Analytic Thought: Consequences for Religious Belief

[Sensitive post topic follows!]

First, some background. "People who are intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious, but getting them to think analytically even in subtle ways decreases the strength of their belief, according to a new study in Science."

I'm an open atheist who's long considered religion to hold the same place of societal importance as sci-fi fandoms. Some people really enjoy their religions, and try to share them with others, and are inspired by the source material to be better people. Okay, I dig it. I had much the same reaction to Firefly. And some of the stuff religious fandoms produce is pretty good, mostly in music. Gospel is awesome, and I hope people are still listening to Handel's Messiah 100 years from now.

Of course, then there are certain people in certain countries who behead women for witchcraft or deny blood transfusions to dying infants because of their religious fandom, and I think that's abominable. And then there's how governments around the world pay more attention to church leaders than to Star Trek fan clubs, which strikes me as rather silly, since I think comic book shops and conventions still have to pay taxes. And of course, like any fandom, you'll occasionally have the pushy asshole fans who insist people join their fandom (and their takes on the canon) and spurn those who don't. Every fandom, and every religion, has those people.

But whatever. On the whole, I consider belief in the nonevident supernatural to just be a symptom of human cognitive biases; bugs in the programming, so to speak. I'm not interested in an atheist utopia. I don't care enough about religion to want it stricken from society.

So I'm kinda surprised when I read this article. I want to encourage logical and analytical ability in all children, from a very early age. Critical thinking and reasoning classes belong in the elementary school curriculum, if you ask me. But now I find myself imagining such classes being a big red "Destroy All Religion" button...and mild-mannered atheist me can't find a reason not to push it.

TL;DNR: I'm an atheist who is excessively tolerant of religion. Studies indicate teaching analytical thinking weakens belief. I don't mind religion that much but I want everyone to be better analytical thinkers. I am not being intolerant, am I? Tolerance towards religion doesn't obligate me to preserve it in light of the side effects of better education, does it?

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Nope.

Nope.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

No it doesn't obligate you to preserve it at the expense of better education though I doubt it will get rid of all religion. I'm still religious after all. I became deeply religious after great amounts of thought and analysis. From what was an atheist. Though I had an idea that there is a God that I couldn't shake despite my disbelief. I've just sort of given up on that subject and decided to believe in the God. It's not like I base any of my practices on it. It just rots in this box of "Unimportant stuff I don't care about".

There's other people like me as well and will continue to be. As well as the atheistic branches of certain faiths. Most of these are Asian. At least the ones I know of. Buddhism as it is in the West is mostly atheistic and at times even entirely devoid of anything that could remotely be considered "supernatural". As is the practitioners are still very religious.

I'm fine with the idea of promoting such things in schools personally. I don't feel it's a threat to the existence of religion. Even if it turns out to be somehow I won't stop regardless.

edited 28th Apr '12 3:53:10 PM by Aondeug

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

I dislike the implicit notion of believing in GOD= antiscience and anti analitical thinking.

Speaking as a christian I don't see why this notion persists as there isn't anywhere in the bible to say that science and logical thinking are wrong.

Furthermore if it actually was anti-thinking it would have been doomed from the beginning.

Analitical thinking is welcome.But the idea that it will remove the belief on God or that believing in God is a "glitch on the system" or that it will destroy faith (as in eblieving in God) is just an hypothesis and part of wishful thinking on itself more than actual science.

If analytical thinking will actually destroy religion then so be it.

If what we believe is actually the truth then we shouldn't be scared of the light (in an "enlightment" sense)

edited 28th Apr '12 4:18:54 PM by FallenLegend

Make your hearth shine through the darkest night; let it transform hate into kindness, evil into justice, and loneliness into love.

Okay, so reflection breeds doubt. This is 1) duh, and 2) not even unique to religion. Hell, on rationally thinking about their methodology in these experiments, I have to suspect a good deal of that too — some of the leaps they make in regard to what represents "analytical thought" are pretty hand-wavey.

Maybe I'm not up in arms about this because I consider a good amount of doubt and reflection to be a critical part of faith — half-assing your understanding of things and loudly going around vomiting them on everyone else's shoes isn't exactly a good way to go about things, you know?

edited 28th Apr '12 5:24:08 PM by Pykrete

It is how most do it, though.

Do we actually know that for a fact?

The emotions of others can seem like such well guarded mysteries, people 8egin to 8elieve that's how their own emotions should 8e treated.

I know that I used to work under the principle that "God, even if He exists, is not muddling with this experiment". So yeah, it can be done.

The article linked in the OP described different kinds of experiments, including one where people were given a questionnaire about their beliefs that was written in a hard-to-read font, and the control group had the same questions but in a normal font. The group that had the harder-to-read text rated their belief in God lower on average than the control group.

To me, that sounds like people who have to spend more time thinking about a question tend to give more thoughtful answers, in this case expressing a higher degree of uncertainty. I'm assuming that this is indeed a result of having to spend a longer time reading the question, as the subject would begin to think about the answer as soon as the question takes shape, which would be before they're done reading it to the end.

In other words, when you're asked if you believe something and you have to spend a longer time parsing the question, you tend to answer with less certainty, as you will have had time to think "do I" before you give your answer. The tendency to quickly answer "yes" (or other positive option) would probably arise from the social expectation that everyone, including you, is a believer as a matter of course and saying "no" or "probably not" would be going against the social norm.

To me, this doesn't seem to expose a tendency for more doubt, but one for a lower impulse to give a "normal" answer instead of the one you'd give if you had stopped to think.

Still, this is relevant to the discussion because it raises the question of whether or not people in general actually are as religious as they claim to be in the polls, or if people are saying "yes" just because that's the answer they would normally have to give to avoid social embarrassment.

Of course, I'm speaking in a very general sense here, and don't intend to imply that all communities have an expectation of religious belief or that all who were more doubtful would have given the same answer without the extra time to think, and so on.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Actually, that just fits into the psychological bell curve theory more than anything. Basically that what most people believe on any particular topic is most likely to be the neutral stance or near it. By removing the neutral stance, you're artificially forcing a person to one of the end of the curve or the other, in this case being believing in a higher power or not. The thing is, no one is ever that certain about these matters, or more of, people that are 100% or 0% tend to be extremely rare.

People also tend to prefer to do the least amount of work for the most effect, otherwise do no work at all. In this case, being on the extreme end of a curve without needing explanation tends to fulfill both of those, thus breaking that bell curve.

Or essentially, people try to be so efficient as to get tangled around their own efficiency and so often end up just being lazy and loud.

edit: That reminds me, has anyone ever done a survey on analytical minds also being less atheistic? It doesn't seem to be bought up much but it feels like an obvious extension to the question at hand, due to the bell curve effect.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:02:35 PM by Ramus

The emotions of others can seem like such well guarded mysteries, people 8egin to 8elieve that's how their own emotions should 8e treated.

Like Legend and Aondeug, I'm a Christian, precisely because of my analytical thinking.

Personally, like Fallen, I'm annoyed by the constant "If you're religious (but particularly Christian) then the ability to add two plus two and get four is beyond you." Further, there's plenty of stuff in secular science that, let's just say, requires a bit of a leap (for instance, secular science itself holds that anything with a any discernable sense of order is clearly the work of intelligence, not random chance, and yet that same science holds that some 'Big Bang' created the universe in all it's infinite order and sublime. Uh-huh.)

With all that said, I'm in complete and total agreement with teaching critical thought. The Bible encourages it. I don't follow the Bible's dictates for kicks and giggles, I follow them because I've seen them work (when executed properly). I don't think my faith will suffer at all for it.

I'm one of those who believes that as our science and knowledge of the universe develops and increases, it'll only point more to God and less to evolution and big bangs.

TL:DNR - I for one welcome our new critical and analytical thinking overlords.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:09:32 PM by TheStarshipMaxima

It was an honor

To be fair. Christianity cant explain how the world started either past "God did it"

Its a tad hard to explain cause and effect before cause and effect existed.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:11:01 PM by Midgetsnowman

@Snowman: Going to cut you short there. That's like asking what happened before the big bang. No one knows. Or like asking what caused God. Both answers you're going to get isn't explain to a whole lot.

For all I know, the big bang didn't actually happen because God created and loaded a save state that happened after the big bomb and yet we would believe that the big boom happened anyway since all evidence was set up so that such a thing happened.

Or you know, we're all living in a matrix and that we're all just being used right now as incredibly inefficient, fleshy batteries.

Long story short, let's not get philosophical right now or ask impossible questions and just talk about the religious differences between an analytic brain and a less analytic brain.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:16:44 PM by Ramus

The emotions of others can seem like such well guarded mysteries, people 8egin to 8elieve that's how their own emotions should 8e treated.

That's a matter of interpretation.

I can more readily accept that the universe is the result of some sort of higher intelligence than the result of a few billion years worth of countless "coincidences".

Put it this way, if they discover the ruins of a civilization on Mars, most non-religious types will say it's proof of intelligent alien life. They won't say that a bunch of random Martian gases and chemicals caused the ruins to just form.

I don't know why if you replace "aliens" with "God" suddenly it's unacceptable.

Ramus, I know Midget. He wasn't going to derail the discussion. And besides this thread is kinda about the differences between brain types.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:18:01 PM by TheStarshipMaxima

It was an honor

To be fair, there's very few people who think that discussion of alien life is sane.

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

Do I call them gods or aliens? EITHER WAY I LOSE.

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

Er? Why?

It was an honor

Because ancient ruins are incontrovertible proof that a civilization built them? While the universe can quite easily be explained as having formed through co-incidence. Your argument is a false analogy is what I'm trying to say.

"Roll for whores."

OK, there's a point I'm gonna have to address because otherwise people might be left with the wrong impression, but after that's done, I'm gonna have to request that we remain strictly on-topic. I wouldn't respond to this otherwise, but it's a pretty important point to make and having this fly past would be a great disservice to anyone who reads the thread.

This is not a position held by science at all. It is entirely possible and in fact common that things that seem "designed" can emerge from less complex natural states.

Let's take the formation of the elements in the Periodic Table for an example.

Shortly after the Big Bang, almost all matter that wasn't antimatter was Hydrogen. Elements like Iron, Sulfur, Uranium and so on didn't exist. Because the Hydrogen was unevenly spread, the Hydrogen atoms that were in the denser areas began to condence due to gravity (which in an evenly spread arrangement would have been negated by the equal pull from atoms in the opposite direction.)

When enough atoms were condensed, the pressure in the core became very great and the energy started to turn into heat.

When there's too much energy, fusion begins. So it happened here: the lumps that were large enough to contain so much energy that fusion began turned into stars, massive balls of heat, at the core of which were constant fusion reactions. Two Hydrogen atoms fuse into Helium and release energy, which can feed the reaction if more hydrogen is around, as would be the case in a star.

When a star has spent its stock of Hydrogen, it condenses and heats up, which causes it to begin fusing Helium. When that's gone, it goes into fusing the products of the previous generation of elements, all the way up to Iron, after which it doesn't produce enough energy to go further. Then it starts to shrink and eventually explodes, becoming a supernova. During this month-long explosion, Iron is fused into even heavier elements, but the price that the star pays is its death; it blows away its outer layers, including the new elements, and goes into one of three forms, based on the size it was: it can become a Red Dwarf, a Neutron Star or a Black Hole.

The "stardust," as it is sometimes called, floats away in space until there happens to be an incidence of high density of dust, which would be from many different stars. These lumps then go on to form new stars or, if they're too small, planets.

As Lawrence Krauss points out, the atoms of Carbon in your left arm are from a different star than the Carbon in your right arm. Another (paraphrased) quote from him: "Forget Jesus. Stars had to die for you."

This is one case where a series of entirely natural and understood processes, starting from a universe full of unevenly spread hydrogen, can result in star systems and galaxies. Indeed, it has!

Another example would be evolution. Or the formation of snow crystals: a process that is understood and known very well that starts with a simpler model and ends in a complex outcome.

To claim that science doesn't accept complexity emerging from simplicity is to gravely misunderstand science.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:44:04 PM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

We've studied the process behind how planets, stars etc. form naturally and have a pretty good idea of how it happens. No intelligent creator required, just the natural forces of the Universe at work.

If we found alien ruins on Mars, we could look at their buildings and inventions and see that they were manufactured, and built for a specific purpose. If they have a written language, we could try to decipher it. We would be able to study their culture and get an idea of their history and what happened to their civilization.

Basically, if we found evidence that these ruins were created by intelligent beings, that would not be an unreasonable conclusion to draw. There is no evidence that planets, stars, galaxies and whatnot were created by anything other than the natural forces of the Universe.

And ninja'd.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:44:39 PM by Talby

Well, it's a relief that no one thinks I'm Joseph Stalin for suggesting this.

Probably won't. In defense of the authors of the mentioned study, they didn't push that notion and were entirely neutral about the issue. They're using a specific definition for analytical thinking, not the fuzzy layman's concept. I see this word going around a lot and I worry about its different meanings. There is one definition of faith, the belief in something despite a lack of evidence or even in defiance of established counter-evidence. There are religious traditions that praise holding faith in this sense. This isn't quite the most accurate characterization of the Big Bang, which never 'created' anything, but that's to be expected as the Big Bang is a horribly counterintuitive phenomena to study and still has physicists today scratching their heads. I don't wish to derail the thread, so if you want good resources and explanations of the Big Bang, send me a PM and I should be able to find something for you. Just a note: the theory of evolution is more solid than the theory of gravity or Newton's laws. Again, I don't wanna derail, so if you want resources explaining why evolution is as solid a theory science has ever produced, drop me a PM.

To All: Thank you for keeping this discussion civil. This kinda topic is easy bait for incendiary posts.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Just a joke, Maxima.

^There are two types of faith to me and Buddhism. Faith with intent to prove and faith without intent to prove. The former is considered useful and proper to have. It's a sort of motivating force. You're supposed to go in skeptical, test some things, gain greater faith in the method, continue to testing, and so on. Gaining greater strength in the conviction of your faith with each step you take further down the Eightfold Path. Eventually you abandon your faith because you no longer need it. You've found Truth and you now Know. You don't merely believe and hope. You know.

Faith without the intent to prove, either because you can't or believe you shouldn't question the belief, is generally frowned upon. At best these sorts of beliefs are useless. At worst they are actively harmful to your development as a Buddhist. My belief in the All is considered useless and falls into this category.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:50:16 PM by Aondeug

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

Ah, I see.

I don't think talking how analytical people can come to different conclusions quite independent of religious or non-religiou bias is derailing.

My point is that yes, secular science has uncovered a lot of stuff and knowledge, that's why the internet and microchip technology is enabling me to type these posts.

But science doesn't have all the answers. And a lot of what is considered "rock-solid" and "irrefutable" isn't necessarily so. I'm fully aware in evolution, it makes sense living things subjected to different stimuli will develop different. To leap from that to amoeba's become human beings...er, no.

And as Best Of points out, the leap from well we can get more ordered states from less ordered states - we can get an office building from purely random chance, again, er..no.

The point here is that my refusal of accepting "those" particular aspects of secular science, whether right or wrong, doesn't require me having read any part of the Bible.

That was my point. And thus, I have no fear of teaching critical and analytical thinking.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:54:58 PM by TheStarshipMaxima

It was an honor

Another troper P Med me suggesting a name change, to "Analytic Thought in Relation to Belief". It's a good idea, and will encourage keeping the discussion civilized, though I personally think that title doesn't capture the thread topic. Maybe "Analytic Thought: Consequences for Religious Belief" perhaps?

That's not what evolution predicts or asserts. That is not required for emergent phenomena like biological evolution, abiogenesis, or the formation of complex stellar phenomena.

...at the risk of a mild derail, can I ask who told you that stuff? This sounds less like a failure of analytical thinking on your part and more people just bullshitting you on what the science actually says.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:59:38 PM by RadicalTaoist

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

I guess I have to prevent a very predictable challenge that would probably derail the thread further if it wasn't addressed pre-emptively.

No, science does not yet know exactly how the universe began (as in, what caused the Big Bang) and the abiogenesis or emergence of life from non-life is not yet understood, either. Cosmology can still work from after the Big Bang based on what we know from observations and experiments, which has yielded the model of the growth of galaxies that I just explained. Similarly, evolution explains how life becomes more complex through speciation, but it does not claim to explain how life began in the first place.

As for abiogenesis, it is often claimed to be such an unlikely event that trying to discover the process that led to it is futile. This is false. All that is needed for life to emerge is an imperfect replicator. A replicator is anything that builds copies of itself. If it's imperfect, it makes mistakes from time to time. Once anything like that exists, there is variation and that gives rise to different kinds of replicator, and voilá, evolution has begun.

It would probably take millions of years to get from that to RNA or something equivalent, which would then eventually generate DNA and much later the first cells. I'm saying this here because one falsehood that creationist propaganda often sprouts is that scientist claim that the first form of life to emerge was a cell, which is not true. The first cell would have been a result of a long chain of generations of proto-cells, imperfect replicators that weren't anywhere near complex enough to become cells to begin with but would have, through natural selection, eventually led to the first cell.

Another falsehood to be prevented: it is also not strictly true that one species ever "becomes" another.

Humans didn't evolve from modern apes, but the ancestors of modern apes. If one was to follow one's family tree back enough generations (perhaps using a time machine; this is a thought experiment and so a time machine is allowed,) one would eventually meet an animal that one would be inclined to call a monkey, but it would in fact be a member of an extinct species that underwent branching.

That means that that ape (or proto-ape's) extended family was at some point split (perhaps by a geographic event or migration) into two or more groups, which went on to evolve until they reached a stage where if they were to meet again, they would not be able to produce viable offspring by cross-breeding, which is the traditional definition of the distinction between species.

At no point would you have one generation so different from the one preceding it or the one coming after it that they would be classified as different species; but the process is very long, and eventually there are enough changes in one line that the ancestors of those animals, should they be transported through time to meet their very distant descendants, would not be able to interbreed with them.

I hope I've avoided a derail.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.