Here is your Tuesday assignment. Read this post and this article in today's Times:
Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. Yet they could just as well have examined their own neighbors, lab assistants or even some fellow scientists. New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking — the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick — are far more common than people acknowledge.
These habits have little to do with religious faith, which is much more complex because it involves large questions of morality, community and history. But magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day.
Discussion topic: Do people who carry $2 bills for luck, or who watch for 4 leafed clovers, "perpetuate the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence in order to have an ethical and spiritual life"? Do they "refuse to deeply question the preposterous ideas of those who" "fly planes into buildings, or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy"?
Is talking to them "like asking someone if they understand science, and they can recite a string of facts at you … but they haven't absorbed the concept"?
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I think that many have conflated methodological naturalism with metaphysical naturalism. Science means different things to different people; to some it is simply a research strategy that has proven to be instrumentally efficacious, but to others it is a way towards the revelation of metaphysical truth. To those in the latter category, adhering to (or merely entertaining) metaphysical truth claims which are not supported by science is anathema to what they view the very purpose of science to be.
The conflict is scientific instrumentalists versus scientific metaphysicians. Scientific instrumentalists are free to believe in God, spirits, or lucky charms, and if they are nonbelievers themselves they tend to be untroubled by the beliefs of scientists who also happen to be theists. Scientific metaphysicians, in contrast, believe that they are in possession of (or tantalizingly close to) metaphysical Truth, which in some leads to a kind of evangelical zeal and an abhorrence at the treatment of science as a mere research strategy that can exist alongside unscientific beliefs. Many on both sides apparently do not understand that to the other side "science" means something different than it does to them.