Analytic Thought: Consequences for Religious Belief

This is the part where I'm probably going to start upsetting people.

People get irritated if you point this out, because the implication is that something that falls down without props isn't the truth.

This is why it's important to look at what the researchers meant when they said 'analytical'. They had a specific use of the term. This theory kinda contradicts the Dark Ages. And the Enlightenment. Again, what kind of "analytic thought"? Do you mean just thinking hard in some sequence of logic, or do you mean actively trying to disprove hypotheses and propositions? [[cognitivescienceberserkerrage]] What is a "mode of thought", and how can we talk about "being" in such a mode in any sort of meaningful way? Is it a neurological state we can detect, or is it just a pattern of behaviour (meditating, acting reconciliatory, trusting people, etc.)? And in either case, if it is possible to adopt the neurological state/pattern of behaviour without any religious trappings, why would we consider it "religious thought"?[[/cognitivescienceberserkerrage]] Cuz lemme tell ya, atheists can meditate, appreciate the wonder and beauty of everything, forgive wrongs done against them, all that jazz. If you're empirically testing truth-claims through questioning, then you can get less wrong then you were before. If you do so methodically, then you're almost guaranteed to be less wrong and better informed than you would be if you weren't questioning truth-claims so. Fair enough, there are goods besides being right. However, any negative aspects of activity A must be mitigated, and not working with a mode of thought that's essential for us to have truthful inferences about the world is a negative aspect. Some atheists, like Aron Ra, prefer to be called infidels, because what they reject is not specifically deities or religion but faith, and their rejection of faith results in the rejection of deities and most religions.

Let me be clear that I'm using the word 'faith' here to mean 'belief in a proposition despite a lack of supporting evidence or even in face of contradictory evidence'. For example, when I read this:

I would argue that the poster may not be using the term faith correctly, because if it required evidence to strengthen, it wouldn't qualify as faith. You don't have faith in Newton's Laws; you accept them. I can also securely conclude that either the writer of this passage rejects deities and the supernatural as a central tenet of their religious belief, or that they are mistaken somewhere down the line.

This is the threat analytic thought can pose to religious belief. Analytic thought involves processes that identify false or unsupported propositions. The only religions that are safe are those that avoid false or unsupported propositions, such as claims of the supernatural. Evidence matters to analytical thinking.

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

Assuming that religion implies a mistake is flawed. You don't know if anyone's religion is correct or incorrect.

That said, I do not think that believing in one thing I cannot prove beyond a doubt invalidates any other observations that I make. My religion does not contradict knowledge, it just fills in the gaps, so to speak- which I believe Carcio would say as well, in effect, although our gap-filling material is a bit different.

edited 1st May '12 7:20:19 PM by Exelixi

Mura: -flips the bird to veterinary science with one hand and Euclidean geometry with the other-

This is a very important thing to remember. There are a whole lot of good character traits that may only be considered true if you prop them up stubbornly — particularly in a socioeconomic climate that rewards self-interest and ruthlessness.

Correct. However, I can reason to conditional statements. There is no evidence for deities or the supernatural, thus belief in deities or the supernatural is evidently wrong. If a religion demands belief in deities or the supernatural, it demands that people incorrectly treat an unsupported proposition as fact. That's not an assumption. Of course not, it just invalidates that belief and any other beliefs based upon it. I'm not going to argue that religious believers can't do basic math. Religious ≠ dumb. The thing is, speculation that might answer questions is not the same as evidence that does answer questions, and that difference matters to analytic thought. I, for one, reject "God of the gaps" arguments because they don't actually tell me anything.

edited 1st May '12 7:27:22 PM by RadicalTaoist

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

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

"Roll for whores."

This is so, but you still treat a belief that is evidently unfounded as though it were baseless. That's what the "evidently" is there for. Russell's Teapot, ja?

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

To you it's unfounded, to them it's not. With no evidence for or against, all opinions are valid.

"Roll for whores."

I have no evidence for or against an invisible dragon perching on my bedroom door. It is illogical to hold contradictory beliefs, so I treat this dragon as evidently nonexistent. I can't operate as though it exists. It would be competing with the invisible griffon for which I also have no evidence either way.

Just because I can't prove that something doesn't exist, doesn't mean I shouldn't operate like it doesn't when there's no proof that it does exist.

EDIT: Also,

A foundation in evidence (or lack thereof) isn't a subjective personal thing.

edited 1st May '12 8:13:28 PM by RadicalTaoist

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

Not everything necessarily needs to tell you things to be worth doing or believing. I agree that based on a purely scientific perspective, I have no reason to hold my faith- but I have a great number of reasons other than objective ones (though those are not on topic).

So, assuming that there's non way to prove or disprove the belief, and the belief in and of itself conveys some benefit. . . I stick with it.

Mura: -flips the bird to veterinary science with one hand and Euclidean geometry with the other-

If you're talking not about a proposition of belief, but a behaviour to practice, then that's a different thing. I go to Aikido class and hold my hands in front of me like they were attached to my center of balance by an invisible string. No such string exists, and I know it doesn't, but this position helps my technique.

"What is" and "what should be done" are different questions.

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

This thread is starting to become a "Religous belief is wrong" thread.

Be not afraid...

"Starting?" Been that way for a while, ma'am.

Mura: -flips the bird to veterinary science with one hand and Euclidean geometry with the other-

I ask again why we have to single out religion as if it's anything "special". It's just a set of beliefs with metaphysical underpinnings.

@Radical Taoist (#51)

You can't reject faith. Everyone has fundamental points they take by faith - those are called axioms. Then they build other conclusions based on reasoning with those axioms.

Evidence can strengthen faith by correlation. Your evidence is things turning out "as you expected" from the axioms taken by faith. Evidence cannot conclusive prove the axioms, however.

Now using Trivialis handle.

They did; but what about the subjects? If they associated "solving simple math puzzles" and so on to some popular assumptions about rationality, you cannot pretend that this had no effect whatsoever on the results.

I was actually referring to periods of my personal life. But since you mention the Middle Ages, what about them? It is a thousand years long period, and of course lots of good and bad things happened during it in Europe; but all things considered, it was an age of relative stability in which a lot of technological and cultural progress occurred. On the other hand, the "Enlightenment" were 50/100 years (I've seen different estimates) during which, mostly because of economic reasons, a number of philosophers came up with a few interesting ideas (and a number of rather silly ones, of course, but that's humans for you .) But you cannot value Voltaire's work and dismiss Abelard's (actually, I'd say that Abelard was vastly superior to Voltaire; but comparisons between thinkers are always iffy.)

I agree, the term is ill-defined — I kinda said it. In my case, I was referring to formal, mathematical thought — proving theorems, finding interesting conjectures, and so on.

The article implies that there exists a distinction between "analytic thought" (whatever it is) and the way in which people think about religious matters. I am not being formal here, obviously; all I am saying is there is that the passage from "doing activity A weakens belief in B" to "belief in B is bad" is entirely unwarranted.

Color me doubtful. People have come to all sorts of silly conclusions and justified them on "rational" grounds. I may concede that an habit of questioning oneself makes it more likely that, on average, one will be more likely to reach correct conclusions; but to think this a near-certainty is, I think, more than a little naive.

Here you are making a, I think, entirely unwarranted transition from "using analytic thought" to "being right". Whatever analytic thought is, I have no reason whatsoever to make it the sole arbiter of truth and falsity.

edited 2nd May '12 12:57:04 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I still hope to keep this on the topic of "what analytic thought does to religious belief". I honestly have no issue with religious beliefs that don't posit myths as reality. Buddhist theories of psychology, for example, are surprisingly accurate and insightful.

By faith or necessity? Everyone has axioms, sure, but often only because the alternative is solipsism and that way lays madness. In some cases, you can determine the correct conclusion just by logical consistency rather than any concordance with an axiom (for example, when not-X contains an inherent logical contradiction and X does not, X is clearly true).

What did the thoughts of the subjects have to do with the experiments? I give their methodology more credit than that. Of course. But the value of a product a thinker can provide depends on the intellectual environment in which they operate. Abelard would have done amazing things had he lived and worked in a post-Copernican world. The religious institutions of medieval Europe did a fine job of preserving the knowledge of the Romans, but they also halted a considerable amount of inquiry beyond it for political and ideological reasons. OK. I was referring to skeptical, eliminative reasoning - establishing a consistent standard of proof and attempting to eliminate anything that doesn't meet it. OK, this I can grant. Did the authors give or fail to give such a distinction? This is why I used the "eliminative skepticism" definition. I don't mean justifying anything, I mean trying to disprove everything. It is nearly a tautology that if you're consistent and methodical about rejecting untrue propositions, you will be less wrong than if you weren't. That is why science is the best method of determining truth and rejecting untrue propositions that humanity has ever created. See above.

....aaaaaaand I'm turning this into a phil of sci thread. >__<

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

Well, seeing as the experiments attempt to put the subjects in an "analytic" frame of mind and then they evaluate their religious beliefs, it seems possible to me that the fact that "rationality" is associated in popular culture to certain metaphysical assumptions could have affected the results. It's just a random hypothesis, however.

I would say that Abelard has done amazing things — it saddens me that, nowadays, he is mostly remembered for postulating a child in his student and getting castrated by her angry uncle. He basically developed most of Frege's theory of Sense and Reference, for example, and he presented an incredibly sophisticated theory of entailment (which I do not fully understand, to be honest).

Could he have done more if he had lived and worked in the modern world? Almost certainly. But I think that his works compare favorably to the ones of classical thinkers, and also to the ones of early modern thinkers. And he was just one of the medieval philosophers and logicians (although, granted, one of the heavyweights.)

I only mentioned this to point out what cannot be inferred by the authors' result — it's not a criticism of the authors' work itself.

The problem here is what "being consistent and methodical" even means. We have some guidelines and techniques which have proven themselves to be generally useful; but these guidelines are always adapted and updated and modified — for example, modern experimental science makes use of a lot of statistical techniques which simply were not available until relatively recently.

"The scientific method" is not some sort of philosophy, it is an ever-evolving assortment of tricks and methodologies.

edited 2nd May '12 8:11:54 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

p(A|X) = p(X|A)*p(A) / p(X|A)*p(A) + p(X|~A)*p(~A)

Bayes' theorem. That's all it is. Literally. Look it up. We've had it since 1763.

edited 2nd May '12 8:31:08 AM by Muramasan13

Smile for me!

I am familiar with Bayes' theorem. I am also familiar with Kolmogorov's axioms, which define formally the notion of probability, and with the Dutch book argument that shows that, under some very general conditions, using probability distributions and Bayes' theorem is the best possible strategy.

However, "under some very general conditions" is somewhat different from "always". Sometimes, probability theory is not the correct formalism; and sometimes, Bayes' theorem is simply not applicable.

Just as an example, Dempster-Shafer Theory is a different approach to the representation of uncertainty, which generalizes probability theory and which, in some circumstances, is more convenient. It does not use Bayes' rule, but rather Dempster's rule:

if A nonempty,
m12(A) = 1/(1-K) SUM ( m1(B)m2(C) : B intersection C = A )
where K = SUM(m1(B)m2(C) : B intersection C is nonemtpy)

Other times, you want to represent degrees of uncertainty through possibility distributions. And there are a number of different update rules for possibility distributions, all with their respective advantages and disadvantages.

All of these approaches to the representation of uncertainty are used in practice, and more besides. I will use Bayes' theorem when, in my judgment, it is the best available approach; but the idea that the "scientific method" — or, even worse, the correct use of Reason — reduces to Bayes' theorem is entirely incorrect.

edited 2nd May '12 2:12:41 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I see your point. I apologize for being hasty to assume lack of nuance on your part, when indeed I was lacking nuanced understanding.

Smile for me!

No worries

Truth to be told, Bayes' theorem is a very powerful technique, and certainly a hugely useful one in practice.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

"By faith or necessity? Everyone has axioms, sure, but often only because the alternative is solipsism and that way lays madness. "

What's the difference? What I've basically said is that faith is a necessity.

Now using Trivialis handle.

Believing in some things you're not quite certain of is necessary to lead a healthy life, which is synonymous with some definitions of "faith"- not to be confused with faith in platonic ideals, free will, or God. (Not saying that you're drawing that dotted line, but if you're not, it might be best to substitute a less-confusable synonym.)

It seems to me that "our minds do not delude themselves in a way that is utterly self-consistent and designed to lead us away from the truth about the outside universe as discoverable by rationality" is a shorter leap of faith to take than "a certain book written thousands of years ago is correct on certain points regarding the nature and existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being".

edited 2nd May '12 1:33:55 PM by Muramasan13

Smile for me!

It's also one of the easiest ones to apply in code, but prohibitively difficult to apply in everyday conscious thought because we don't actually think in calculations that way. Which is why the people who harp on it tend to be AI geeks.

Yeah, but you can think of it in terms of "weighting". It's subjective and subject to the affect heuristic, but it works if you stick to the qualitative principles.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Bayes happens to be a rough enough approximation of how associative reinforcement works at its most abstract level, but how it happens is just so wildly different that you're not likely to get anything notably "smarter" than Cleverbot by implementing it that way.