belief » Heaving Dead Cats

People Trust Peers, Not Science

This is depressing, but not surprising, I guess. Three psychological studies have come out recently all saying about the same thing. People trust their peers and tend to distrust authority (the government) and scientific information.

I heard about this on The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, episode 254, from May 26th. If you want to listen to Dr. Steven Novella talk about the three studies, start around the 23:30 minute mark. This segment goes to about 35:20, but the whole episode is good, of course.

The attitudes of parents toward the MMR vaccine and autism: The study concluded that parents had a significant bias toward believing information that they heard from other parents. The parents were mostly affected by their peers, and did not seem to be affected at all by what the scientific evidence said, and they seemed to inherently distrust information that came from the government. Not a surprising result.

Raising a general level of scientific literacy would be the best thing we could do to help this mess we’re in. My fear is that people are so anti-science and anti-intelligence these days that I don’t know how we could go about it, that people aren’t interested in learning anything that goes against their narrow world views. Another thing we could do (as recommended by Steven) is to change regulation so that it’s rational and evidence-based, not based on public opinion. Read the rest of this entry »

What Level Of Woo Would Make Someone Undateable?

Here is a question for you. What level of woo would make someone undateable? What about unfriendable? Do you have a limit that you’ve drawn in your life or do you have a lot of woo woo people around you that you interact with? How do you get on with them? Do you find it difficult? Do you argue with them or are you silent about your woo disbelief?

Woo can be defined as anything supernatural, irrational or lacking in evidence. So it would include religion and any kind of pseudoscience.

On a side note, is there anything that could be defined as woo that you still believe in? If so, why?

For me, I’ve somehow whittled down my friend list from all woo-lovers to all skeptical atheists. I didn’t do this deliberately, but I guess with my skeptical talk and constant questioning (not aggressively, but I really did question all the woo I previously embraced), my woo-loving friends all went their separate ways and avoided me within months of when my quest for knowledge began.

I didn’t have many friends for awhile but then found the Morgantown Atheists where I found several people that have become good friends. Also, having HDC has let me meet new people who were rather like-minded as well.

With extended family, I still have to deal with woo, both religious and supernatural. They know Butch (my awesome husband) and I are die-hard atheists so we have come to an unspoken agreement that we don’t talk about religion. Or politics just to be safe and have nice dinners together.

I think I’m lucky in most respects. My skeptical atheist friends keep things lively by being smart and reason-based (most of the time, we’re not perfect, of course). And my extended family gives me an occasional glimpse into woo-land so I get to see what the majority of people are dealing with and believing. It’s enough.

Read the rest of this entry »

An Alternative to the Santa Lie For Secular Parents

I know it’s Spring and no one wants to be thinking of christmas this time of year, but my friend Joe sent me a paper called Ho, Ho, Hoax: The Case against Santa Claus by Ernâni Magalhães, Visiting Assistant Professor at WVU. It makes some excellent points which really got me thinking.

Before I read this paper, I thought Dale McGowan‘s take on Santa to be the best way to handle it. In a nutshell, he says Santa is a dry run for letting kids reason their way through the fact that Santa is a myth, to then figuring out that religion is mythical, as he puts it, Santa is “the ultimate dry run for a developing inquiring mind”. It makes sense in a way. But then my friend Joe told me about his experience as a kid.

Joe really believed in Santa, the Easter Bunny, etc. Then one day a kid in the playground told him it was all a pack of lies. Joe believed him and went home crying. He was devastated. When Joe and I talked about the McGowan philosophy of Santa, I figured out that in theory it seems like a great idea, but maybe in practice it could backfire and cause a lot of unhappiness and pain for kids who don’t get to reason it out for themselves but are told by other children.

And is it necessary to lie to children about a mythical jolly old fat man? Does it increase their happiness, improve their moral fiber? Does it make them better little people, or better adults down the line? And is there an alternative to lying about Santa?

First, there are 3 alternatives, according to Ernâni:

Disbelief: The parent tells the child Santa Claus is not real
Neutrality: The parent does not inform the child one way or the other
Pretense: The parent invites the child to pretend there is a Santa Claus.(page 13)

…inviting to pretend there is a Santa Claus is morally superior to encouraging to believe. (14)

I never thought of this as an option, but it makes sense. You get all the good fun of Santa but you don’t get the lies and beliefs in those lies.

What about short term pleasure and pain? Here is what Ernâni has to say:

The extent to which the pleasure of children and adults justifies the Santa Claus lie depends on the amount of pleasure available from non-deceitful alternatives. The alternative that most closely replicates telling children there is a Santa Claus involves inviting children to pretend there is one. Although pretending something is real is fundamentally different from believing it is, as I have argued, many of the emotions evoked by an object believed to be real are also evoked by objects supposed to be fictional. Children and adults derive great pleasure from creatures of their imaginations, as witnessed by the large crowds at movie theaters. Children who are old enough to know she is fictional still derive great enjoyment from the pretense that Cinderella is a real person with real hopes. And, it is easy to replicate the gift-giving aspect of the Santa experience, which is surely a significant factor in the child’s enjoyment. (15-16)

Interesting and thought-provoking, don’t you think? This is even more important: Read the rest of this entry »

Jerusalem is Populating a Biblical Zoo

And I said, WTF? Then I remembered, people in Jerusalem are there because they believe its the promised land, given by God to the Jews. They are just as nutty as the christians, the muslims and all the other religions.

So these zookeepers over in Jerusalem are trying to sort of reconstruct the animals from the bible (old testament, of course) in Israel. They aren’t trying to repopulate the area with the biblical predators like bears, but they are trying to bring back vultures, even though Levitucus 11:13 called them detestable. Which makes me wonder why they’d want to nurture and breed them. And why cherry-pick certain animals but not the rest from the bible? But why try to get logical now?

Almost 100 animals were mentioned in the bible, according to the fluffy, credulous HuffPo article where I found this ridiculous story, so of course, I am quite skeptical. I guess that’s how Noah was able to get them all on the ark, then. He only had 100 or so to deal with, not the millions found in the world today.

There are nearly 100 different types of animals mentioned in the Bible, many of them key players in well-known stories: the lions in Daniel’s den; the dove that scouted for dry land from Noah’s ark; the ram that was sacrificed by Abraham to save the life of his son, Isaac.

Today, many of them are gone, hunted to the point of extinction or driven away by ongoing conflict. Of the 10 animals that are listed as acceptable dinner fare in Deuteronomy 14 — ox, sheep, goat, deer, gazelle, roe deer, wild goat, ibex, antelope and mountain sheep — only two (the gazelle and the ibex) could still be found in the historical boundaries of Israel in 1960. …

“… I want to keep the vultures because they were mentioned in the Bible that it was a common animal and that’s good enough for me.” Read the rest of this entry »

What Would It Take To Make Me Believe In God?

So what would it take for me, a 7th degree black belt atheist, to believe in God? I’ve been thinking about this lately. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

1. God would have to personally reveal himself to me and correctly answer every question I throw at him.

2. God would have to reveal himself to every person on Earth at the same time, in a way that doesn’t make us all think we are suffering from some type of mass psychosis or delusion. Otherwise I might think I was just hallucinating.

3. God would have to demonstrate his power. He’d have to cure me and bring me to total health and fitness, end all suffering in the world instantly (after proclaiming to everyone that he would do so), end all wars, etc.

4. He would have to demonstrate his superior intelligence, and have an answer to every question that we have. He would have to have good answers for all of his stupid past behavior.

5. He would have to predict the future, in rigorous scientific experiments, with 100% accuracy.

6. He would have to bend the laws of physics and the natural world, but only in rigorous scientific experiments.

As you can see, I still won’t have blind faith. I would require testable, repeatable evidence in massive quantities to believe. In this sense, I wouldn’t “believe” so much as accept the evidence that would be available.

Now, if I believed in him, would I worship him? That’s a separate issue. I don’t think so, not the god of the bible. He’s a hateful, childish, vengeful, jealous, petty god with anger issues. I think I’d say thanks but no thanks. I require more godliness and love to actually worship anything. I also require a god that actually does good and not harm.

So what are your thoughts? I know my list isn’t complete. What else would you require to believe in God? And if you believed in him, what would it take for you to worship him?

The Secret Is Still Bullshit

The Secret, which is all about the Law of Attraction (not a real law, or even real), is still bullshit. But Elizabeth found a great video from Australia that will make you laugh. It explains how The Secret works. It’s about 7 minutes long:

Notice how in the demo clips it’s always about some materialistic thing like a bike or a necklace? How shallow and self-serving! Why don’t all believers in this stupid lie wish for world peace or clean drinking water for everyone? Or everyone to be disease free? Instead they have to have a new Shiny. Pathetic!

Oh, and see the waves of rays coming out of the peoples’ heads? That doesn’t happen. That’s a special effect. So when you wish for something your thoughts don’t actually leave your head. Just in case you were wondering. Don’t believe me? Ask a neuroscientist. They have proof your thoughts don’t leave your head by magic (they only leave your head when you speak, write something down or perform an action based on those thoughts)

Oh OH! And when you ask for something, then believe it’s already yours, there’s no invisible man in the sky that says to you, “Your wish is my command.” You know that, right? The Universe doesn’t have a log of every time you wish for that new Ferrari. It doesn’t wait for the wish requests to reach 1,000 before it has it shipped to you. (Don’t move your house because it will get delivered to your old address! LOL!)

Logical Fallacy 11: God of the Gaps in Science and Faith

“I can’t understand this so God did it.”

I like what Iron Chariots says about this argument: It is a form of non sequitur, since the hand of God is posited without proof and often with complete disregard to other possible explanations. In a nutshell, this is an argument from ignorance. But ignorance is never an argument for something. It just means we don’t yet know the cause of something.

This is Part 11 in a series about Logical Fallacies. We are going through one fallacy at a time. There are many types of fallacious arguments. I’m going to try to explain them with examples then find ways to help you refute those arguments when they occur. Please comment or email if there’s a particular fallacy you want me to tackle, or if you have success with refuting an argument using a good technique you can share.

I want to share this video of a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson from 2006 is about 38 minutes long. He talks about the god of the gaps throughout scientific history, intelligent design and then about Stupid Design. Highly recommended watching:

Read the rest of this entry »

What Level Of Woo Would Make Someone Undateable?

An Alternative to the Santa Lie For Secular Parents

Jerusalem is Populating a Biblical Zoo

What Would It Take To Make Me Believe In God?

The Secret Is Still Bullshit

Logical Fallacy 11: God of the Gaps in Science and Faith

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