Binary religious thinking

[Jenny A]

It's interesting that the two groups of highly STEM educated people most likely to be theists are engineers and doctors. Both are very practical professions. And very necessary ones. But the practitioners are usually not involved in research (I'd be interested to know how many of the research professionals in these professions are theist) but rather in the application of scientific discoveries. The use of of discoveries does not necessarily require the mindset necessary to discovery.

[I_am_not_mafia]

This is a good example of binary thinking (my husband is going through all these atheist experience clips at the moment)





Basically the guy is trying to use prepositional logic and talking about having a statement, such as God exists, and if you negate that preposition then your new statement is true and the original must be false.

The problem is that he is assuming that True and False exist. That's like saying that 1 exists. There is nothing that you can point to and say is 1. You apply the concept of 1 to something else, such as that is one egg. But there is no number existing by itself that is not somehow applied to something else.

This is because these are concepts that we humans use to represent and reason about the natural world. And as with a computer program it is also Garbage In Garbage Out. You can get garbage that you want out from it by carefully selecting the garbage that you pass in. So while prepositional logic is useful, it is being applied incorrectly in this instance.

But the binary thinker can't comprehend this. Everything for them is true or false, one state or another.

Watch this clip from 5:20

There are things in the Bible that are true, but the Bible itself is not. The caller then says that Matt is contradicting himself until Matt has to point out that there are different versions of the Bible and that it also contains many things that are wrong. Yet you know that the caller won't go away thinking that wow, things do not have to be one state or another and can be a mixture of the two. Instead he'll go away and forget about that conversation and probably assume that he was temporarily caught out with a proper comeback.





What I get from this though is that even though theists have real trouble thinking in terms of degrees and have a natural tendency to think in binary terms, it's not actually always impossible for them.

[downbeatplumb]

There 10 kinds of people.
The people that understand binary and people that don't.

[houseofcantor]

There 10 kinds of people.
The people that understand binary and people that don't.

[ignoramus]

Ok, so we are assuming that people who are religious and remain so in adult life have a predisposition to being capable of fully absorbing their indoctrination without too much questioning.
Are we saying this is a type of psych profiling? I don't really think we'll find any patterns really between religious people and all the other categories, eg: intelligence, creativity, IQ, etc.

I believe indoctrination at a young age is 99% foolproof with anybody/everybody.
Isn't it genetic that we listen and be guided by our parents as part of our survival? (at a very young age, we see our parents as practically "gods" anyway)

What happens to people as clearer thinking adults can sometimes reverse this process.

[robvalue]

Right, maybe the profile has to do with who ends up breaking out of the indoctrination and who doesn't?

I agree that indoctrination can probably work on anyone. Maybe the strength needed to force it in also depends on the profile?

Some people are highly suggestable. It's what Derren Brown looks for in people with a lot of his tricks. I wonder if this has any correlation.

[ignoramus]

Considering that there are many intelligent scholars of science who choose to remain religious even as adults, and conversely, many simpletons who suspect it's just a bunch of bullshit.
I'm under the impression that there are so many variables that we may not be able to pinpoint a specific profile.

eg:

Cultural - would you want to be an atheist doctor in Saudi? Or keep your mouth shut and have a nice life?
Personal - Spouse and most family/relatives are religious ... Don't rock the boat while life is good.
Intellectual - This probably applies to the vast majority. Most will not even know that an alternate explanation even exists, and therefore never try to seek it.

And an infinite mix of all of the above.

[robvalue]

Ah, you're making it too complex for my binary atheist thinking

You're right, there probably is no simple profile. We're all vulnerable to irrational thought.