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Has Superstition Evolved To Help Mankind Survive?
Pickens writes "The tendency to falsely link cause to effect — a superstition — is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. For example, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but 'if a group of lions is coming there's a huge benefit to not being around.' Foster worked with mathematical language and a simple definition for superstition to determine exactly when such potentially false connections pay off and found as long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favored. In modern times, superstitions turn up as a belief in alternative and homeopathic remedies. 'The chances are that most of them don't do anything, but some of them do,' Foster says. Wolfgang Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect — often falsely — science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition. 'You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant,' Forstmeier says. By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, 'quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often.'"
I heard getting first post increases your life expectancy.
I hope they knocked three times on their desk and spun around in a circle before they did this study...
Otherwise the results are completely wrong.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Superstition is not as easily verifiable as scientific statements. I am not talking about money, science is more expensive that Mythbusters. I am talking about the design of scientific statements.
The director of the scientific institution I grew up in said once that good scientific paper should answer to one yes-or-no question.
Science is about analysis, superstition does not care. Science about cleaning up cause-effect relationship in nature to make a repeatable experiment in the lab, superstition just takes cause-effect pairs as they are - in a raw form mudded with all kind of unique circumstances.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Belief in Homeopathic medicine would also be beneficial because of the placebo effect.
A blog about stuff.
Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!
Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!
Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!
Because homeopathy is superstition.
There are plenty of examples of flawed superstitious beliefs leading to an equally large disadvantage or equally great damage. For examples see what happens to people who join cults. For a really good extreme example much more elloquently stated than I possibly could take a look at Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" and look for a persuasive argument why Nancy and Ronald Reagan consulting fortune tellers and horoscopes might not be a good thing when Ron's got his finger on the nuclear button. Wiping out most species on the planet has to qualify as an evolutionary step backwards.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Our brains are made to continue to think about things until we figure them out....that's what curiousity is and it's key to intelligence.
Problem is, if our brain is unable to find the answer, it's best to have some sort of exception handler break it out of the loop. That's where superstition comes in. So we don't spend all day trying to answer questions about, say, how we came to be, as opposed to trying to figure out why our bow and arrow doesn't shoot as straight as we'd like.
That's my theory anyway.
What is described in the example is known as Partial Reinforcement, not Superstition.
Ignoring the painfully vague inclusion criteria for "alternative" treatments, it's just plain wrong to lump every non-pharmaceutical/medical treatment in with a sham like homeopathy. There's solid biochemical/clinical research to support a number of therapeutically active plant compounds and conservative treatment strategies that would probably be considered alternatives to conventional medical protocols. This sort of arrogant badmouthing keeps patients from getting decent information about their treatment options.
This might be a fascinating bit of research, but the story posting isn't even particularly thinly-veiled cannon-fodder flaimbait. It's practically guaranteed to bring out religion apologists and armchair scientists alike in droves.
[Scientist argues that] science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition.
WTF!?
Science only works because it isn't superstitious ! The very fact that we can use the methods we call "science" to discover the nature of reality refutes this assertion in its entirety. That was the statement of a hack.
By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, "quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often."
(Emphasis mine.)
Again: WTF!?
The practitioners of science are the strongest bastion against this sort of dogmatic, superstitious thinking. It is disingenuous to say that "quite a lot of scientists [are superstitious and therefore inept at science]" because that fraction, and certainly that absolute number pale utterly in comparison to the number of people who live every moment of their daily lives, years on-end, in an opaque fog of superstitious belief that some particular list of claims about reality is inerrant while all similar ones are fallacious, and reality can just get bent because "huh, scientists sure are stoo-pid!".
Now we have to endure a flame war between religious zealots, crank science adherents, scientists, and rational non-scientists all seizing this story as a chance to advance their righteousness and deride their opponents, and perform damage control when they suffer affronts in kind.
My predictions (which might admittedly be partially self-fulfilling):
1)at least 850 comments before this story leaves the main page. (Page views galore! Screw enriching the readership; flamefests are more profitable.)
2) A dozen or so comments by the religious regulars who feel they are making the world a better place by spamming the same thoughtless garbage several times a thread, no matter how many times it's refuted. How some of these people have good karma is beyond me. (Please help fix this problem if you have mod points and don't feel like playing whack-a-religious-nutjob-a-mole.)
As a programmer I constantly refer to Murhy's law. It helps me through the day by expecting the worst and being positively surprised when my code does what it's supposed to. ;)
Superstition? Why the hell not? It's not very rational is it... But it seems to work for me.
But those elaborate see-a-black-cat-throw-salt-and-spit-over-your-shoulder superstitions? Naah...
.: Max Romantschuk
Seriously. Read The Science of Discworld and, in particular, it's sequels (all co-authored Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart in addition to Pratchett). They (particularly #2) touch upon this subject.
Superstitions, culture, religion has had its place in ensuring the safety of the believers. Take a look at the dietary restrictions of various religions. Often, they concocted supernatural explanations for diseases or parasites that we understand today. Like prohibitions against eating pork or shellfish. The cost of continuing to avoid such foods, even when we understand the science and can prepare them safely is minimal.
However, there are times when the refusal to understand explanations behind superstitions cost our ancestors dearly. Take cats. Cats coexisted with ancient man as efficient means to keeping rodents out of grain stores. After a time, some civilizations came to hold cats in high regard, even worship them. Ancient Egypt is one example. Enter Christianity. Rather than examine the basis of other religions and cultures reverence for the cat (understanding their practical utility shouldn't have been that hard, even in the middle ages), they associated cats with pagan religions and eventually witchcraft. Cats were feared, driven out of human habitations and killed en mass. Now, the bubonic plague arrives. Societies that didn't buy into the cat loathing of Christianity fared far better then those that did.
Have gnu, will travel.
One day while driving, my five year old managed to unlock and open his car door. The door stayed mostly shut long enough for me to pull over and close it. I sternly warned him that if he did that again, he could fall out of the car and be seriously hurt. When he didn't seem phased by that, I told him that his toy could fall out of the open door and be lost. He got very frightened and promised not to do that again. (He hasn't.) Why the different reaction? I think that falling out of a car and being seriously hurt is an abstract concept to him. He just can't really imagine what it would feel like. But losing a toy that he likes, that he can easily imagine. Sometimes with kids the bigger threat isn't the one that they can wrap their minds around and thus isn't the scarier option.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
According to this guy
- Science is like superstition
- Superstition is not ignoring things that are potentially false
- Some scientists are ignorant
- These ignorant scientists are ignoring mounting evidence, which makes them not-superstitious
- Science needs to be more superstitious
I've either missed something, or he's contradicting himself, or he's making a judgment on a profession based on the actions of small group of scientists who shame the profession by calling themselves such.
I fail at breaks.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
Aside from labeling mis-generalization as superstition (where superstition is really only one possible category of mis-generalization), what has this guy really done? Shown that a mis-generalizaion that is based on some observation might occasionally pay off when that observation does occasionally represent itself? Big Suprise!
If we use our brains a little, this is a bit of a sad excuse for an article is it not?
If anything, fear evolved to help mankind survive.
For example, fear of snakes or spiders due to their venom. Natural enough, right?
But go overboard, or be irrational, and you've got yourself a phobia.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
The 'belief system' exists so that the brain can cope with congitive dissonance.
You can break the mind loop with other things besides having a superstition in your belief system.
Examples: Sleep, food, sex, drugs
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Kid drops lollipop and learns about gravity and slowly builds up an idea that if you drop something it falls. Hand the kid a hydrogen balloon and you'll see that "WTF!" look when it goes up when you let it go.
Kid learns that rocks sink when you throw them in water. I still remember that "WTF!" look on my 4 year old son's face when handed him a chunk of pumice to throw in the water and it floated!
When a pattern is beyond our ability to comprehend then it becomes a superstition: 6 is my lucky number and green is an unlucky color for me; if I dream about snakes then bad stuff is going to happen.
Perhaps these days pseudo-science has largely replaced straight-out superstition. People believe crap like cellphones can pop popcorn.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The problem with this article and other stories is that it's not superstition they're dealing with.
I recall one study where they shocked cats or something if they walked too close to an object, and reported that the cats had developed a "superstitious" aversion to the object, obviously showing how gullible and stupid all of us carbon-based life forms are, and how religion is probably just a complex fraud.
Of course, the problem is that the cats weren't being superstitious. There WAS actually an invisible man in the sky throwing fucking lightning bolts at them, and they learned that correlation.
I know that if I got hit by a lightning bolt every time I climbed to the top of half-dome, I'd damn well stop climbing to the top of Half Dome. I don't need Zeus, or even a working understanding of electromagnetism, to come to that conclusion. I'd avoid it.
Science, is thus something that can disprove something is is thought to be true. An example would be horoscopes. Science killed them long ago, yet some people (quite irrationally) still swear by them. Quantum Mechanics is strange and counter-intuitive, but none-the-less has mountains of experimental evidence to show its veracity.
Well, science has tried very hard to kill astrology, but after my years of studying the patterns of behavior in people with respect to their times of birth, I believe it is more accurate to say that many would simply really, really LIKE it if science would kill astrology, (for reasons I've never fully understood). --Especially these days. After all, the latter part of your statement above does much to throw into question the former.
There was another Slashdot article a few days ago wherein researchers were baffled to discover that certain radioactive particles decay at different rates depending on the time of year, (or as they assumed, the Earth's distance from the Sun). I wonder what force between the Earth and the Sun could affect the behavior of particles and if that force might not be related to the manner in which people's brains develop as they grow up? It would help to explain things.
Conventional wisdom is always growing for a reason; we don't know everything, and as such we should never be hasty to dismiss observable phenomenon just because we happen to find them objectionable for one reason or another.
-FL
I don't trust your statements. In fact, all of you, put your hands where I can see them!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, I see his point, though. The mammalian brain didn't evolve to make scientific reproductible experiments and calculate the error bar. Any given creature wouldn't have enough data or the chance to perform some meaningful experiment. So learning some cause-effect pairs, no matter how flawed, is all that was available and better than nothing.
E.g., if you're a goat and trying to eat one kind of bush gives you some nasty thorn wounds, you just remember that and move on. From now on, you avoid that bush if you can. You don't have the luxury to sample enough such bushes and enough such goats, divided neatly into two groups for a proper double-blind test, to see if you have a good sample. (And probably wouldn't live long if you did.) In practice, maybe that bush was growing through a barbed wire fence, but you wouldn't know that.
The same would apply to the early humans too. If cousing Urgh and aunt Graah ate the funny spotted mushrooms and died, you avoid those mushrooms. You don't divide the tribe in two halves and do a double blind experiment to see if it was really the mushrooms.
So they're not the same, but one of them was all that was available. And we're built to jump to conclusions, basically.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Think about the situations in which people are likely to develop superstitions and its a clue to what's going on.
Two of the most notorious groups of superstitious people are athletes and gamblers. You hit a home run with your shoes tied a certain way, and the association is made - never changing those shoes again! I know a guy who dropped a penny before playing the slots. He hit big, and now drops a penny before every pull.
I think these circumstances have the following important characteristics: lack of control or partial control over outcomes; high potential for reward. I think this combination of factors leads us to pay extra attention to the relationship between our actions and their outcomes and we are therefore more likely to draw spurious associations.
As far as I'm concerned the same thing can be said of religion. Thousands of years ago, before we scientifically understood everything, we had religion to give us an inaccurate but constructive understanding of our world and our existence. However now religion has become obsolete and more accurate and scientific things are taking its place. This is obvious to me. I don't understand why all the Republicans don't get it.
Religion wasn't obsoleted by science so much as by disease, at least in the west.
Religion had a firm grip until the Black Plague hit Europe in the Middle Ages.
During that time people felt, with good reason, that the church should be doing its job and getting God to sort it all out.
This didn't happen, so there was a trend towards being less included to obey the church, and the first recorded attack on a monk by members of the public (an unbelievable event at the time).
It didn't help the church that the survivors felt, rightly, that they were entitled to make a lot more decisions on their own about work, pay, housing and such. No longer were they satisfied with doing what they were told and being content with what they had.
Following the plague, whilst religion regained some of its influence, especially in rural area's, its hold was never again universal, and has been in decline since.
Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science. The only thing likely to turn them is the belief that God has let them down somehow.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science.
You can. Put a lightning rod on your roof and none of the roof of the church.
As Richard Feynman once said "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts"
He also had this comment in his classic speech "Cargo Cult Science"
I don't think I'm as optimistic as Feynman that it's only a small group of scientists that don't have "that kind of disease"...
"if a group of lions is coming there's a huge benefit to not being around."
JESUS CHRIST IT'S A LION GET IN THE CAR!
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Image:Jesus_Christ_it's_a_lion_Get_In_The_Car!.jpg
--
BMO
Who modded this up? Numerous scientific studies have shown that time of birth does not affect any cognitive, behavioral or physical traits. Wikipedia link for the curious
How many rats do a cat need to survive. How many flea per rats, how many maximum possible flea per rats. Now add 1 plus 1 and see why cat would have helped by reducing greatly rodent population and thus reducing the possibility of contamination , spread, and natural reservoir for the plague.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Imagine the first gene. Floating in primordial soup. What did it do?
It found a way of replicating itself.
Then it found a way of protecting itself from the environment.
Then it found a way of protecting itself from other genes.
Then it found a way of taking advantage of other genes. --- (this is us)
They aren't our genes... We are their replication machines.
Deleted
You wouldn't understand unless you yourself had once believed in something. The religious types don't get why you discount all of their beliefs either. From their point of view they have 'evidence' of their beliefs (mostly based on feelings or circular/incomplete reasoning) and can make up even more stuff to discount the rest. I'm saying that from the point of view of someone who used to be religious and was trying to keep fooling myself as well, but eventually gave up on it. There were definitely benefits to being in a large group of likeminded and 'moral' people, but I'd rather live alone seeking the truth, than live a lie with a group of people who think they know the truth and therefore have stopped seeking*.
Religion is basically included in superstition btw, so I considered your post pretty redundant. It also seems pretty flamebait-ish with the mention of republicans. Being left or right wing doesn't necessarily mean being religious. The fact that you "don't get" how different people can believe different things and see the world differently shows that you need to learn more of the science of the mind. I'll give you a clue, logic doesn't always win in there. Quite often the opposite is true.
*Okay, so god created the universe - who created God? You say a watch can't appear fully formed, someone just created it - but a god who is even more complex than us can appear fully formed, or is more likely to have 'always existed' than the universe? Sure. Believing there is a higher purpose in life does make me feel nice and fuzzy inside, and curbs my nihilistic leanings. It also still is possible that there is some higher truth that we just don't have the capacity to grasp yet. But at the moment I don't think humanity has any clue what that is, nor can it be blamed for not being able to understand yet, in the same way that we can't blame fish for having to live underwater. BTW if we did all appear by chance, it doesn't matter how improbable the odds are. We wouldn't be here to question things if those odds had not paid off. I know that's circular reasoning, and I'm not saying that we are just an accident, but IMO it's even more foolish to assume that god always existed fully formed, then decided to create a bunch of people because he was bored.
which is totally what she said
studying the patterns of behavior in people with respect to their times of birth
Don't forget it can be a completely circular effect. For example Aries are supposed to be self confident and stubborn. By having people tell an Aries that he is supposed to have those traits, and expecting him to behave that way, it can in fact encourage and reinforce those traits in that person. Even if in fact that person was adopted and the paperwork was botched and we was never an Aries in the first place. It's the expectation that produces the result.
Take me for example. My sign is Neon. Neons tend to be arrogant and mock irrational bullshit.
See? It's a self fulfilling prophesy. It even worked on me.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science. The only thing likely to turn them is the belief that God has let them down somehow.
Mostly true. It's not so much the belief that God has let you down (there are plenty of excuses for that in Christianity), as a certain attitude of depression and a period in my life where everything was upside down anyway, and a combination of seeing some pretty decnt evidence for macro-evolution (species to species evolution by an organism evolving new abilities). A combination of a number of things are necessary for someone to change their beliefs without being brainwashed.
So I think science and logic helps, but you can't reason someone out of their beliefs. They have to doubt them for themselves, otherwise they will just get very defensive and even more entrenched. You can present some evidence to them and leave it with them to let them compare and decide. It's scary losing your faith, especially if you believe in hell or have a lot of friends with the same beliefs, but it's better than living a lie.
which is totally what she said
No. Perfectly reasonable; as programmers we can attest to the fact that everything always goes wrong. Haven't you ever heard the definition of programmer?
;). Probably because every *nix programmer writes paranoid code as I do. I've (*sigh* I can't believe I'm about to admit this) fatfingered an effective 'rm -rf /.' with a shell command on a production box. Before and the windows clients connected went down harder and faster than the Linux box that was limping along screaming "'Tis but a flesh wound!" Had to put the thing down like Old Yeller and ddrescue through the night.
Programmer: The kind of person that looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
I always assume that my code is the only working non-OS process and everything it has to interface has crashed and burnt without having the common decency to inform anyone or even try to restart, the log drive is full and my every memory allocation fails. Then again, I make none of these assumptions when I'm doing 'doze programming
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I can't believe no one's touched on this yet.
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~fle/gazzaniga.html
Executive summary:
Neuropsychology student is studying split-brain patients- people with injuries or diseases that inhibit the hemispheres of the brain from communicating. Their brains function normally kind of, except no information is passed between the two hemispheres.
Speech, or more specifically, translating what you see into words, is predominantly handled by your left hemisphere. Your left visual field is handled by your right hemisphere, and your right visual field by your left.
One experiment he conducted was showing different pictures to each eye at the same time, and then asking the subject to point to a card showing a picture that relates to the image shown.
One subject was shown a picture a picture of a chicken claw to his right eye (left hem.), and a snow covered landscape to his left (right hem.). The subject then pointed to a chicken with his right hand (again, controlled by left hem), and a shovel with his left (right!). Obviously, the logic behind his choice was the claw belongs to a chicken, and you need a shovel to shovel snow. However, when asked to explain his choice, the subject responded with something to the tune of, "The claw belongs to a chicken, and you need a shovel to clean the chicken shed."
Even though acting independently he was able to correctly deduce the response, the lack of communication between the hemispheres meant that when his left hemisphere was trying to put it all into words, it was unable to recall why he chose the shovel from the right hemisphere of the brain.
Gazzaniga (the student conducting the test) believes that in the left hemisphere of the brain lies what he calls the interpreter: a part of your brain whose sole function is to try to rationalize what we do not understand. An evolved speculation machine. Like the article said, I probably served an evolutionary purpose in that it kept us paranoid and safe in the grasslands, but odds are this is also the same part of the brain that saw lightning and concluded there must be an unseen humanoid in the sky making it. Or, when the great questions of "why?" and "how?" concerning our world began to plague the mind, the same brainpiece reached the same god conclusion.
It may have been evolutionarily useful at the time, but like male nipples, serves only to confuse, bewilder, and slow progress anymore. Nietzsche killed it.
The Republicans in charge do get it, and get it very well. They know how easy it is to control people through religion, and it's one of the most powerful tools they have. They figured out that you can do pretty much anything you want in the name of God, and you will be supported by a lot of people because they can pretend to be following you in the path of God, whether they actually believe it or not. It comes back to the same question: Is it easier to just continue believing it, or to wake up and do something about it?
The current administration is about as anti-Christian as anyone can get, but all Bush has to do is tell people what a great Christian he is, and they believe it, while he murders innocent people, takes from the poor and gives to the rich, and pins medals on people for NOT helping tragedy victims nearby that are dying from lack of a drink of clean water. What Would Jesus Do? indeed.
Yet if you ask most people which party is more religious, most would say Republican. And one the arguments I hear a lot from Republicans about why the Democrats are so bad is that they spend too much money helping the poor.
I'm not saying Democrats are much better. Just that the Republicans have the religious thing figured out.
That's some pretty grand claims when you say that you don't even understand how some humans can have different worldviews from others. Of course perhaps you have stumbled upon the meaning of life, who am I to say when I haven't even heard it :p Personally I wouldn't put it in a book where not many people are likely to read it, I'd put it online and have a link in my sig so that as many people as possible could see it! I wouldn't use it as an attempt to make money. It's very easy to prey on people's insecurities to do that. Perhaps you're not just out to make money, but you're being very secretive about your opinions.
I've seen plenty of people who think they have explained everything, but there are often gaps or just poor logic in their reasoning. I myself will very likely have inconsistencies in my beliefs, because they have changed pretty rapidly over the last couple of years. I may not be able to see the inconsistencies but if I tried to explain my views to others then they would likely spot some flaws. There is no such thing as 'a perfect theory of moral philosophy' - it may be perfect for your own culture, but other cultures often hold very different ideas on morality. The whole "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" kind of works, but not really - how exactly does it work when applied to a masochist?
BTW, you probably should only call your opinions hypothesis until other people have had a go at refuting it. Calling your own opinions a theory is bad enough, but 'perfect theory'? It just makes me think you are being arrogant and short-sighted rather than insightful. Sorry if that is harsh, but it's the way you come across to me.
which is totally what she said
Religion, Superstition, Science and belief systems are not US centric, the Democrats and the Republicans are. No American president could be elected who would proclaim himself/herself to be an atheist.
Also, whether your theories are perfect or not (if they ever will be awarded the status of theory instead of simply being your opinion) is not for you to say.
MP3 Search Engine
" From their point of view they have 'evidence' of their beliefs (mostly based on feelings or circular/incomplete reasoning) and can make up even more stuff to discount the rest."
This is a pretty good description of people in general, not just the religious ones.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
by Niels Bohr. (Possibly apocryphal, but often attributed to him)
When asked by a friend why he had a horseshoe hanging over his door, he replied "Of course I don't believe in it, but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not"
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
I disagree. The only thing absolutely necessary for someone to change their beliefs without being brainwashed is a willingness to change. You point out why change can be hard, and certainly people who proselytize science to counter religious arguments seem anti-religious enough to cause many to simple shirk back to their faith instead of listening and thinking. In many ways, it's like the Matrix; many people are so unwilling to listen to anything that risks their world view, that it's basically futile to bother discussing certain issues with them; at least, it's futile unless and until they want to talk about them.
Oh, and please realize when I say all of the above, I hold the same view for atheists. They too are bigoted to their beliefs. And while certainly in living it is necessary to have at least some bigoted belief (even if it's as simple as the belief to drink more and think less), it's very difficult, if not impossible, to know which belief is the right one to be bigoted to. That's the paradox of religion in general: if it's the case that anyone can lie as much as they want and make up whatever religious belief they care to, how at all is it possible for a sane person to reasonably know the right one from the false ones? It seems the answer is, it's impossible to know. That's why I have the bigoted view of agnosticism. Thankfully, not having a definitive answer about religion isn't necessary to live.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science.
You can. Put a lightning rod on your roof and none of the roof of the church.
Except Churches were the first building to use lightening rods..
There's nothing like having the spires of loads of churches exploded off to make people think a little technology can be a good thing.
Actually, thats not quite fair. The church was never against technology as such, just idea's that challenged their version of the world. Technology usually led to richer states, and therefore a richer church. It was things like 'Earth isn't the centre of the universe' and 'God didn't create the world in 7 days' that gets them twitchy.
Heck, they even reverted back to a strict Aristotelian world view just to avoid the problems posed by Zero. Not because they were afraid of accounting, but because if such a thing as 'nothing' existed, then God couldn't be there, but he was meant to be everywhere. This caused an even wider rift, because of course, businessmen *did* like zero, it made accounts easier to keep.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Funny, but I've often thought of the best Christians as having "humanist" morals. Perspective is a funny thing.
Somersault, as someone who spent a big part of my life as an academic, I've seen more than one "spiritual awakening" of a very religious person who learns to set aside childish superstitions.
It's not an easy road, but when you can start to see that your morals come from the person you are instead of the fear of punishment, you are truly "putting aside childish things" as a wise man said.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There are other ways superstition can be very harmful.
Let's say your superstition is that when your children get sick, you're going to pray instead of take them to the doctor.
Your genes may not get very far.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As far as I'm concerned the same thing can be said of religion.
I would say that religion falls firmly into the category of superstition.
However, these guys seem to be using a different definition of superstition than I would: They are saying that superstition is a tendency to link cause and effect where that link is rarely true - the example of the rustling grass is a case where the link is rarely true, but the prehistoric human knows it is _occasionally_ true because she's seen people being eaten by lions after hearing the grass rustle (or has been told about such incidents). To me, this isn't an example of superstition, it is an example of assessing a real risk.
I would describe superstition as a tendency to link cause and effect where there is no evidence that the link is *ever* true - take for example, belief in ghosts, religion, etc.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
IANAHistorian, but I've been given to understand that faith wasn't diminished by the Black Death, and you'd be hard pressed in the centuries that followed to find anyone in Britain who professed anything other than Christian faith. If anything people became more devout during and after the event - as tends to happen during any crisis. Consider that those who survived probably considered their survival a miracle in the first place...
My understanding is that the economic impact of massive devastation to the working population was the real cause of change. Church and State were almost one and the same during that time, and so the church wielded an incredible amount of power over the daily material lives of the commoners. All land was owned either by the church or by nobles who were closely tied to it, and all workers were essentially beholden to the land-owners to earn a living, grow food etc - and the land-owners pretty much dictated the law and punishment too.
When the population suddenly declined (about a third was lost), there were not enough workers to work the land and such. The balance of power shifted - not massively, but perceptibly - towards the workers. The iron grip was relaxed slightly, and this is what caused the increase in rebellion and unrest. Faith had not diminished, but the power to enforce arbitrary rule had.
It wasn't that the events had shaken people's faith and made them dissatisfied - no doubt they always felt that way. It was that the church/state was somewhat less able to repress their will.
Meta will eat itself
Science and Religion cover different aspects of human endeavors. Science didn't make religion obsolete.
Heck, I'm mostly an atheist and I'm not sure why you'd think that. I know someone with a BSc, two MSc's, and a PhD -- he's still a practicing catholic. He just doesn't rely on the bible to explain the structure of the universe (he's a computational astrophysicist). He also doesn't use science to inform his morality and understanding of how we find meaning in all of it.
They really are different disciplines, and they're not as fundamentally incompatible as people around here seem to think.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Well, that's a recent thing though.
E.g., antibiotics exist only since the 1930's. So only since then you have choices like, basically, "do I trust the doctor and take these pills, or do I trust the shaman and take this extract of Aqua Clara?"
If you go back, say, 5 centuries, already the choices were a lot more like:
A. "Do I trust the alchemist and drink the Aqua Vitae, or do I trust the barber-doctor and let him draw a pint of blood, do I trust the priest and pray real hard to God?" All three were wrong, and actually the first two were _worse_. The alchemists only had distilled alcohol as a cure-all placebo, and drawing blood tended to be worse in the vast majority of cases than doing nothing. So blind faith and superstition might actually have been the better choice in a lot of cases.
B. "Do I trust the superstition that storing pots and dishes with the opening downwards repels evil spirits, or am I an enlightened renaissance man and laugh at such superstitions?" Again, actually the superstition had a point. Dust setting into pots was harmful, and even if nobody had seen a microbe, some people did figure out a correlation between how you store your empty pottery and how often you get sick.
Heck, as late as the 19'th century, during the cholera outbreaks, the superstitious folks had better chances of survival. Mortality in the homeopathic hospitals was actually lower than in the proper medical establishment ones. Of course, homeopathy was still bullshit, but the doctors also bled you dry as the only treatment method they knew, while the homeopaths merely gave you harmless water to drink. (Or rather, solutions of something or another, but so dilluted that they were effectively just water.) The homeopathic solution didn't help, while the other actually caused extra harm to someone already dehydrated and weakened.
Likewise, in the 90'th century, some 50% of the women who gave birth with a doctor would die of septicemic shock, whereas among those who trusted a midwife mortality was a _lot_ lower. Some people actually proposed that doctors wash their hands after performing autopsies on corpses, and before operating or helping people give birth, but that was discounted as a ridiculous superstition. Well, what do you know? The superstitious guys killed a lot less patients. There actually were some nasty germs which the rest got off corpses, and just helped transplant them into previously healthy people.
Etc.
And if you go even further back in time, to when the brain evolved to jump to conclusions and make such hasty generalizations from too little data, the choice was even simple. "I tried to go through this thorny bush, and it hurt for a week. Do I (A) generalize and avoid this kind of bush, or (B) think you can't learn anything from a sample of one, and try again with a dozen other bushes like this?" Or like, "I ate that spotty mushroom and threw up my immortal soul, and was sick for a week. Do I (A) hastily generalize that there's something evil about them, and avoid them, or (B) think it was just a statistically insignifficant coincidence, and try again?"
Simply put, option A was the _safer_ one. Sure, it was sometimes wrong. Sometimes it wasn't the bush, it was the patch of poison ivy it was in. Sometimes it wasn't the mushroom, it was simply an illness which happened at the wrong time. But there was no way to know better anyway. Getting some quick empirical cause-effect rules was the best you could do.
Option B wasn't that safe at all. A lot of time trying something harmful again, just to see if you got the cause right, would outright get you killed.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against science or medicine or anything. Sure, _nowadays_ that's a better choice than superstition and empirical generalizations. Very much so. But the interval where we even had that choice at all is infinitesimal, at evolution scales. We had medicine for less than 100 years, the human species alone is 200,000 years old.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
People on the left, instead, welcome everything that conflicts with theirs? Get a grip
Global warming is a cube.
Knock on wood is a psychological tool to put things out of your mind so you don't dwell on them.
Some superstitions are externally based and come from probability and intuition, not really caring if it's deterministic causation, probabilistic causation or purely co-relational. Others serve the purpose of regulating the internal world, controlling perspectives and where the mind is focused. Self administered psychotherapy, so to speak. Covet not thy neighbours wife, or you will dwell in hell, not because you're going to go there later, but because you're dismissing what you have for what you don't have and putting yourself in hell in your own head, that sort of shit.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Okay, so god created the universe - who created God? You say a watch can't appear fully formed, someone just created it - but a god who is even more complex than us can appear fully formed, or is more likely to have 'always existed' than the universe?
Mu, the question is retarded. Have you ever heard a physicist explain that there wasn't any time before the Big Bang? It works like that. God doesn't exist in linear time as we see it, He just sticks his toe in occasionally. Thus, from our perspective He appears to have "always" existed when, in actual fact, time is really a much smaller place than we thought it.
From their point of view they have 'evidence' of their beliefs (mostly based on feelings or circular/incomplete reasoning) and can make up even more stuff to discount the rest.
WAIT are you talking about Atheists?
And one the arguments I hear a lot from Republicans about why the Democrats are so bad is that they spend too much money helping the poor
This might be what you thought you heard, but no Republican actually said it. The argument is that Democrats make too many simple transfer payments to the poor from the wealthy. If we can accept the general truism that giving a man a fish feeds him today but teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime, then Republicans view transfer payments as part 1 and would prefer a system that encourages part 2 and makes part 1 a voluntary only system. There are a LOT of Republicans who donate both time and money to private institutions that help the poor (usually church/faith based organizations) so they are not at all against the idea of giving a fish today, just against using the tax man to involuntarily collect donations and another bloated beauracratic system to dole it.
I think that a lot of Christians have their 'morals' through a fear of punishment
Not just Christians. Fear of God/church has been replaced with fear of Government. Don't believe me? Look at the situation with hurricane Katrina in 2005. Law-enforcement was disabled and people went bat-shit-crazy. People shot at medical helicopters who were trying to rescue people for no reason other than nobody was there to stop them. People looted. Sure, food and beer and such I can understand. But DVDs? Really?
Civilization is extremely fragile. That guy you pass on the street is only refraining from killing you because there would be legal consequences.
Base your morality on reason. There are logical reasons for morality. Most people don't think about it. Ask someone if they think theft is wrong. If they say yes, ask why. Many won't be able to give you a reasonable answer.
by linking cause and effect - often falsely - science is a simply dogmatic form of superstition.
Examples, please? Could someone tell me about the large number of superstitions that are often correct, and the number of scientific claims that are incorrectly stated as fact? The reason superstition survived isn't because it is more likely to be correct. It is because people were scared to death of what would happen if they were wrong.
Science is not dogmatic. Scientists base their opinions on evidence, and change their minds if contradictory evidence arises. In other words, they admit when they are wrong and learn from their mistakes.
"You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant," he says.
To rephrase that, "you have to choose between having a small amount of knowledge, or a large amount of misconceptions". I personally think that being misinformed is a form of ignorance in itself.
By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, "quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often," he says.
So does anybody know if this guy is a creationist? This sounds like the kind of vague generality that would only be made in reference to creationism, or possibly the Atkins diet.
That's harmful to the individuals but beneficial to the species.
Science is a mechanism for filtering superstition out from reality. In fact that's pretty close to a one-sentence summary of what science is for, and what the difference between science and other approaches to understanding the universe are.
What Wolfgang Forstmeier seems to be doing is noticing a tendency for scientists to fail to use the scientific method in situations where they should, and generalizing it to a general case. He's concluding that, since individual scientists may be superstitious, it follows that science is superstition.
This is of course a common superstition about science.
This is an interesting topic. Richard Levi-Strauss was concerned with this as well, and had a similar set of methods for parsing data related to superstition and religion, how they relate, and how we can develop a system for understanding the interrelation of ritual and communicative behaviors which have their roots in emotional/instinctual/superstitious-type responses.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
I haven't succumbed to superstition (knock on wood), nor will I ever (cross fingers)!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
"if a group of lions is coming there's a huge benefit to not being around."
I can has cro-magnon burger?
I remember a novel where a character used Taro. Not because he believed it, but because when you were looking for problems from A and B, the taro deck would pull a card and tell you to look at D
Religious belief is dogma .. unquestionable, unalterable, ineffable. Actions are set in stone until some random religious leader decides that too many people are leaving the church and changes it. Questioning by the masses is forbidden, and if someone presses it they can be kicked out of the church.
Reasoning is continuous examination of evidence as it comes in and adjusting one's actions because of it. There is no grand almighty scientist telling us what we have to do or think. The many scientists that are encouraged to argue with each other and refine their theories. The average person can even contribute to the furthering of scientific theory, there is no 'chosen one'. Unlike religion, discussion and refuting a theory is expected. Very few religions tolerate such discussions.
It is not conceivable to me that a deity exist. It is not necessary to prove one does not exist, lots of things 'don't exist' like the aforementioned Santa Claus, I don't belief there is no Santa Claus ... there is no Santa Claus. There are other things that fall into the 'might exist' category like Sasquatch and scientific principles are brought to bear against any evidence that arises.
Until evidence is brought forth to prove a deity exists, as far as I'm concerned there are none. I don't 'believe' there isn't a god, I don't have to because there is no reason to believe there is one.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
What a crock of bullshit. An atheists doesn't hypothesis about the non-existence of something, that is just an ignorant statement offered up by religious people trying to elevate their non-scientific methods of establishing religion to a credible level instead of the dogma and circular logic it really is.
There is no need to believe something exists if there is no evidence that it exists. The only reason religion exists at all is because people are unwilling to admit they are ignorant and don't know everything, such as where did we come from, how did that tree get there, how is it possible something like the human body could come about by random changes. True, science does the same thing, but science at attempts to truly explain something rather than just offer 'Oh .. I don't know. It must be because god wanted it that way. Now stopping asking such question.'
Religion provides fairy tale answers to those insecurities. Nothing more. They provide no true moral compass, since it appears all religious tomes are vague and subject to interpretation by whatever person needs to twist it to their current purpose, including the pope. Those all mighty deities have a terrible communication plan. Even the 10 commandments are vague and have been twisted and changed throughout history to suit whoever has an agenda.
Religion also provides a means for a central group to force a larger group to behave according to what they think is right. 'Don't have sex with your sister because you will go to hell' is easier to explain than 'Don't have sex with your sister because the risk of genetic mutation is greater'. 'Don't have butt sex because it's evil' is easier to explain than 'Ummm...that's an outie. Bad things will happen to it if you use it that way too many times and it increases the chance for transmitting diseases'. 'Don't steal because you will rot in hell' rather than 'If we all steal we fall into a state of anarchy and progress is forever halted'.
It's time for atheists to stop being polite and to start denouncing religion for what it is .. delusional behavior and petty superstition. It's time to let everyone know that they don't have to accept the dogma of the church, they can live their own lives perfectly well, with purpose and morals of their own choosing rather than from some reclusive group in Italy who never has sex or kids (talk about out of touch...), and without all the BS and tithing and wasted Sundays. Or Saturday. Or all that bending and praying all day.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.