This is a discussion that grew out of comments on an article I posted on my Facebook page. I've moved it here to the blog because the Facebook wall is not a good place for ongoing discussions. The original article was
Science involves a great deal of humility, because most new ideas, even clever ones, turn out to be wrong. Science is predisposed to disbelief....
about which I commented "Interesting, short post on "denialism" in science, such as those who deny that HIV causes AIDS. Doesn't really address how these movements get started or how they're maintained despite massive, contrary evidence. I didn't find the comment section very useful, so you can save some time ..."
A comment by Michael Peraino sparked the discussion about whether religious beliefs are another form of baseless irrationality. I'll include the existing comments in this post, and then we can continue further discussion in the blog comments.
Michael Peraino I am curious, what is the difference between irrational beliefs that are pseudo-science and those that are religious? Both are based on shaky evidence and seem to cause a devotion to waste time on a subject that those that don't share the belief find bizarre.
Mike Blyth Ah, I expected you to say something like that. Well, you may not like religious beliefs or think they're grounded, but they don't at all fit the category discussed in this article, which is basically defined by a small minority position on a scientific question held against strong evidence and supported by weak if any evidence.
Most religious beliefs are in a different domain than (natural) science and are thus not in conflict. Certain ones such as creation stories or theories of illness causation may be contrary to science but their adherents do not try to twist science to prove them, but simply accept them. "Creation science" is the one example I can think of that, the way it's seen by many, fits in this category of scientific conspiracy theory.
Susan Evertz Mike, really liked your article, "Scientific Conspiracy Theories.."
David Blyth Michael (both of you), let's ignore religion for a second and get back to the original question. How do movements like this get started?
IMHO, there's not any one cause - it's a collection of different issues. These include (but are not limited to):
- Seeing is believing. "I didn't see man land on the moon so they didn't."
- This threatens my key value. "HIV can't cause AIDS as it reflects on my view of African Morality." BTW, denial is a stage of many types of grieving - it's not just limited to religious objections.
- I don't trust authority. "The US government withheld information on JFK's assassination so all US commission reports are wrong." This gets into a grey area (sometimes the US government is in fact wrong) but it's a fallacy to believe that the government is wrong all the time when they're only wrong some of the time (no one's perfect).
- Ego. AKA, pushing your own agenda. "Polio vaccine causes autism".
- Members of Group "A" (seeing is believing) meet to reinforce each other
- Members of Group "A" are also members of Group "B" (I don't trust Authority).
- The two groups feed off each other and start a grass-roots movement.
- The grass-roots of A & B run into the astro-turfing of Group "D" (pushing your own agenda).
- And a major ground-swell is born.
Michael Peraino: David, your logic is sound. I just think it should be extended :). Michael Shermer just released a new book that I would love to read on his research into what causes belief in the brain. The religion aspect is important because in context, that is the stated purpose of the website. The source of anything must always be examined. It is not that I simply wanted to take a pot shot at religion. I do assert that it should be a topic of debate and just as we should defend our beliefs in other areas, religion should not get a free ride. I would hypothesize that the same reasons you stated above can be traced through the beginnings of every religion.
David Blyth => Michael P....
David, your logic is sound.
It can happen from time-to-time... ;)
I would hypothesize that the same reasons you stated above can be traced through the beginnings of every religion.
My brother and I are probably in the same religious ballpark (fancy that!) but I've always been interested in the origins of religion. Even if there is no God (or gods), why do humans believe in any religion?
What evolutionary advantage is gained by believing in religion? Humans have been doing so for at least 25,000 years so so. Why are we doing it?
Michael Peraino: David, I think that you answer most of your questions. Your brother and you have similar religious ideas because, more than likely, your parents passed them to you. Likely, if you were born in a Muslim country, you would be Muslim. Why should this be so?
I think there are evolutionary actions at play in religions. Certain traits exist in the surviving/popular religious that have enabled them to win out over others. Some of these would be 'unquestionable belief', promise of an afterlife/meaning for this life, and strong dislike/hatred for non-believers/different believers. Primary infection starts young and since it is passed by those in a position of trust, the ideas stick long after the rational mind has dismissed the ideas as nonsense. Strong social stigmas are in place to keep the faithful faithful.
Bill Beckon: I haven't read Shermer's book, but I doubt he will find a clear cause for religion in the brain (although a predisposition, quite likely). Rather, the origin of religions is most likely through social evolution, arising as humans began to live in larger groups than the small bands of related hunter-gatherers for which our brains adapted. Those larger groups generated new group selection pressures that exactly predict the nature, and even the specific theologies of religions. In short, religions were an inevitable outcome of the invention of agriculture.
David Blyth: Michael P,
Your brother and you have similar religious ideas because, more than likely, your parents passed them to you
...Perish the thought that we had good parents. ;) No, seriously. Dad's still a very intelligent thinking scientist and deeply religious man. Mom was a very intelligent feeling artist - opposites attract - and deeply religious woman.
But onto the origins of religion....
IMHO none of your ideas are good reasons for why the _first_ people who got religion got religion. What was in it for them?
I think folks got religion because humans perceive something odd in how the universe is constructed. See also Roger Penrose, who has some atheistic ideas up this alley.
Michael Peraino: As the species evolved to develop brains that were capable of more than what is required to fulfill our base needs, we began to wonder about such things as why we are here, where did we come from, what are those glowing dots in the sky at night? What was in it for them? Same as today, it answers questions and it makes people comfortable to have answers. That is still one of the big marketing ploys of modern religions. Come to us, we have the answer.
Just a note, I wasn't making a value judgment on your parents :). I was just stating that most get the religion of their family, culture and epoch.
Bill Beckon Michael doesn't have a brother, David.
David, Michael's answer is the usual one, but there is another, I think more powerful factor. Religion is a group selected trait, like militarism. It benefits the larger group at a cost (or at least risk) to the individual, enabling the group to have a competitive advantage compared to other groups. Once one group adopts militarism, then other adjacent groups must also, or they get wiped out. The same with religion except that with religion, you can get wiped out by conversion as well as conquest.
David Blyth: Bill, Michael certainly has a brother. So do I.
On "how did religion start". I've heard similar theories before and find them very unsatisfactory. That is, I have problems with them even if I assume that there is no God.
-- end of comments on Facebook --
NB: I may be rather strict in vetting comments to this post, since it's a topic that can quickly attract a lot of comments and expand outward. So please keep comments to the issue of the inherent rationality or lack thereof of religion in general and not, for example, on why one religion is better than another, why revelation trumps reason, and so on. Fine topics, but not for this post.
(BTW, let's go with Michael=Michael Peraino and I will be Mike, to avoid confusion).
ReplyDeleteMichael, you say "After all, the natural world would be far different with a deity than without." That's a surprising assertion. Would it not be more reasonable to say, "If there is a deity involved somehow in this natural world, then the natural world probably gives us clues about the nature of that deity?" How can there be anything in nature that precludes deity?
Looking at religion in the broad sense, that there is some aspect of reality that matters to us but is beyond our ability to perceive or analyze by physical methods, there is no way to use science to address the issue since it is by definition in a different domain. In a narrower sense, if a specific religious claim (e.g., the universe is 6000 years old) is inconsistent with our experience (including science) then there is a problem to be worked out.
"Don't you find that as science shows us the amazing truth of the universe that we formerly relied on myth to explain, we must question what is use of keeping these 'beliefs' around?"
I don't know enough about the history or sociology of religion to know whether the explanatory power of religion about the natural world has ever been the main engine driving it, but I'm skeptical. I'd think it has definitely not been the main factor in most places in the past 500 years and that concerns such as ethics & morality, social control, personal destiny & purpose, meaning, and so on have had much more influence. So, no, I do not see scientific advances as eroding the grounds of religious belief.
"Intellectually, are you really comfortable stating that you just don't need any evidence to believe in your particular faith?"
I did not say I don't need any evidence! I do think that there will always necessarily be some element of personal choice, leap of faith, or whatever involved in religion since, as I argued above, it is on a different plane than our normal existence. Even if I had a vision of God or witnessed a miracle, nothing could logically compel me to conclude that a certain religious belief is true or even a spiritual realm exists. Looking at another way, if a god exists, of whatever character, how could that possibly be proven to a rational being in a material universe?
One class of "evidence" is that the reality of a personal God, one who is sentient, relational, and ethical, is a
parsimonious explanation of some big questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and “Why is there
right and wrong, good and bad?” (I'm not asking why do we _feel_ or _experience_ morality, but why it exists. The atheist can answer that in fact there is no objective morality, which is consistent but does not satisfy me.) This sort of thing certainly doesn't prove God, but it does make me more inclined to see religion as reasonable.
The evidence that prevents me from seeing my Christian beliefs as ungrounded is basically that of the life, teaching and resurrection of Jesus, which are attested to by the New Testament and early church history. Obviously not everyone accepts these as reliable, but neither are they easily written off except by invoking the categorical claim that they cannot be true.
Am I a Christian because I was born and raised in a Christian environment? Of course, to some extent. Likewise, I am predisposed to scientific thinking because my parents were like that and that's how I was educated. I'm not sure it makes any sense to ask questions like "What would you be like if you were someone else?" but, playing that game, I'm sure that if I had been born and raised in Northern Nigeria and attended Koranic school I would be a Muslim and anti-science. If I had been born in Russia in 1953 I likely would have become a Communist. Does the fact that our environment influences our beliefs of all kinds mean that there is no reality or rationality behind those beliefs?
If I may be allowed, I'd actually like to question the article. In theory, the scientific method is predisposed to disbelief. In practice, people are not, whether scientists or not. I do my own work on the politics of food policy, where the number one quality that is lacking is humility, whether from the politicians or the scientists.
ReplyDeleteWe still insist that our current understandings of scientific knowledge are absolute truth and anyone who disagrees with them for religious reasons (or any other) is a nut, nevermind that the scientific consensus will shift again in 20-30 years.
The scientific method is supposed to go something like this: identify hypothesis, design a test, falsify and go back to step 1 or fail to falsify and go back to step 2.
The reality is muddied by the politics of grant writing and tenure, ability to publish results, data mining (run a test first and then show what it proves), actually altering the data in some unfortunate cases to fit the hypothesis, and so on. There are reasons that "science progresses one funeral at a time." I have a PhD and we sit around talking about these problems regularly, but they never get out of academia.
And that's all besides the fact that science and religion ask fundamentally different questions that the other's methods are poorly equipped to answer. Even run properly, the scientific method has nothing to say about "why," only "how" and "when". Religion has very little to say about those questions, but focuses on the "who" and "why".
My position is that true science and true religion will eventually be in perfect harmony. It is only when true science and false religion, false science and true religion, or false science and false religion get together that we have problems. There are plenty of faithful men and women who are scientists and marvel at the wonders God has created as they learn more and more about how.
Daniel, it's true that scientific ideas change, but that is no reason to be totally pessimistic about any scientific knowledge. For example, in the case of vaccine causing autism, which is a statistical/epidemiological question, we can precisely quantify the degree of uncertainty left in the question given the existing studies. For example (and only an example), the studies might show that if vaccines caused greater than 10% increased risk of autism, our studies would shown a difference 99% of the time. Sure, we could be wrong 1% of the time. Sure, there could be conspiracies but they're unlikely to survive long in the competitive environment of research. So no, I don't think that we can generally solve apparent faith-science contradictions by supposing that someday science will change. Faith may change? Well, I guess that's part of the work of theology.
ReplyDeleteSorry, that "for example" sentence was quite unclear. Let me try again:
ReplyDeleteFor example (and only an example), a study may be designed so that, if vaccines really DO cause as little as a 10% increase in autism, there will be a 99% chance of finding that effect.
Nothing in science is 100% certain, but our knowledge tends to converge, not to change in leaps and bounds in a chaotic way.