoharAtkins Can you say a little more about what you find compelling about Tertullian's statement?