Monday, 24 February 2014
A tale of two ways of thinking...
In 2012, an international team of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss/French border announced they had demonstrated the existence of the elusive Higgs Boson. This was a monumental effort. It took more than 10,000 scientists ten years to build the LHC and a further four years to reveal the Higgs Boson.
The LHC cost more than $4bn. It is the most complex machine ever built. It creates and accelerates beams of protons around a 27Km ring to within 0.000000009% of the speed of light. To process the vast quantities of data produced as trillions of protons collide each day, the LHC has a network of 100,000 linked computers around the world. The LHC collects and processes data equivalent to the entire Google databank every three days.
Despite this gargantuan effort, the team and LHC are not CERTAIN they have found the Higgs Boson. Their data suggests a 4.9 sigma level of confidence—the chance that they are wrong is one in 2 million.
Meanwhile in a windowless meeting room at an office in Columbia Street, Seattle, five men and two women are discussing a 2 million-year-old fossil hominid found in South Africa. Australopithecus sediba is a candidate for the last link between australopithecines and our genus Homo.
The people at this meeting are endowed with a certainty the scientists at the LHC lack. They are 100% CERTAIN the truth is to be found in a book written between 2 - 3 thousand years ago by people who lacked scientific instruments, who knew nothing about the size of the universe and nothing about the composition of matter. They did not even know the shape of the Earth. Their most advanced technological achievement was a bronze sword.
But they had something possibly more important—they believed they were the chosen people of a god who created the entire universe and all life-forms in just six days.
A tall man with a shock of brown hair picked up a marker pen and turned to the whiteboard, “Ok, let’s get down to business. How do we discredit australopithecus sediba?”
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Nildogma, the blogga
About Me
- Nildogma
- As a 20-year-old I was insatiably curious about the world and passionate about rejecting superstitions and all kinds of false beliefs. I still am today. Sometimes when people believe things that are not true, it make little or no difference but sometimes the consequences can be disastrous and deadly. Now, I do what I can to help people improve their thinking skills, especially in how they impinge on core beliefs, such as cultural values and religious beliefs. I have an active Facebook page for which I create memes and write articles almost daily. I also engage people in on-line debates. You can find me here: https://www.facebook.com/bill.flavell.1 I lecture at universities around the world and present or debate at public meetings. I also, draw on my management consultancy background to help freethought groups, almost anywhere in the world, to get organised, develop strategy and improve their media and presentation skills. If you would like me to present at your university or for your church group or freethought group, please contact me.
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Have a christian scientist friend who is an intelligent design proponent (figures!). He actually believes this stuff! And he is a really knowledgeable guy too! it baffles me! (am exclaming too much, aren't i?)
ReplyDeleteThere is an inverse relationship between IQ and religiosity and between educational attainment and religiosity. Put simply, the smarter you are, the less likely you will be religious. But it is a rather weak relationship so there are plenty of people who are very bright and religious and even very bright and fundamentalist.
ReplyDeleteHow can this be when there is no validated evidence that any gods exist?
It's actually not hard to explain how this happens. We all have some things we just KNOW are true. We all know that jumping out of a high window would be harmful. Most of us know that we should not harm babies and so on.
There is a long list of similar things we just know are true but we don't all share the same lists (our culture makes our lists similar but not identical). Some people feel they just know God exists. Such people often use their intellect to rationalise this "knowledge" (smarter people are actually better at this than less smart people).
What happens when such people find a lack of evidence or even contradictions? They may rationalise that evidence is there but just waiting to be discovered and one day it will be discovered. Or, they may think contradictions are just a consequence of imperfect understanding and the apparent contradictions will go away when things are better understood.
If you just KNOW God exists, all the evidential and logical problems you encounter are just that--problems waiting to be solved.
Of course, you and I would argue that you can't just KNOW that God exists. The existence of God should be a conclusion--not an axiom. If you can convince a smart person this is true, you MAY be able to convince her that belief in God is unwarranted. If you can't--you might as well give up.