Which Secular Superstition do you Believe?
By Logan Gage, OpEd Contributor
- | 10/10/08 10:03 AM
Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival…On this model we should expect…that superstitions and other non-factual beliefs will locally evolve—change over generations…. –Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Not long ago at a local pub, an acquaintance interrupted a conversation in progress to announce, “I know the truth about Christianity. I read The Da Vinci Code.” Now, it was not really the assertion itself that made my jaw drop as much as the confidence with which it was proffered.
Perhaps Richard Dawkins is right that superstition is in such bountiful supply that it demands explanation in terms of our dispositions. But, we may ask, who is more likely to believe wild-eyed superstitions these days, the religious or irreligious?
New social science is shedding light on this question, and the results may surprise you.
Just last week Rodney Stark, a respected scholar at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, released a study entitled “What Americans Really Believe.” Stark and fellow researchers commissioned The Gallup Organization to poll Americans on questions of religious import.
Many of the fascinating findings of this year’s Baylor Religion Survey, which asks much deeper questions than typical religious surveys, center on atheists and the irreligious. For instance, despite making their authors rich, the neo-atheist books of the past few years seem to have produced few American converts: Atheism is holding steady at around four percent of the population. Even more intriguing, the majority of Europeans are not atheists.
Gallup asked questions regarding belief in things like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, Atlantis, haunted houses, and astrology. Baylor’s researchers aggregated these figures, producing an index of paranormal belief.
As Mollie Ziegler Hemingway reported in The Wall Street Journal, “While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.”
"Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did.
"In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead."
Ignoring available data such as these, prominent atheists continue to claim that religion breeds gullibility and superstition while letting go of God hastens enlightenment.
For example, Nobel laureate in Physics Steven Weinberg, writing recently in the The New York Review of Books, argues for what he sees as major tensions between science and religion, especially traditional theistic belief.
“The first source of tension,” he writes, arises from the fact that religion originally gained much of its strength from the observation of mysterious phenomena—thunder, earthquakes, disease—that seemed to require the intervention of some divine being.
“There was a nymph in every brook, and a dryad in every tree. But as time passed more and more of these mysteries have been explained in purely natural ways. Explaining this or that about the natural world does not of course rule out religious belief.
“But if people believe in God because no other explanation seems possible for a whole host of mysteries, and then over the years these mysteries were one by one resolved naturalistically, then a certain weakening of belief can be expected.”
Despite the scientific erudition of Weinberg and similar prophets of scientific materialism, myths like this continue to persist. And it is the persistence of this mythology which leads our secular elites to see discord between the scientific and religious outlooks.
Even many non-religious historians of science now understand that, far from perpetuating old superstitions, the Judeo-Christian tradition constituted a radical break with pagan thought. It posited a single rational mind behind the universe rather than myriad irrational spirits in the universe.
This Gestalt shift was crucial in the rise of modern science. It is no accident that experimental science arose in the West where the idea of the intelligibility of nature took root, for it made sense to seek orderly laws of nature if there exists a rational lawgiver of the universe.
While the findings of the Baylor study appear counterintuitive, perhaps they shouldn’t. Once we lose “faith” in the rational intelligibility of the universe, what is left to dissuade us from the latest findings of UFO-logy?
The existential question facing science today is whether it can survive an intellectual milieu dominated by the materialist superstition.
Logan Paul Gage is a policy analyst with Discovery Institute in Washington, D.C.
12 Comments
Reader Comments:
POSTED Oct 10, 2008
Reagan Was a Numerologist: "Interesting topic. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were numerologists. They believed in the occult significance of numbers like birthdays. I'm surprised you didn't mention this since Reagan Worship is the most far-reaching cult in Republican circles."POSTED Oct 10, 2008
s masty: "G K Cheterton remarked that the problem with atheists is not that they believe in nothing, but that they believe in anything."POSTED Oct 10, 2008
DCReader: "This is a very insightful op-ed."POSTED Oct 10, 2008
: "Materialism, properly applied, discredits UFO-logy and haunted houses, without the proper evidence. Just ask noted anti-theist Penn Jillete. Does anyone have a link to the actual survey? I hope that the following questions were asked: Have you ever made an observation that contradicted something you strongly believed? Have you ever changed an opinion or belief you held for a long period of time? How old is planet Earth? Do you believe in virgin births, resurrection of the dead, humans turning into salt, and walking on water? Do you know what happens to people after they die? Do you believe the universe was created by intelligent life? Do you believe that the creator of the universe is personally involved in everyday events? Do you believe that disease is spread by divine judgement?"POSTED Oct 10, 2008
Lies, Darned Lies, and Statistics: "Materialism, properly applied, discredits UFO-logy and haunted houses, without the proper evidence. Just ask noted anti-theist Penn Jillete. Does anyone have a link to the actual survey? I hope that the following questions were asked: Have you ever made an observation that contradicted something you strongly believed? Have you ever changed an opinion or belief you held for a long period of time? How old is planet Earth? Do you believe in virgin births, resurrection of the dead, humans turning into salt, and walking on water? Do you know what happens to people after they die? Do you believe the universe was created by intelligent life? Do you believe that the creator of the universe is personally involved in everyday events? Do you believe that disease is spread by divine judgement?"POSTED Oct 10, 2008
: "Statistics reflect the bias of those who select specific criteria upon which their (subjective) conclusions are based. Value systems assume a priori criteria. Hence:CHOOSE whom/what you believe. And delight in advocating your choice."POSTED Oct 21, 2008
: "I'll put aside that Baylor is a fundamentalist Southern Baptist school, but I wonder if that had an impact. How were the questions framed? I know, from knowing people who belong to the Assembles of God that they believe in demons and a Holy Spirit that actively possesses those "slain in the spirit." They believe in modern prophecy and believe that speaking in tongues is a gift of the holy spirit that is conferred on those Christians who are "baptized in the spirit." Knowing this, I doubt very seriously that Assemblies of God do not believe in at least one ghost and a host of paranormal activities. They don't call them these labels, but the sort of belief is the same. I think it would be interesting to include a survey that said do you believe in ghosts or in the physical experience of the holy ghost. You'd get a much different study, I would imagine, while the results would be more honest by refusing to insist Christian paranormal beliefs are somehow of a different form."POSTED Oct 24, 2008
test: ""While the findings of the Baylor study appear counterintuitive, perhaps they shouldn’t." The problem is, Mollie is misrepresenting the results. Mollie defines anyone who does not go to church as "irreligious". That means that some New Age religious person who believes in some god is considered to be the same as an atheist, who believes in no gods. This study does not show that atheists are more likely to believe in stuff like Bigfoot, healing, etc. It shows that religious fundamentalists are simply hostile to competing superstitious ideas, while "mainstream" religious people and people who don't go to church are open to new ideas. Atheists, by definition, don't believe in the supernatural."POSTED Oct 24, 2008
james: "Atheists actually believe in the ridiculous. By denying the resurrection, they believe that 12 men all conspired to die for a lie knowing it a lie. If anyone would know the resurrection was a lie, those 12 would. Despite plenty of opportunity for such conspiracy to recurr since the resurrection, it has not recurred. So, it is riduculous to insist that it ever did. Superstition has been defined as a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like. Denial of the resurrection is superstitious. As far as believing in the supernatural, atheists just make up stuff to explain the intractable. The belief in parallel universes is one example, a completely unverifiable, unfalsifiable belief. That is tantamount to belief in the supernatural, despite their endless protests otherwise."POSTED Oct 25, 2008
Doctor Atlantis: ""Ignoring available data such as these, prominent atheists continue to claim that religion breeds gullibility and superstition while letting go of God hastens enlightenment." Really? I thought they claimed that "religion IS gullibility and superstition, and that embracing scientific and critical thinking hastens enlightenment." Pretty big difference. This survey assumes that religion itself is not paranormal - when clearly it is. If it weren't - when miracles would have to be naturalistic phenomena - and therefore not miracles."POSTED Nov 2, 2008
mark: "Genesis 1-1"POSTED Nov 6, 2008
: "To James: Great post. So much for the vaunted ideal of one of the central tenets of the scientific method aka - "falsifiability". How can one disprove the multiverse hypothesis, for example? To your example of the twelve apostles, what a vanishingly small probability that 12 men who had nothing to gain and absolutely everything to lose, would all give their lives for a known lie. I am just waiting for someone to claim that this singular event in human history HAS happened again, somewhere in the world that can be verified. One possible rejoinder might be that this happened in the case of David Koresh, Waco TX and the Branch Davidians of the 1990's. This would be wrong. This self-proclaimed Messiah did not convince any of his fanatical followers to spend their lives preaching his message around the world, only to die as martyrs. If I recall correctly, they were all smoked out and or died in a fire at the hands of the FBI/ATF. Not exactly voluntary martyrdom."