Epiphenom

I always thought a majority of people approach re...

2013-05-24T16:20:19.263+01:00

I always thought a majority of people approach religion more like a flavor of ice cream than doing math.

Way to bring out the extra-wide roller brush!

2013-05-23T22:00:59.716+01:00

Way to bring out the extra-wide roller brush!

Actually, both supported Israel at the onset but w...

2013-05-23T18:39:00.515+01:00

Actually, both supported Israel at the onset but when Israel moved away from socialist structure of the kibbutz is when Russia ended its support for Israel. Europe and Great Britain were much more against idea of Israel than Russia.

This is a very silly article. First, this Journal...

2013-05-21T03:02:09.821+01:00

This is a very silly article. First, this Journal has an impact factor of 0.63. I didn't even know you could go below 1. You also need to make it more apparent that there were almost 6 times more Christians surveyed than any other group. That is a huge bias. The majority of respondents were women as well. It's hard to tell what effect gender had. You should also include standard deviation with your graph. They also throw out values which may have hurt their significance. I could go on and on, but don't bother reading a journal article with a 0.63 impact factor. Blogs have higher impact.

Yes, I think from a perspective of pure logic the ...

2013-05-20T21:34:34.000+01:00

Yes, I think from a perspective of pure logic the entities (supernatural or otherwise) either have properties or they do not. So questions of religion are questions of fact - it;s just that there's no real way of deciding who's right or wrong. Which is why it's interesting that both children and adults have a tendency that people who disagree over religion can both be right - perhaps a way of easing the potential conflict?

I'm not convinced that the issue of faultless ...

2013-05-20T02:08:10.500+01:00

I'm not convinced that the issue of faultless disagreement can easily be reduced to the difference between facts and opinions. But even so, it seems like there are possibly facts about about non-existent things. If I claim that unicorns have one horn and somebody disagrees with me, it seems pretty clear that only one of us is right, even if there are no unicorns. The spirit location question in the article seems to have similar qualities. Likewise, perhaps it is possible for a person who has a concept of God that is not incoherent to be right in a way that someone else is not, regardless of the existence of God.

Btw, a little birdie told me that dinosaurs are not really extinct, they just learned how to fly.

In the title: "an fact"?

2013-05-19T23:20:24.324+01:00

In the title: "an fact"?

I ask my kids this question all the time: How do y...

2013-05-15T19:02:29.357+01:00

I ask my kids this question all the time: How do you know what you know?

Do you know it, or do you just think you know it? ...

2013-05-14T07:33:50.700+01:00

Do you know it, or do you just think you know it? After all, until someone has done the research, how can you know it?

Sorry, but it's known since always... every th...

2013-05-13T23:24:37.363+01:00

Sorry, but it's known since always... every thinking person knows it!
Regards,
Mauro.

Fascinating article. The reactions are a bit child...

2013-04-17T06:24:05.432+01:00

Fascinating article. The reactions are a bit childish and knee jerk, but I remember the same when the whole "Religious people have lower IQs" study came out. Human nature I suppose.

I remember reading that fundamentalists are similar in having low empathy. I wonder if there is a connection in the inherent brain function. Often when you see this discussed in the context of those who are more liberally religious or Spiritual but not Religious you see both fundamentalists and atheists who are more militant or emphatic in view disown them to the other side. What if they are both right? Perhaps the more Spiritual types are on the other end of a spectrum while atheists and fundamentalists are two branches from the same trunk (one skeptical and curious, one skeptical and traditional, both testing all new information against their favored truth - science/philosophy or tradition/religion). It would seem to be corroborated by that study I read about that said Spiritual but not Religious and those who are more liberal about religion tend to suffer more mental problems than Atheists and Religious folks.

So, choose between having a low IQ, mental illness, or low empathy (a joke, of course, as it is varying degrees, no doubt, but does explain why it feels like we talk past each other so much).

It may also be that those most aware of how bad th...

2013-04-15T14:57:45.544+01:00

It may also be that those most aware of how bad things are are going to be naturally more depressed. It's the counterpart to the "ignorance is bliss" aphorism.

Lurker111

I noticed the same thing baopu81 did. The Chinese...

2013-04-11T15:42:18.853+01:00

I noticed the same thing baopu81 did. The Chinese subjects in the delayed response actually remembered the Intuitive better than the MCI, the reverse of how the westerners performed.

@Sabio Thanks for the interesting link, although ...

2013-04-07T03:22:34.831+01:00

@Sabio

Thanks for the interesting link, although it largely supports the the rationale that my colleagues and I adopted in the paper. The article asserts that homosexuality is not directly referenced in Buddhist scripture

As homosexuality is not explicitly mentioned in any of the Buddha's discourses (more than 20 volumes in the Pali Text Society's English translation)

and also suggests that Buddism's teachings advise evaluating the morality of homosexual acts in the same way as heterosexual acts, which would suggest there's nothing intrinsically "wrong" with homosexuality.

You are of course right: anti-homosexual attitudes ARE ubiquitous, and out here in Asia there is just as much (if not more) overt prejudice towards gays than there is in the West. However, what we're arguing in this paper is that religious value violation doesn't necessarily drive this effect.

Additionally, I hope readers of this blog realize that we're not working with a sterilized, Westernized version of Buddhism here. This research was conducted in a majority Buddhist/Taoist country in Asia. Anti-homosexual prejudice is frequently encountered here, but we believe this may have far more to do with general conservatism than religious values per se.

2013-04-07T03:18:39.047+01:00

This comment has been removed by the author.

Why is everyone discussing this study as if there ...

2013-04-05T04:30:24.095+01:00

Why is everyone discussing this study as if there were no confidence intervals displayed in the graph? The differences that were found were nowhere near being statistically significant. This study found nothing of any scientific value, so why discuss it?

I'd like to see more experiments (like this on...

2013-04-05T04:21:24.275+01:00

I'd like to see more experiments (like this one) that use people from different parts of the world. I think for too long many test results reflect the reactions/behaviour of Western college kids.

Now, I may not be reading the graph right, but I'm not sure all of your observations are correct. You write, "For the Chinese speakers, there was no difference in immediate recall, but there was a difference in the delayed recall." It appears that there was only a difference in the delayed recall of MCI, but not Intuitive. Maybe that's what you meant, though it was unclear to me.

You also write, "They found that the longer the period until the second test, the more likely it was that the intuitive items would be forgotten." But this doesn't appear to be the case with the Chinese, does it?

Anyways, thanks for blogging about this. Food for thought.

@ Jayarava, you write " Or our being social empathetic animals, with strong preferences for people that look like us." I think there is something to this, and it reminds me of Gene Roddenberry's insistence on making most alien species be humanoid. Of course, it was easier to film, but he also believed people would be able to relate better.

Do these 'atheist countries are more peaceful&...

2013-04-04T05:35:45.445+01:00

Do these 'atheist countries are more peaceful' guys always leave out HISTORY and modern communist regimes like, oh I don't know, North Korea?

I believe any 'study' done that shows atheist countries are more peaceful are willfully ignoring the last 100 years of atheistic regimes, communism, MODERN catastrophy countries like North Korea, and also suicide rates - Japan is nice and peaceful, and tragically depressed and suicidal country, low crime though!. How peaceful.

BS, BS, and BS. These studies are the very definition of narrow bias.

Now I have to add a sentence to make sure conscience wise the athiest moderating these comments might actually let this comment through - let's see, will you allow this comment? Or delete it like a coward? Up to you.

I think the one problem the theory has is in defin...

2013-03-30T19:32:13.278Z

I think the one problem the theory has is in definition. It talks about "minimally" counterintuitive, but what exactly that means when it comes to gods is pretty much open to speculation. The idea is that if gods were any more or less strange than they are, they would be harder to remember, but I haven't seen that tested directly.

Kassul the distinction Tomas draws repeatedly is u...

2013-03-30T16:24:25.930Z

Kassul the distinction Tomas draws repeatedly is us and "slightly odd things" or images that were "minimally counter intuitive". You can certainly split hairs on this if you wish, but I think this (interesting) effect has little explanatory power for human gods and that we already have much better explanations. In the end Tomas agrees.

Not sure that egyptian, etc, etc gods are a point ...

2013-03-30T16:21:08.257Z

Not sure that egyptian, etc, etc gods are a point against MCI ideas.
As I understood it, MCI doesn't just mean physical appearance, but rather an overall look at the idea.

I'm no expert in ancient Egyptian religion, but their gods still had personalities like us, likes and dislikes. They could hear and talk(after a fashion), they eat, they fight, they can get sick, etc, etc...

Sure they might have a jackal ead, but they're not all THAT different from us. Just ... enough to be a god. Enough to catch your attention and help them lodge in memory and be worth talking about

You know, I'm inclined to agree with you. It&#...

2013-03-30T07:40:47.349Z

You know, I'm inclined to agree with you. It's an interesting hypothesis, but I don't think it's well supported by the data,and then there's all the points you make. It would be interesting to see some research to see if there is any consistency in the way gods are represented around the world. Maybe the MCID hypothesis is actually a non starter.

Hi Tomas, I think there are better and stronger a...

2013-03-28T21:46:52.584Z

Hi Tomas,

I think there are better and stronger arguments and evidence for why we might have created gods mainly like us (at least like us socially). Apophenia for instance. Or our being social empathetic animals, with strong preferences for people that look like us.

Mainly... because many of the Egyptian gods, for example, were slight odd in having animal heads. Assyrian gods were slightly odd in having wings (as were the Hebrew angels based on them). Tibetan wrathful deities are extremely odd, as are many of the Indian deities. Viṣṇu takes many forms: turtle, boar, dwarf amongst them. Lots of cultures have gods in animal forms.

The more I think of it the more I don't think many cultures did have gods "much like us". Most were quite counterintuitive in form, even when their social relations are similar to ours. It's really only the Greeks (and the peoples they influence) that go in for humaniform gods in a big way.

I think the research is interesting, but I'm not convinced of the case you are making. It might contribute in those minority of cases where gods are roughly human, but other factors are surely much more important.

@Jayarava, the basic idea is that MCI concepts are...

2013-03-28T20:02:55.416Z

@Jayarava, the basic idea is that MCI concepts are more culturally transmissible, since they are at the sweet spot of being different enough to be memorable but not so different as to be too complex to memorize.

So they were testing whether slightly odd things were easier to remember (they weren't) and easier to recall (they were). So this supports the idea that the reason we have gods that are much like humans but with a few distinctive features is that they are 'minimally counterintuitive'

@B.T. Newberg - no, they say that there were no si...

2013-03-28T19:59:33.322Z

@B.T. Newberg - no, they say that there were no significant differences between Western and Eastern participants, and also say that no differences were hypothesized.