In the comments below Jason Malloy took issue with John Hawks’ contention that Creationists “will now cite Eric Lander in support of the idea that hominid fossils are not transitional between apes and humans, but instead are hybrids of apes and humans.”
I don’t know. Here is a short passage from Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust:
…after reading a bogus article on a new finding from the Dead Sea Scrolls that seemed to contradict Christian doctrine, religious respondents who also believed the story reported their religious beliefs reinforced (Batson 1975)….
My first reaction, from the gut, is to explode about “God-idiots” in a Raving Atheist fashion. I mean, a) these people believe that that the Dead Sea Scroll fabrications are actually accurate b) but they still aver a belief that they should logically see is untenable. Frankly, the subjects of these studies remind me of the moronic undecided voters who grin about how they “just can’t pick” because “they aren’t hearing the issues.” Usually, if you are watching them on TV you probably think, “Damnit, tell them that they’re fucking toothless morons with only a few spare neurons, and that’s why they can’t make up their ‘minds.'”
But I have to take a step back. The fact is after the initial incredulity I understood exactly what Atran was pointing to because I had seen it many times in my own life. In the case of religionists I recall a Jewish Orthodox girl telling me how the Holocaust confirmed her belief in the existence in of a Jewish God. How the hell did she get there? It was really convoluted and I really can’t repeat it because it didn’t make any sense to me at that time and so it didn’t “stick” in my memory (it wasn’t as naive and obvious as “it was God’s punishment for not keeping the law”). But the point is that belief sure can be a fucking mystey to logical analysis. And yet it is not necessarily a mystery to cognitive science. If you read Cognitive Daily or Mixing Memory you will know that the human mind is not some naked, plain and transparent computational device without bugs. We have biases, and are riddled by incongruities. If there is an Intelligent Designer he should have cribbed some notes from Frege, because the mind isn’t really good at formal logic. Whatever mental book-keeping we have seems really ill-suited to smoking out internal contradictions in our beliefs.
I think that it is obvious that the biases and cognitive “bugs” in our minds make most humans pretty susceptible to the meme-complexes of religions. That’s just the cards our species was dealt. One of the features of these meme-complexes is that you really can’t make heads or tails of the mental processes going on…and when it comes to something like chimp-human hybrdization, I’m sure that some Christian will figure out that it actually proves the existence of God. The reality is I think that for most people all data will confirm the existence of God, but that’s because the existence of God is predicated on “under the hood” mental processes. These processes are orthogonal to the explicit ideas and facts that are the currency in conscious domains. So you see, idiotic contradictions are feasible because the modularity of various mental processes, your brain isn’t always in a state of crosstalk unless you are constantly engaging in conceptual analysis (even then, some processes are encapsulated so you can’t get to them, remember this next time you try to ‘convince’ yourself that you aren’t hungry).
Now, I have silly beliefs that are pretty inflexible to new information, and, they probably often operate unconsciously. The only thing is that I don’t make these silly beliefs the center of my ontology (or elaborate complicated word games that I demand other people accept as True), nor do I imbue them with transcendental significance. Oh, and I don’t blow people up over them.
Addendum: Read this Muslim gibberish, I dare you to say that this is the product of an integrated mind!
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