Believing in Anything

Posted on September 23, 2008
Filed Under Politics, Science |

Great post at the Frontal Cortex on magical thinking. “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing - they believe in anything.” Fascinating study showing that the irreligious or liberal Christians tend to be more likely to believe in the paranormal and pseudoscience than Evangelical Christians.

I’d love to see a similar study of Europe as I’ve long thought that despite the lower level of formal theism that Europeans have as many dubious beliefs as Americans. i.e. even if they “accept” scientific beliefs like evolution they really aren’t a whole lot different than Americans in terms of scientific vs. superstitious thinking.

Admittedly that suspicion of mind is largely made up of anecdotal evidence from my encounters with Europeans. But I just never found them to really be skeptical and critical thinkers the way they like to portray themselves. Lots of people are, of course, skeptics. Your average fundamentalist is a huge skeptic of many aspects of western culture. That doesn’t make them a critical thinker. Why should we assume that happening to accept many scientific theories somehow implies that the believer is a critical thinker?

Anyway, read the Frontal Cortext post. It’s quite good.

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4 Responses to “Believing in Anything”

You may like the Chris Hedges interview over at Point of Inquiry. I thought it was pretty funny. The interviewer seems used to pat Atheistic answers and struggled to get a number of the points Hedges was making. Of course, he wasn’t overly cooperative either. The main point was new atheists end up reproducing fundamentalist views including underlying assumptions that a proper world view can make up for lack of self criticality.

Yeah, I’d commented on that a few months back. Chris over at Mixing Memory has discussed this a lot as well. (Here’s the last post of that sort) Of course it’s hardly all or even most atheists of course. And, to be fair, I have to agree with a lot of the criticisms of Hedges being quite unfair in places or missing the point.

Of course that’s not what the above study was really getting at. Just that people tend to believe many things uncritically. We might point to many religious beliefs as uncritical but people who don’t hold beliefs we’d characterize as stereotypically religious seem to do the same thing. The critical stance is, I believe, a fairly unnatural one.

A great term I came across a couple of years ago that never seemed to catch on was the “voodoo atheists” - people who claim to be atheist and then embrace several new age or other supernatural beliefs.

One example that springs to mind is J. Michael Straczynski, the guy behind Babylon 5. He’s rather sympathetic towards religion, actually, but he claims to be an atheist. However, his personal writings and internet postings show that the belief system he gave to the Minbari in Babylon 5 is quite close to his own. He’s merely replaced “God” with “the universe” and thus claims to be an atheist because his god goes by a different name.

Arthur C. Clarke also springs to mind, though he jokingly referred to himself as a “lapsed atheist.”

Yeah, Clarke is definitely an atheist who keeps putting a God in his stories.

Having said that I think there’s something to be said for atheists who adopt more philosophically Greek ideas of God. Say pantheism. What I think many, if not most, atheists are opposed to isn’t the idea of the absolute or some ultimate origin. Rather it is to the idea of a personal interventionist God. So the line between deist and atheist is a blurry one.

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