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Sorry, most people are indeed not idiots, but that doesn't apply to creationists. It's one thing to go to a church (there even might be purely social reasons),

Sorry, most people are indeed not idiots, but that doesn't apply to creationists. It's one thing to go to a church (there even might be purely social reasons), and it's another thing to discard overwhelming scientific evidence and believe something based on the principle of not needing any evidence at all. I become especially sad when I think of the confused minds of the poor children of these people. On the topic, I've found The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins a very enlightening read if one wishes to understand the arguments of religious people.

civilian 10y ago
You're right that creationists are pretty deep into idiot territory. But alsetmusic's fact-finding mission could still be useful! Right now he doesn't even know where to start on how to construct an argument, because he doesn't know what creationists have been told. There are probably many pieces of evidence in the creationist museum that are valid "holes" in science, that we're still looking to fill. He'd be able to acknowledge certain fossil gaps and irregularities, while describing how they still fit into the great scientific theory.
- flukus 10y ago
  > There are probably many pieces of evidence in the creationist museum that are valid "holes" in science From what I've seen the arguments aren't that sophisticated, they start with an outright rejection of most branches of science. Amusingly, evolution is the one they criticize the least.
- Trill-I-Am 10y ago
  The creation museum posits that dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time before the great flood a few thousand years ago. They also say that dragons were real.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    Exactly. It's pure fantasy. Looking for shreds of intelligence in it is foolish. To
- Scarblac 10y ago
  If a new fossil is found that fills one of those gaps, the museum will then proudly claim there are now TWO gaps there!
reitanqild 10y ago
Creationist, son of creationists here :-) Although I guess there are creationists and there are creationists: If you ask me about science I will answer with science. I did well in school, including biology and introduction to astrophysics. If you hold a gun to my head and ask if I still belive this nonsense about the world being created I'd guess I'd say yes (if I can't get around to disarming you, I don't like armed people with strong ideological beliefs going around trying to convince people :-/ ) On a more serious note: For me, the distinction between belief and science disappear somewhere around "all models are wrong, some are useful". For me, both models have been very useful.
- flukus 10y ago
  > On a more serious note: For me, the distinction between belief and science disappear somewhere around "all models are wrong, some are useful". For me, both models have been very useful. What useful model does creationism put forward?
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Mostly not creationism specifically but my religion.
    - andrepd 10y ago
      Useful perhaps, in that it makes you feel good. But like another poster pointed out, nazi ideology made its followers feel pretty good.
      - reitanqild 10y ago
        More useful though in that it made me stop hating and get control over my impulsiveness.
- marklgr 10y ago
  No snark, but I guess white supremacists also find their model pretty useful. The obvious question is, does anything go, provided it makes some people feel good somehow?
donw 10y ago
The point is not that creationism is an obvious case of twisting the facts to fit theories. It is that, if you want to have any hope of bringing a creationist over to your side, you need to be able to understand and articulate both their arguments, and their point of view. If you can establish that you understand them, they are going to be a lot more receptive to you asking the hard questions about their beliefs (this is best done by asking them to convince you to be a creationist, and then asking those hard questions). Calling those people idiots does nothing other than give them a legitimate reason to dislike both you, and by extension, other people that "believe in evolution". Somewhat related to that, creationists tend to be deeply religious, so books like The God Delusion -- which I very much enjoyed, by the way -- are almost guaranteed to turn off a creationist. It would be better to recommend books that explain evolution through a Christian world-view, as they will have a much easier time relating to the material.
NhanH 10y ago
One of the arguments for evolution involves some very non-trivial calculation on probability of whether it could result in the world we're in right now (not the maths itself, but the sequence of reasoning). It has been a while since I read Dawkin's books, but I don't think the books cover those kind of arguments. I think there are quite a bit of writing on lesswrong on the topic. I've met creationists that believed in micro evolution: microbe can evolve to get certain resistance. But not the macro one, that is natural selection can result in human as we are right now. I was absolutely not able to justify the probability that it can happen.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  The probabilities cannot be calculated as we do not have interstellar travel required to inspect worlds that evolve separately from our own. So, that is no argument, just speculation. Same problem as with Drake's equitation and aliens. A stronger argument is that we have managed to create building blocks of life from basic physics and chemistry. No superpowers required for that. At least we can see how the stars begin, change and die.
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    > A stronger argument is that we have managed to create building blocks of life from basic physics and chemistry. No superpowers required for that. No. Just some creators.
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      No, just a few known laws of physics and chemistry. The conditions required are expected to happen spontaneously during planet formation. We just don't have a handle on how common those conditions are. And many other subsequent conditions, for cellular life, for multicellular, for tissues and organs. Finally, for intelligence and sapience.
      - humanrebar 10y ago
        The point is that we cannot prove there is no creator by creating life. There is still a creator involved. The 'best result' (assuming we're itching to disprove God) would be to show an origin of life is plausible. But even that doesn't prove where life on Earth actually came from.
72deluxe 10y ago
If we replace "creationists" with "Apple users" in the first sentence, is this still acceptable comment here on HN? Personally I think the God Delusion by Dawkins is as far from my perspective as could be possible, so I would not recommend it as a book for people to understand "religious people" (as if you could pigeon hole people like that!). Blanket stereotyping forgets about individuals.
crististm 10y ago
There is a particular video of Feynman about scientific method where he describes the dual slit experiment. He notes that the "scientific method" should have been able to reproduce exactly where the electrons will go, in different experiments. The experiments are not reproducible in that sense, but only "statistically" which is a completely different thing. Feynman beliefs are irrelevant. There is also the argument that if you yourself do not accept evidence that creationists do, that does not mean that evidence is not there. You might also want to read/see Hamming about science and how mathematics is not exactly free from presuppositions. And there is also the Goldbach conjecture where you find that a system generates facts about itself that can be demonstrated only by going outside the system - ad infinitum. I did not read the paper you mentioned but God does not exactly work like people regularly assume, that is "you pray and God will do you good". The idiot argument is convenient but weak. It just gives a quick way to dismiss counter arguments
- crististm 10y ago
  Too late to edit... That would be The Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel - not Goldbach
coldtea 10y ago
>Sorry, most people are indeed not idiots, but that doesn't apply to creationists. You'd be surprised. You can easily find creationists with higher IQ than you, that can out-solve problems in your field faster than you. And the same for most categories one can dismiss as "idiots", except people with verifiable cognitive impairment.
- Nursie 10y ago
  I think the post you reply to is saying that the fact that someone believes fervently in creation over evolution actually makes them an idiot, regardless of IQ. This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief. Not all forms of faith and belief require you to reject evidence, mind, but this one most certainly does.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >I think the post you reply to is saying that the fact that someone believes fervently in creation over evolution actually makes them an idiot, regardless of IQ. That stretches the definition of an idiot considerably. >This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief. That could be beneficial for one's emotional health (belief in higher power and all that) and thus the smart thing to do in some cases. Who said "identifying reality correctly" is the smarter thing to do? Sometimes, not being too logical can have great benefits. Here's an old argument for this: >Origin of the Logical. — Where has logic originated in men's heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally lave been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we! Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality. The preponderating inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal — an illogical inclination, for there is nothing [100%] equal to another — created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of [a shared] substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived. The beings not seeing correctly [and saw similar things as "same" and static] had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux". In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination — to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right — had been cultivated with extraordinary assiduity. The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust ; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaya Scienza -- with small edits in [] to make the excerpt clearer) And here's a newer one: >Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never. http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illus...
humanrebar 10y ago
Since creationism is fundamentally a metaphysical premise, attacking deism through induction and observation is inconclusive but maybe a fun thought experiment. Succinctly, if miracles exist, they violate natural laws. Claiming that natural laws and observations (carbon dating, say) do not allow for miracles is begging the question.
emodendroket 10y ago
If you want to understand the arguments of religious people you should probably listen to them and not a polemicist against them, but it's a mistake to equate "religious people" (or even Christians) with "creationists" in the first place.

civilian 10y ago

You're right that creationists are pretty deep into idiot territory. But alsetmusic's fact-finding mission could still be useful! Right now he doesn't even know where to start on how to construct an argument, because he doesn't know what creationists have been told. There are probably many pieces of evidence in the creationist museum that are valid "holes" in science, that we're still looking to fill. He'd be able to acknowledge certain fossil gaps and irregularities, while describing how they still fit into the great scientific theory.

flukus 10y ago
> There are probably many pieces of evidence in the creationist museum that are valid "holes" in science From what I've seen the arguments aren't that sophisticated, they start with an outright rejection of most branches of science. Amusingly, evolution is the one they criticize the least.
Trill-I-Am 10y ago
The creation museum posits that dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time before the great flood a few thousand years ago. They also say that dragons were real.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Exactly. It's pure fantasy. Looking for shreds of intelligence in it is foolish. To
Scarblac 10y ago
If a new fossil is found that fills one of those gaps, the museum will then proudly claim there are now TWO gaps there!

reitanqild 10y ago

Creationist, son of creationists here :-) Although I guess there are creationists and there are creationists: If you ask me about science I will answer with science. I did well in school, including biology and introduction to astrophysics. If you hold a gun to my head and ask if I still belive this nonsense about the world being created I'd guess I'd say yes (if I can't get around to disarming you, I don't like armed people with strong ideological beliefs going around trying to convince people :-/ ) On a more serious note: For me, the distinction between belief and science disappear somewhere around "all models are wrong, some are useful". For me, both models have been very useful.

flukus 10y ago
> On a more serious note: For me, the distinction between belief and science disappear somewhere around "all models are wrong, some are useful". For me, both models have been very useful. What useful model does creationism put forward?
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Mostly not creationism specifically but my religion.
  - andrepd 10y ago
    Useful perhaps, in that it makes you feel good. But like another poster pointed out, nazi ideology made its followers feel pretty good.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      More useful though in that it made me stop hating and get control over my impulsiveness.
marklgr 10y ago
No snark, but I guess white supremacists also find their model pretty useful. The obvious question is, does anything go, provided it makes some people feel good somehow?

donw 10y ago

The point is not that creationism is an obvious case of twisting the facts to fit theories. It is that, if you want to have any hope of bringing a creationist over to your side, you need to be able to understand and articulate both their arguments, and their point of view. If you can establish that you understand them, they are going to be a lot more receptive to you asking the hard questions about their beliefs (this is best done by asking them to convince you to be a creationist, and then asking those hard questions). Calling those people idiots does nothing other than give them a legitimate reason to dislike both you, and by extension, other people that "believe in evolution". Somewhat related to that, creationists tend to be deeply religious, so books like The God Delusion -- which I very much enjoyed, by the way -- are almost guaranteed to turn off a creationist. It would be better to recommend books that explain evolution through a Christian world-view, as they will have a much easier time relating to the material.

NhanH 10y ago

One of the arguments for evolution involves some very non-trivial calculation on probability of whether it could result in the world we're in right now (not the maths itself, but the sequence of reasoning). It has been a while since I read Dawkin's books, but I don't think the books cover those kind of arguments. I think there are quite a bit of writing on lesswrong on the topic. I've met creationists that believed in micro evolution: microbe can evolve to get certain resistance. But not the macro one, that is natural selection can result in human as we are right now. I was absolutely not able to justify the probability that it can happen.

AstralStorm 10y ago
The probabilities cannot be calculated as we do not have interstellar travel required to inspect worlds that evolve separately from our own. So, that is no argument, just speculation. Same problem as with Drake's equitation and aliens. A stronger argument is that we have managed to create building blocks of life from basic physics and chemistry. No superpowers required for that. At least we can see how the stars begin, change and die.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > A stronger argument is that we have managed to create building blocks of life from basic physics and chemistry. No superpowers required for that. No. Just some creators.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    No, just a few known laws of physics and chemistry. The conditions required are expected to happen spontaneously during planet formation. We just don't have a handle on how common those conditions are. And many other subsequent conditions, for cellular life, for multicellular, for tissues and organs. Finally, for intelligence and sapience.
    - humanrebar 10y ago
      The point is that we cannot prove there is no creator by creating life. There is still a creator involved. The 'best result' (assuming we're itching to disprove God) would be to show an origin of life is plausible. But even that doesn't prove where life on Earth actually came from.

72deluxe 10y ago

If we replace "creationists" with "Apple users" in the first sentence, is this still acceptable comment here on HN? Personally I think the God Delusion by Dawkins is as far from my perspective as could be possible, so I would not recommend it as a book for people to understand "religious people" (as if you could pigeon hole people like that!). Blanket stereotyping forgets about individuals.

crististm 10y ago

There is a particular video of Feynman about scientific method where he describes the dual slit experiment. He notes that the "scientific method" should have been able to reproduce exactly where the electrons will go, in different experiments. The experiments are not reproducible in that sense, but only "statistically" which is a completely different thing. Feynman beliefs are irrelevant. There is also the argument that if you yourself do not accept evidence that creationists do, that does not mean that evidence is not there. You might also want to read/see Hamming about science and how mathematics is not exactly free from presuppositions. And there is also the Goldbach conjecture where you find that a system generates facts about itself that can be demonstrated only by going outside the system - ad infinitum. I did not read the paper you mentioned but God does not exactly work like people regularly assume, that is "you pray and God will do you good". The idiot argument is convenient but weak. It just gives a quick way to dismiss counter arguments

crististm 10y ago
Too late to edit... That would be The Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel - not Goldbach

coldtea 10y ago

>Sorry, most people are indeed not idiots, but that doesn't apply to creationists. You'd be surprised. You can easily find creationists with higher IQ than you, that can out-solve problems in your field faster than you. And the same for most categories one can dismiss as "idiots", except people with verifiable cognitive impairment.

Nursie 10y ago
I think the post you reply to is saying that the fact that someone believes fervently in creation over evolution actually makes them an idiot, regardless of IQ. This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief. Not all forms of faith and belief require you to reject evidence, mind, but this one most certainly does.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >I think the post you reply to is saying that the fact that someone believes fervently in creation over evolution actually makes them an idiot, regardless of IQ. That stretches the definition of an idiot considerably. >This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief. That could be beneficial for one's emotional health (belief in higher power and all that) and thus the smart thing to do in some cases. Who said "identifying reality correctly" is the smarter thing to do? Sometimes, not being too logical can have great benefits. Here's an old argument for this: >Origin of the Logical. — Where has logic originated in men's heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally lave been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we! Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality. The preponderating inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal — an illogical inclination, for there is nothing [100%] equal to another — created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of [a shared] substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived. The beings not seeing correctly [and saw similar things as "same" and static] had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux". In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination — to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right — had been cultivated with extraordinary assiduity. The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust ; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaya Scienza -- with small edits in [] to make the excerpt clearer) And here's a newer one: >Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never. http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illus...

humanrebar 10y ago

Since creationism is fundamentally a metaphysical premise, attacking deism through induction and observation is inconclusive but maybe a fun thought experiment. Succinctly, if miracles exist, they violate natural laws. Claiming that natural laws and observations (carbon dating, say) do not allow for miracles is begging the question.

emodendroket 10y ago

If you want to understand the arguments of religious people you should probably listen to them and not a polemicist against them, but it's a mistake to equate "religious people" (or even Christians) with "creationists" in the first place.