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Highly intelligent people who believed in religion.
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15-05-2011 11:12pm#1
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magicbastarder wrote: »one of the most intelligent people i have known is a priest with a PhD in astrophysics.
Yeah, my aunt's brother is a priest with a physics background. Didn't manage to interrogate him about it though
I don't think belief is willingness to lie to yourself
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magicbastarder wrote: »is your aunt from armagh, by any chance?
Nope
I guess there are a few of them out there! 0 -
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When I first saw this thread title. I drafted a huge post, that was imo way too short and left out far too much. So I decided I'd add more to it later. Saved the post in Word. Then realised who the OP was, their poor understanding of science and I debated with myself whether or not it was worth finishing. I decided it wasn't because the OP needs to better understand science (and humans) and unfortunately that is something that takes a lot of time. And then I later realised that a large chunk of it was beautifully explained in this book.
Put aside a week to read it and you will have most of your answers and many more questions.
Anyways, for what it's worth here's what I'd drafted. it is a bit incoherent and broken in places and still has a few key points left out, but, for now, I have no intention of finishing it.
I guess the obvious question to ask you is : Are you superstitious? Do you have any ritual or routine you do before playing a sports game, sitting an exam, asking someone out, sitting an interview etc. ? The next obvious question is: Do you project "essences" into inanimate objects. Say I were to hand you a box which I claimed had voodoo inside it that will curse you. Would you hesitate in putting your hand into that box? Or better yet would you wear the same jacket that a serial killer wore the night he massacred and brutally tortured two people? Finally, do you feel a sense of remorse when you break a glass, cup, plate or any inanimate object that you already have several identical copies of but you’ve owned with years and seem to have a ‘connection’ to? Surely you realise these thoughts are totally irrational and totally illogical, yet the vast majority of the world's populations will answer 'Yes' to all those questions. So too will a very high proportion of skeptics and non believers!
There a number of reasons why humans are superstitious and believe in the supernatural. The first one is 'illusion of control'. It is a well known fact that people experiencing physical pain can tolerate it for much longer if they believe they have to power to stop it at a moment's notice. So when the Israeli famlies during the gulf war were under threat of a SCUD attack they would touch wood, because they believed it made that them that bit safer. Under threat of danger we are more likely to resort to superstitious behaviour. If they were to survive a wave of extremely close bombings they would easily believe the act of touching the wood had a positive effect. Why? Because taking that action, in their minds, negated the threat. When groups of adults are asked to recount moments in their life where they felt they had little or no control they were far more likely to see connections between random pictures,find connections between random events and could even be fooled into thinking random made up superstitious rituals were effective. The bottom line is that when humans perceives themselves to be in a situation where they can do nothing at all about. They will tryanything that they feel could change the outcome. Doing nothing is simply not an option to us.
The second is that we are more likely to reason from experience rather than use logic. Toddlers know that solids cannot float on air and become fascinated by balloons. Young Children generally regard anything that they haven’t yet experienced as impossible e.g the idea of walking to school barefooted. As we grow older we tend to realise more and more that what is improbable isn’t actually impossible but we tend to base what is improbable on our experience rather than use of logic. Consider the following example.
Sarah is 33 years old, single, outspoken, and very smart. She has a PhD in Philosophy and a degree in Economics. During her undergraduate years she was deeply concerned with issues regarding discrimination, social justice and the environment.
Which of the following is more likely?
a)Sarah works in a bank.
b)Sarah works in a bank and is a feminist.
If you said she’s more likely to work in a bank and also be a feminist then you are in the grand majority. Unfortunately, you are also wrong. It goes without saying that either all of these women are feminists or there is always going to be more females working in bank than females in the bank who are feminist: The feminists are always going to be a subset of the female bank workers. Yet 80% of the people who are asked that question all have to be told the blatantly obvious that should have gone without saying. We tend to have a more powerful stereotype of feminists than we do of non descript female bank workers and because our description of Sarah matches our expectations of your stereotypical feminist we tend to weigh the odds more in that option’s favour regardless of the actual odds. This is why anecdotes are much more powerful tool than statistics when it comes to shaping a person’s opinion.
The third reason is the illusion of explanatory depth. We always think we understand something complex with far greater precision and coherence than we actually do. This is especially true of lay people. Practising scientists and engineers quickly learn that what theories they formulate in their heads doesn’t work in reality, but the lay person often has to convince only one thing : their own mind. This is of course remarkably easy and gives the person the sense that they understand something in great detail. The practising scientist is also just as vulnerable as the lay person when it comes to areas outside their disciple. Worse still are areas outside their discipline where they have a tendency to use common based experiences from their own discipline to explain the other disciplines to themselves. (The worse culprits to this illusion though are apparently software programmers!) Coupling this with the fact that most people don’t understand knowledge, how it works, how it is stored and how it is processed and you’ve got a pretty powerful illusion. So far! Perhaps somewhat depressingly I’m not actually finished describing it yet.
We tend to overestimate to grossly the accuracy of our own senses but most of us will admit our senses are flawed. What we rarely tend to admit is how flawed our actual memory systems are. You obviously blink your eyes subconsciously several times a day (once every five seconds apparently). I'll bet even though your eyes were shut for at least 15 seconds (or longer) from reading this post you can’t remember one instance of it. If we experience something, say a robbery, our minds, bless em, will confabulate the vague memory based on what we have see into a continuous like footage from CCTV or a mainstream TV Show. So much so that how you remember the robbery going down, is probably not how it actually occurred. The reason being is that our visual memory works a lot different to a CCTV camera and we don’t notice all the details we think we noticed. Some details are merely just included by our brains put in to complete our film. More so, what we expect ourselves to notice we often to miss. Experiments have shown just how blind to change we really are, subjects watching a film rarely notice if the actor mid conservation is swapped with a different actor.
Finally just because you happen to be non religious doesn't necessarily mean you’re thinking in a rational or logical fashion. Whether you like it or not your brain is constantly tricking yourself into thinking, seeing and understanding stuff that isn't necessarily true? It truth though that’s bit harsh, the brain does the best it can to construct the world around into an accurate picture but because of the internal limitations of the sense gathering organs and the brain’s neural network itself the picture will forever inaccurate. What we see, what we hear, what we taste, what we understand, isn't the way reality is. Now, time to discuss the social aspects and religion in general. (Finally!)
Religions, it is believed, survives via the following : meaning, motivation and memory. Let's start with meaning. One with God, One with Jesus, One with the Buddha, One with the Universe, whatever. The central tenet of most religions meanings is that it offers a sense of higher purpose and better connectivity among society with something greater than all of society combined.There's a meaning to it that only people within it can understand. Only people of the faith can understand this idea, that is greater than them all, that is greater than every other human and so there's a sense of identity with knowing something that is so complex others cannot understand. It almost brings with it a sense of power over others.
Of vital importance here though is the idea of one being one with a group.
As humans we will always prefer not to be seen doing something that the majority consider distasteful. In other words, if everyone around us starts touching wood we will feel the urge to do it also. There's far more to it than that though. When you become embroiled in a large crowd you tend to be more vulnerable to losing your own self individuality and become more as one entity with the crowd. When you are wearing a mask that keeps your face anonymous you are more likely to prolong the torture of someone than if your face was exposed. (Even if the subject in question doesn't know you or isn't even human You'll still be more likely to exert more pain on it when you have a mask on!) This phenomenon is known as deindividuation. It is the reason why under the right environmental cues a crowd of peaceful well wishers will suddenly tell a depressed person to jump off the building and take their own life and then spend the whole evening wonder what exactly it was they were thinking?
Religion thrives on this group power, there is nothing going to motivate people more than a powerful mob all behaving identically to one another. This is why frequent social gatherings are a must for any religion. Without regular attendance the sense of a unified mob mentality is lost. More so, is the loss of the individual self to the ideas of that religion. Over time tenets of the religion which appeared intuitive and logical begin to appear more and more aloof and confusing and just downright strange for a finish.
More importantly though is that attending the religious service makes them feel one with a group. All it serves to do is individualise the person into a single group or mob. This relaxes the individual and makes them feel like they have less responsibility over their actions.
The second aspect towards a good surviving religion is violence in rites and images. Although you may not think it initially, Christianity is full of violent rituals. The Catholics are cannibals, their saviour was crucified, they fast, they remind themselves of Jesus's torture annually, their chosen symbol of the faith is one that epitomises pain and suffering and that's what it's all about pain and suffering. These are images that every now and again the religion propagates into the believer. In the more extreme rituals of other religions this includes violent acts of harm such as human sacrifice, amputations, mutilations etc. The successful religions evolved to find the balance between violent rituals and images of peace, love and togetherness. What's key to any religion though is that the rituals are carried out regularly to reinforce the group behaviour into the hivemind so to speak. This is exploiting a type of memory known as episodic memory. We have two basics types of declarative memory worth mentioning here: semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory deals with the memory of meanings and facts. Episodic memory deals with personal experiences or episodes. For a religion to be successful it is vital that it exploits both these types of memories successfully. Semantic memory is addressed by the use of stories which have a hidden meaning often vaguely understood.
There are few other reasons, but this post has become far too long for me. I might add more to it, but hopefully it gives you a general idea as to why religion exists. For why people believe in God you could always take a gander at this thread which I started almost two years ago in a hope to better understand why people believe such stuff. Two years and lots of reading later, you get a free summary of what I can remember. I thoroughly recommend though you do your own research into it as you will come to some fascinating understandings and insights into the nature of human beings.
There are many other cognitive and social reasons but this post has expanded to be far longer than I could have even dreamed of. Belated apologies for any confusion that may arise from spelling errors, typos, brain slips, or lack of coherence.
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Glad to help!partyatmygaff wrote: »I never would have guessed.
Try reading what I wrote again, this time stressing to yourself that I said "side-effect" and not "result"partyatmygaff wrote: »Who'd have guessed that human belief in a religion is an effect of the way that human brains work?SuperInfinity wrote: »Saying something is the "current scientific consensus" isn't an argument, it's asking you to believe scientists... Er, no, it's saying that the cognitive neuroscientists and others who've studied religion believe that it's a side-effect of the way in which the brain was designed by evolution. 0 -
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Glad to help!Try reading what I wrote again, this time stressing to yourself that I said "side-effect" and not "result" Er, no, it's saying that the cognitive neuroscientists and others who've studied religion believe that it's a side-effect of the way in which the brain was designed by evolution.
Every human behaviour is a side effect or result of the way in which the brain was designed by evolution. All I'm saying is that he should learn to think about it for himself.0 -
A side effect is still a result. Both Atheism and Theism are responses (Or results if you will) of the human mind's musings on an age old question. One side abusing science to label the other's views as negative side effects does not bode well for a healthy society. It reeks of prejudice.Glad to help!Try reading what I wrote again, this time stressing to yourself that I said "side-effect" and not "result"0 -
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SuperInfinity wrote: »All I'm saying is that he should learn to think about it for himself. Er, where did I say that he shouldn't?
And are you implying -- as I think you are -- that the OP shouldn't read up on the current consensus on the topic and related research that's been going on in this area? And that the findings of peer-reviewed papers published in reputable journals are worth no more than a prelate's sermon?
"Abusing science?" "Negative"? Where did I say or imply that?partyatmygaff wrote: »One side abusing science to label the other's views as negative side effects does not bode well for a healthy society. It reeks of prejudice.
Like, srsly, wtf, what on earth are you two guys talking about? Did either of you actually read what I wrote before sounding off about some weird post in a parallel universe?0 -
Glad to help!Try reading what I wrote again, this time stressing to yourself that I said "side-effect" and not "result" Er, no, it's saying that the cognitive neuroscientists and others who've studied religion believe that it's a side-effect of the way in which the brain was designed by evolution.
You said and implied it in the above post."Abusing science?" "Negative"? Where did I say or imply that?
The definition of a side effect is...
A secondary, typically undesirable effect of a drug or medical treatment.
Now patently we are not talking about medicine but the insinuation is still clear. They are labeling theism as a "side effect" or a "byproduct" of the human mind.0 -
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