Humanity reboot

World reboot is a thought experiment which attempts to demonstrate a fundamental difference between evidence-based belief, and other forms of belief.

Imagine rebooting the world as though it were a computer. We reset everything back to the dawn of time, before any technology, before any religions, before everything, and then we let history replay itself.

Without any intervention, humans will once again make stone tools, tame fire, create the wheel, being writing, discover mathematics and logic, invent microscopes and telescopes, and eventually understand quantum mechanics. Science and technology will progress and develop more or less the same as it is now, because science and technology are based on fundamental laws of the universe.

However, the same can not be said for religion. People might once again go through a stage where they will believe lightning bolts are hurled to the ground by a god in the sky, but they won't name him Zeus, think he lives on a mountain in Greece, or believe he sometimes descends in the form of a swan to impregnate young maidens. They also won't come up with the belief that they only way to get eternal life is to believe a Middle Eastern man was executed to appease a vengeful god who is also the slain man, and both of them hate gay sex. Religions are not based on laws of the universe, they are cultural constructs, and, without a supernatural intervention, they will never repeat.