09.05.08
The believer and the scientific ostrich
Monsters, Ghosts and Gods: Why We Believe
By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor
Monsters are everywhere these days, and belief in them is as strong as ever. What’s harder to believe is why so many people buy into hazy evidence, shady schemes and downright false reports that perpetuate myths that often have just one ultimate truth: They put money in the pockets of their purveyors.
This article cited by Pigliucci in his essay (at Livescience) on Palin/evolution seems to show the inability of scientists to correctly address the issue of religion. It is certainly true that scientists should expose beliefs, yet they have succumbed to the problem with Darwinism, which is so obviously still another tenaciously held belief system that crystallizes a world view, one that has all the earmarks of religious conditioning, if not religion.
The bottom line, according to several interviews with people who study these things: People want to believe, and most simply can’t help it.
Touche. The exasperation of critics of the reigning paradigm should be cautioned with this point: Darwinists can’t help themselves, because all the people raised on Dawkins’ memes and talk.origins want to believe.
“Many people quite simply just want to believe,” said Brian Cronk, a professor of psychology at Missouri Western State University. “The human brain is always trying to determine why things happen, and when the reason is not clear, we tend to make up some pretty bizarre explanations.”
A related question: Does belief in the paranormal have anything to do with religious belief?
The answer to that question is decidedly nuanced, but studies point to an interesting conclusion: People who practice religion are typically encouraged not to believe in the paranormal, but rather to put their faith in one deity, whereas those who aren’t particularly active in religion are more free to believe in Bigfoot or consult a psychic.
“Christians and New Agers, paranormalists, etc. all have one thing in common: a spiritual orientation to the world,” said sociology Professor Carson Mencken of Baylor University.
Lumping together Christians, New Agers, paranormalists and belief in Big Foot is hardly fair to the question.
People do indeed get confused on the question of the paranormal, and it is ironic that science and religion share a social strategy of suppressing beliefs in the paranormal (although the New Testament drops many hints that diverge from this strategy).
Strange to say, however, science is crippled on this question. All around them there is a society, or sub-section thereof, where the issues of the paranormal arise and fall, and the typical scientist is oblivious to reality, content with the supercilious ignorance of the professional skeptics.
It is very possible to deny the status of ‘spirituality’ to much religion, or to New Agers, and paranormalists. The ‘truly’ spiritual might be something else. So this charge is an old one, adopted by its practitioners, long ago.
“It is an artifact of our brain’s desire to find cause and effect,” Cronk, the psychology professor, said in an email interview. “That ability to predict the future is what makes humans ‘smart’ but it also has side effects like superstitions [and] belief in the paranormal.”
“Humans first started believing in the supernatural because they were trying to understand things they couldn’t explain,” says Benjamin Radford, a book author, paranormal investigator and managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. “It’s basically the same process as mythology: At one point people didn’t understand why the sun rose and set each day, so they suggested that a chariot pulled the sun across the heavens.”
Apply this reasoning to the Axial Age, the data for which scientists won’t acknowledge, although the evidence is right under their noses. The redactors of the Old Testament were attempting to describe and understand a genuinely strange historical phenomenon, and got it confused with theological issues, OK, we can grant the point. But they were actually on to something, and we might well think a macrohistorical phenomenon on that scale could only be an act of ‘god’, a term they were wary of using, and they attempted in a crude mythological fashion to effect explanation, cause and effect.
We can at least grant them the sense of history, and its observation, in their discovery of historical evolution, and not grant scientists much brilliance in their massive denial, on a par with the ostrich.