Evolution and Science Acceptance

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i'm really irked about mattj's analogy between people believing what a textbook tells them to be true, and the bible.

the bible is however many years old. textbooks (should at least) be up to date with current knowledge of a respective subject and are often cited with where the information comes from, from chapter to chapter, lesson to lesson. equating a group of men that wrote the old/new testament 2000 or so years ago to moderm scientists/historians/mathematicians (past theorems and all discovered long ago, if you're about to get pedantic) is hilariously childish. it sounds like you're the child whining about listening to your mother "because she said so."

i went to catholic school for 8 years, and the only class i ever failed was religion. i didn't really care about it, nor did the masses we had at least twice a week strike me in any meaningful way. even then, an impressionable eight year old, eventually fourteen year old. for some, maybe the bible was the answer to all their problems. maybe this solitary book, number of revisions be damned, was all the information they could have asked for about the meaning of life.

however, i cannot tolerate such believers scoffing at the ideas of evolution. i cannot understand years of research and 99.99999999% accurate facts that support the idea of evolution to be ignored by believers of a solitary book. there is no difference between believing that the x-men are real because of reading a comic book and believing an omnipresent and omniscient god figure is real because you read the bible.

i do not disrespect having faith - i only reserve my respect for tangible knowledge.
 
Why don't we have ancient alien classes in school either? That's wrong and it would cause ignorance to not teach it. I think we should teach everything in school because if you believe something is true, it makes it testable science (albeit not necessarily true). Ergo all sciences should be taught in school, that way people can choose whether to believe in ancient aliens, medicine, godjesus, the matrix, nanobots or invisible space teapots. You're all just too stupid to understand. Get on my level.

PS: This thread is amazing.
 
I found this article on google just now and I found it interesting if any of you people want to explore the idea further:

http://www.science20.com/florilegium/science_belief_religion_science_recent_research




aaaaaaand that will be the last anyone hears from me on the issue.

EDIT: If you're just going to choose to not read it then you have no right to be a dick about the ideas and criticize them through immature gifs. However, this article does explain why you are treating these ideas this way.

The researchers “used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of 14 adults while they judged written statements to be “true” (belief), “false” (disbelief), or “undecidable” (uncertainty). To characterize belief, disbelief, and uncertainty in a content-independent manner, we included statements from a wide range of categories: autobiographical, mathematical, geographical, religious, ethical, semantic, and factual.”
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Looking at the brain scans, the images showed a distinct increase in activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) for statements of belief versus disbelief. This VMPFC appears to be involved in reasoning tasks that have a high emotional salience, including modulating behaviour in response to changing rewards, selecting goal-based actions and, it seems, in on-going reality monitoring. Thus if our reality is the sum of true propositions then each manifestation of such propositions gets a positive emotional boost, as if to verify that it still holds true. Damage to the VMPFC has been associated with an inability to feel any moral consequences to planned actions as well as to confabulations, where reality-checking has seriously broken down. What was surprising was that this activity in the VMPFC was independent of the content of the propositions: mathematical propositions that were true showed the same signal as religious propositions that were deemed true by believers, as well as irreligious propositions deemed true by disbelievers. What we seem to be witnessing is part of the brain's truth checking system, and that system is powered by emotions.

In contrast, when the researchers analysed those false statements compared to either true or undecidable ones they found increased activity in the anterior insula (on both sides) and the left frontal operculum. Taken together, these regions are associated with judgements about taste, smell and pain. Statements that are untrue - basically lies - are experienced as unpleasant or downright disgusting. Yet again, what we think of as rational decisions are mediated by emotional responses. Good and bad are thereby associated with pleasure and pain. The lessons of the real world are replicated by the brain so that it simulates such real world responses when reacting to purely mental constructs, even to statements that appear quite abstract and unemotional. What is worrying to a rationalist is that the same emotional weight is given to supernatural statements as to natural statements.

Lastly, a quick look at the fMRI scans for those propositions that were undecidable compared to those that were either true or false. These showed a marked increase in activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and a decreased signal in the caudate. The ACC is thought to be involved in processes of error detection and behavioural responses to cognitive conflicts. It is therefore not surprising that it should also be involved in questions of undecidability, some of which may be the unresolved conflict between truth and falsehood. Overall, what the research has uncovered, is that the brain seems to treat propositions and thoughts about propositions in very similar ways to other sensory inputs. Decisions taken about the truth of statements seem mediated by emotional responses, with truth and falsehood eliciting respective feelings of pleasure and pain. This appears to be independent of the content of the statements and applies equally to natural and supernatural claims. This is an important step forward in understanding the neurology of belief. It also suggests that our lexical distinction between knowledge and belief may be much finer than we expected. To the believer, the belief is knowledge, and the brain reinforces this through its pleasure circuits. The mutual incomprehension between religious believers and non-believers starts to make sense. But it also means that an individual's supposed rational internal dialogue is also subject to the same processes. A person's mental map of the universe may thus be deeply flawed and yet trying to change it is a painful process that few are willing to undergo – in some ways we are all addicted to our prejudices.
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When comparing the brain activity when a subject was confronted with non-religious statements compared with religious ones we find a distinct increase in many areas of the left hemisphere - including the hippocampus - that are involved in memory and language retrieval. Not a great surprise here, but interesting finding is that the believers and non-believers showed increase brain activity in exactly the same areas when responding to negative, or blasphemous, statements about Christianity. Thus although the Christians responded negatively to such statements, and the non-believers positively, the same areas were involved. It is not clear if this is purely down to the non-believers being largely former Christians.
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The 17th century philosopher, Benedict Spinoza, conjectured that the mere comprehension of a statement was tantamount to a tacit acceptance of it being true, whereas disbelief requires a further process of rejection. On reflection, this would seem to make sense in terms of pure processing speed. Somehow, a false statement needs retesting and opening up to a wider search to verify its falseness. This is most obvious in mathematical statements; “62 is perfectly divisible by 9” takes longer to process than “62 is perfectly divisible by 2.” The number of values of x for which the proposition “62 is perfectly divisible by x” is true is very small compared to those for which it is false. Whether the brain actually attempts a global search in the hope of finding each statement as true may well be worth further research.

However, the current research shows that it isn't just a matter of processing power but also an emotional reaction to questions of truth and falsehood. Truth is beautiful, whereas falsehood is painful. This negative emotional reaction to false propositions may be the cue for a further search to see if one's original judgement is wrong – there seems to be an emotional prize in this extra mental effort in that discovering a new truth brings with it a sense of satisfaction and joy. However, what we seem to be left with is a form of mental hedonism. Is that the end of the trail?
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Heart to heat right here man.

Logan, you need to stop watching the "History Channel" and change it to like PBS or Discovery / Science, after a year of watching them, I invite you to come back here and discuss how modern science is fucking retarded.

I bet you also doubt we landed on the moon, Obama is a citizen, and JFK was shot by someone else. sheeesh at least get a cool conspiracy theory like that he US planned pearl harbor (look it up its wild)

Jesus iDunno and Logan fucked up this thread. Mattj come here and tell us how your grandfather didn't see the big bang, lets get back to some reasonable discussion.
 
Scarfwynaut said:
Heart to heat right here man.

Logan, you need to stop watching the "History Channel" and change it to like PBS or Discovery / Science, after a year of watching them, I invite you to come back here and discuss how modern science is fucking retarded.

I bet you also doubt we landed on the moon, Obama is a citizen, and JFK was shot by someone else. sheeesh at least get a cool conspiracy theory like that he US planned pearl harbor (look it up its wild)

Jesus iDunno and Logan fucked up this thread. Mattj come here and tell us how your grandfather didn't see the big bang, lets get back to some reasonable discussion.
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Oh I apologize for thinking I could add something new to the discussion beyond going back and forth on the same arguments. Man, what was I thinking!


This part of the article is more speculative, but I thought it was fun to think about, nonetheless:

A Thought Experiment

Here is a thought experiment I designed (if it already exists elsewhere in the literature please let me know). Can a person hold two religious faiths simultaneously? Can, for example, a devout Christian also be at the same time a devout Hindu? You can replace those two religions with any other two you may choose and do the same thought experiment. Syncretistic beliefs count as new faiths so that the intersections of all sets of religious faiths is empty. This is not the same as the intersection of propositions of beliefs as there are obviously some beliefs that overlap. This experiment is not about the statements people make about their faith but their state of mind and emotional state associated with their faith. My proposition is that it is not possible to be a devout believer in two different religious systems.

Now let's add science into the mix. Many religious apologists like to state that science is just another belief system and that therefore their religious system is on a par with science. This means, to them, that religious claims to truth are equivalent to scientific claims to truth. If this is true then we would expect that if we added science into our religious mix above that it would also create a new set with no intersections with other religions. But this is obviously false. Can, for example, a devout Christian also be a scientist? Absolutely! There seems to me to be no emotional reason as to why religious individuals cannot also be scientists. To return to Aquinas, his sacred doctrine is both a religion and a science but the two remain distinct. But Aquinas does not have equal faith in both realms; in a conflict situation religious faith wins. It is unfortunate that we have one word – belief – that seems to describe two different states. These two research papers, however, suggest that both science and religion are mediated by beliefs that are reinforced by emotional circuitry. Essentially, both atheists and Christians believe they are right because it makes them feel good. But these experiments were conducted on discrete propositions – there is still a difference between their default states.
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you people can go back to your dialogue/verbal catfight now.

EDIT3: Oh sorry I just noticed there was actually civilized discussion before Logan entered the conversation. Sorry for jumping to conclusions like that, but the thread still was pretty shitty by the time I came along to "fuck it up"

EDIT2:
elcheeso said:
Why don't we have ancient alien classes in school either? That's wrong and it would cause ignorance to not teach it. I think we should teach everything in school because if you believe something is true, it makes it testable science (albeit not necessarily true). Ergo all sciences should be taught in school, that way people can choose whether to believe in ancient aliens, medicine, godjesus, the matrix, nanobots or invisible space teapots. You're all just too stupid to understand. Get on my level.

PS: This thread is amazing.
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It isn't about teaching everyone everything just in case something might be wrong. It's about teaching tolerance, which is obviously something everyone on both side lacks.
 
who would have thought that posting a disparaging picture about autism would invoke such an inundation of further autism
 
Glen said:
who would have thought that posting a disparaging picture about autism would invoke such an inundation of further autism
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Well, you can't do much to close floodgates after they've been opened :(

EDIT: I honestly don't see what was wrong with what I posted, but whatever - you people just aren't the right audience, i guess.
 
Every time I hear someone make a disparaging remark about autistics, I remember that they are the target audience for the Big Bang Theory and I feel a little better.
 
iDunno said:
If you hadn't noticed I already did. I'm not campaigning against evolution. All my argument was about was religion actually being a form of science and people somehow derived that I was anti-science from that. If given enough reign men of science can be just as bigoted and dogmatic as men of religion. To avoid a future like that people need to be trusted to know about all religions and sciences and to choose what to believe for themselves. The core of intolerance is ignorance and choosing to teach some things but not others only perpetuates it.



just because I take consideration things you don't agree with/don't understand doesn't make me a "moron"

Again, I'm an atheist and accept scientific theories to be widely true given the evidence we are given, so I'm not on a campaign to discredit science as a whole...
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Religion is not a science. As a Christian, I can fully say science and religion are founded upon completely different foundations; one is based on empirical evidence and data, the other faith. Faith cannot be used as scientific data, and empirical evidence doesn't come into play with religion (I'm referring of course to the faith-based Abrahamic religions with its off-shoots, not those of Buddhism, Shintoism etc).
 
Crux said:
Logan said:
I have a feeling man of you are the same people that still believe freedom hating Muslims took down 3 World Trade Center buildings with 2 planes.. Rme.
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Just because we believe in evolution doesn't mean we are stupid enough to think anyone but George W. Bush did it.
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Sorry to derail the topic, but the issue at hand here is much the same as when dealing with evolution.

To the "average guy", evolution seems far-fetched and crazy, especially considering the much more easily comprehendable explanation that "something bigger than us created us, in ways we could never understand". A simple sentence can sum up Creationism, and you don't have to learn any minuscule facts or long-winded explanations to fully understand it. All you need to know, is that "something bigger than us created us, in ways we could never understand". Nice and simple. The explanation doesn't demand any further fact-checking, seeing as the "something" that created us can't be fully understood by humans and trying would be futile.

However, upon closer scrutiny, another explanation slowly takes form. Either way you look at it, to answer the question whether life as we know it evolved or not, you have to study life itself. Theology can get you as far as describing how the religion says life came to be. But if you want the facts, you have to venture into the field of biology.

And again, it turns out that biologists are near unanimous on the subject. Among the millions of people whose job consists of examining the evidence in biology, only a tiny fraction disagrees that the evidence points to evolution. That should be a pretty solid indicator that evolution has something going for it.

Back to the WTC, we have the same situation with engineers. At first, it seems unlikely that two planes can bring down three towers, but once the evidence is examined, it's pretty clear that so was the case on 9/11. To properly understand it, you have to look at the chemical properties of steel, deflection of beams, force application and the behaviour of materials under stress and high temperatures. It's not very complicated stuff, you learn most of it during the first year of a structural engineering course at university. But simply learning it requires both time and devotion, and unless you invest a little of both, you will only be able to scratch the surface of the subject. Like most biologists believe that evolution is true, most structural engineers believe that the NIST report on the collapse of the WTC holds true. Had there been anything fishy in the conclusion of either theory, there would have been an outcry among the academics.

(see for instance the affair at CERN where evidence appeared to suggest that neutrinoes travelled faster than the speed of light, and how much discussion that stirred. There was a general consensus among scholars that there was an error somewhere, and it turned out to be a loose cable).
 
Fine that's fair. But then again, on the same coin, having a differing opinion from mine does not give you a right to call me a moron, so we are both equally guilty of labeling.
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I didn't call you a moron, but considering the utter uselessness of your position, I can see why people would. It's not a justification, but it seems to me that you should have known what kind of territory you'd be treading into by communicating a position like this in the way you did. You don't get to escape a double standard callout with another double standard callout. Your repeated claims of "this is the last time I'm bothering to talk about this" is no better than popemobile's gif.

Ultimately, you're making the mistake of equating "science" with "the scientific community". No one has argued for some kind of infallibility of the scientific community. Indeed, we have had the benefit of philosophers like Paul Feyerabend, who have looked into the scientific method and the dangers of treating theory as dogma. Schools should, indeed, strive to teach SCIENCE rather than the "dogma" of the "scientific community". Yet, it's easy to miss the subtle distinction. With science, we are just trying to conduct inquiries on the universe in an honest way, without invoking a deity because it makes us feel good, and without holding a single theory as sacred because it makes us feel good. The way I'd put it, science comes in two forms: experiment, which is the collection of data, and theory, which is the communication of that data (NOT necessarily the interpretation). And as we all know, with communication we have to employ Occam's Razor and aesthetics; that is, we strive for the simplest, most elegant way to describe what we have measured. Nowhere in there is a claim of "absolute truth" made.

If that's not something more worthy of being taught than specific religions, then what else is? You don't get to ignore that question. The implication here is that we teach things based on popularity, rather than on any kind of merit or usefulness. Supposedly, the only reason the Harry Potter fan shipping class cannot come to be is that it wouldn't be popular (or would it...?).
 
Fishy said:
i'm really irked about mattj's analogy between people believing what a textbook tells them to be true, and the bible.
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With all due respect, I didn't compare the information contained within the Bible with the information contained within a textbook. I compared blindly, without any personal investigation, accepting what the Bible says to blindly, without any personal investigation, accepting what any textbook says. How is that any different? How would it be any different to blindly accept what Carl Sagan has said, than to accept what Jesus has said?

The point was that a whole lot of people who ostracize Christians for accepting the Bible's account of creation blindly accept every claim made about evolution, without doing ever taking the time to look into the evidence behind each of the claims. "The fossil record must prove ancient ancestry because I read it in a book somewhere! No, I haven't actually looked at any ancient striation. Why would I do that?" That sort of thing.

And Ancient Aliens in Biology oh my.
 
Very few things can be known with certainty however that does not mean very few things can be known. The concept pf probability allows us to define the relative likelihood of different claims. Science is based on provability. What we really mean when we say that something is scientifically true is that it has a probability that is close to 1. Conditional probability allows us to use our observations to update our probabilities. This is what science is all about http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/prob.html
 
pathetic. I post a completely relevant response that took quite a bit of time to compose and it is completely erased because I refuse to be talked down on and be insulted for my much enlightened stance on the subject. You could have edited my one sentence remark (response to your harassment) out of the post but just censor me entirely instead. pathetic.
 
wow Glen I'm sure Logan had a very well written and thought provoking response written up and you have stifled discussion by deletaaaaahahahaha sorry I couldn't even finish that sentence
 
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