Highlights from Gallup News:
-38% say God created man in present form, lowest in 35 years
-Same percentage say humans evolved, but God guided the process
-Less-educated Americans more likely to believe in creationism
Higher education levels are associated with less support for creationism and higher levels of belief in the evolutionary explanation for human origins.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-humans-new-low.aspx
1. Is your belief that creationists represent a higher degree of gullibility than non-creationists backed up by any data?
2. Assuming you can provide data to support that contention, why is fewer gullible people a good thing?
Because, in my experience, when people have information that does not correspond to reality, they make decisions that get themselves and others in trouble.
It should be easy to see why with an admittedly very extreme hypothetical example: Suppose you were to cross the street, and you had a deeply held personal faith that the street was empty so you don’t even bother to look in either direction. Chances are you might step into traffic and get yourself killed, or cause a driver to swerve to avoid hitting you, in turn causing this driver entirely by accident to drive into oncoming traffic.
The general principle is that, the further your beliefs about reality are from how reality is, the more likely it is that you make bad decisions that get yourself and people around you hurt.
A scientists generally values the truth, and regards falsehoods as correctable error. But I suppose one could argue that belief in something (however imaginary) that makes a person more socialized (not harming others, etc.) is OK — so long as that belief doesn’t require those who hold it to cram it down the throats of those who do not.
What sort of data would satisfy you? Simple logic says that people who fall for nonsense are gullible.
Good question. If you are a Republican, you know in your bones that the more gullible people, the more votes you will get.
Rumraket, to WJM:
I find it amusing, though altogether unsurprising, that William needs to have this explained to him.
Acartia; I am no kind of creationist; and I’m a disbeliever. But I do believe in objective morality; tho’ obviously not predicated on any deities’ “commands” or theological doctrines.
Flying priests? Only with the assistance of an airplane.
KF and I used to go ‘round and ‘round about objective morality, back before the banned me. I may be gullible, but I think a case can be made …
sean s.
1. Do you hold that no true beliefs can result in an increased chance getting yourself and others hurt?
2. Do you hold that no false beliefs can result in a decreased chance of getting yourself and others hurt?
3. Can you provide any scientific data whatsoever to support your view that “harm” of self and others increases with false beliefs?
Yes, they believe in creationism. Did you miss that?
They are less likely to make decisions that harm themselves or others.
Glen Davidson
Are the beliefs of creationists backed up by as much data (facts) as non-creationists? No. Therefore, they are more gullible.
“A gullible person believes anything, but a sensible person watches his step. … Gullible people are gifted with stupidity, but sensible people are crowned with knowledge.” Proverbs 14:15 and 18
Can you do anything but ask stupid questions?
Like, can you show that believing in idiotic claims like ID helps anybody other than the people fooling the gulls?
Glen Davidson
It appears you have claimed or implied the following:
1. Creationists are, as a group, “more gullible” than other groups
2. Gullibility leads to more harm for self and others
Is there any data or resources to support those claims?
I’ll take that to mean that you have no answers to those questions. Thanks!
Hmm. It appears that several people her believe things they have no empirical support for, nor can they answer fairly straightforward answers about, pertaining to the logic of their positions.
Does anyone want to make a real attempt to answer the questions and/or provide the data to support the claims being made? Or are we just going to head straight into the ad hominem?
Asked and answered.
Logic supports those conclusions, as does (not ironically) your Scripture.
sean s.
Of course not. It doesn’t have to be always the case, in order to be more often than not the case. It doesn’t even have to be the case more often than not, in order for it to still cause significant suffering of humans and animals.
Yes. There are so many examples I barely know where to even begin.
To just pick a big one: Smoking. It was believed for a very long time, in large part because tobacco companies engaged in a systematic effort of misinformation, that there was no connection between smoking and lung-cancer (and other smoking related health issues). Because of this systematic effort to mislead, people for a long time believed that such a connection did not exist. They had a false belief. Millions of people have died in debilitating agony in part because they kept smoking for a long time, when the truth could have caused them to stop smoking and significantly increased their chances of not contracting smoking related cancers and many other smoking related health issues.
There are many such examples in the history of medicine, health, nutrition and so on.
Rumraket,
George Washington died because he was bled in the false belief that it would cure him. He was not the only one.
sean s.
.
No, that's incompetent reading and/or projection (like thinking I was implying something beyond what I wrote). You asked if there were any data that would indicate that they were more gullible, and I mentioned the fact that they're creationists. Not much data, but certainly some.
Didn’t say that, I was discussing the types of decisions made. Of course they might not be harmed as much as others if they’re simply sheeple, but they’re not as likely to make decisions on their own that aren’t harmeful
Yes, I already told you the evidence for the one. And I’m not out to try to provide evidence for your hackneyed misrepresentation.
Glen Davidson
Wow, what a stupid claim.
Glen Davidson
The history of medicine is filled with fatal false beliefs. A really REALLY good source is this series by Julius Comroe from the 1970s.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1203837
sean s.
sean samis:
If you do an OP, I guarantee you’ll get responses. It’s one of the most popular topics at TSZ.
Just be careful not to smuggle a subjective premise into your argument, like assuming that human flourishing is the basis for an objective morality.
Probably ad hominem, because an honest and decent person wouldn’t be asking for evidence for what is known.
We don’t have to provide evidence that stupidity like Murray’s is more harmful than honest inquiry, for instance. Murray’s like a retarded four-year old asking “why?” about everything, while intelligent discussion moves beyond his hideous attempts at distraction.
Glen Davidson
keiths,
I might if I can find the time. Which might be months.
Human flourishing is not the basis of any kind of objective morality. Been there, done that.
sean s.
sean,
It doesn’t have to be fancy. You could even just quote one of your UD comments in the OP to get discussion started.
Asked and answered and ignored. No ad hominem required.
Logic supports those conclusions, as does (not ironically) your Scripture.
sean s.
keiths,
Understood. I’ve archived all that; I’d need to go find it. Something to look into this weekend maybe, unless mia famiglia has dibbed all my time.
; )
sean s.
sean, to William:
William is not a Christian (or Jew, or Muslim).
Yeah ironically, if a particular literalist interpretation of Christian scripture is correct, then people who believe that God does not exist, or that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead to forgive our sins, are likely to roast in hell for an eternity. So that would be another false belief that had the potential to cause great harm.
I don’t see how this idea that having false beliefs is likely to cause great harm can even be a point worthy of debate or pushback in any other sense than out of purely abstract philosophical interest.
Then let him say so.
Or do we need to wait for the cock to crow three times?
sean s.
Because it is easier to sell propaganda… materialistic first…
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said: ” You can sell anything to people, you just have to know how…”
If you don’t know why something happens, follow the money, then ideology driven control…
Why ever not? Why wouldn’t human flourishing be the basis of objective morality? What are you assuming about the concept of objective morality — and esp the idea of objectivity — in order for this to be true?
I don’t know, it really depends on context.
Religion with its false (at best not backed by proper evidence) beliefs can almost certainly be good for the individual, especially for some individuals who need some structure, order, and social support. But it’s one thing to make claims that are basically beyond testing and another to make claims that are quite counter to the facts. Even then one might say that if the person is simply agreeing with the community, with no strong anti-science, anti-empirical, stance (and with little knowledge about what’s at stake, as with most creationists), it’s not necessarily too likely to cause harm. On the other hand, the virulent demonizing stance of the ID/creationist proponent is likely to harm people’s ability to think through matters rationally and according to the evidence, as we see with the crank magnetism rampant at UD and, say, Phillip Johnson’s HIV denialism.
What we can probably say is harmful to IDists/creationists is the tendency to get gullible people to believe in “authorities” that are little more than charlatans, in fact, while disbelieving the “authorities” that actually have the expertise that should afford them credibility. Hence crank magnetism, people believing in chemtrails, conspiratorial thinking in general, and people falling for “creation diets” or some such rot.
I won’t even say that it’s overall harmful for some people to be creationists rather than to lack community and certain rules that they need. On the other hand, such things are possible without denial of science, and the latter is almost certainly bad in nearly every context, so long as other conditions remain the same without the science denial.
Glen Davidson
I don’t have any scripture, sean, and no one has supplied any data or answered my follow-up questions.
keiths:
sean samis:
He’s said so many times, and his history of commenting here gives no indication that he’s lying about that.
1. In the case you mention, was George Washington “gullible” for believing that being bled would help cure him?
2. Are all false beliefs due to “gullibility”?
sean, KN,
I’ve started a new thread to host the discussion of objective morality.
It’s a pretty simple logical examination.
Some have claimed that the reason that belief in creationism is bad is because either holding false beliefs, or being gullible, (the two are not the same) can lead one to make more harmful decisions than others. So, we have to draw a distinction between just holding false beliefs and gullibility, because in most cultures througout history “everyone knows” things that we find out later are simply not true. Certain medical practices, for example.
So, what do we have to make the distinction between what “everyone knows” in a culture, which might itself be a harmful false belief, and what is actually true? Empirical data would be nice, but no one has provided any.
Then we get to another problem with what is an unexamined assumption: that true beliefs are necessarily less harmful than false ones, or that gullibility necessarily causes more harm, on average, than, say, skepticism.
Then the problem is that even if we can draw up some statistical comparisons based on data (which nobody has yet provided), does that mean that **any** false belief due to gullibility is more harmful than its “true belief” counterpart? It seems to me you’d have to have some specific data about particular beliefs in order to know (not in the Glen Davidson “everyone knows” sense, which might mean appealing the volcano god) whether or not a gullible false belief was actually more harmful than its counterpart.
But that doesn’t mean Tom thinks any of this at all. He hasn’t weighed in.
Gee, Murray doesn’t understand what’s written in context. What a shock.
It’s one thing to know something that any intelligent social animal would know about trusting others, like that the gullible aren’t very good to go to for advice, vs. some made-up belief about a “volcano god”. One is basic to discourse and understanding, the other is a claim about the world that isn’t going to make much difference either way to most people in the society.
Well, he’s not knowledgeable, nor capable of dealing with issues in context. But that’s always been evident.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
You should prove that ignorant Cordova wrong and create an op with supporting evidence of the prokaryotic to eukaryotic cell transition.
If you cannot keep the unsupported ad hominem blurbs to yourself.
I have a feeling that the decline in the numbers of believers has something to do with the “facts” regarding the origins of life research:
“How life evolved: 10 steps to the first cell. By Nick Lane and Michael Le Page
We may never be able to prove beyond any doubt how life first evolved. But of the many explanations proposed, one stands out – the idea that life evolved in hydrothermal vents deep under the sea. Not in the superhot black smokers, but more placid affairs known as alkaline hydrothermal vents.
This theory can explain life’s strangest feature, and there is growing evidence to support it.
Earlier this year, for instance, lab experiments confirmed that conditions in some of the numerous pores within the vents can lead to high concentrations of large molecules. This makes the vents an ideal setting for the “RNA world” widely thought to have preceded the first cells.
If life did evolve in alkaline hydrothermal vents, it might have happened something like this:
1.Water percolated down into newly formed rock under the seafloor, where it reacted with minerals such as olivine, producing a warm alkaline fluid rich in hydrogen, sulphides and other chemicals – a process called serpentinisation.
This hot fluid welled up at alkaline hydrothermal vents like those at the Lost City, a vent system discovered near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 2000.
2.Unlike today’s seas, the early ocean was acidic and rich in dissolved iron. When upwelling hydrothermal fluids reacted with this primordial seawater, they produced carbonate rocks riddled with tiny pores and a “foam” of iron-sulphur bubbles.
3.Inside the iron-sulphur bubbles, hydrogen reacted with carbon dioxide, forming simple organic molecules such as methane, formate and acetate. Some of these reactions were catalysed by the iron-sulphur minerals. Similar iron-sulphur catalysts are still found at the heart of many proteins today.
4. The electrochemical gradient between the alkaline vent fluid and the acidic seawater leads to the spontaneous formation of acetyl phosphate and pyrophospate, which act just like adenosine triphosphate or ATP, the chemical that powers living cells.
These molecules drove the formation of amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – and nucleotides, the building blocks for RNA and DNA.
5.Thermal currents and diffusion within the vent pores concentrated larger molecules like nucleotides, driving the formation of RNA and DNA – and providing an ideal setting for their evolution into the world of DNA and proteins. Evolution got under way, with sets of molecules capable of producing more of themselves starting to dominate.
6. Fatty molecules coated the iron-sulphur froth and spontaneously formed cell-like bubbles. Some of these bubbles would have enclosed self-replicating sets of molecules – the first organic cells. The earliest protocells may have been elusive entities, though, often dissolving and reforming as they circulated within the vents.
7.The evolution of an enzyme called pyrophosphatase, which catalyses the production of pyrophosphate, allowed the protocells to extract more energy from the gradient between the alkaline vent fluid and the acidic ocean. This ancient enzyme is still found in many bacteria and archaea, the first two branches on the tree of life.
8. Some protocells started using ATP as well as acetyl phosphate and pyrophosphate. The production of ATP using energy from the electrochemical gradient is perfected with the evolution of the enzyme ATP synthase, found within all life today.
9.Protocells further from the main vent axis, where the natural electrochemical gradient is weaker, started to generate their own gradient by pumping protons across their membranes, using the energy released when carbon dioxide reacts with hydrogen.
This reaction yields only a small amount of energy, not enough to make ATP. By repeating the reaction and storing the energy in the form of an electrochemical gradient, however, protocells “saved up” enough energy for ATP production.
10.Once protocells could generate their own electrochemical gradient, they were no longer tied to the vents. Cells left the vents on two separate occasions, with one exodus giving rise to bacteria and the other to archaea.”
How do you like those facts?
Well, unfortunately for the believers of SDL there is neither one piece of scientific, experimental evidence that protcells ever existed, nor that one of the steps leading to the phantom protocell could have happened…
All these steps are the product of the imagination of someone who is a devout believer of sheer dumb luck…
Now, what is the difference between someone who logically comes to the conclusion that life, even at the most fundamental level, has to be a product of a superior intelligence, because many components even of the simplest of cells needed to be present and functional at the same time vs the believer of sheer dumb luck that could not have resolved those issues in gradual process?
The only difference I see is that the believers of sheer dumb luck are gullible…
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17987-how-life-evolved-10-steps-to-the-first-cells/
OK, you have no scripture. I stand corrected.
Three people have answered your first two questions; Flint, GlenDavidson (twice), and me (twice). You might not like our answers, but that is not the same as “not answering”. Are you dissatisfied because you want “data”? Data (such as the paucity of supporting facts for creationism versus the abundance of facts supporting non-creationism) has been supplied.
Time for you to acknowledge those answers, that data and reply; dismissal is not a reply; it’s an evasion. Similarly, your question about why gullibility is bad has been answered.
If you ignore answers to your first round of questions, why would any right-minded person think it worthwhile to answer follow-up questions?
sean s.
Flint,
I agree with everything you said except Behe is a 3 and Miller is a 4 if you remove the word imaginary.
– Behe has chosen not to challenge common descent and acknowledges supporting evidence for certain transitions.
-Miller believes in natural evolution but believes God is the creator of the universe and set it up for evolution to create life’s diversity
What a stupid claim. Cordova tells a story without any evidence or corroboration about how he trashed evolution and turned someone into a creationist, and I note the ignorance manifest throughout Sal’s postings here, along with the fallacy of the false dilemma that he alluded to as his primary “argument,” and you’re whining that I need to explain your god-of-the-gaps scenario. Something you’ve never come close to explaining in any way.
He essentially admitted to using the false dilemma (which he never admits is a fallacy, but is), and it’s clear that his plodding ignorance is only slightly less than your own.
And you only demand that I fall for your (and his) false dilemma, while you won’t answer the first thing about real evidence for “design.” But I didn’t learn logic just to be bullied by ignorant people like you and Sal.
If you cannot write grammatical sentences, why don’t you keep your mindless misrepresentations to yourself? Why not anyway, and go off and rectify your inability to grasp what others are discussing on these boards? I don’t care that you won’t acknowledge Sal’s plodding ignorance–as you dare not admit the general ignorance of your “experts”–nor that you can only repeat the fallacy of the false dilemma, rather than address the problem. These are basic flaws in your emotion-laden belief system.
Glen Davidson
I take these new questions as an acknowledgement that I’ve satisfactorily answered your first two questions and you want to move on. OK then…
Regarding George Washington; you asked for an example of “any scientific data whatsoever to support your view that ‘harm’ of self and others increases with false beliefs?” Examples from history constitute adequate answers to your query. The events around Washington’s death, the practice of bleeding, and other false beliefs (some well documented by Comroe) answer your question; false beliefs can and do kill. Washington’s gullibility is irrelevant to that; he may have been unconscious during his last round of bleeding. But to the extent his doctor falsely believed bleeding would help, that false belief killed Washington.
Are all false beliefs due to “gullibility”? I don’t know and I don’t care. It does not matter here. But when a belief has been discredited often enough, to stick with it is “gullibility”.
sean s.
You don’t need empirical data to demonstrate what YOU assert here: that false beliefs can be harmful. Claims need evidence, but not always “empirical” evidence. Often plain ol’ logic suffices. That has been provided on this thread.
sean s.
In other words, even if we gave you data in response to your question, you’d say the data means nothing. So why would anyone bother providing data to you knowing you’re predisposed to dismiss (or igore) it?
Your reputation precedes you.
sean s.
colewd:
Haha. Poor Bill still can’t bring himself to state the truth: Behe accepts common descent. Period.
keiths,
You mean the truth according to keiths. 🙂
You’re making my point for me, Bill. Behe has stated unambiguously that he accepts common descent, and he’s explained why.
You’re in denial. The truth is simply too painful for you to acknowledge.
keiths,
I am interested why you obsess over this point given you only selectively comprehended the conversation I had with Behe. Lets see if you can get someone else to listen to the discussion and agree with you. If you can, I will happily concede the point. If you can’t, I suggest you take a fresh look at your ability to comprehend issues accurately without your worldview distorting them.
Only a skeptic would claim that 75% of Americans saying they believe that God had a role in man’s creation means “less” people believe in creationism not more.
Only a skeptic would keep repeating that there is a “decline” simply because more believe in ID now than ever before.
Only a skeptic would say that LESS scientists believe in creationism than ever, when the fact is the polls show that MORE do.
Why do skeptics hate facts so much should be a poll question.
Why do skeptics live in such denial?