[LINK] Former Christian fundamentalist: Science robbed me of my faith
This person seems to have the virtue of non-compartmentalization. What rationalist skill can we learn from this? Maybe look for ways a strong belief in one domain, to another where it’s more testable?
I’m a former Christian, and I’m fascinated by intelligent Christians’ ability to compartmentalize.
In every other area of their lives, Christians can be savvy, skeptical, rational...only to be credulous when it comes to religion.
In fact, they compartmentalize even at the “faith” level. Christians can give plenty of rational reasons why miraculous claims by Muslims are obviously dubious, but feel sincerely justified in believing supernatural elemants of their own creed.
In my efforts to understand what is going on in the mind of Christians, I’ve (currently) concluded the following:
It’s largely emotional and psychological, separate from rational components of their mind.*
There is often childhood indoctrination involved.
There is often a significant life-changing event or existential crisis involved prior to conversion.
There is much to lose from leaving—Social, professional, emotional networks.
There is little to lose by staying. Pascal’s Wager, etc.
Many don’t actually “believe” in any true sense of the word—they just play along and don’t make waves.
*Some seem to be able to reason about their beliefs (apologetics), but most of those attempts deconstruct down to some form of Pascal’s Wager or Kierkegaardian Leap, which are essentially the same thing—”Why not believe? Life is hard and it can’t hurt.”
There are a few Christian/spiritual thought schools I’m impressed with. They have depth and devotion, admit agnosticism on many issues, don’t dogmatically ignore evidence, etc. To what extent this group can be called “Christian” is disputable, but it’s how they see themselves, so…
I don’t think that’s anything specific to Christianity or religion.
Professors who teach evidence-based medicine at universities generally don’t have any problem with the fact that they use non-evidence-based teaching methods to do it.
Very skeptical philosophers still think that they retirement money they invested in the stock market is safe.
I guess, though I don’t like your examples.
I don’t know of any 100% certain way to impart knowledge. There are techniques that teachers use that help the transmission of knowledge. There is at least some evidence suggesting certain methods work better than others, most of the time.
“Safe” is the key word. No one who is paying attention believes their money is safe anywhere, let alone the stock market. There is a risk, and people, professor or otherwise, guage the risk and reward when they decide whether to invest.
Some Christians are compartmentalizing on a much more significant level. On one hand, they go to the mechanic if their car needs repairing and the accountant if they need halep with their taxes. On the other hand, they believe in invisible winged creatures and invisible horned creatures who are doing battle over the eternal destiny of souls in a very real ethereal spiritual plane of existence.
Yes, but the average professor of medicine who preaches evidence-based medicine doesn’t study those methods.
He also doesn’t run controlled test together with other medicine professors to find out how to teach medicine most effectively. He still doesn’t feel like a hypocrite.
If you ask them specifically they might deny to hold that belief, but they usually don’t walk their talk in the sense that they apply the student they preach with their philosopher hat to the decisions they make for their retirement money.
Not really. If you retirement funds get wiped out that a significant life event. If you believe in God and he doesn’t exist not much bad happens.
Beliefs with a high cost of being wrong are significant.
I think there are lessons to be learned.
Here’s how it started for this guy:
A lot of not dumb people have trouble with
I watched the following BBC Documentary a while back. Some interesting stuff I hadn’t seen before, and I’ve done the whole machine learning schtick, where it’s obvious recursive iterative processes with cost feedback can do most anything.
http://documentaries-plus.blogspot.com/2011/08/secret-life-of-chaos.html
The title seems a misnomer, as it was more about systems producing spontaneous order than chaos.
Add to these physical examples of spontaneous order a little background in computational learning and optimization, and it’s completely obvious that with billions of years and bazillions of stars, the universe can churn out things with tremendous function.
(Me, I find it strange that people make such a big deal out of evolution, while embryonic development and morphogenesis is about a zillion times more amazing, as it turns one tiny little undifferentiated blob into a baby in 9 months. )
I think the other hangup about evolution is conceptual. High school biology talks about species—at least back in my day. Then a creature is of one species and not another, so how could it magically transform form one to another?
If you take a nominalist approach instead, and just note the diversity of creatures, with varying degrees of the ability to interbreed, it’s no shock that the population statistics change over time, and interbreeding clusters merge and split and move in state space.
Physical spontaneous order plus some simulations of spontaneous order, functional development, and population evolution and clustering. It’s simple, when the right pieces are presented. Most people haven’t seen those pieces.
Open Thread.
That’s a little laconic. What exactly is the requested action? Should I delete this Discussion post, and post it as a comment in the open thread? Or just learn for next time?
The post karma is mildly negative and there is no big discussion here, so deleting and re-posting in OT is probably the best action.
(If the karma were positive, or a long discussion would be here, it would be probably best to keep it here. If the karma were −10 or less, it would probably not be worth posting even in OT.)
Hmm, karma is positive now & there’s a little discussion. I’m going to make no change this time, and post links without much commentary in OT next time.
How about we stop jerking ourselves off over the fact that we can outthink Christian fundamentalists? That would be a pretty solid application of rationality.
I’m all in favour of not jerking off over our ability to outthink Christian fundamentalists (also: some Christian fundamentalists are actually pretty damn smart in their domains of expertise), but it doesn’t look to me as if that’s what Benquo’s doing. I think he’s saying: OK, this guy managed to escape fundamentalism, which we know to be difficult even for smart people, so can we see what enabled him to do it and try to learn from that?.
I do agree with Viliam that this should have been a comment in the Open Thread, though.
Yes, I’m aware. But it’s useless. “Hurr durr I learned about evolution and therefore original sin didn’t happen.” Now I don’t know a lot about Christian theology, but does it even matter that original sin didn’t happen, so long as people sinned anyway?
He mentions that there are plenty of theists who accept Darwin. Why are they wrong? He just goes on about how they can’t be reconciled and doesn’t avail himself to explain why. I can’t see anything to be gained here except an understanding of how utterly estranged from reality creationists are.
What does ‘Open Thread’ mean, btw?
Very much so, according to that theology. The point of original sin there is that it means nobody can be blameless, even in principle, i.e. all people are tainted by Adam and Eve’s actions; opinions differ on whether this represents some sort of ancestral culpability or is supposed to work in a more metaphysical way. Either way, it leads directly to the idea that people need divine intervention to be absolved of that taint, which underlies the justification for the Gospels’ sacrifice-for-redemption narrative and by extension pretty much all of Christianity.
(At least, that’s the perspective I got from my Catholic relatives. Other Christian sects might have slightly different takes on it, but all the existing mainstream ones have similar doctrine.)
In this case it means that the person saying “Open Thread” thinks this isn’t worthy of its own thread and instead should be posted in the weekly Open Thread.
Clearly.