The "Scientific Impotence" Excuse 892
chichilalescu writes "I've had the feeling for a long time that people refuse to listen to scientists. The following is from an article on Ars Technica: 'It's hardly a secret that large segments of the population choose not to accept scientific data because it conflicts with their predefined beliefs: economic, political, religious, or otherwise. But many studies have indicated that these same people aren't happy with viewing themselves as anti-science, which can create a state of cognitive dissonance. That has left psychologists pondering the methods that these people use to rationalize the conflict. A study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology [abstract here] takes a look at one of these methods, which the authors term "scientific impotence" — the decision that science can't actually address the issue at hand properly.' The study found that 'regardless of whether the information presented confirmed or contradicted [the subjects'] existing beliefs, all of them came away from the reading with their beliefs strengthened."
Re:Evolutionary biology (Score:1, Informative)
Evolutionary Biology doesn't explain society or the relations between men and women. Ev Psych does.
Re:Blind Faith != Religion (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Newflash (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Religion (Score:5, Informative)
Faith makes a virtue out of not thinking.
That would be a surprising deduction to monks, theologians, and apologists of many faiths throughout the ages. Reason and rational thought are not the sole province of science. In fact, before the Enlightenment (in Europe), reason and rational thought were believed to be the province of priests and lawyers. Logic deals only with deduction based upon accepted assumptions. Assumptions about metaphysics are unprovable/unfalsifiable, so science can say nothing about it (the very topic of this article). Some people with faith will determine scientific results differently than some people without faith because certain assumptions (about which science has no say) necessarily creep into the logic. In short, there _is_ thinking on the part of the faithful, and to disparage them by claiming they are unreasoning fools, fit only for padded cells is short-sighted at best.
Re:Blind Faith != Religion (Score:3, Informative)
iirc it was at the Council of Nicaea, as for an example of removed texts: Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary (among MANY others declared non-cannon). The first was removed because it cast Judas in a positive light (favored of the apostles, he was chosen by JC to be the one to get the romans as he knew he would have to die soon, that Judas was not a betrayer but was actually asked to do it), the later because it was authored by a woman.
Re:Religion (Score:5, Informative)
Unblinking rationalism will cause you to lose the ability to appear reasonable to other people.
*appear* reasonable is the key phrase there. The rational always appear unreasonable to the irrational. Is it the rationalist's fault that others don't think enough?
You won't want to compromise, because you think your belief is the only right belief.
Unless presented with evidence otherwise. That's the core of rationalism.
Re:Blind Faith != Religion (Score:2, Informative)
King James' Version [wikipedia.org].
Doesn't take a Pope to revise the Bible. Of the people I've discussed this topic with (at least the non-theology and non-literature majors), none -- ZERO -- were even aware that there were multiple, significantly different versions of the Bible. Or that King James personally authorized many changes to the wording of HIS Bible, nearly 1,200 years after the original version was thought to be written, to suit his own political tastes and purposes. As for what he changed, I'll leave that as an enlightening exercise for the reader, but the KJV Bible is still one of the more common Bibles in publication today.
A hint: Find the word "witch" in the King James Bible, and then go and find it in an older version.
Re:Evolutionary biology (Score:4, Informative)
Evolutionary biology does? Really? I think what you've done is exhibit another aspect of psuedo-skepticism, the reading of headlines and assuming you've gained some understanding of underlying concepts. There are aspects of the theory, such as sexual selection, which can explain certain facets of behavior in generalistic terms, but you'd have to go to neurology and evolutionary psychology to find attempts to move beyond a very "big picture" notion of any species' behavior to specific claims, and indeed, plenty of biologists have some problems with the way that evolutionary concepts are extrapolated to explain specific behaviors. Indeed, one of the chief criticisms of Dawkins' memes is that it takes phenomena that are at best analogous to the genetic aspects of evolution and taking the analogy too far (something Dawkins himself consistently warns against throughout his publications for the layman).
These is a result of 2 factors (Score:3, Informative)
1) Children not being taught critical thinking and have no training to deal with alternative aarguements to their own viewpoint
2) Learning that contrary to what the GOP wants you to thinks, changing you mind when new data comes in is NOT a bad thing.
3) Religion. It's very nature teaches people not to question things they believe.
Re:Blind Faith != Religion (Score:3, Informative)
Christian Bishops convened with Emperor Constantine, and later Councils convened with later Emperors, I can't speak to any popes, but the Bible that is known today came through many revisions and was changed for many reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea [wikipedia.org] 325 AD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Council_of_Nicaea [wikipedia.org] 787 AD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douay-Rheims_Bible [wikipedia.org] 1609 AD 73 Books
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Bible [wikipedia.org] in with 66 only books
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Dort [wikipedia.org] Dutch translation in 1637 inspired by the KJV
Re:What about Short People? (Score:3, Informative)
Gary Coleman's dead you insensitive clod!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/28/gary-coleman-dies-child-star [guardian.co.uk]
Re:Religion (Score:1, Informative)
Disproof by counter-example: me.
I'm religious. I go to church every Sunday. I also believe, 100%, in things like evolution, a fourteen-billion-year-old universe, and the possibility of alien life. I consider the Bible true, but realize it speaks mainly in metaphor and parable. Very few passages can be taken literally.
Do I believe in God? Yes. Do I believe in science? Yes. Do I find them in conflict? No.
Heck, I've got an essay in the works on solving the Trinity mystery by use of calculus. Whoever thinks religion causes bad thinking is guilty of the same bad thinking as the subjects of the study.
Most people make bad decisions. This is generally accepted. Most people are religious. This is fact, supported by many, many statistical studies. Simple probability, then, indicates that many of the people who make bad decisions are religious. Don't blame religion for people being stupid.
Blame people for people being stupid.
Re:Religion (Score:3, Informative)
> Rationalism is not an ideology. It cannot be.
It mostly certainly can be.
See: Pseudo-skepticism.
http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/talk/talk.html [rpi.edu]
_Anything_ can be turned into a religion.
Re:Religion (Score:3, Informative)
Rationalism can be a school of philosophical thought opposed to empiricism [stanford.edu].
Perhaps more illustratively, in Jerry Pournelle's chart [wikipedia.org], rationalism "refers to the extent which a political philosophy is compatible with the idea that social problems can be solved by use of reason."
no, you have a different definition or ideology (Score:1, Informative)
You conflate ideology with idealism.
Rationalism is the philosophy that underpines the scientific method.
Ideology:
1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture.
2. A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.
Rationalism:
The theory that the exercise of reason, rather than experience, authority, or spiritual revelation, provides the primary basis for knowledge.
"unproven viewpoint espoused as truth by someone else."
Here is an excersise: Prove rationalism as a means for the scientific method without circularity or by example. Get back to me when you have a solution and can stop they hypocriticality.
Science isn't even vaguely an idology. (Score:3, Informative)
No actually, its not "becomming one". The people who have become disenchanted with their existing religion have taken their initial, inadequate, and over-blown imagining of something and decided to erect a new false idol to replace their old false idol.
The fact that these idolators have chosen to stamp the word Science on their alter, and have taken up the trappings of what they beleive to be science, and then fool other people who presume there exists congruence where "strong evidence" and "confidence" and "idology" into thinking that they "practice Science" is no real surprise. The average religious person could be sold a cheese sandwich as a religion if you knew exactly how to dress it up for their individual needs.
So there _are_ people who have made a religion out of "Science" and for that matter "Atheism" or "Rationality" but in neither case are these people actually engaged in these pursuits per se. The first hint is the capitalization. None of these terms are big-letter nouns. They are, when truthfully applied, little-letter labels for procedures.
Saying big-letter Science for reference to the scientific method, is like saying you "practice Dishes" because have washed your dishes out in the sink.
The scientific method produces scientific results. The method is (1) make your best guess; (2) figure out how many ways your guess could be wrong; (3) figure out if you can produce a procedure that can demonstrate any one of those ways; (4) execute that procedure; (5) if the procedure does prove your guess wrong go back to step one; (6) if your procedure fails to prove your guess wrong tell everybody to see if they can kill your guess by starting at step 2. (7) if nobody can come up with working disproof, presume your guess is right until someone _can_ come up with a disproof, then go to step 1.
See thats a process, not a state of being. And nothing ever gets "off the table" in science. The best theories are those that spend the longest time in step 7.
Thats it. The only "faith" involved is the sure and certain knowledge that if your guess has been at step seven long enough, there is some young turk out there who can totally make a name for himself by knocking it down. That is, there is a faith in human nature there, that someone will want to one-up you. That's right, just faith that someone eventually _will_ find a way to piss in your Cheerios. Its the ultimate game of king-of-the-mountain. And that's the best way we have found to-date to make sure that nothing is ever enshrined as "true".
The people who are full of religion just assume that everybody else has _something_ that feels the same to them. When they see someone who isn't filled with religion they are compelled to believe that person has some pursuit "in that mental slot". There is no real fault to this since many people "find science" as a new religion instead of actually engaging in any scientific pursuit whatsoever. There are so many of these souls that it becomes almost reasonable to believe that mistake is universal. But this is the result of confirmation bias. The faithful seek to confirm that everyone is adherent to some faith.
Here is the first clue: True Science(tm) never _proves_ anything. Really. NEVER PROVES ANYTHING. There is no such thing as "scientific proof". There is strong scientific evidence (e.g. a large body of exercises that end in step six) and so on.
That is also why it is so obvious and exasperating for any person of rational thought to deal with a religious person when that religious person conflates their religion with science. All those books and pundits which attempt to prove some religious point "scientifically". It literally cannot be done. Any attempt to prove anything is outside the scientific method, that is it is inherently unscientific.
This frustrates the scientist because its like having somebody come to a curling match with a book on american rules football and trying to prove the a sweeper was offsides. It just doesn't apply no matter how hard the outsider t
Re:Religion (Score:3, Informative)
how do you think scientists got past the mind blowing inconsistencies quantum mechanics requires us to grasp. ...
By believing what they measure and observe and correlate it with theory?
Re:Define people (Score:3, Informative)
A white lab coat does not make you a super-people, a god, infallible, incapable of being wrong, or corrupt, or bribe-able, or blackmail-able, or otherwise influenced adversely.
Yes and scientist know that very well, which is why science isn't build around authorities, but around such things as peer review and reproducibility. And more importantly, science is self correcting. If you find an reproducible experiment that conflicts with existing theories, the theories get extended or replaced with better ones.
Science simply is not a believe, it is a process to weed out the good hypothesis from the bad ones.
Re:Most people... (Score:3, Informative)
I thought it was because they did so without permission.
Re:Religion (Score:3, Informative)
Luke chapter 3 states that Jesus is the 75th generation after Adam. So if one even assume an average of 20 years per generation that would mean only 1500 years between Adam and Jesus. But the bible states that Adam lived to be over 800 years old and Noah lived close to 400 years old. But even giving a thousand years for each generation would only give 75,000 years between the first human and Jesus. Even that amount of time is not enough to explain how people got to all the far reaches of this planet and how there are different races. So one has to pick and choose what one believes from the bible since it is irrational to believe there were only 75 generations and that the flood covered the whole earth. To be rational and reasonable one would have to throw out a huge per cent of the bible which the early priest did not do.
So, you want to devolve a discussion of generic faith and rationality into a discussion of the internal consistency of the Abrahamic religious tradition? Okay. Genesis 11:9. It didn't take 1500 years to spread people across the world, nor 75,000. According to Genesis 11:9, God did it in an instant. The priests never threw out any percent of the Torah; they would have known the story of the Tower of Babel. Now can we get back on topic and discuss reason and faith, and how one does not negate the other?