This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Creating Cognitive Dissonance, How To Reason, New To CCD?, Religion In The News, Science in the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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October 4, 2009 at 7:45 pm |
Hi Ben,
The Newsweek commentary was interesting. For those interested in reading the full text of the article, it’s available free online at:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007272
Ben, do you think that this study supports atheism? Because to me, if anything, it tends to undermine atheistic arguments. I’d be interested to hear your perspective.
I think there are a few interesting points worth noting about this study:
1. From the little that I have read of him (I would be happy to be corrected), it seems to me that Harris draws a sharp contrast between the “rational, scientific facts of atheism” and the “irrational beliefs of theists”. In fact, the title of this blog post seems to draw a similar distinction between “facts” and “beliefs”. For instance, consider this Harris quote from his essay on Collins:
“While Collins argues for the rational basis of his faith, passages like this make it clear that he “decided” (his word) to believe in God for emotional reasons.”
It seems to me that Harris’ current study undermines this argument. Harris and his coauthors find that the atheistic beliefs of atheists and the Christian beliefs of Christians are neurologically equivalent. Consider the following quote from the paper:
“the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent”; that is, a Christian who believes that “God exists” and an atheist who believes that “God does not exist” believe using exactly the same parts of the brain. The data tell us that it is not a matter of an “emotional belief in God” versus a “rational belief in atheism”, at least from a neurological perspective. Certainly, the rationality of the arguments are still open to examination. But neurologically, it would appear that the same apparatuses are involved in the formation of these beliefs.
2. If you read Harris’ previous 2007 paper (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/117858891/PDFSTART) he concludes that “the final acceptance of a statement as ‘true’ or ‘false’ appears to rely on more primitive, hedonic [i.e. pleasure related] processing”. In other words, this previous paper he suggests that all people believe partially because they find pleasure in the belief. It seems clear that this current paper was motivated by a desire to ascertain whether belief or disbelief in Christians functioned differently than belief or disbelief in atheists. Given that motivation, consider what Harris would have concluded if he HAD observed that religious belief was content-dependent. For instance, imagine that the statement “God exists” had correlated with activity in the emotional centers of the brain in Christians while the statement “God does not exist” correlated with activity in the frontal cortex in atheists. I think he would have drawn the conclusion that religious faith is emotional and irrational. The fact that he does NOT find any difference between atheistic and Christian belief is therefore revealing.
3. Obviously, this study (or any study of this kind) does nothing to validate or to invalidate the veracity of various Christian or atheistic truth claims. To affirm that both Christians and atheists believe their religious beliefs to be objectively true says nothing about whether the beliefs themselves are actually true. I can believe true facts for very poor reasons, and yet the facts themselves can still be true. And I can have what seem to me to be very compelling and rational reasons for my belief (say in Newtonian mechanics), and this belief can still in the end prove to be false.
4. I know of no evangelical Christian who would claim that a belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ should be placed in a different category than what Harris refers to as “tables and chairs”. In fact, it is precisely this error that Christian apologists are always trying to defend against. The Resurrection is good news only if it is TRUE, meaning that Jesus really did actually, phyically, objectively rise from the dead. This has been the message of Christianity since ~33 AD (see 1 Cor 15) and continues to be the message of Christians today. It is therefore not surprising that Christians would believe that the Resurrection is objective truth (i.e. “I had Corn Pops this morning”) rather than subjective opinion (i.e. “Corn Pops are the best cereal on the market”). The Resurrection can still be rejected as objectively false or accepted as objectively true, but it must at least be placed into the correct category.
5. I think the Bible and human experience actually affirm Harris’ conclusion in his 2007 paper: that we believe things not only because they are rational but also because we want them to be true. The real surprise of the current paper is that the emotional aspect of belief is true for both Christians AND atheists. I certainly have an emotional investment in Christianity since I am living my life trusting in Jesus Christ and his forgiveness. Similarly, as I have mentioned before, the Bible says (see Romans, Chapter 1) that our atheism is not primarily due to lack of evidence, but due to desire: we do not want God to exist, and therefore we believe that he does not exist. Because we do not want God to exist, we will surpress or ignore any data that point us towards God. Interestingly, repentence can be viewed in similar terms (see Luke 15). It is a “change of mind” about God; not only about the intellectual proposition that He exists, but out attitude towards His existence. When we repent, we come not only to see that God exists, but that God is good. He becomes not only real (which He is) but also beautiful to us (which He is!). As a result, I think repentence will always involve both intellectual assent and emotional response.
-Neil
October 16, 2009 at 9:12 pm |
With the existence of ‘Techie Worlds’ (available at amazon.com) believers in Christianity can hold their views utilizing sound logic, clear thinking and a mechanistic view of worlds. Applying Flatland’s concept of contiguous dimensional worlds, Trinity, Resurrection, Judgment and soul are sensible and mechanically viable beliefs. ‘Techie Worlds’ follows that rule of science by which individual details are tested for their conformity to the overarching hypothesis. Admittedly, agnostics may choose not to follow such obvious and sensible logic, but no longer can they denigrate believers for fuzzy thinking. Moslems and pagans who read and understand the sound logic of the Flatland concept must adopt the reasonable Trinitarian view. ‘Techie Worlds’ will make them abandon the ways of terror an adopt the way of love.
GeorgeRic