Paul Bloom - There Is Nothing Special About Religion

thank you I referred a really kind introduction um can people hear me back I just I'm hugely grateful to have been invited here this is a this is in my mind one of the finest intellectual communities in the world and this delight to go through and talk to my old friends and colleagues and and and meet some new ones this is terrific I want to talk today about religious belief now we possess many beliefs people believe that grass is typically green and that unsupported objects fall down and these beliefs pose a lot of puzzles nobody knows precisely how to represent in the brain nobody knows precisely how we come to learn them but they aren't that mysterious after all grass really is green unsupported objects do fall down so it doesn't pose a huge puzzle why we possess such beliefs religious beliefs are different and it's nicely this difference was nicely expressed by HL Mencken the famous chroma Jian and atheist he wrote how is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves one functionally normally naturally even brilliantly another capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelist such balderdash takes various forms but it has that at its worst when it is religious why should this be so what is there in religion that completely flabbergasted wits of those who believe in it now it's not quite the most respectful introduction to a topic of religion but in fact even those of us who are theists could agree the spirit of Mankins inquiry in that the beliefs we have that would have come under the category of religion seem to be sort of different from everyday beliefs they aren't acquired in the same way they aren't understood in the same way and it does pose a puzzle how come we we possess them we know that the sort of beliefs that we're talking about here are a belief in deities and spirits like like God believes in the divine creation of humans and other creatures and other beliefs such as life after death and we know the people in this room don't need persuading these beliefs are quite a pervasive most humans are religious and most religions adhere to such belief systems the beliefs are particularly prevalent in the United States the country in which I live where over half will even miracles angels in the devil about two-thirds believe that God created humans and other animals either directly a spontaneous creation or by guiding evolution a bit more believe Jesus was raised from the dead and just about everybody believes in God so those are the sort of puzzles I'm interested in today and we could break these down into two categories we talk about the puzzle of universal and near-universal tendencies to believe things and I want to talk about differences across cultures and within cultures my talk will fall into two halves corresponding roughly to these two questions now one theory where these beliefs come from is that we have a special dedicated faculty in our minds that are did is specialized to producing these beliefs so this was the view of John Calvin so Calvin and us in the 1500s suggested that God and planted with us within us desire to believe in God a propensity to believe in God that that exists before any sort of schooling and experience atheists have a stunted system due to some sort of personal trauma or or or malice have decided to stunt their natural system but this natural system should exist in all of us more recently Jesse Bering has argued at religion certain religious beliefs are specific biological adaptation so motivated in part by the work of Aaron or in Zion and others bearing a propose that a belief in God keeps us moral the belief in the scrutiny of what what hour is called a big God makes us better people and he argued as part of an adaptation for our moral system we have evolved a propensity to believe in such gods I'm interested here in exploring an alternative and alternative perhaps most famously articulated by Pascal boy a which is that there's no specific biological adaptation for religious belief rather religions an accident religions a byproduct certain Funt we possess certain foundational assumptions about the social world and these make certain religious beliefs natural so talk about three such assumptions the first is an animism a general tendency to see people and human action and agency in the world around us and this has different manifestations so one is a natural human tendency to see faces popping out of objects that that aren't really people and there's some famous examples of this somebody discovered a Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich causing quite a fuss someone else discovered the nun bun the face of Mother Teresa inside a baked good and and about four days ago I found on the web disc more recent example which is not entirely impressive but for dropping showing images Christ now now other another manifestation of this is to see in the movements even in movements of simple geometric figures intelligent animate motion emotions plans goals the classic example here comes from Heider and Simmel in 1944 where they showed people the movements of various geometrical figures and then asked them later tell a story about it and it turns out that people have no problem establishing a narrative about these individuals giving them goals and desires even different genders based on on you know fairly abstract patterns of movement and it's all attest to the prevalence we have to to interpret these things in such a way more recently there's been a lot of developmental research showing that even young infants will interpret geometrical figures will interpret simple figures as having beliefs and desires as having goals behaving in a rational manner even perhaps having moral qualities and I'm going to say absolutely nothing about this except to note that this work was done this is work led by Kiley Hamlin and I'll talk about this in more detail tomorrow in my better talk um no this this is my better talk and and then to note that that that that's do it guess we argued that argued I think convincing a lot of the beliefs that we associated religion are the byproduct of this animist tendency in that we see in this world we are naturally prone to see deities he spirits in the movements and in the structures of everyday objects as he very poetically puts it the clothes have no emperor the second case study is dualism and dualism many of us are socio dualism through the philosophical framing of this as a sort of a philosophical theory of the relationship between body and soul and here that the major champion is Descartes so Descartes wrote summarizing the theory of dualism I knew that as a substance the whole essence or nature of which is to think an ad for its existence there is no need of place or any material thing that is to save a soul by which I am what I am is entirely distinct from body Descartes this intuition is not of course limited to philosophers it shows up in many aspects of everyday life it shows up in a belief that many of us have that when we die we will go to heaven and not our bodies but us somehow our bodies will remain in the ground or will turn to dust but we ourselves will survive the death of our body going to heaven in our culture reincarnating in another culture or occupying a spirit world in another culture it shows that the non religious manifestations in you can immediately read the title of this book help I'm trapped in my teachers body and immediately understand what the book is about it's about a student who due to have won various scientific mishap ends up himself occupying his students teachers a body of course his body doesn't jam into a teacher's body he does this is part of a series Hopis includes help I'm trapped in my sister's body helping drive to my gym teachers body derivative that and much my favorite help I'm trapped in my dog's body so I became interesting the question of whether we're natural born duelist whether this assumption of dualism is something which manifests itself because we're live in a dualist culture and doulas beliefs all around us or whether is a natural tendency of humans to adopt a dualist belief perhaps because our cognitive systems for reasoning about the physical world and our cognitive systems for reasoning about a social world don't quite mesh and I got into the idea of this question actually through a sort of a surprise event that happened in my life and it revolved around my son Max when he was six years old and this is a picture of him and the situation was it was very late and I told him he had to go to sleep he said to me you can make me stay in bed but you can't make me go to sleep it's my brain and I said and I said okay well I'll stay up my guys it had some questions for him made of some coffee and then I'm and I said what does the brain do a sort of open-ended question q my data said millions of things a person could die if their brain was badly hurt it is an extremely important part of body and am i pressed him I said does the brain does this does the brain do that ask the various questions and he said the brain does seeing hearing smelling and most important of all the brain was involved in thinking but it does not do dreaming feeling sad or loving his brother and Mac said that's what I do though my brain might help me out so so in order to explore this I collaborated with with my colleague Frank Collins and cat and graduate student Catherine Cho and we did a series of studies testing us in various ways including a study involving brain transplants where we told children stories about brain transplants such as a boy's head into the brain of a pig now and it turns out that at a certain age when children are old enough to understand this they go through a stage where what they say is you'll get a very smart Pig but still one that has Pig memories Pig personality and pig desires they believe that the brain is like a big what they believe is the brains of cognitive prosthesis it's a person could use it to enhance his or her computing power but it's not the self and and and other research by them right by Susan Gelman Carl Johnson and others have found the same truly young children believe the brain is important for sort of cognitive effort like mathematics or memory but not for your experiences or your beliefs or your are your desires it turns out I think that some residual form of this belief shows up even in the most highly educated adults so I've often been struck by the reporting in science in the New York Times and other science sections of contemporary results from cognitive science my favorite me where often there's this sort of often the results of studies themselves are important and worth knowing about but often people just amazed that the brain does that my my favorite example my favorite example is this headline in pain and joy of envy the brain may play a role know if the brain didn't play a role of the discovery of the millennium as it would be Cartesian dualism was mistaken but the headline writer didn't Wow the brain might be involved in that too recently since I and I wrote this up in a book called a cards baby published many years ago where I talked about evidence and since then there's been more evidence there's been some work by Jesse Bering on afterlife beliefs there's been some work here at UBC I'm considering looking at evidence both developmental cross-cultural suggestion there's an intuitive dualism that people will naturally come to the conclusion that a mind can jump from one body to another but what I want to focus on and not not unto evidence for my claim but on an argument against it because I think the argument against it is a serious one I think is basically correct and it focuses on one aspect of Cartesian dualism that stands out as among the others and doesn't seem to me or to anybody else who commented in my view very plausible is that there's no need of place now it's true that we naturally construe ourselves in arguably consider ourselves as immaterial I can leave our body can drift off to heaven it is not continuous on the body but the idea has no location seems too many to be unintuitive so if you ask people where are you where is yourself you will get an answer you're in your head you do have a place now this belief in the location of the self seems like an interesting question because maybe you believe here in your head among other reasons because you know your brains in your head and you're a materialist another possibility though is that this is a fundamental into intuition that that yourself has this place that shows up even prior to knowledge of the brain and the brains role in mental life and this is something I explored in collaboration with Christina star Matt's who's a graduate student at Yale and what we did was we used an indirect method with children without else to figure out where they think people are where they think the location of a person is and what we did was we showed them a series of pictures with in one case a girl and a fly floating around her in different places and we were show them pairs of pictures and we would simply ask in which picture is to fly closer to Mary now in some way that's a weird question they're both equally close for Mary maybe maybe it was in the center it'd be closer to the center of her but it was equally close to Mary but I want to compile the data using sort of looking at the older contrast we found that they tend to think the fly was over here behind your eyes are round around that part of her face right here now this original study had certain flaws maybe they're doing this because a fly buzzes so you hear a fly buzzing or maybe a fly is distracting around the face or maybe you most notice a fly above the face so we replicated it with a snowflake and we found the same sort of pattern now this we thought would be an interesting case study of a disassociation mean tacit beliefs and more more explicit beliefs and so this is this work was published in cognition last year but this is some unpublished work what we did was we use an online survey method to ask people from different countries where the self is we just forget about its indirect method say where is a person like a person could occupied everybody but where do you think you are Americans said this you're in your head but the India population was more mixed saying here in your chest just as many would say you're in your chest as you're in your head then we gave them the same Mary questions that we gave in the previous study to remind you this is data from the previous study and that's the data from Indian adults where again they were perfectly clear that the fly was closer to Mary when it was around her eyes the third foundation after animism and dualism is creationism so creationism like dualism has long went around a sort of a philosophical position and many people have argued that the design that's apparent in a natural world screams out for intentional explanation so Cicero wrote when you see a sundial or a water clock you can see that it tells the time by design and not by chance how then can you imagine it universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence more recently the creationist Michael Behe wrote an op-ed piece New York Times where he said the visual physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology in the absence of any compelling non design explanation we are justifying at real intelligent design was involved in life it turns out this this trait does this this jumping from the existence of design to a designer shows up in children so now many investigators including Piaget a while ago and more recently Evans Petrovich and Deborah Kellerman have found that children are more creationists than their parents so if you asked children parents often from the same family questions like who put the Sun in the sky where the mountains come from where did the very first dog come from they're more prone to give creationist explanations Kellerman asked a question in a different way she has showed people as she showed children adults different items and asked what are they for and gave them an option of saying they're not for anything so children think that clocks are for telling time so to adults children think body parts like the paw of an animal is as a function so do adults but children are more prone in adults to think that an animal or a mountain itself is for something so a mountain might be for climbing recently uh my colleagues at Yale led by George Newman have published a pas paper where they they found even younger children have sort of systematic intuitions that design calls out for intentional creation so I'll tell you about two of the studies they did and one of the ones done with four-year-olds they showed different objects in different form different arrays and the question was what did the girl do did she make this or did she make this turns out shoulders are split they kind of go 50 but then you tell about the wind blowing things about and you say what did they do this or this they almost unanimously say it made a mess the wind can't create order then they did an experiment twelve month olds using looking time methodology to measure surprise at different configurations so there are four setups and two of them there's a ball in two of them there's an agent that moves around at it like an animate beam and then in one and two of them endures this order created some orderly things become messy and then two of them messy things become orderly and the question is you look at the looking time measures to see what our baby is surprised by so here's one of the movies baby saw and that's and that's the ball creating order out of disorder and there are four stimulus items that was the one that surprised them babies were comfortable with a ball creating a mess babies were comfortable and animate being either creating order or creating a mess but when they saw order being created if it was created by a non agent they were surprised by this suggest they have an expectation that it's intentional creatures not balls that create order this is a sort of creationism about that about objects in the natural world about the structure natural world more recently I've been collaborating with a graduate student Kony Banerjee and Kony is interested in belief in an order of in that there's a natural order to reality that events happen for a reason and her prediction is that children will be more prone to accept teleological purpose-based explanations for events then would be adults so she did a series of studies in one study what she did was she told children in adults a story about a girl who lost her her teddy bear and they had to choose this is a design a methodological design used by by Deb Kellerman which were adopting here they had to choose who do you believe and here are two different stories and who you favoring so Joey thinks it was because Monica accidentally left her teddy bear on a school bus as a standard for the causal explanation Bobby thinks it was to make Monica learn to be more careful with her things and that gives a reason to this what we find is the children are far more prone to accept a teleological explanation so this is acceptance of the teleological estimation then our adults now this being the first experiment was limited in certain ways so one immediate limitation you might notice is maybe what's happening is the younger children aren't teleological but what the younger children are doing is they're misinterpreting this um this thing maybe they're reading it as well it made Monica more careful for things that was a result of this and if and what the difference developmental difference just attending to the subtleties of grammar so we did another another version and now all the kids are told us Monica lost her favorite stuffed teddy bear because she lost her teddy bear Monica learn to be more careful for things so we're just stipulating this now there's an a disagreement Joey thinks Monica learned this important lesson and Joey thinks this is definitely the reason why she lost her teddy bear Bobby thinks Monica learned is important lesson but Bobby thinks is definitely not the reason why she lost her teddy bear the developmental transition happens later but still the children are twice as likely to accept a theological account as two adults suggest innate is sort of intuitive this belief in purpose and design extends not only to things in the world on animals but also possibly to events so what I've suggested is that foundational assumption of social world can't help me explain certain universal that show up across different religions such as animism dualism and creationism but this is of course just part of the story because what's equally obvious along with with the universals is human variation so let's focus on this a bit so just one example from religion Tim Taylor describes a certain afterlife belief a belief in reanimation so this belief is that after a loved one dies the soul will go to heaven but at some point I will go to the spirit world but at some point very quickly unless you do something to stop it it will try to reanimate the body and you have to keep the body from coming to life this is not an afterlife belief I possess or anybody in my culture possesses so you need to explain why some people hold such a belief in other people hold hold a belief you go to heaven or hell or you're reincarnate or so on or take creationism the people of this planet are have very different views as to whether they accept creationism or they accept a scientific worldview in evolution instead those are you sitting in back here's the United States just that's not that's not good to be down here but uh but the United States is unusually creationist and then within the United States there's considerable variation in what people believe so this is from a business from Gallup poll all the way running from that early 80s to the present and what you'll see is this top line are people who believe in strong creationism humans God created humans in your current form the line below it is god evolution occurred but God guided the process and the line below this is humans evolved and God had played no role in the process so any Theory has to explain the differences across cultures but also differences within cultures or a more local example from Canada I'm nothing if not appropriate to the place I met a 2011 poll found that 14% of people said had a strong creationist view 19% said divine guidance and 58% said humans of all through natural selection there are two common sense views about the variation in religious belief one is that culturally specific beliefs are learned by absorbing culturally specific facts and the second is scientifically accurate beliefs and emerge through an understanding of science I want to suggest that this is incomplete and this is just false and my work here is actually on a collaboration of Nina Weisberg who wrote a theoretical paper of me on this topic let's do the first one um this view is nicely summarized by bhaiyya by Richard Dawkins who writes a human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture for people when you're a pre-programmed to absorb useful information a high rate it is hard to shut up pernicious or damaging information at the same time it is no wonder that child brains are gullible open to almost any suggestion vulnerable to subversion easy prey to Muniz Scientologist and nuns like immune deficient patients children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort the fears that child's sponge now there are reasons to doubt this that children's psychology is a sponge-like as Dawkins says it is for one things will and get information many sources some new information can be false due to ignorance and later on in life somebody's information can be false to the malevolence people that lie to children it's very useful to be able to sort it out it's very important to be able sort of and in fact children are highly sensitive exploitation other domains like sharing and sibling with siblings so if if a child's with with her sibling and the sibling takes five of the cookies and leaves her one and says this is fair the child's not going to believe it reject certain sorts of information and in fact the empirical work and this is work done by Susan birch and her colleagues among others I'm suggest that children in fact are selective they're selective learners they are so they will attenuate their learning based on the confidence of the person providing information certainly based on a person's past reliability and they will continue to based on age though here the story is complicated for when it comes to facts or some evidence that children prefer adults over children when deciding to learn form when it comes to aspects of language like accent there's some evidence that children prefer children over adults which makes a sort of logic logical census the children that they're with is the community that they're going to be entering with and have to communicate with this issue of selective learning poses raises some interesting puzzles I've long been interested in the learning of obscenity by children because because also anything else just but can be extensively taught this is this this is it this or learn from context but obscenity has a special status in order to learn obscenity children have to figure out monitor subtle cues so just two anecdotes for this one anecdote was in order as part of an informal experiment my wife and I try to teach our children a new swear word it was at a time it was eBay so Eve a hedge of you today so whenever so eBay and our children found is amusing and somehow Venice is funny and did not ever treat it as an obscenity despite our best efforts somehow they filter it out the second one is an example of learning gone wrong slightly off color story and I apologize for this but but um but my son Max actually was again max um had a babysitter called named Dina for a long time and uh and at one point he comes up to me and he says dad do you know what the worst swear word in the world is and I said no what is it and he leaned over and he whispered damn so okay okay um so yeah that that is pretty bad it is I understand that so what what why do you find it why do you think it's so so bad well Deena talks on the phone all the time and she swears she says but she never says damn so now so you might say okay so - am i selected there's that selective they're a selective sponge but that's not true either for an interesting reason certain beliefs have a strange status and and maybe religious please fund this category so Scott Akron says in a response to some attacks on religious beliefs by the sort of so-called new atheist says they shouldn't be taking these beliefs literally certain core religious beliefs like poetic metaphors are literally senseless in that they altogether lack truth conditions that is there is no logical or empirical criteria for judging whether such utterances are true or not now I don't think that's right I know it's entirely right people insist these beliefs are true they teach them to their children they believe that at least some of them should be taught to all children they are defensive when people try to teach other beliefs about children here's what my favorite onion headline states and but I think after this right pointing out the special status of religious belief something also pointed out by the philosopher Dan Dennett which is that people are strangely reflective about these religious beliefs so this is the point also remark by the sociologist Alan wolf so wolf writes there are people who believe often passionately in God even if they can tell others all that much about the God in which they believe and I think what we're seeing here is what one could call double deference um so people defer to experts when deciding which beliefs to adopt but also people defer to experts as to the precise content of the belief and or the grounds for believing it sometimes known as the division of cognitive labor but I want to suggest this that this is not special to religion that it also shows up in sign and morality so do science how think to yourself for a second how old is the earth well I know how old the earth is it is 4.5 4 billion years old I know this because I looked it up in Wikipedia I have no idea how they came to that number but now that I know that's the number I'm pretty confident it's true so if any of you believe that the earth is 6,000 years old I would laugh at you for your ignorance even though I have no idea why that number up there is correct but I believe that because although I don't know the grounds for it I trust the people who tell me I trust the scientists who have presumably right to Wikipedia pages one hopes and there's other beliefs that have so so let's take let's take so so this is the Canadian data again and and people people who study religious belief and so on psychotic are fascinated by people in the first two categories and talk about why do people believe this but let's look closely at the people who believed humans evolved through natural selection and I will tell you the one thing we know about the 58 percent of people in Canada who think humans evolved through natural selection the vast majority have no idea what natural selection is if you asked them to describe it they would say well you know things evolve and and then when you push them on it like you asked them and so how did you draft neck yet so long either they would have no idea or they would propose a view that reserves are the mysterious evolutionary force that across the course of generations stretches out the brass neck to satisfy its need to reach tall fruit a view associate of course not with Darwin but Lamarck so why then what determines whether you believe that God created animals in their current form or whether animal or whether animals evolved through natural selection I think the answer has nothing to do with what you know I mean for some people for some small proportion of scientists or theists it might but for the vast majority of us it reduces to the question of who we trust do you trust religious figures or do you trust scientific figures pick an example a moral example now and this is my favorite moral example um it was um lynn westmoreland it was a congressman and he was you advocated data the 10 commandments should be on display in government buildings he then had the misfortune to show up on a television program known as The Colbert Report where were Stephen Colbert plays sort of a faux conservative and asked him various questions and in the course it is he got a question he could have never expected to get for his entire life and I'll show you the clip of the sound word for this I think if we were totally good Alan we may lose a sense of our direction was he over the name No No so two things first thing the day after his his representatives say this Lucas cow was unfairly edited and he made it through five the second thing is is he was ridiculed for for what it was said to be hypocrisy I don't need is hypocrisy at all I think he really did view the Ten Commandment as important and that people should also view them as important so he didn't know what they were but this is a form of double deference the same way I think it's very important that people believe in natural selection even though it's possible I really don't really know exactly what natural selection is there are other examples this is a nice study button by by jeffrey cohen where he asked different groups of americans about different welfare policies one of them the table one was by american standards insanely generous the second one the bottom ones by american standards insanely stingy they were either different americans given these policies as to judge them were either Republican or Democrat and they were told that they were either thought up by a Republican or Democrat it turned out that the state of actual facts about these policies or had little force on whether or not they accepted them what they would accept would determine whether they accepted them was was somebody of their same party endorsing them importantly nobody later knew that this was why they endorsed them they defended them on the merits once they were asked about them not being aware that it was a congruence in political party that was driving their intuition a final moral example this is the evolution of Barry Bonds as steroids a graduation to mine eyes at Giroud II was very interested in certain moral intuitions he took it upon himself to ask what do people have against steroids if you ask people our steroids use the steroids wrong they say they definitely are people will rank them worse than betting on a game that you yourself are involved in and they believe they should have criminal penalties Aiza was simply interested the question why what do people think is wrong and it turned out he spent two years of an otherwise distinguished graduate career finding no answer at all to this question he did even as in dozens of experiments so for instance some people would say um would say well they destroy your body they're very bad for you to destroy your body give heart conditions and so on okay any that's another good bit okay so there's a new sort of steroid that comes out and it doesn't destroy your body it doesn't do anything bad to you but in fact it gives you immunity to Cole's and you better it's still exactly as wrong some people say well it's cheating because it's illegal okay what if it was legal still be wrong he came to the conclusion which i think is right that people think steroids are wrong because people think steroids are wrong in other words in other words which isn't as circular as it's not whatever people for whatever reason there's sort of an idea that steroids are on other people notice that other people believe steroids are and they assume steroids are wrong just in the same way that that when running shoes were first introduced they were reviewed as a form of cheating and now nobody believes that anymore so things things change just because people monitor community standards I've suggested that religious belief is a product of universal and near universal tendencies started as a product of sorry for the universal tendencies foundational stands that shape our common-sense understanding of the world and for the differences they're largely due to deference often double deference to trusted authorities I think this holds much to say for scientific belief that our scientific beliefs are intuitive scientificly are grounded either in our common sense understanding or deference sometimes double deference to Authority and I think this holds as well for moral belief I think the same considerations hold and in my talk tomorrow I'm going to talk a little bit about these foundational stances that are operative in our moral psychologies now it might look at this point that I'm saying science and religion and morality are all the same and this is actually not in my view I think in particular science and religion have rather an irredeemable clash against each other um I think because the actual methods and procedures of science from those of religion so I think that there is in fact a difference but I do think so I don't think that but I do think that I think that that in the heads of non experts folk science folk religion and folk morality come from the same psychological sources or to put it more succinctly there's nothing special about religion thank honey here's we can combine the the stuff you had about children being actually illogical that's Pony and the double deference for the deference so basically um parents say a lot of crazy things to their children because children want to know why and parents help they make up stories to answer the why because children don't take because I said so that well and so in some cases you can imagine a parent giving their kid that lesson like you lost yep you're teddy because you know I'm using as a way to give you this lesson and so is there potentially some sort of doubling up here in which the deference to parents as a expert in all things y+ yeah that's that that's a thoughtful comment I think that that's right I think that that my bet would be to cross culturally even with young children you're going to find differences across in how teleological they are and I think part of it is our best our belief at this point is there's a fundamental teleological impulse for both events in the world but also for looking at animals and for looking at artifacts and so on but you're exactly right that some adults and some cultures explicitly reinforce that this teleological view by telling their kids by telling kids you know God created mountains and God to make so we would have some to climb on and they created Tigers to to run around and also and you lost your teddy bear well that was God our fate tell it making sure you'll remember next time was any more important comes up and I wouldn't doubt for a second that that would reinforce this is Victor religious parents right so I could as an atheist parent avoid telling my kid God made that mountain for you to do I'm on but I might be equally likely to say that's because you're got to take care of your stuff and so I mean I guess has an appeal it's not going to be awake showing yeah science is like religion is like around that's true and and that specific question me something which you could be well addressed through as you know there's tons of transcripts of how parents speak to their children and it would be very interesting if you're writing and even atheist parents adopt a teleological style of explanation of everyday life you know I hope that teaches you a lesson when talking to their kids and and and although I think that children in our society are maybe more teleological and adults because adults override their tealy all at their teleology I have some other work with Kony and era has some work independently finding even people who are explicitly atheists do believe have some belief in fate and some belief in karma or whatever you call it yeah I just I think it to disagree with hearing it basically we just diverse my authority because I'm unsurprising people can't explain natural selections I think a lot of biologists don't understand or just in general way to understand very well what's going on if it's acting on populations or individuals and so on so that's I think it's have a very tricky question to ask people in explaining they don't understand what they're talking about they say they believe in evolution because I think most people believe that or they'll agree with Richard Dawkins because they've seen dinosaur bones because they have some rudimentary idea of geology lots of people have heard continental drift and so and so forth so it seems like there's a lot of possible data can fit into that believe in the fact that they can't explain a fairly technical thing that even isn't even longer said by scientists I don't think that's quite the same thing as just say no oh Richard Dawkins told me that and I just think there's a lot more going on if you will do use a lot of the evidence field and there's a lot of things available through part of the culture of the media and someone's support they give you that information well I appreciate the comment stick to my guns here because I I think natural selection the wait when it's asked is not meant to be something extraordinary father Consett it's meant to be the sort of thing one hopefully learns in high school or college the idea that that you know idea of differential reproductive success and that the idea that there are different variants and some reproduce more than others anything like that gets a tick office-boy you got it cold you don't have to know the subtleties of the group selection debate and everything and people have no idea and yes they know there were dinosaur bones but they're not much beyond that if you don't like that example we could choose another one so I'm sure most people in the room are not gonna embarrass anybody but most people in earth but most people in the room believe that the earth is say over a billion years old but how many of us can explain how we know this just accuracy I can't anybody here could good explain it I won't i won't i won't ask you i won't point to you and ask you okay so if somebody anybody somebody else somebody else sort of but making hanok don't ask me good so by just get one theory fair enough fair enough 6000 years is a bit is a bit of actually how do we know there's more than 6,000 years old I don't know it's a radioactive stuff the oldest you know tying natural reason trees things we can actually observe right but then I'm still basing it on a certain level of trust that other really smart fellows have thought this through and go with what they say and I want to be clear I'm again I'm not saying there's anything irrational about this I defer to all sorts of things I use Wikipedia I ask scientists and everything the world is too complicated to to figure it all out ourselves so if you don't like natural selection example there's a million other examples and I also think that some of us have a sort of rationale for accepting scientists believe in scientists over say priests in that we may we have a belief that the methods of science are better than than the methods of religion our dreams or divination and and so on but I think my point is so my point is sort of a narrow one I'm sure if I gave people a hundred scientific questions do you believe in that you believe in electricity do you believe that that the Earth revolves around the Sun everyone will give you the accepted answers but only a tiny minority of us could be able to understand why yes to press this point further it seems to me that there are different kinds from ignorant involved there's to take your initial example of this wonderful comparison thank you when you're speaking about moments there is no underlying mechanism um you either mail them or you don't go in terms of scientific facts there is a fact and there's a mechanism that explains the fact so there is one more step in size so inside so don't you bring you know these questions on the level field you would have to ask religious people so how exactly 10 commandments you know came to exist in the way they exist and there's a story behind it no one to use your own argument nobody goes it's a story yes even people Camela 10 commandments they don't not what some problem it is so I mean there is there's one more step and I think we should still respect but I think you're right though again I think that as you went this is yet another parallel so there's all sorts of interesting theistic questions one could ask a believer you know and typically for the most part believers are reasonably ignorant about the foundations even our own religious belief system just like I'm ignorant of the foundations of my own scientific belief system so to make like the question like you ask a Catholic about the Trinity you know you ask specific question about people's religion they're often lost but they know who the experts are they know who they could ask and find out yes then I'll go thank you very silly talk a lot of ask you a few things here okay but when you talk up a vigil okay you're if we make it 16 state religion or spirituality or religion and highly documented mystical experience and then and even your notion of theological the whole notion of you look at this form of religion is culturally biased in a frame right so a large proportion of the important for spirituality sort of understanding the world and don't fit into that type of framework I entirely agree although that's a general conclusion which I believe a more a conclusion that would match better if my talk is there's nothing special about religious belief and and admittedly I just wrote that title down 10 minutes before I got to the talk I figured out of it um but there's but uh so my arguments today only pertain to religious belief so one might say what about religious ritual what about spirituality that oceanic feeling mystical experiences and so on and nothing I've said bears on either envy bears on those phenomena leaf right is in fact a Christian mission to keep emphasizing at Yale right the idea of faith the idea I think that there's some interesting like ways in between might ask some slightly different questions about how when one has a spiritual experience or a mystical experience then one interpret based upon something else cultural something based in know and I think you're absolutely correct website and I'll just going to the best scientists I know that we don't know a lot and we're always at the point where where we accept our beliefs of science might for one day in the district later or something like that pushing back so the question if there's question okay is that I think what you're suggesting is that there is a cognitive way in which think looks with this kind of Bhavesh and that we and there's something in this thing yep right which does and I think that may also be a highly cultural bias so so you're raising a lot a lot of sort of different interesting points there's the interesting question of how people across the world construe their own understanding of religion whether they think of in terms of a system of belief or a system of practice um and that I don't have that much or experiences that exist better we put it and that's that's I don't have that much to say about it but I do in fact think that all humans have a set of beliefs that we have belief systems that underlie our behave and underlying action that sort of a scientific claim of how the mind works I'm not controversial I think and that humans that both religious and non-religious have all sorts of beliefs that are of the interesting sort I'm interested in here so so a Buddhist a Hindu or whatever would have beliefs about the origin of the universe about about good fortune or karma and so on and that's what I'm interested in even though they themselves may not view it as both in terms of beliefs the scientific approach I'm taking will will approach it in terms of beliefs yeah I get it double deference yeah and sort of how you can tell the difference is in theorists between an instance of double deference you simply saying things but not really leaving yeah it's the reason I'm worried about or interest in this is because there may be cases where people's rooms say acknowledge the official position and some with incentives in the sentences that will come out of your mouth yeah but there's no I think they just have no idea what they're talking about and in the case of religious utterances versus some of the signs three cases might be that people behavior will sometimes be completely at odds with the official position in religion and government the evidence that they don't even believe it not that they sort of double verbally I think I bet that's an important thought um I do think that there are things that fall into that category I think the beliefs I'm interested in a belief in God a belief in life after death belief in creationism really are things people believe to be true they aren't merely saying them even they believe to be true and there's double deference at work but you're exactly right that there are other beliefs that are more signals of one's fidelity to the religion sometimes sometimes they're ridiculous in which case sir they're costly signals Owen Flanagan tells the story of when the previous Pope at one point said you know there's um there's no head when you think of heaven as a place that's ridiculous heaven is just a state of being in convergence with your God in here and now and people didn't say oh my god the Pope is fallible I have to revise my whole metaphysics Flanagan said everybody he knew said the Pope has gone senile and lost his mind he's the ninth existence of heaven and so I think tonight the fal ability to Pope is a sort of thing where we're most working Catholics don't believe it is any ridiculous it's just ridiculous but I think the existence of God is more of a standard double reference case it's at least white nothing does but the extremely sad when someone does so right so this comes up sometimes so how could people sincerely say they believe in life after death when they're very sad when people die and when and when they are they fear death greatly themselves if the religious believe in heaven why don't they live their lives unafraid of of death I think I think in the fence of the sincerity of religiously death is somewhat of a special case where we have we have biological X psychological systems that are very dedicated to not letting us die and and these systems work alongside other systems so it's almost as if um I could fully believe that a lion won't bite me but still shiver and be reluctant stick my hand in this mouth because there's so much sort of another system screaming at me my the Tamar Gendler gives the example of standing at the pane of glass there's a pane of glass in Grand Canyon and you lets it go down forever and people know they know if you step on it will support you but they can't step on it they shake and everything that I think even if I strongly believe in an afterlife still when faced with my own death I'm going to be terrified and the systems of grief that respond to death just can't be overridden so I was hitters or I would view that in terms of two competing systems yes one is how they change one is how they accept any fractions between people so how they change you might have some healing beliefs about evolution but I believe I sit down with you and run for system of principle work and lay out to you how it works eventually you've been just waiting oh that LaMacchia stuff that doesn't make sense after all and that would change their mind later on you get someone else for the revelation you could toss them out their religious beliefs seems to be in the usual as people seem to this seems to be no principled way in which people explain religious places just transmitted in people of little resistors to persuasion vicars I was such a poor memory that when you got a sec when I forget the first one oh my god I'm already forgetting no I got um um I see the point I disagree I think that that although a huge fan of rationality and rational inference and rational discussion and I'll make that case tomorrow as changing moral views I think we tend to overstate the amount that people scientific views are changed by persuasion outside of us in a tiny subfield who do this for a living and and we we also and so the parallel I think the connection and religious persuasion and scientific persuasion is is there two or more similar you would have it so for instance I actually don't think there's anything you would say to me that would cause me to dispense my belief in evolution I don't even sit down me and you could be you could know many many you to be you could persuade me yes if there's an issue that we're in the scientific worldview I'm here and I should be here you can move me but this is true for for religion as well I can meet a new rabbi and he says you know you think that that's kosher it's not really kosher you know read this part oh I didn't know that okay it's not kosher so that's the parallel so getting somebody to this getting me to disbelieve in in evolution is like it's like getting a theist to disbelieve in God it can be done but it can't be done by sitting down and raising some arguments is a huge complicated process interactive so I know you have a particular evolutionarily formal acknowledgement and I feel like we have a very interesting conversation of some sort whether that be all well if I share the same religious beliefs as you that was very different interaction maybe I have very big trust figure is it possible that maybe I'm trying to kill you or or not trust you or more easier because we all know this is the interaction between 20% I think you right but I think it's the difference in degree and not unkind so where you're pointing out correctly is that religious beliefs will express a religious identity and and this religious identity could be extremely will be salient and in a clash in identities could lead to horrific violence but I or trust but I think a scientific belief also indicates an identity it's just that the identity of us as the community of scientists is a weaker community and in this world we live in now then the community say of Jews or Muslims are Christians so so to some extent that's why I'm agreeing with you with religion oh I'm not going to kill you for for having a different scientific belief than me but religious we will kill each other for different religiously but on the other vendor have been times when scientific communities have sort of gone to war with each other with various degrees of violence and also as a simpler case there's some extent of affiliation if I was in a community full of people who were strong creationists and I'm feeling always a strong creationist and then in annually you whisper to me Darwin rules my brother so there'd be that it wouldn't I agree if you because of other factors that religious communities have all sorts of mechanism akin stronger and tighter than scientific mirrors there is that difference agency in degree not kind yes yes but pedagogical stands that teachers taken in teaching science write suicide by selling school classes they're demonstrating sign hours when you're in a church mass there are stories about other people there what's the source of that I think you're I think you're right I think you're right although I think when you're taught science badly as I was which is why I don't know anything you're taught as if it were was religion okay everybody write this down equals MC squared Einstein was a great man you know and then and and it's a lot like religion but you're right science the science scientific pedagogy has a potential to be rich and deep in a way that I think religious pedagogy typically doesn't I mean religious studies are different but the religion is so if it doesn't and that I think is is a real difference I'll limit dad is a real difference and it connects that a real different in science and religion science and religion really are different types of institutions and science has a cumulative property that that religion typically doesn't and accumulated property building insights upon in sites and experiments and tests and falsifiability will lend itself to different form pedagogy so so that that I would agree I would also be well by the way that there are all sorts of differences in sort of scientific institutions and religious institutions because science and religion are again different yeah the one case about the sort of Crossman please average everyday is too devices are there making sense played out which book juicy religious please have a claim a ultimate role promoting the reputation um I've been convinced but I just making this buy era and and others that this is a matter of empirical fact that religion does seem to be good for you reproduction wise there's a lot of evidence that religious people have reproduced more and that makes it natural to hypothesize that um that we've evolved that a religion has emerged it has evolved just because of the reproductive benefits that it confers so I I have to have to entertain that as a possibility but yeah um but when it comes to beliefs III I don't think the empirical evidence supports it or at least I don't think it it's in for that so what I would need to to believe this what I need to accept this is evidence for an early emerging religious belief that's not taught yet doesn't fall out from other sort of broader stances that we know taze us that's not part of our animistic bias or creationist buy it or duelist bias or so on and I've never found that people have made the argument so again Jesse Bering said look people have an impulse to believe in a monotheistic God that observes them and if that and that showed up in young children that would suggest wowed us that that belief is a biological adaptation but there's AI thirst is not a smidgen of evidence that it does and both cross culturally and developmentally the evidence is that idea of again of what error calls a big God is a human cultural invention not a biological one so I don't actually think any religious beliefs per se have evolved though because of the reproductive benefits as a religion it seems like a reasonable enough hypothesis I just not sure it's true yes rejection as an adult for the gues difference from one to another from religious belief rejecting it moving to scientifically and vice versa are the same processes involved or do you think it can get some sort of exasperation before it's a learning process that one of those parallel with a completely different I'm embarrassed to keep referring back to era but he wrote this wonderful analysis and trends and caught in the journal trends in cognitive science about atheism the different reasons why somebody might be or might become an atheist and there's different sorts of of ways but I guess what I will propose in the spirit of this there's nothing special about religion is to say that the case of somebody religious becoming a theist can be perfectly the same somebody atheists becoming religion and what this would be would be an affiliation of a new group trusting new people so so this leads to a prediction which is somewhat common sense for instance that when people go when when adolescents go off to college or university that's when or at the point of maximum vulnerability either way it's when you'll yo ditch your religious beliefs from an atheist background or you'll suddenly acquire sorry you lead ish your religion be from religious background or somebody acquire religious beliefs and I think that there's a certain case where the case are exactly it's just a shift in trust a lot of people who buy into the scientific worldview know very little about science they're just saying I'm a cosmopolitan person who associates with people who you know who watched certain TV programs and and and we in certain newspapers and votes more liberal and and rejects traditional values and is more and so on and part and parcel of that is I believe in evolution if you any when you shift part and parcel your shift might be you believe the special creation yes so your penalty conclusion was that folk religion science and morality are all similar if you know the debt and then that license is this insurance that there's nothing specialized religion someone might wonder well we got also licenses inferences nothing really special with science fibers you might want to say we'll look not all science and folk science are you saying that all the region is essentially you've got me on this logic thing yeah it's fair enough um I think that there's nothing special about folk science or or folk religion I think folk morality has its own special things that distinguish them from from these two so I could have put brackets sort of what I would say is in a direct answer your question I think the gap as a matter of fact between folk science and real science is bigger than the gap between folk religion and real religion so so people talk about sort of theological in correctness and so on and and the way in which so one example is for instance that although almost all Christians are heavily dualist scholars of Christianity point out that the non-dual astound ations in Paul and others and that's an example of a disjunct and I accept this dis Jones exists but in this junk for spoke science and Sciences is enormous and and and the whole institution is so and I think so and I think that a principal reason for this which is in part real religion religion as is practice by institutions although it's gone on its own course is largely a manifestation of our folk beliefs about the world among other things while our scientific institutions are something very very different it's the discovery of a way of learning but it was gone crazy on his own course leaving most of us mortals behind yes party party party is your world of research people talk about our innate tendency to be illogical varying communicable individual so some of us are really on geological artists are really about to leave and then the Parthians are there some things we just can't believe because it's inheritance so which we're really not your little bit illogical we'll never buy a personal dog and if we're really really really illogical we'll never buy the idea of having to answer part a there's clearly variation between people not actually scales you could ask them questions you could give them scales and so on and whenever we do this people vary and I think some of the variants for these things is probably genetic to some extent genetic tendencies in different ways and some of it clearly is the culture into which they're exposed I think people there's enough room that the idea of a mechanistic universe can be at least understood by every neurologically normal person and the idea of a personal deity shaping our faiths can at least be understood and appreciated by every normal person I think there's a broader point here which just is take-off on what you're saying which is our cognitive apparatus shapes how we understand the world is sort of a gut level and I'm not the first to point out that a lot of the discoveries of say science more so than religion against is is pithos the places where we have no intuitive grasp and we just sort of learn that we understand it maybe intellectually maybe but we have no feel for it so quantum physics as your classic example but also the evolutionary theory itself is grossly unintuitive the time spans the subtlety is different especially you would understand it but it's very difficult and this is one way in which religion and science I think are different which is religion even religion religion doesn't stray too far from our sort of psychological comfort zone because then it wouldn't fulfill its purpose science could go such that you know the scientific side could be said we're just impossible to understand at any at any gut level and so teleology is an interesting case study to look at that since what most scientists would tell you is that we live in a profoundly non teleological universe it's a you know there's there's no under no purposes and and so on and it's interesting question how well that sits with people there's an interesting question whether even people like me who sort of explicitly endorsed this view really will when pressed when given a speeded reaction time study when when poked with the hot poker um we really say that's what I truly believe yes just want to follow up you just said that it was strange we just please comes to stray too far outside our psychological comfort Chris let the anything in the talk I thought was sort of didn't tripod roughly which doesn't help for so many thanks for thanks from let me clarify this there are religious with seduced folk religion which is what the folk belief and it's an avid purpose this is what we what we believe then there's religion religion what the experts the authorities was in the holy text was into what sort of official version um these often do have a purpose because they're created by complex institutions and complex institutions often have a purpose not and make expressions of belief and expressions of fact that serve their purpose let's say you should you should do this you shouldn't do this this is good and this is bad and so on if those but if but scientific institutions can produce beliefs that make no sense and we just say wow look what they discovered over there but but but if but if the if my if my local synagogue comes out with a belief that makes no sense and says this is what we now believe they're failing in their purpose if the folk like me just has no understanding of it it doesn't sit well with us just attentions of the people who create institutions that I don't think so I mean I know there's some people who think that institutions sort of as an emergent property of institutions can have their own purposes and goals but I'm thinking sort of in a more of a simple-minded way yeah that just that that you know the purposes are the purposes of people who are who are standing up saying ok everybody this is what we believe and that when they said I'd often have you know an idea behind it yes could you say use the word very carefully - and I think you mean by belief absorption trust opposite of knowledge system of accepted foundational foundational ornaments and to me to mix these bacteria a little bit differently with in 2009 they asked any Darwinists given even gold what and have some said yes and the other handset me so I would I find interesting that is foundational psychological mechanisms and go those by fighting for automatically music if a child does it that means its earlier somehow that's an assumption I would say that's a working assumption because adults may have very complex reasons why they changed things and then when they get very old they go back to what they were I think a lot of things used to be feed into your research which will then are they to believe but but it's really the term piece itself which driving find because it's not quite clear to me whether you are saying it's all the same or one is better than the other or we shouldn't have it at all and what do you mean by this wait um let me clarify that um if you want you could pursue some of the other issues which sound interesting as well but let me but by belief I mean in sort of the standard English sense so so I started off with an analogy to kind of keep people going which is I believe grass is green or most grass is green that unsupported when you are you go straight so you read this mother what that's a perception thing because we received life raises well I'm using these belief grass is green so so so it's true it's true it's just it's it's true that I believe I'll have a belief under certain circumstances but but here's so here's a test here's a scent a standard test you can do with adults to see if they believe something you could ask them so I can see who here thinks the earth is 200 years old who is these as more than twenty years then people raised your hand and now the evidence for people's bleep that's what I mean by belief in theology is a religious thing or a spiritual to you you can harmonize these things in a way which will reduce reductionist documents that's an eloquent way of capturing the goal of my talk the Harmonized to harmonize these things in a way that sort of reduces them to a singular psychological phenomena the nature of religion as you also said is always the same the difference is not truly and of course there are very different ways in which religion can be communicated and because you can have fun at assists and God knows what they believe you have also Dawkins is a narcissist you know even though he doesn't believe in God but normally people exercise religion by thinking about it really Gardens to go back to this over and over again and if it doesn't stack then you remain and there's a it's not it's not just mindless I think that's an interesting empirical claim but I don't think it's true I think that most people on earth most people in Canada if you ask them at her religious please you won't discover that they do this theologians will do this of course theologians are in many ways like scientists but most religious people don't do that I mean again I again there's you know there's data on this we're not just making things up there's tons of data asking you about our beliefs one of the one of the exciting facts about Gallup polls and the pupils are fascinated by religion so thousands by now millions will masturbate or religious beliefs and this reconstruction that you're doing may well be right for some people but it doesn't seem to be right in general now let me get somebody new just yes I actually hit creationism yes because creationism kind of requires a whole lot more like everything pretty or as natural selection half starts when life started and then humans have evolved over there but doesn't say anything about before that I've worded the matter for life so I was like not dinner well I wasn't trying to make them duke each other other that's a that's sort of a different talk so so but but but dancer your question directly like the question the Builder the contrast involved questions the same scope so it's it's questions like will do animals come from so it's not you right if the question was sort of where the universe comes from then natural selection has nothing to say about an enormous part of problem under some views but biological selection has nothing to say over most of the process well a theistic view start to ground zero and continues so I'm just focusing on origin of biological creatures where I think those two are contending here's to it until you ask people you know do you believe and you given options you believe God created animals as they are people with God guided evolution or you believe was natural selection evolution all the way down people see these as three contending things it's not apples and oranges does that seem that way with you so I guess my question is then how do you think that ratio ever changed the percentages if the third one wasn't humans evolved natural selection there was more like science is working on understanding the beginning in first you take a lot do with job then it's a good it's a good question I'm that third option I wanted to find one dimension natural selections or folks might but often they just say evolution or they just say evolved or so on the numbers stay pretty much the same because I think people again you're not you're you're maybe you are coming from this are you biologists as well natural selection is the specific evolutionary mechanism enters are the ones as well but most people just view natural selection evolution Darwinism as just a cluster as the sort of things that would science beliefs and so the numbers don't change that much when you rephrase it yes and exclusive like sometimes I think it's you're right so sometimes you imagining a blur together often they're framed to be explicitly a disjunctive so they say evolution occurred but God guided it I think this was the guy who more or less the Gallup poll represented evolution occurred but God guided it or evolution occurred but God didn't guide it so it's me to be explicit I agree that there's some ways unless you and particularly unless you put an option that evolution occurred and God played a role the results get a bit messy because you find a lot because it yeah I'm for evolution but I think God had a guiding hand yes like a pair of those then but something we can have two believes because they are quite a few scientists who are religious believe in God how do you explain this in one person so so you're exactly right that people have beliefs that on the face of it would be inconsistent so for instance as you pointed out before zone before mentioned a lot of people who call themselves who are actually evolutionary biologists also believe in God and a lot of people who are champions of natural selection believe that sort of God God guided the process I have I have nothing that interim people are really complicated and and and and I think I think what you see they're putting in this framework I think you see multiple allegiances that work so first thing a working scientists isn't doesn't have his or her beliefs because oh I'm fall into this category it really often happen because they they've done the research they understand it and so on like that but they might also be religious they may also go to church you know say and and and they don't want they don't want to abandon their beliefs they don't want to I mean two-point air great go to when Eric was was leaning towards they don't want to publicly announce their disrespect for the community they love the people that they're allied with so it puts them into a little bit of an apipa pickle and and where people will also will have both beliefs and it will slop on the third bleep they're compatible and let's not talk about it and so so and so so that's sort of how I make sense of that sort of paradox as you put it explain this in ultimately rational terms you're always secret information where someone is religious over someone it's enduring or what someone changed their mind but what if it's not a rational thought what if you're over a huge diversity personality oh I'm not actually the term rationality is a bit ambiguous there so I'm not I'm not saying that people make their choices through the exercise of Reason through sort of conscious deliberate eyes rational typically in fact part of my argument is that that almost never occurs in these domains you know I don't I I'm not uh most people aren't religious people that that is not their identity isn't as a scholar of religion our son so he's believe it because that's what they're supposed to believe if they do this double deference however it is it is it is it is rational in a sense that these are cognitive psychological mechanisms that do it that it's a neuronal mechanisms like a logical manner but what's the alternative I mean it's rational in the broad sense that there are reasons for it we seek trust and we seek this and this is that and those are ultimately Russian explanation there's an offline because and maybe oh I would I would I I would put you you may be right I mean it may be that I'm used to being told I'm wrong I could I'm sometimes told not only you wrong but we'll never know the answer to this question and then I get even more depressed you're saying good may not be an answer this question for some reason this is something which has no answer I would find that very depressing but I can see there might be true access to south

Channel: The University of British Columbia

Views: 121,708

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Id: ttSULfIoWHU

Length: 80min 21sec (4821 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2013

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[u/Telmid]

'Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College. Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. He was born in Montreal, Canada, was an undergraduate at McGill University, and did his doctoral work at MIT. He has published in scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and in popular outlets such as The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the author of two books: How Children Learn the Meanings of Words and Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. His research explores children's understanding of art, religion, and morality. This lecture is part of the ongoing Green College lecture series, "Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture: The Evolution of Religion, Morality and Cooperation"'

The video is split roughly half and half between the talk and Q&A.

[u/oroboros74]

Bloom is also on coursera with a course on Moralities of Everyday Life for those interested.

[u/Philip_of_mastadon]

In the end of talk, he establishes a very specific similarity between folk science and religion, sufficient to justify the compelling title of the lecture. Then he spends the Q&A session conceding senses in which the two are qualitatively different.

[u/kitsune]

Very interesting, thanks

[u/lilgreenrosetta]

I think his idea of deference in science being the same as deference in religion is based on a false dichotomy. In Blooms view, you either understand something completely or you defer to authority. Like 'if you belief the earth is more than 6000 years old but you can't explain exactly how we no this is true, that means you hold that belief based on deference to scientific authority'. I think that is nonsense. I think it is entirely possible to hold such a belief based on the fact that it makes more logical sense than the alternative. The fact that you don't have a 100% airtight explanation does not mean that you have no explanation at all.

I can only explain the age of the earth in quite rudimentary terms about carbon dating, tree rings, sediment layers etcetera. But those things put together make for a far more logical story than a sky wizard willing the earth into existence.