Quote of the Day

"Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of "7 times 9" in a boy's mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of "65." What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought -- that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces "7 times 9 are 63" is better than the brain which produces "7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law -- laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural law may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed."

Arthur S. Eddington
Science and the Unseen World (1929)



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Homo ideologicus

The New Atheists have made waves by loudly insisting that religion and religious belief are inherently irrational, that they are unique in their capacity to make people do stupid and destructive things. Richard Dawkins is most famous for describing religion as a virus of the mind, infecting people's brains and clouding their judgment. Or take Steven Weinberg, who famously remarked that "With or without [religion], you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion."

But is religion alone in this regard? I am inclined to think that behind the seemingly inherent irrationality and destructiveness of religion lies an even deeper human impulse which is not unique to religion but can arise from all aspects of human experience: the impulse to ideology.

What is ideology? It is not simply a system of belief or a worldview. It refers to the process by which the human mind, individually or collectively, becomes fixated on a specific idea or institution as a source of value, meaning and security. Take German Nationalism, for example: Hitler because as powerful and popular as he did because he promised the Germans the things that they had been missing since World War I: economic prosperity and a reason to be proud of their country. And these were not just frustrated desires coming to the fore: they represented a deep chasm within the very soul of Germany, that had to be filled somehow. It went beyond just wanting to have more money or seeing their country rise to prominence again: the German people could not find meaning in their existence were it not for the restoration of these things. And so they turned to a monster who promised to give it to them and so turned a blind eye on the atrocities of the new regime. (See the excellent discussion of ideology in Hope in Troubled Times, pp.31-60)

Satan astutely remarks in the book of Job, "Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life." (Job 2:4) In this simple statement we see the deepest roots of ideology: insecurity, physical or spiritual. When we are confronted with life and meaning-threatening circumstances, we are tempted to surrender power to something, anything that looks like it might save us from our predicament, regardless of the ultimate consequences for ourselves and others. That something becomes an ideology, which is then endlessly rationalized and defended with seemingly blind faith.

The important part of this process for our purposes is that ideologies are not confined to religions. To be sure, religion is very fertile ground for cultivating ideologies because it seems to promise eternal security to its adherents. But ideologies can also be found in politics (think conservatives vs. liberals, or people's adherence to revolutionary leaders), economics (Keynesians vs. neo-classicals), philosophy (think of the devotion which Marxists or Freudians shower on the writings of their founding fathers) and elsewhere. In each case we see adherents of ideology selectively read the evidence, refuse to back down in the face of critical challenge and write their opponents off as biased, irrational or even dangerous. There is no inherent difference between religious and other ideologies, with the possible difference that the consequences of being wrong in religion, as Sam Harris reminds us, are far more serious!

Ideology in any field is dangerous. The remedy for it is open-mindedness, critical thinking and in the monotheistic traditions the acknowledgment that you are not God, that the quest for truth, though it ends ultimately in God, is never ending from a human point of view.


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Origins

Reasons to Believe is a Christian ministry that deals primarily with science apologetics. A common objection to using science to defend Christianity, or any religious claim, is that appealing to supernatural causality is not falsifiable, since it does not make risky predictions, and hence is not really science. (Of course, many people who so object tend to see science as refuting -- that is, falsifying -- Christianity. This is a rather striking inconsistency.) To counter this objection RTB has come out with several books in the last few years which present models that make predictions that future scientific discoveries can verify or falsify.

The first book they published is entitled Origins of Life by biochemist Fazale Rana and astrophysicist Hugh Ross, RTB's vice-president and president, respectively. Origins of Life addresses ... wait for it ... the origin of life. The book's subtitle notwithstanding, they write

This is not a book about evolution per se. That is, it is not about the theory by which life accumulates changes over time, so that simple, early organisms change over eons into more complex, advanced ones. It is not about the entire history of life on Earth either. Rather, this book has a narrower, yet crucial, focus ... This book is about the origin of life -- the first appearances of living organisms on Earth. We address such questions as: What was first life like? When did it appear on Earth? How did it get here?

Rana and Ross contend that natural processes are incapable of bringing life into existence out of non-living material, and thus life's origin requires a supernatural agent. To this end, they take the baton from The Mystery of Life's Origin written by Thaxton, Bradley, and Olson in 1984. Rana and Ross attend the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) conferences held every three years, so their knowledge of the field is extensive and up to date.

Rana and Ross specifically make eight predictions based on their interpretation of Genesis 1 which they say can be falsified. Some might suggest that basing their model on the Bible immediately excludes it from consideration as scientific. But how one comes to hold a model or hypothesis or theory is irrelevant in science; what matters (at least according to contemporary philosophy of science) is whether it can be verified or falsified. Friedrich Kekulé came up with the ring structure of benzene after daydreaming of a snake biting its own tail, but no one would use this to suggest that benzene isn't characterized by a ring structure. Of course, I don't consider the Bible to be as fanciful as daydreams; my point is that even if you think it is as fanciful, or even that it is anti-scientific in the extreme, this is no argument against Rana's and Ross's model. If it can be verified or falsified by evidence, then its origin is simply irrelevant.

At any rate, these are the predictions that Rana and Ross offer:

1. Life appeared early in Earth's history, while the planet was still in its primordial state.
2. Life originated in and persisted through the hostile conditions of early Earth.
3. Life originated abruptly.
4. Earth's first life displays complexity.
5. Life is complex in its minimal form.
6. Life's chemistry displays hallmark characteristics of design (they discuss what these hallmarks are in their conclusion).
7. Early life was qualitatively different from life that came into existence on creation days three, five, and six.
8. A purpose can be postulated for life's early appearance on Earth. ("[Our] model bears the burden of explaining why God would create life so early in Earth's history and why (as well as when) He would create the specific types of life that appeared on primordial Earth.")

They contrast this with what they claim are the predictions from a naturalistic (i.e. non-miraculous) perspective. They acknowledge that there is great diversity here, and that often the predictions made from a particular model are based on that model's specifics. Nevertheless, they are able to derive nine general predictions made by naturalistic models:

1. Chemical pathways produced life's building blocks.
2. Chemical pathways yielded complex biomolecules.
3. The chemical pathways that yielded life's building blocks and complex molecular constituents operated in early Earth's conditions.
4. Sufficiently placid chemical and physical conditions existed on early Earth for long periods of time.
5. Geochemical evidence for a prebiotic soup exists in Earth's oldest rocks.
6. Life appeared gradually on Earth over a long period of time.
7. The origin of life occurred only once on Earth.
8. Earth's first life was simple.
9. Life in its most minimal form is demonstrably simple.

Rana and Ross then test the predictions of both models against the scientific facts as we now know them, and argue that their model receives strong support, while naturalistic models are undermined. Moreover, they point out that their model can continue to be tested as future scientific discoveries will either support or undermine their predictions (as well as those of naturalistic models).

They address whether life arose early in Earth's history or late; whether it arose quickly or slowly; whether there is any evidence for a prebiotic soup; whether chemical pathways can account for the origin of proteins, DNA, and RNA; the difficulty of accounting for homochirality (that proteins and sugars must be uniformly right or left "handed"); the information content encoded in DNA and RNA; the origin of cell membranes; the lower limit of complexity that a cell must have in order to survive and propagate; the role of organisms that thrive in extreme environments (extremophiles); the possibility of life on Mars, Europa, and other extraterrestrial locations; and "directed panspermia", the theory gaining in popularity (due to the problems outlined in the preceding chapters) that an advanced alien civilization intentionally seeded Earth with life. (Indeed, it seems to me that any supernatural explanation for the origin of life amounts to divinely directed panspermia).

Origins of Life is a fascinating discussion of the subject. Several chapters are worth the cost of the book all by themselves. Their chapter on cell membranes, for example, addresses a subject that is rarely raised. "To date, no studies have been conducted on the long-term stability of octanoic and nonanoic bilayers." ... "Despite its importance to naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios, researchers in this field focus only limited attention on membrane origins."

Other examples are their chapters on alternate life-sites in our solar system, including Mars, Europa (one of Jupiter's moons), and Titan (one of Saturn's). The latter is particularly interesting, since the Huygens Probe landed on Titan a few years ago, although (unfortunately) several months after Origins of Life was published. Again, this book is very comprehensive in its approach, so to discuss their arguments at length would take pages.

Other books they have published employing this model are Who Was Adam? by Rana and Ross which deals with human origins; Creation as Science by Ross which deals with their creation model in general; The Cell's Design by Rana which deals with the complexity of individual cells; and just released is Why the Universe Is the Way It Is by Ross. I have not yet read these books and don't know anything about them beyond their general descriptions. But I'm looking forward to them.

(cross-posted on Agent Intellect)



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Two short stories

First, James' post on the Large Hadron Collider reminds me of a very clever short story: Some Particles Just Shouldn't Be Accelerated. Enjoy.

Second -- and please forgive the vanity, but writing a blog is an exercise in vanity already -- I sometimes post short stories on my other blog, and I thought my most recent entry would be of interest to readers of this one, as it is something of a send-up of the Brights and their ilk. Here it is.



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Hitchens, God, and Morality

The Corner is National Review Online's blog that's primarily devoted to politics from the right side of the spectrum, but occasionally they veer over to more important issues. One of their bloggers saw Christopher Hitchens debate Lorenzo Albacete, and Hitchens apparently acknowledged that he believes in the numinous and the transcendent, just not in the supernatural. Moreover, his rantings against the evils done in the name of religion belie a belief in an absolute standard being violated; so much so that the bloggers muse that he's downright Puritanical (to use an oft-misused term). It starts here, and then continues here, here, here, and here.



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A Universal Declaration?

There was an interesting piece on P Z’s blog this week about the development by scholars of a new Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration is claimed to be complementary to the UN’s Universal Declaration of human rights (UDHR) but contains a number of important differences. The Islamic version for instance changes the declaration of equality of rights for all people to equality of dignity and obligations, and limits rights to those given within the shari'ah. PZ was characteristically outraged, saying that the Islamic version is ‘nothing but an open attempt to protect the privilege of religion to violate human rights in the name of imaginary gods’.

The drafting of a competing deceleration isn’t that surprising when you consider the origins of the UDHR which was really an attempt to enshrine values developed within the Christian tradition and depict them as universal, a fact noted by the author. In 1948, as he completed the original draft, the Canadian law professor John Humphrey went home and noted in his diary that what had been achieved was ‘something like the Christian morality without the tommyrot’ by which he meant all the unnecessary accretions of prayer and miracles and faith and sacraments and chapels. This is recognised by the Iranians, who refuse to ratify it because they see it as "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law. Many have noted that the universalism of the declaration is primarily based on the teachings of Christianity, a religion which from the start promulgated its message as one for the whole world. In "A Time of Transition," the philosopher Jürgen Habermas writes:

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love

In particular, the premise of the UNDHR is that all human lives have equal dignity and worth. This is not, however, the teaching of all the world's cultures and religions and certainly wasn’t much in evidence in the three decades before the declaration was drafted. As a result the deceleration is seen by other societies as a threatening ‘mission statement’ which undermines their culture.

How much do liberal values and the idea of human rights owe to Christianity?, after all when you read someone like Aquinus you find very little about them. Instead Aquinus is preoccupied with the duties of a leader, the good that he can achieve and the things he can do to make his people more virtuous. With the Reformation came a great shift in thinking and the gradual development of liberal democracy as an alternative structure of governance. The rationale for this process was the fracturing of Christendom and the breakup of the religious unity of Western Europe. This new situation of religious pluralism was the cause of too much war and social discontent to be bearable. The alternative was the new idea of a political structure based on a schedule of natural human rights, a polity based not on doing what you can to make people good but the inviolability of human beings who are created in the image of God.

The common narrative is that the idea of natural rights was born from the atomistic individualism of the enlightenment or late medieval nominalists such as William of Ockham. This narrative has been decisively refuted. Historians such as Tierney gone further and have traced these ideals all the way back to Rufinus and Ricardus, to Huguccio and Alanus, and to their "obscure glosses" of the twelfth century. These writers based their ideals on the concept of the Imago Dei and the belief that people, as creatures of nature and God, should live their lives and organize their society on the basis of rules and precepts laid down by nature or God. As Tierney has shown, 11th century church Canon lawyers were regularly using the concept of natural rights almost three centuries before the nominalists. Some would argue that these ideals can be traced back as far as the church fathers. To give one example, in 388 and 389, John Chrysostom, preached seven sermons on the parable of Lazerous. In one of these sermons, he preached that the extra shoes in the closet of the wealthy person belong to the poor person who has no shoes and that this poor person doesn't have to be good, all he has to be is a person in need. He then used the analogy that just as a harbormaster has to allow the pirates into the harbour when the storm comes up, so also the poor person who has the claim on the shoes does not have to demonstrate that they are virtuous. It is clear from the literature that the idea of natural rights was a presence in western thought long before it was put to new use in the reformation and enlightenment. Instead Tierney has shown that the idea of natural rights grew up in a religious culture that supplanted rational argumentation about human nature with a faith in which humans were seen as children of a caring God, that is the distinctly Christian circumstances of the High and Late Middle Ages.

Once adopted, the idea of natural rights could have been placed in a secular context. This did not happen. One of the most influential exponents of this idea was John Locke who saturated his writings with Christian references and was heavily influenced by Richard Hooker, the Anglican theologian. Locke justifies the principle of equality this way:

‘The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another's uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our's.’

Locke’s ideals found their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’. By contrast the US bill of rights contains no theological language and prevents the establishment of religion. However, state constitutions of the same period give the rationale for this free exercise of religion. All of them except for New York’s constitution (which mutters something about wicked priests), state that everyone has a natural duty to worship god and an inalienable right to do so in a way that suits their own conscience. The ideal of toleration therefore derived from religious dissent, that is to say from a type of religion rather than an attack on religion. So even secularism which really goes all the way back to Jesus’ statement ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ which was developed by St Augustine, can be seen as a development from western religion not from the attack on it.

Despite his hostility to Christianity, Paine understood that such concepts as the dignity of man and human rights depended on man's special place in God's creation. Indeed the Jacobins of the French Revolution imprisoned Paine after he warned them that their atheism would undercut the basis of their declaration of human rights. Having written ‘The Age of Reason’ Paine wrote that "the people of France were running headlong into atheism and I had the work translated into their own language, to stop them in that career, and fix them to the first article . . . of every man's creed who has any creed at all – I believe in God" (emphasis Paine's).

This was to be the high point of the natural rights concept; which was derided as ‘nonsense on stilts’ by Jeremy Benthem. Under the onslaught of legal positivism, cultural relativism, and Marxism, the idea of natural rights was abandoned by most jurists and philosophers. Then came the aftermath of World War II and a great revival of the ideal of universal human rights, driven, in part, by the fact that the Nazis at Nuremberg used legal positivist principles and cultural relativism in their defence proceedings. For a time at least simple-minded cultural relativism seemed inadequate in face of the crimes of the Nazi regime and it was in this atmosphere the UDHR was drafted.

One of the oddities of the current wave of new atheism is a fundamental error in not studying how we have acquired the concepts and categories we use, how they emerged and developed in the western tradition. This mirrors the tendency of new atheists to erase or play down the significant contribution from religion to the development of western science. Trace the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to their origins and study their development and you’ll find that they were largely developed within the mental landscape of Judeo-Christianity and find their legitimacy in PZ Meyer's ‘imaginary God’. This was fully recognised in the 19th century by atheist thinkers like Nietzsche; today's crop of logical positivists seem to be in collective denial.


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The Large Hadron Collider has Broken Down

Scientists were forced to admit this week that their attempt to destroy the universe had failed. Boffins at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva in Switzerland turned on the device last week to international excitement. However, on Friday it was shut down after a rattling sound was reported as coming from within one of the meson cannons. Dr Hun-Lum Kim, on secondment from the North Korean Nuclear Research Facility, explained that it looked like one of the quark accelerators used to drive atoms at twice the speed of light had come loose. “It is very frustrating,” he said, “ we have got so close to a functioning doomsday machine and then this happened.” Blaming budget constraints and sloppy workmanship, he added “I knew it was a mistake to source the fission magnetrons from Iran but obviously most the technology is completely illegal in the West and you just have to get it from where you can.”

Sources close to the project reacting angrily to the suggestion that trying to destroy the universe was “irresponsible” or “playing God.” “Science is merely the disinterested search for knowledge,” a source insisted. “Knowing whether it is possible to create black hole big enough to swallow all reality is vital to testing the validity of string theory. Clearly, we would not want the technology to fall into the hands of dictators or Republicans but that is unlikely to happen because we’ll all be dead anyway.”



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Visions of Jesus and other spirits: were Resurrection appearances hallucinations?

Comparative religion is a tricky business, apologetically speaking. Pointing out cross-cultural similarities (or differences) between belief systems can be both an aide and a detriment to making the case for Christ. Take the Resurrection appearances, for example: many apologists argue for their uniqueness by pointing to their collective nature (i.e. Jesus appeared to many people at once) and the tangible effects of those appearances. In a recent post on his blog, N.T. Wrong attempts to provide comparative historical evidence, not for collective hallucinations per se, but for individual dreams/visions which subsequently mutated into reports of collective visions, and concludes that "The most plausible explanation for the accounts of the sightings of Jesus, therefore, is that they derive from individual vision reports, which over time have been transformed into reports of mass sightings of Jesus."

There are problems with Wrong's case stemming from the fact that all the examples of mass visions which he gives are dreams, experienced at night rather than during the waking hours by groups of awake, alert people. Furthermore, he acknowledges that some of the Resurrection appearances begin with a group of people (i.e. the three women who came to Jesus' grave) rather than an individual (Mark's resurrection account has an individual sighting, that of Mary Magdalene, tagged on to an original group vision account). He refers to Mark's account as visionary even though Mark does not present it as such on the basis of some similarities to other vision stories: the women were grieving which is known to produce hallucinations (so-called grief-induced visions), and it was in the early hours of the morning, the 'liminal' hours which are associated with visions (so this wouldn't apply to Luke's story of an encounter with the risen Lord by two disciples at around dusk). This seems pretty flimsy evidence upon which to pronounce the Markan account a vision story, especially given the distinctive nature of the Christian resurrection claim. As Robin Fox points out, "In the pagan world, visions of a person soon after death were not uncommon...Christians, however, advanced the extreme claim that the object of their visions had risen physically from the dead...These [resurrection] stories were very explicit and had no pagan counterpart." (Pagans and Christians, pp.377-378)

But suppose he is right that there is, or could be in theory, comparative evidence for phenomena similar to resurrection appearances. Would that be an apologetic weakness necessarily? Philip Wiebe's case for the Resurrection in Visions of Jesus is dependent upon there being such evidence. We should recall the oft-repeated caution not to prejudge the evidential value of vision accounts simply because they are visionary. Just because people have had visionary experiences doesn't mean they are not veridical. Of course there is the problem then of determining whether vision stories from other religious traditions are veridical. I think there is a case to be made that at least some of them are, although of course their source and meaning is open to question. The point is that each apologetic strategy (emphasizing uniqueness, emphasizing continuity) has its pros and cons. But perhaps they can be brought together to emphasize the strengths and downplay the weaknesses of each. The argument about the Resurrection is far from over.

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Steven Weinberg recovers from Russell's Syndrome

Steven Weinberg has written a surprisingly good article in the New York Review of Books. It is in marked contrast to his much less successful review of the God Delusion in the Times Literary Supplement last year. For example, the new Weinberg admits he has no idea what effect al-Ghazali had on Islamic science while in his review of Dawkins’s book, he blamed him for completely destroying the Arabic scientific tradition. In his earlier piece, Weinberg wrote, “after al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries”, which is factually inaccurate as many, not least George Saliba, have pointed out. Likewise, Weinberg has abandoned the conflict hypothesis for the relationship between science and religion in favour of mere ‘tension’. Ironically, that is the same word I use in my own book, God’s Philosophers, although I refer to the tension as creative. One of the reasons why I use the word ‘creative’ is that the medieval condemnation of Aristotle’s naturalistic philosophy had a positive effect on the rise of science. Weinberg even acknowledges this point in his article. He also has a realistic attitude to science’s inability to answer many important questions. That isn’t to say that Weinberg has changed his mind about God. And he continues to make mistakes about several aspects of history (not least how Darwin lost his faith). But the improvement in both tone and argumentation is clear to see.

I want to take one point from Weinberg’s article. That in itself is a sign of progress because in his previous incarnation, his thinking wasn’t even worth engaging with. The point I want to raise is the question of authority, both moral and scientific. Weinberg thinks he can do without authority and explains that scientific authority is not absolute. This is true but, for most of us, it may as well be. In order to effectively criticise science one has to have a relevant PhD and access to peer-reviewed journals. In practice, even if we could understand the issues and do the maths (which most of us cannot), we cannot challenge scientific authority. Scientific authority is thus vested in a group of men (and a few women) that few of us have the slightest chance of ever joining. It is all very well for a Nobel Prize winner like Weinberg to laud this system, but then he is on the inside.

The thing is, I laud the system too. I want science in the hands of experts who have been properly trained and are backed up by a long tradition of similarly learned individuals. I’d like a similar level of expertise to be brought to bear on moral questions as well. Weinberg would appear to deny us this because only religion has provided such a framework. He realises that the removal of this authority on how to live one’s life creates a huge problem. The substitutes, such as Nazism and Communism, have, he acknowledges, been worse than the religion that they aimed to replace. Weinberg eloquently notes that, as atheists, “at best we live life on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.” The tragedy of being an open-minded atheist is the realisation that they need religion just they reject it.

Weinberg’s article also raises an interesting medical point. I had previously assumed that Russell’s Syndrome (whereby intelligent atheists turn stupid when they talk about religion) was incurable, but on the evidence of the NYRB article, Weinberg is well on the way to making a recovery. We should wish him well.

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Who are you calling irrational?

Damien Thompson is a conservative Catholic and a big fan of Pope Benedict XVI. He is also the author of Counterknowledge, a book that brutally debunks faith healing, pseudo-history and creationism. Thompson is a standing indictment of those who think being a committed Christian is the same thing as being gullible and irrational.

It gets worse for the Dawkinistas. Researchers at Baylor University, including Rodney Stark, have found that conservative Christians are less likely to be superstitious than non-believers.

The Baylor Survey found that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases
credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs,
haunted houses, communicating with the dead and astrology. Still, it
remains widely believed that religious people are especially credulous,
particularly those who identify themselves as Evangelicals, born again, Bible
believers and fundamentalists. However, the ISR researchers found that
conservative religious Americans are far less likely to believe in the occult
and paranormal than are other Americans, with self-identified theological
liberals and the irreligious far more likely than other Americans to
believe.

So, it is conservative believers who are the least credulous while liberal Christians are as bad as non-believers. The rest of the report summary is pretty interesting too.

The Wall Street Journal gives us a practical example of this. Atheist comedian Bill Maher’s film Religulous is the latest ill-informed polemic against religion. Sadly, Maher himself is a fully paid up wing nut who rejects the germ theory of disease and vaccination. If he had had his way, polio would still be killing and disabling millions.

None of us are as rational as we like to believe. But it seems that atheists are even further from their self image than the rest of us.

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