I love this quote from Valerie Tarico in her chapter “God’s Emotions” in John Loftus’ book The End of Christianity.
To say that the descriptions of God in the Bible are metaphors does not make the situation any better. A metaphor about something as deep as the human relationship to ultimate reality needs to be deeply accurate.
Category Psychology
Metaphysical thought processes are more deeply wired than hitherto suspected
WHILE MILITANT ATHEISTS like Richard Dawkins may be convinced God doesn’t exist, God, if he is around, may be amused to find that atheists might not exist.
Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged.
Over at another post of mine, we have been discussing whether religion can and should be destroyed. During that conversation, the idea came up that Christians, in all probability, hold more ridiculous beliefs which are unscientific in nature; and also arose the connected idea that Christians, in a generalistic sense, are not as good at doing science, because they have a higher propensity to give up searching for answers.
When the scientific method is used badly, when preconceptions are allowed to dictate analyses and conclusions, then you get bad science, and false knowledge. Untruths. In this vein, the work of Dr Caleb Lack and Dr Charles Abramson is well worth looking in to.
“I’m not a racist, I’ve got coloured neighbors and they’re fantastic neighbors” – An interviewed UKIP voter on the BBC.
Local elections have just taken place in the UK for a proportion of local councils where the electorate can decide which councillors will represent their interests in local wards by winning seats on their local council. UKIP (the UK Independence Party), essentially a break-away faction of the Conservative Party, the right wing mainstream party of the UK, originally set up to take the UK out of membership of the EU, made massive gains.
I really enjoyed being a guest on the Skeptic Canary Show podcast where we covered lots of issues and philosophy,…
This is really interesting, and whilst it doesn’t prove anything particularly in and of itself, it does hint at a connection between more ‘out there’ irrational beliefs and free will, which, in my opinion, is equally irrational.
This article is taken from the excellent podcast Reasonable Doubts which itself borrows from source material and commentary from Tom Rees’ superb…
Some fellow tippling philosophers and myself are having an email exchange about psychology. It started with one of us writing an email lauding Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast and Slow (the bold is where he is quoting someone else).
In reading Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, which has been a slow burner (both in terms of time taken to read it and time taken to get into the really interesting stuff [Now long finished]), I have just started to read about the importance and ontology of emotions. I
Dr Caleb W. Lack, purveyor of the fine opinions and science over at Great Plains Skeptic here at SIN, already has two Onus Books publications:
Mood Disorders: An Introduction
Anxiety Disorders: An Introduction
These great little introductory texts illuminate the latest understandings on these conditions. Look out for one on OCD to come. Further to such contributions to the Onus Books portfolio, he is, with a fellow psychologist, producing a text called “Psychology Gone Astray: A Selection of Racist & Sexist Literature from Early Psychological Research”. Here is a post from his blog to describe the project. In reading the MS to edit it, I am finding much of interest in this early, pseudoscientific era of the discipline:
I am hoping to have Ed Babinski writing the foreword to Beyond an Absence of Faith, an anthology of deconversion accounts. In a private email, Ed wrote this gem:
…it’s sad that many people either avoid reading books based on views they oppose, or they read them and STILL manage to slough off all the questions raised. The mind is a marvelously creative artist when it comes to finding ways to maintain whatever worldview it acquires rather than juggling and shifting between different worldviews all day long, which takes too much mental energy.
So I have a question. I will detail the following research. For ‘free will’ to be true, it has to explain the following. Or more accurately, the following has to be fully explicable within the free will hypothesis. How does it do that?
Morality is not just something that people learn, argues Yale psychologist Paul Bloom: It is something we are all born with. At birth, babies are endowed with compassion, with empathy, with the beginnings of a sense of fairness. It is from these beginnings, he argues in his new book Just Babies, that adults develop their sense of right and wrong, their desire to do good — and, at times, their capacity to do terrible things. Bloom answered questions recently from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
Post hoc rationalisation is what most of us end up doing when we reason. We have a gut instinct, a potentially irrational or a-rational decision based on the underlying cognitive faculties connected to our whole personhood, physical reactions and gut instincts.
I am presently reading an absolutely superb book by David Eagleman called Incognito:
The book is a popular foray into psychology and neuroscience and synthesises a host of different studies into things brain. I wanted to just bring up a few fascinating studies which cast doubt upon the idea that we have fully fledged, or even remotely authored, conscious free will. It even talks about chicken sexers, which is nice. Rather than produce notes, I have tried to directly link the claims.
Tomas Rees runs a really interesting blog called [epiphenom] the science of belief and non-belief. Well worth visiting. This article reminded me of an earlier article of mine linking autistic people with a lack of belief. If you are an instinctive thinker, it seems, you are more likely to believe in God:
Late last year some fascinating research revealed that people who take a more deliberative approach to problem solving – rather than just going with their instincts – are also less religious.
If you are interested in psychology, then you might be interested in getting hold of a couple of introductory texts…
The longer I have been pursuing philosophy, the more liberal I have become and the less nationalistic. By this i/ mean that I have recognised that my nationality if a mixture of several components over which I have no control:
The best music festival in the world, Glastonbury, is on and the sun is shining. The BBC are showing highlights, and their website is well geared to showing the best of what the festival has to offer. Perhaps overseas viewers may not be able to see it due to licensing laws, I don’t know.