Rigorous What?
There’s a bizarrely idiotic argument from a commentator on NPR here. The subject is religion, and the Brights, and Dennett’s editorial again. The commentary starts off with the name, which I have no intention of defending: I think it’s absurd, and I’d rather be nibbled by sharks than call myself a Bright. But then it goes on.
55% of people with post-graduate degrees (lawyers, doctors, dentists, and the like) believe in the Devil. 53% believe in Hell. 72% believe in miracles. Remember these are people with post-graduate educations. 78% if them believe in the survival of the soul after death. 60% believe in the virgin birth. And 64% believe in the resurrection of Christ. You can’t get a post-graduate degree without being taught rigorous examination of evidence – figuring out which symptoms indicate a particular disease, or what facts could justify a lawsuit.
Sure you can, if you pick the right subject. I believe there are PhDs in theology, for instance, and in Critical Theory. And besides that, learning rigorous examination of the evidence that applies to one field is not automatically the same thing as learning what counts as evidence in general. Don’t we all know that? Don’t we all know people who are expert in their own field and lost in the fog as soon as they leave it?
Skeptics would say that the human need for something beyond the realities we can touch is so strong that even highly educated people end up manufacturing delusional belief systems. But there is another possibility – that some of these rationally oriented people have found actual proof for their beliefs. Maybe they’ve had a personal supernatural experience with prayer that makes them believe in God or an afterlife. Maybe they’ve found a compelling logic to their views. Perhaps they’ve looked at the universe and said, “something made the big bang happen.” For some highly educated people, faith is not a matter of faith. Rather, they see around them evidence. Evidence that is, to be sure, hard to explain or prove to others, but is nonetheless quite compelling to them.
Our commentator, for instance, seems to be pretty much lost in the fog. Just for a start, ‘actual proof’? A ‘personal supernatural experience with prayer’ constitutes ‘actual proof’? Is that the rigorous examination of evidence Steven Waldman was taught when he got his postgraduate degree? First, to say proof when he means evidence, and then to take someone’s ‘personal supernatural experience’ as evidence? And third, to claim that evidence that can’t be explained or proven to others is nevertheless evidence? Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron? If evidence is convincing to no one but the person who presents it as ‘evidence’ then it really isn’t evidence, is it, it’s something else. By definition. One would think that would be one of the very first things one would learn when being taught this ‘rigorous examination of evidence’ Waldman says all these highly educated believers in the Devil and Hell and the resurrection of Jesus are in fact taught. Perhaps Waldman skipped class that day.
Well, as I explained some time ago, those who use the term “Bright” are making the same error as those who used the term “Moral Majority”: insulting their opponents (by implication).
(Sorry Jim, your original comment ended up attached to the wrong N&C so I moved it, but I did it wrong so had to re-do your comment from memory, apart from the first few words which I could retrieve with the Back button – but the rest of it is crudely garbled, sorry.)
Anyway, yes, I agree. I dislike that kind of stealth rhetoric. And even if I didn’t I still wouldn’t like that ridiculous name. Might as well call oneself Twinkle.
haha, have you looked around their website?
“With the fresh term [‘Bright’ as opposed to ‘atheist’ etc], people can relate to you as a person and not react to a label.”
Do they honestly believe that others would not react to someone calling themselves a ‘Bright’?
Still, apart from the name, their actual ideas seem reasonable enough? Certainly those statistics quoted by Waldman were disturbing enough for one to hope that the Brights movement meets with some success (though i somehow doubt that was his intent!)
55% of American post-grads believe in the devil? Wow. Makes me glad i live in New Zealand – the religious nutters are in the minority here ;)
“You can’t get a post-graduate degree without being taught rigorous examination of evidence – figuring out which symptoms indicate a particular disease, or what facts could justify a lawsuit.”
I wish that was true, but we all know it isn’t, medicine is about rote learning for the large part and lawyers learn how to use rhetoric to smear the boundaries between hard facts, speculation and insinuation. And don’t get me started on postgraduate education in the arts, or even physicists and mathematicians talking about ‘consciousness’ and quantum theory!
I think someone’s personal supernatural experience qualifies as evidence to that person, and the testament of large numbers of people that they have experienced this is also evidence. Not overwhelming evidence by any means but evidence all the same.
Aaaghhhh!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1041298,00.html
Religion making a last ditch desperate grab for philosophy’s teritory methinks.
Richard, no, I haven’t bothered looking at their site, I suppose because the name is so silly I don’t expect them to have anything worth reading there. But yes, those statistics are depressing, aren’t they. But of course those postgraduate degrees are, as Waldman himself admits (without actually noticing that it’s an admission, I think), mostly vocational. They are also from US universities, of which (as is well known) there are a huge number, not all of them of high quality or standards. I know that sounds like a cruel (not to say elitist) thing to say, but it’s true. So that does undercut Waldman’s point a bit. But, yeah, the figures are high, and I often wish I myself lived in New Zealand or Canada or the UK or some other non-religious-nutter-filled place.
PM, yup, my point exactly, about doctors and other vocational degrees. About personal experience and evidence though…Granted a personal experience can be evidence to the person who has it, but I don’t see how it can be to anyone else. Therefore I also don’t see how the same thing experienced by however many millions of people can be. Millions times zero is still zero. Humans are fallible, we have hallucinations, we construct memories, we dream, we imagine. And we have fears and desires, which influence those constructions and imaginings. I agree that multiple personal supernatural experiences are evidence that a lot of people have such experiences (or perhaps that they claim to) but not that they are evidence of something external to the human brain. I don’t see how that gap can be bridged.
That Guardian piece…aaagggh indeed. What a consignment of geriatric shoe manufacturers.
“78% if them believe in the survival of the soul after death” A lot of what passes for religious authority hinges on this very statistic. Sad how something that is wholly unknown can have such a powerful effect simply by being introduced to a rational being with a fear of death.
I heard that NPR piece too.
The thing that struck me immediately is that the commentator conveniently left out the statistics for the uneducated and the general population.. hardly irrelevant.
He also of course left out how the questions were phrased. For instance, if someone asked ‘Do you believe there are unknown effects governing how the world works’ I personally would say ‘yes’ although I don’t believe those effects are supernatural – just that we don’t know everything yet.
My suspicion is that the relevant stats for people with only a HS education would be in the 80s and 90s.
Yes, people always do leave out how the questions are phrased, don’t they. But then when they’re using those statistics as a piece of not very subtle coercion, that’s not surprising.