Hypothesis: the more educated you are the less likely you are to be religious

DDL on 27/1/2012 at 10:10

Also, Beleg: aren't you basically saying "yeah the study seems valid, but only with respect to the silly bits of religion, not my beliefs"?

Seems a bit "no true scotsman" to me.:erg:

faetal on 27/1/2012 at 10:12

The thing I find interesting about religion is how people deal with the fact that their religion is usually a local cultural template. So which template of religion you pick up and believe to be a universal, ineffable, unerring truth is mostly dependent on what the trend is in your area, rather than for any solid empirical reason. I also find myself wondering who exactly is in charge of updating cultural viewpoints on scripture (e.g. by the way guys, it's no longer cool to be homophobic) when so many parts of it are considered sacrosanct.

If you removed all of the history of Christianity, say for example, in a hypothetical scenario, there was a cataclysmic event and a huge proportion of humanity was wiped out along with all books, the internet etc.. would god return to start guiding the technologically bereft survivors, have them re-write the scriptures and then mysteriously vanish the moment reliable recording techniques came along again? Would we be back to images of Jesus in an awkwardly sliced apple?

faetal on 27/1/2012 at 10:22

Quote Posted by Briareos H

...is there a person, even profoundly scientific and atheist, that cannot feel a sense of unprovability/unattainability of the start of everything? I mean both in the philosophical and mathematical sense.

From there, it's always possible to adapt the hypothesis of the existence of god and never be able to refute it. One way or another, from the angle of the creation of our universe, there's always something that can't be proved. Big deal, stop arguing over it.

Of course there is a limit to knowledge - this isn't a new idea. Whereas humility and rationality will lead you to the conclusion "we don't know", a mind prone to supernatural explanations will extrapolate and say "therefore GOD". There's no shame in saying, "we just don't know", but it is disingenuous to take a void of knowledge and turn it into supposed possibility for the basis of a deity - a specific being whose role was to create the universe and devote their life to the strange, paranoid, jealous love & punishment of humans. It's the "god of the gaps" argument and the gaps become smaller and fewer as time and knowledge progress.

It's genuinely strange seeing people run from one gap to the next and then dig in on the assumption that this new gap is definitely a keeper.

Azaran on 27/1/2012 at 10:28

Quote Posted by faetal

So I'd say that it's a fairly natural product that there will be more people in religion with lower intelligence because it offers lots of pseudo explanation about life and the universe without the need for entry qualifications.

Like Creationists:

Inline Image:

http://timcooley.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/godsaidit.jpg

faetal on 27/1/2012 at 10:44

I think a big part of the problem for me is that if you accept a certain *flavour* of religion, e.g. Christianity, then you are inherently putting a certain amount of trust in tradition and exhibiting a trust in the generations of people since the advent of Christianity to have somehow preserved the information perfectly. Because it is faith-based, you are not really given much in the way of a tool set to challenge it in any meaningful way. It's pretty much, "the bible says this", "the pope says that" (depending on your denomination), "my priest says this". But you need the dogma of God and Jesus Christ there as things you believe to be a present and existing supernatural force in the world today.

Now to my mind, a critical thinker would wonder if there really must be a creator and if so, why just pick up this particular version? I'd also find it a bit fishy that various religions the world over have their own different and potentially mutually exclusive versions. I'd wonder what makes my one the true one.

I hear a lot of people say they can "feel" they are right or they "know in their hearts", but again, a critical thinker could wonder how reliable these feelings are bearing in mind how our brains work. For example, everyone has had that thing where they've been thinking about someone and then they've called you on the phone. And, if you weren't thinking clearly, you might think "Oh my god, that's so spoooooky" etc.. not realising that the way human brains evolved to filter information provides us with a very warped version of reality in order to give us good survival tools. So every time you think of someone and they DON'T call, your brain demotes these data as insignificant, so when you're thinking about someone and they DO call (a statistical eventuality), your brain sends it up the flagpole as GOOD information. Likewise, I hear friends saying that they know god is real because they prayed for a, b or c and it happened, or asked for a sign etc... now if we assume that this wasn't the one time in that person's life that they'd prayed or asked for a sign, then you see what we're getting at.

So I think religion not only requires trust in the tradition of worship of a specific set of pseudo-historical figures and events, but also an inherent trust of one's mind, ignoring cognitive biases.

It's something I've been interested in for ages. I think for many, it is a fine line between genuine belief, like the kind of belief you have when you know you have heard something true (i.e. someone said they have cleaned the kitchen and you saw them do it) and something which you just want to believe in order to maintain mood stability (i.e. you believe your partner has never cheated on you, despite the fact that you can never truly know as negatives can not be proved).

Azaran on 27/1/2012 at 11:13

Quote Posted by faetal

It's something I've been interested in for ages. I think for many, it is a fine line between genuine belief, like the kind of belief you have when you know you have heard something true (i.e. someone said they have cleaned the kitchen and you saw them do it) and something which you just want to believe in order to maintain mood stability (i.e. you believe your partner has never cheated on you, despite the fact that you can never truly know as negatives can not be proved).

The way I look at the world, and still manage to have spiritual beliefs, is that I accept the way the universe is, but I think there's something more to it. In the end, it may just be my pattern-seeking human brain that's seeing more than there actually is, but in any case I think it's a reasonable way of balancing reality and religion. In my case it's not really faith or belief, but more like a weird feeling that maybe all those mystics, shamans, Gnostics, etc... of the past were not as delusional as we think, and perhaps discovered something else about the universe that we still haven't found through science.

Beleg Cúthalion on 27/1/2012 at 11:35

@DDL: I'm indeed saying that the core of (a) religion is what its core beliefs are and what its ethical system looks like. For instance, there's a big mysterious being somewhere demanding of you to act not only according to your own will but to the good of your respective community or the whole world. This is what you'll find in most religions, however usually embedded in the social, political, economical context of the time it was proposed (even making offerings to the rain god has an aspect of not acting towards the rest of the world as if it didn't care). So if e.g. Jesus said "love everyone around you and don't harm them", people might later turn it into "every wife shall love her husband" because that's what the demand would look like turned into a rule, but it would also feature characteristics of the social context because 2000 years ago women were probably more expected to be faithful and loving then their husbands in return. In this case I'm really of the true Scotsman idea when I say that "love your husband" isn't the actual religious idea but "everyone should love everyone else". The funny thing is that IMHO Jesus already pointed to this discrepancy of a (written) rule and the intention behind it (which is anything but unknown/dubious nowadays, it's a basic principle of life or at least law to see that difference) when he questioned the Sabbath rest ("What happens if a donkey falls into a well then? Following the rule would make you commit a crime.") or harped on the issue that desiring a woman is almost like commiting adultery ("Yes, you followed the rule by not commiting adultery, but what about your intention?").

So if you're intelligent enough to see these differences (surprisingly many people aren't, even if they have a doctor's degree...[coughs]Dawkins[coughs]) and decide that "your" religion isn't about making differences between man and woman but about love and understanding; if you know that going to church on Sundays is not about (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ7RDPv6K3k) winding up your god but about self reflection and being kept aware of the core ideas, are you then less religious only because you abandon certain rituals and rules of an outdated context? Or are you even more religious because you are aware of what matters?

Briareos H on 27/1/2012 at 11:42

Quote Posted by faetal

You apparently missed my point, which was that debating creation was an exercise in futility. As for the rest, you're somehow paraphrasing what I wrote, except for the part where you pass a judgement "it's strange", no it's human.

faetal on 27/1/2012 at 11:47

What I have a problem with is some sections of the religious community claiming that religion invented morality, or is tied to it, when in fact the morally relevant parts of religion are most likely *symptomatic* of human morality which is an evolved trait common to most social caste animals. It just so happens that as the most cognitively complex animal, our morality looks the most complex and is presumed to be somehow divine in nature. It also comes from the fact that the computer can not solve problems outside of its processing power, thus we see our own complexity as divine because we can not 100% comprehend it, as we'd need processing power we don't have (at an individual level) in order to fully understand how we work. So it stands to reason that the brain, in order to resolve the tension of not having a palatable answer will turn to something more simplistic as a place-holder. The nature of cognitive dissonance will also mean that when someone challenges this viewpoint, the reaction will be to immediately reject the challenge (either because of valid reasons, or without reason) and either go trawling for well-established arguments to refute (confirmation bias) or just dismiss the person out of hand, ignore / block them.

From: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance)

"The Belief Disconfirmation Paradigm

Dissonance is aroused when people are confronted with information that is inconsistent with their beliefs. If the dissonance is not reduced by changing one's belief, the dissonance can result in misperception or rejection or refutation of the information, seeking support from others who share the beliefs, and attempting to persuade others to restore consonance.
An early version of cognitive dissonance theory appeared in Leon Festinger's 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails. This book gave an inside account of the increasing belief which sometimes follows the failure of a cult's prophecy. The believers met at a pre-determined place and time, believing they alone would survive the Earth's destruction. The appointed time came and passed without incident. They faced acute cognitive dissonance: had they been the victim of a hoax? Had they donated their worldly possessions in vain? Most members chose to believe something less dissonant: the aliens had given earth a second chance, and the group was now empowered to spread the word: earth-spoiling must stop. The group dramatically increased their proselytism despite the failed prophecy."

faetal on 27/1/2012 at 11:54

Quote Posted by Briareos H

No, I got your point, I was just adding to it that there is a contrast between the response to this limit of provability between the superstitious and the rational.

Also, it's not *entirely* futile, it's just futile after a point. For example, there is lots of very valid research into abiogenesis (emergence of life from organic building blocks) which provides weeks of reading as opposed to the biblical genesis myth. Likewise, the origins of the universe can read about in great depth backed up with reams of empirical observations which pertain to the formation of most of the universe we know about. This represents a massive leap forward in what we have obtained since the days of Sun worship, yet religion and creation myths still tread water in stories written some time during the bronze age.

I agree that when it hits its vanishing point, the event horizon of what we can realistically model, then anything more or less goes, but the idea that as soon as you hit that point, science and religion somehow become equal, just because no one knows is a little flimsy, bearing in mind which of the two schools of thought have made massive quantifiable gains in knowledge and which has simply had to dilute itself over the years in order to make room for the aforementioned knowledge.