In the comments below Jason Malloy took issue with John Hawks' contention that Creationists "will now cite Eric Lander in support of the idea that hominid fossils are not transitional between apes and humans, but instead are hybrids of apes and humans."
I don't know. Here is a short passage from Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust:
...after reading a bogus article on a new finding from the Dead Sea Scrolls that seemed to contradict Christian doctrine, religious respondents who also believed the story reported their religious beliefs reinforced (Batson 1975)....
My first reaction, from the gut, is to explode about "God-idiots" in a Raving Atheist fashion. I mean, a) these people believe that that the Dead Sea Scroll fabrications are actually accurate b) but they still aver a belief that they should logically see is untenable. Frankly, the subjects of these studies remind me of the moronic undecided voters who grin about how they "just can't pick" because "they aren't hearing the issues." Usually, if you are watching them on TV you probably think, "Damnit, tell them that they're fucking toothless morons with only a few spare neurons, and that's why they can't make up their 'minds.'"
But I have to take a step back. The fact is after the initial incredulity I understood exactly what Atran was pointing to because I had seen it many times in my own life. In the case of religionists I recall a Jewish Orthodox girl telling me how the Holocaust confirmed her belief in the existence in of a Jewish God. How the hell did she get there? It was really convoluted and I really can't repeat it because it didn't make any sense to me at that time and so it didn't "stick" in my memory (it wasn't as naive and obvious as "it was God's punishment for not keeping the law"). But the point is that belief sure can be a fucking mystey to logical analysis. And yet it is not necessarily a mystery to cognitive science. If you read Cognitive Daily or Mixing Memory you will know that the human mind is not some naked, plain and transparent computational device without bugs. We have biases, and are riddled by incongruities. If there is an Intelligent Designer he should have cribbed some notes from Frege, because the mind isn't really good at formal logic. Whatever mental book-keeping we have seems really ill-suited to smoking out internal contradictions in our beliefs.
I think that it is obvious that the biases and cognitive "bugs" in our minds make most humans pretty susceptible to the meme-complexes of religions. That's just the cards our species was dealt. One of the features of these meme-complexes is that you really can't make heads or tails of the mental processes going on...and when it comes to something like chimp-human hybrdization, I'm sure that some Christian will figure out that it actually proves the existence of God. The reality is I think that for most people all data will confirm the existence of God, but that's because the existence of God is predicated on "under the hood" mental processes. These processes are orthogonal to the explicit ideas and facts that are the currency in conscious domains. So you see, idiotic contradictions are feasible because the modularity of various mental processes, your brain isn't always in a state of crosstalk unless you are constantly engaging in conceptual analysis (even then, some processes are encapsulated so you can't get to them, remember this next time you try to 'convince' yourself that you aren't hungry).
Now, I have silly beliefs that are pretty inflexible to new information, and, they probably often operate unconsciously. The only thing is that I don't make these silly beliefs the center of my ontology (or elaborate complicated word games that I demand other people accept as True), nor do I imbue them with transcendental significance. Oh, and I don't blow people up over them.
Addendum: Read this Muslim gibberish, I dare you to say that this is the product of an integrated mind!
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Yeah, OK, I agree. I've held onto the hope that some sort of eventual smoking gun would be able to destroy religion, but this is promising to be an enduring faith of my own.
My parents had the Internet when I began highschool, but I didn't really read much of anything on the web until a couple of years into college. One of the first things I did read, and I still remember it to this day, is When Prophecies Fail: A Sociological Perspective on Failed Expectation in the Watchtower Society about how Jehovah's Witnesses actually kept getting stronger in their faith everytime their religious prophecies failed.
I also came across another head-shaker in the Mormon journal Dialogue in Simply Implausible: DNA and a Mesoamerican Setting for the Book of Mormon [free read]. How can the author simultaneously argue that Joseph Smith has been exposed as an inept liar on every claim we can test, and that Smith should be trusted on all his unfalsifiable religious stories?? Same thing with DM Quinn, the excommunicated homosexual who wrote Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. Even those with the tighest familiarity with the fraud, stick to it, some even after the community rejects them. It's infuriating and depressing.
Manual Trackback:
First, remove the beam from your own eye. . . Razib is complaining about stupid religious people again: My first reaction, from the gut, is to explode about "God-idiots" in a Raving Atheist fashion. . .
I think this process is understandable if you consider that reason works in some kind of Bayesian fashion. Then the extent to which new evidence modifies your beliefs depends on how strong your prior is.
If you have an enormous investment in a position and a lot of your worldview depends on it, including lots of other subtheories that you have constructed at great effort, then you will go a long way to construct epicycles to retain at least what seems to you to be the essential core of your theory.
Another person who did not have such an investment would require far less proof to convince them. i.e. their prior would not be as strong.
Remember: discarding theories is never black and white. Any theory can fit just about any fact if you add enough epicycles. The question is; at what point does the effort to prop up a failing theory become more trouble than it's worth and it is just easier to tear the whole thing down and start again with an entirely new paradigm?
This is almost an economic decision, involving issues like writing off sunk costs, personal shame at admitting that you were wrong,sometimes even discarding old and dear personal relationships. There are all sorts of costs that people just aren't always willing to pay. Or at any rate they require a huge amount of convincing before they finally abandon all hope and let go of the old mindset.
I think older people (and I am not so young myself) find it much harder to throw out everything you've ever believed and start all over again from scratch. That's probably why so many intellectual revolutions start with the young.
dan,
you make a good point, but, i think that it is not totally relevant to religious belief. to some extent it is, people don't want to seem like fools and they are raised with powerful beliefs, but, the issue remember is that they don't always simply reject disconfirming evidence! they accept disconfirming evidence and say that it makes their belief even stronger (!?!?!). the point is that religious beliefs operate outside the system of empirically sensitive models. yes, there are individuals who have "eureka!" moments where the scales fall from their eyes regarding religion, but the vast majority of people never hit this point.
one thing though, i do want to emphasize that different supersitions have different consequences. new age & occult types tend to be tolerant, or indulgent, toward unbelievers. some groups tend not to be...so even if the work is always going to be populated by cognitive ghosts, we can at least try and steer it to be safer for those of us who reject ghosts.
Off topic... what's the best argument you've read, contra Dawkins and Dennett, that Christianity is compatible with the scientific worldview?
what's the best argument you've read, contra Dawkins and Dennett, that Christianity is compatible with the scientific worldview?
for me, the empirical one: until recently the greatest scientists were christian (broadly construed). e.g., galileo, newton, maxwell, gauss, kepler, liebniz....
p.s. this is in part an issue of definitions. what is a 'scientific' and a 'religious' worldview?
what i actually had in mind was ... I was looking for a short version of Ken Miller's Finding Darwin's God or something like it
you won't find one :)
I think the fact that "idiotic contradictions are feasible" is what saved the world from fascism. Sometimes "logic" is wrong.
When I am confronted with facts that contradict what I believe I am (1) skeptical that they are true and (2) skeptical that even if true, that they really disprove everything that I think I know. None of us have time to fully research every issue before getting on with our lives.
I think that this is actually what goes on with most people. The contradictions implied by accepting facts which "logically disprove" one's beliefs is, I think, post-facto attempts at providing "logical" explanations to people who demand them (including ourselves).
I think Dan makes a pretty good point, but people are extremely attached to the sunk cost fallacy. Hell, I have an econ degree and I've done it before: "Well gee, I paid for the tickets, so I might as well go to the movie eventhough I don't really want to anymore." That kind of thing.