How do you rank on the Scale of Doubt?
Jennifer Michael Hecht, who teaches at Nassau Community College in New York, has come up with one of those clever little web quizzes to accompany her book Doubt: A History.
First, take the quiz.
If you think she might know what she's talking about, and have an hour to kill, you can download a podcast of last night's edition of "Speaking of Faith," a weekly radio program heard on NPR stations, which features lots of Prof. Hecht's thoughts on the importance of doubt, not just to the intellectual development of western thought, but to religion as well.
More like this
I'm at #TAM! I've been busy all day! I hung out with ZOMGitsCriss!
Dinosaur-eating Mammals (You heard me right): Jeff Hecht at New Scientist has a good write-up of the discovery of a dog-sized 130-million year old mammal with dinosaur bones in its gut.
I'm not sure what is meant by "pious" in the result.
Really crappy list of questions - it shifts from asking if something created the Universe, then asks a question about whether there is some force holding the universe together, and that question I think any atheist would answer yes by the way it was worded, since gravity for instance, would fit the description. Then the next questions conflate the "creator" of the first question with the "force" of the second, which makes everything after messy. Pretty useless I think. It also assumes a pretty simplistic view of the world - what does "after" mean - even in theological traditions there is problems with this. Based on different readings I can truthfully answer the questions different ways and get quite different results so this is meaningless to me.
I got the same thing as Craig. I agree with Mark -- a dorky "test."
I am an atheist or agnostic, though maybe not of the materialist variety.
She's got a sloppy question:
Do you believe that any part of a human being survives death, elsewhere or here on earth?
I answered yes. The body survives death. According to her, I have a "a pious relationship to the universe." All of my other answers were no.
I guess I'm an agnostic, but I can't be certain.
Haven't read the book but I hope doubt isn't limited to just religion. I scored hard-core athiest which I am.
I like to think that as a person with a scientifically slanted view of the world, I have a tendency to have doubt about current science. Science is grounded in doubt and the questioning of the current 'most definative explaination'
Guess I should download the link and see what's what.
I was told: You may still be an atheist or agnostic, though not of the materialist variety, because I believe the chemicals that comprise my body will persist after my death and that gravity holds the universe together.
Yep, this is one seriously flawed quiz.