(March 16, 2018 at 8:25 am)alpha male Wrote: Just saw this thread. A post I made in the other seems applicable here as well.
(March 16, 2018 at 6:14 am)alpha male Wrote: It always amazes me how you can see something and yet not see it at the same time.
"Most likely they do them anyway but feel really guilty about them."
You see it, but you don't.
People generally don't enjoy feeling guilty.
Guilt can be viewed as cognitive dissonance between an action, and a belief that the action is immoral.
The two most obvious ways to relieve such cognitive dissonance are:
- stop the behavior, or
- remove the belief that the behavior is immoral.
I'm saying the latter - removing the belief in God, and so removing the belief certain behaviors are immoral - is a dynamic present in unbelief.
We can test that idea. Christianity is the main religion in America, and Christianity largely condemns homosexual behavior. If I'm right, we'd expect gays to be more likely to be atheists and less likely to be Christians. If you guys are right that people believe just based on the merits of the evidence, we shouldn't see a difference, as gays and straights have access to the same evidence. Here's a study on that:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201...iliations/
Atheist and agnostic make up 17% of gays, but only 7% of straights. Christianity makes up 72% of straights, but only 48% of gays. It's clear that people's desired behavior influences belief.
Plus, you guys should want to agree with me. You too often make a knee-jerk opposition to something I say without thinking it through. If people believe or not based on evidence, than the fact that most people have been theists of some sort shows that there's strong evidence for a creator god. So, you guys should readily agree that there are emotional influences on belief. (If you claim that unbelievers are unemotional in assessing evidence, but believers are emotional, you'll be called out for special pleading.)
Also, it's interesting how some people have somewhat different views on the topic, depending on which thread they're in. As wrong as Tiz is, he at least gets props for being consistent.
My only question is, having said all that, do you accept that emotionally influenced beliefs are less reliable in the search for truth? Forget finger-pointing for a second... do you recognise the existence of confirmation bias etc, and see how it could apply in your own life? If you do recognise that, do you still consider whatever may result from it reliable evidence? I'm just talking about internally here, within yourself, for your own sake.
Despite what you may think, I have never claimed to be, nor would I want to be, Spock. I'm well aware of the power of belief and the psychological effects on it and of it, and struggle with it all the time; I'm a very neurotic and emotional person and have my fair share of irrational and/or maladaptive beliefs... that I'm aware of... and probably many more that I'm not. But from my perspective, the important thing is that once I do become aware of these processes, I should recognise their conclusions as unreliable, and likewise not willfully enter into anything that I know from the outset will lead to those processes, if I'm looking for truth... especially in the most important questions in life. Would you bet your life on mafia theory? I know I wouldn't, but I really don't know about you, hence my question in the first paragraph.
Our argument before was regrettable... but it did lead to insight. There is indeed bias in my materialistic worldview, not least an anti-spiritual bias, and there certainly is in my anti-theism when that comes out. But nonetheless we ended up arguing creationism vs evolution when that was not the point I was making (or trying to). Whatever I may think about creationism, it wasn't what I was referring to as having no credibility to me... because I was referring to a process, not a conclusion... ie there's nothing about creationism per se, or any other conclusion, that suggests from the outset that it will lead to confirmation bias etc. People naturally get more emotionally attached to theories as time wears on, and thus bias can creep in, and that happens for everyone, atheist and theist alike... I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about things like horoscopes... where, in my opinion, their entire effect is reliant from the outset on the effects of bias and confirmation bias... ie it only works because of that; the suggestion... such as 'you will meet a tall, dark, stranger' primes/biases the mind to look for, interpret, and perceive input in that light, and where the vaguer the suggestion, the easier it is for the mind to gap-fill an answer. My point was that that has zero credibility to me as a means of reaching reliable conclusions. And where theism is concerned, I see the A/S/K process as essentially equivalent to a horoscope and thus would not consider its conclusions reliable either. That's the only point I was trying to make... that those approaches to finding truth have no credibility to me and as such I will not willfully enter into them expecting to find truth... so to the extent that someone says to me 'just look for the signs, then you'll believe' the only thing I can reply is basically 'no shit, Sherlock, but that doesn't make those conclusions reliable'. That's all I was saying, and all I was objecting to.
At the end of the day, as you said, we're all emotional beings, and thus we all have to contend with bias and its effects. But my ideal world is just one where everyone is aware of that and factors it into their decisions and conclusions or tries to. We can't eliminate bias totally but we can at least try to be aware of it, minimise it, and not willfully enter into it. Of course it's an uphill struggle, given how emotional a species we are, but we can at least try.
