I would have to meet you half way again in that I agree that humans are predisposed to interpret events in terms of the teleology of some supreme agency...
Not necessarily a supreme agency, but all kinds of hidden creatures - fairies, sprites, elves, gremlins, pixies, spirits, ghosts, 'little people', etc. Basically, wherever a natural explanation wasn't available, some (often mischievous or malevolent) hidden agent would be invoked.
...as far as teleology in general goes I would instead say that humans are just a species that has the cognitive capacity to spot it. Which is why we are the only species out there that does science, we’re figuring out the teleology of everything.
As I said, this has been studied, and the empirical evidence is that we default to a teleological view - and there are plausible evolutionary explanations why this should be so. To assume teleology when there is no evidence of a purposive agent
and there is a natural explanation that accounts for the phenomena, is clearly a mistake.
As for a supreme agent, one thing I can go back & forth on with myself is the idea that there is a supreme consciousness to reality vs the idea that there are only products of consciousness in reality. IMO it makes no sense that anything would have consciousness if it couldn’t use that consciousness to make decisions, so it makes no sense that a rock would have consciousness but it would make sense for an animal with limbs to have it.
I think that's reasonable.
... a supreme agent that couldn’t alter anything would look exactly the same as no supreme agent at all, and a supreme agent that can alter things but doesn’t care about the fate of Earth would probably be impossible to notice anyway.
That's a problem with supreme agents - there's no point unless they exercise agency in some way - so once you believe, it's like a man with a hammer - everything looks like a nail...
Was there any time in your life that you believed that a supreme agent existed, and if so was it your own idea or do you think that the idea was planted into you by society?
To cut a long story short, I'm not sure... I believed what I was told, until I could think things through for myself. Of course the idea was planted by society; I was told what was 'true', what I should believe. It's no coincidence that the vast majority of people have the religious beliefs of the culture that raises them.
I grew up in a Catholic environment and went to Catholic schools (the second was an abbey school run by Dominican priests). As a child, I followed instructions; I prayed at night and before meals, went to church with family and school, went to confession and asked forgiveness for my sins, etc.
By the time I reached my teens and met non-Catholics, I'd begun to realise that not only were other Catholics not following the 'rules', but beyond scriptural guidance, the supernatural pantheon (God, the Virgin Mary, the Trinity, angels, saints, etc) appeared to have no effect at all on people's lives - they weren't happier, wealthier, or better people. For me personally, talking or praying to God had always been like talking to the void - I got no response, and had to rely on my elders and my own conscience to guide me.
The priests would say ambiguous things like, "It'll come...", "You'll hear the voice", "You'll know when the time is right", but would never answer a straight question with a straight answer. So I drifted away from it - it never really 'took' for me; I went from a child following instructions, to early adolescent waiting for a 'sign', to studying the natural world - and beginning to understand what organised religion was about, and the psychology of superstitions, paranormal, and supernatural beliefs.
Autobiographical memory is notoriously unreliable - we reconstruct it according to our current attitudes & perspectives, so this is literally my story of what I think happened; but for whatever reason, religious belief didn't 'take'.
That's part of the reason I'm here, I'm curious to know why it 'took' for some people and not for others.
The closest I can come to crazy is in regard to Intelligent Design, which is essentially teleological. My main objection to Intelligent Design is that it puts up barriers to researching intelligent design. Note the lower case id. My logic goes thus:
