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Thursday, November 8, 2012

Thor's Day: The most insidious belief of all?

Some exit polling this week sought to gather data on how religious belief correlated to voting in the presidential election [excerpts from Sarah Posner's "Exit Polls on Religion"]:
In Florida...24% of the respondents were white evangelicals, and 78% of them voted for Romney....
    In Ohio, exit pollsters asked voters if they were "white born-again Christian;" 31% said yes, and they went for Romney over Obama, 68-31%....Obama is winning among everyone other than white born-again Christians, 60-38%.
    This sort of correlation makes me glad that we don't have significantly more white evangelicals or white born-again Christians than we do, or the outcome of yesterday's election might have been reversed.

I've been trying to pinpoint what is it about these folks' belief system that directs them the way to go, and I think I may have found it. I think it's their fundamental belief that the Bible is the unerring "word of God." It all starts there, determining such believers to live stuck in the past with primitive notions about "a woman's place," homosexuality, individual creation of species, and so on, and ensuring that they will be impervious to science and enlightenment. Relatively enlightened believers, who may even consider the Bible to be the "word of God" in some sense, allow the Bible to be interpreted in the light of knowledge's advance. They simply ignore much that is in the Bible as outdated and inapplicable. And it is outdated and inapplicable, however hospitably it may have been accepted among ancient Israelites and early Christians. (Google on "inerrant word of god"; it's scary.)

John Brockman, in his 2012 book, This Will Make You Smarter, published the answers to the question "What scientific concept would improve everyone's cognitive toolkit?" that he received from over 150 of "the world's most influential thinkers." Neurologist Gerald Smallberg states in his answer that
Truth needs continually to be validated against all evidence that challenges it fairly and honestly...No ideology, religion, culture, or civilization is awarded special privileges or rights....[pp. 44-45]
    Believers moored to the unerring "word of God" have an extremely difficult time joining a conversation about what's factually true (if they are capable of joining it at all), for they can't address or evaluate anything that seems to contradict the Bible. To them, for example, evolution isn't an established fact, it's a matter of faith in the Bible's teaching. (Of course, evolution isn't a matter of faith; it's an established fact.) So for them, for example, Paul Braun ought to be on the House of Representatives' Science Committee—to represent the "word of God" presumably—which is absurd.
    And these believers are temperamentally disposed to follow information purveyors like Faux News, because such purveyors, like an inerrant scripture, hold tenaciously to prescribed beliefs without reference to evidence. Such followers consequently vote in droves for candidates like Mitt Romney (however contradictory and hypocritical Romney might have been about what exactly it was that he believed).


I hope that President Obama will take opportunities in the next four years to speak up for the scientific facts of evolution and our race's significant contribution to global warming, to name two important issues with real consequences for the education of children and whether we act to reduce green-house emissions and so on. (Mayor Bloomberg of New York City endorsed President Obama in part because of his record in trying to address global warming.)
    President Obama might even lobby for the House's Science Committee to seat scientifically minded members. But good luck with that until the 2014 election might unload enough faith-based Representatives for the House to have a chance of addressing our problems rationally.
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Copyright © 2012 by Morris Dean

9 comments:

  1. You sir are a bigot. It is not your job to tell people what to believe, if people want to believe in an imaginary floating man in the sky, then they darn will do so, because that is what this nation was founded upon, the right to believe what one does chose to believe. People like you preach acceptance and open mindedness but then you live the opposite thing, doing what you claim to hate, forcing your beliefs on others and claiming that your theory is correct, keep in mind, I said "theory", because no, evolution is not completely proven, though I might say that I do believe in the theory of evolution, it is not your place. Stop inferring from critique, hypocrite.

    -Anon

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    1. Thank you, Mr. or Ms. Anon, for taking the time to express yourself on Moristotle.
          I realize that people will believe what they will, and that no appeal to science or reason will make any difference to many. But it is imperative, for the sake of progress, that destructive beliefs be brought to the court of critique.
          Children, for example, who are indoctrinated to value faith over science are thereby handicapped when it comes to being educated for life in the actual world.

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    2. Mr. or Ms. Anon, I should have responded to your comment about evolution's being a "theory," in case any readers less well-informed than yourself might be misled by it.
          While it's true that evolution is still referred to as "the Theory of Evolution," the case is similar to that of "the Copernican Theory" (that the planets, including Earth, revolve around the sun, not the sun and the other planets revolve around Earth). Evolution, like Copernican heliocentrism, has graduated from being an hypothetical explanation of observed phenomena to being the accepted set of principles that do, in fact, explain them. As Richard Dawkins said in an interview in The Washington Post:
          There is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science....
          Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur to a human mind. The power of a scientific theory may be measured as a ratio: the number of facts that it explains divided by the number of assumptions it needs to postulate in order to do the explaining. A theory that assumes most of what it is trying to explain is a bad theory. That is why the creationist or ‘intelligent design’ theory is such a rotten theory.
          What any theory of life needs to explain is functional complexity. Complexity can be measured as statistical improbability, and living things are statistically improbable in a very particular direction: the direction of functional efficiency. The body of a bird is not just a prodigiously complicated machine, with its trillions of cells—each one in itself a marvel of miniaturized complexity—all conspiring together to make muscle or bone, kidney or brain. Its interlocking parts also conspire to make it good for something—in the case of most birds, good for flying. An aero-engineer is struck dumb with admiration for the bird as flying machine: its feathered flight-surfaces and ailerons sensitively adjusted in real time by the on-board computer which is the brain; the breast muscles, which are the engines, the ligaments, tendons and lightweight bony struts all exactly suited to the task. And the whole machine is immensely improbable in the sense that, if you randomly shook up the parts over and over again, never in a million years would they fall into the right shape to fly like a swallow, soar like a vulture, or ride the oceanic up-draughts like a wandering albatross. Any theory of life has to explain how the laws of physics can give rise to a complex flying machine like a bird or a bat or a pterosaur, a complex swimming machine like a tarpon or a dolphin, a complex burrowing machine like a mole, a complex climbing machine like a monkey, or a complex thinking machine like a person.
          Darwin explained all of this with one brilliantly simple idea—natural selection, driving gradual evolution over immensities of geological time. His is a good theory because of the huge ratio of what it explains (all the complexity of life) divided by what it needs to assume (simply the nonrandom survival of hereditary information through many generations). The rival theory to explain the functional complexity of life—creationism—is about as bad a theory as has ever been proposed. What it postulates (an intelligent designer) is even more complex, even more statistically improbable than what it explains. In fact it is such a bad theory it doesn’t deserve to be called a theory at all, and it certainly doesn’t deserve to be taught alongside evolution in science classes.

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  2. Blind faith is generally a byproduct of a blind mind regardless what the faith is.

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  3. The first comment, with reference to respecting the beliefs of others, including a being floating in the clouds, combined with the discussion of evolution, reminded me of one of the most important new religions. It was createdin response to the kansas board of education's decision some years ago to teach intelligent design. I encourage you to check out the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster:) http://www.venganza.org/about/

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  4. While pastafarianism may be as legitimate as any other religious society, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster may easily have as much merit as any other official church, I worry it would also have the same factionalism as all the others. Do you know anything about the official stance of the church in regard to progressive followers who prefer brown rice spirals over the far more traditional semolina penne, and will they welcome into the flock those of the radical organic corn/quinoa rotelli faction and find a way to make them tolerate the ancient sect of white wheat spaghetti?

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