Let’s dip our canteens in the stream of public opinion.
The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.
And the more often you go to church, the less likely you are to understand facts.
The data from several recent Gallup studies suggest that Americans’ religious behavior is highly correlated with beliefs about evolution. Those who attend church frequently are much less likely to believe in evolution than are those who seldom or never attend.
You see what’s happening here: evolution is being used as an indicator for other kinds of scientific understanding. Good choice, too. It’s as well-supported a theory as we get, so if someone refuses to accept it, it probably means they lack understanding on other scientific topics, as well as skill at knowing how to tell if an idea is good or not.
These results follow some patterns that I think are pretty consistent in religions I know of. As a Mormon, I happily believed unsupported or even counterfactual ideas, as long as I liked them or already believed them. I was sometimes encouraged to superficially examine the basis for my faith, but only if I eventually arrived at the conclusion that the Church was true. And I was given terrible mechanisms for evaluating ideas; basically, if I felt ‘good about it’, it was true. I was also surrounded by parents, friends, and authority figures who constantly worked to build my (and their) faith in false beliefs. And so the religion forms a bubble that keeps you ‘feeling good’ about your beliefs by constantly reaffirming them. It’s very difficult for facts to penetrate the bubble.
Religions are support groups for reality deniers. And so, it seems, are political parties.
13 June 2007 at 2:30 pm
This phenomenon isnt limited to religion unfortunately, it is a plague for all thinkers. Most people, including some of us who claim to be scientists and atheists, tend to engage primarily in belief-affirming behaviour. This means we (our wonderful species on average) dont like giving up ideas we’ve held for a long time and we tend to make groups and friends of people who are less likely to challenge our ideas.
I think this is the most beautiful thing about science, in that it is a celebration of being able to say that old beliefs and ideas we now know to be false can be thrown away as rubbish so we can move one step closer to the truth. Fear of being wrong and habitual laziness is the greatest threat to mankinds progress. It is important to encourage skepticism and the challenging of all ideas, especially the ones we hold dear, but also to listen to those people we dont agree with because at the very least it will serve to engage our critical faculties and assess our own positions validity.