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Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief
Freshly Exhumed writes "A new University of British Columbia study finds that analytic thinking can decrease religious belief, even in devout believers. The study, which will appear in tomorrow's issue of Science (abstract), finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious belief."
Then would the religious folks all go to hell?
"all liars"
lol
"those come down to moral issues, informed by my faith" - does that include stoning people death for various reasons, genocide, homophobia etc? If not, why not?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Actually the article seemed rational and logical to me, and I'm a Christian.
Surely though, to me it seems a little more rational than the idea of a loving, all powerful patriarchal father figure who drowned all his children. A deity who unforgivably and eternally punishes his own creations for thought crimes; A God who frequently refers to himself in the first person plural, who felt the need to be nailed to a board so he could sacrifice himself to himself for an inherited original sin from a story mostly regarded as metaphorical.
Don't. If you deeply analyse you'll soon come to the point that the evidence for science is exactly the same as evidence for God : some book's claims. Science's claims are grand and utterly unverifiable by anyone who doesn't have millions to throw at it, once you go beyond Newton's claims.
And even that only applies as long as you stay within physics. When it comes to to chemistry, it's worse than in physics. Still pretty good evidence, but it doesn't go nearly as far as advertised. Beyond trivial chemistry, when it actually comes to more than a few dozen atoms in a molecule, all formulas fail because all datacenters in the world couldn't calculate what happens without making wrong assumptions, and experiments are essentially impossible because of outrageous purity requirements completely out of our reach for non-trivial molecules. The only exception to that is huge biological molecules, which can usually be acquired in large quantities and pure state, though not without large funding. Even if chemistry is more easy to verify than physics. But chemistry mostly works.
The sciences beyond those exact sciences are full of serious screwups that they simply accept for lack of better options. Medicine, for example, is at best -badly- statistically verified. And frankly, how exactly do atheists explain away the elephant of elephants in the room ? The placebo effect ? I'm not talking about whether or not it exists, but what CAUSES it ? If you don't have a biological (or better, chemical or physical) explanation for such a massive number of healed patients, ... how accurate are you prepared to bet your science is ? It doesn't matter, for lack of alternatives, but ...
The humanities, like the paper talked about here, are much worse. Many theorems exist despite boatloads of contradicting data, or because of massively limited scope. Today's publications are full of papers claiming how people are naturally tolerant of differences, despite the fact that we have 5000 years of history and 80% of the worlds population contradicting it. And when there is strong proof for something, it is often rejected on political grounds. For example, it is obvious from experiment that violent video games do make people (a little) more violent. Note I'm not saying you turn into a murderer when playing quake, far from it. But after the game, you will be more aggressive in your responses to others, or so dozens of studies say, some measuring the effect over decades. As if that wasn't bad enough, the humanities are filled with studies that are known to be fabrications (but not known at the time of publication). This started with the soviet union and their thousands of "people living under socialists are hte only happy people anywhere" papers, but has only increased with time.
Besides, where does science actually disagree with the bible ? The bible is used as an accurate historical source for tons of historical events.