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Creationism and conspiracism share a common teleological bias

45 points by tlb 8y ago

dang 8y ago
All: if you comment here, please keep it substantive and avoid shallow dismissals, religious smiting (for or against) and whatnot.
furbyhat 8y ago
"Conspiracism" The Matrix is working hard to preemptively discredit any sheep who dare stick their heads up. My fav conspiracies: - moon landing with Aldrin et al did not happen - the left is importing immigrants who are dependent on welfare, which inevitably gets them to vote for more and more free stuff - same financier's financed all sides of WWII - flouride makes you dumb - global warming is about creating global taxation - Brexit was the plan from the very start (you didnt think the Monarchy was actually going to give up their sovereignty did you?)
EdwardDiego 8y ago
Creationism inherently incorporates a conspiracy theory - that evidence of a young earth exists, but is dismissed or even hidden by scientists because of their "faith" in secularism. E.g., the Grand Canyon totally proves a global flood, but scientists refuse to accept that because of their "faith" in the earth being billions of years old.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  You could probably find a correlation between any two things that involve rejecting mainstream beliefs, right or not. I'm suspicious of any theory that tries to divide everyone up in to the "enlightened ones" and "the dumb ones," on the grounds that you could minimize friction with the public by accepting every mainstream belief, whereas trying to be as right as possible would mean both disagreeing where society is wrong and sometimes when society is right, because if you're in the business of trusting yourself at all you will make at least a few mistakes. To make it personal, think about it like this: if you start by saying to yourself "this thing society thinks is acceptable is wrong," and if you then go on and apply that mindset to everything else, there is a nonzero chance that your honest first-principles evaluation of, say, young-earth creationism would come out positive. Unless you think your inner compass has a zero false positive rate, spin that wheel again for every single commonly accepted belief and you're essentially guaranteed to end up believing at least one think that might appear in a study like this.
  - codezero 8y ago
    This article talks about cognitive bias, not dumbness or enlightenment: “which was partly independent from religion, politics, age, education, agency detection, analytical thinking and perception of randomness.” Plenty of smart people suffer from cognitive bias, I’d bet most do to some degree.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    It shouldn't be too hard for a study too determine if the distribution of "number of conspiracy theories someone believes in" is bimodal with one mode near 0. I suspect it is.
- seandougall 8y ago
  Interestingly, it also requires a conspiracy masterminded by God: the argument I’ve heard goes that dinosaur fossils and other evidence for an ancient earth and evolution were faked and planted by God in order to test our faith.
  - 3pt14159 8y ago
    The counter is that religion was faked and planted in order to test devotion to truth, no matter the risk to personal consequences. If you were in charge, what would you test?
- toss1 8y ago
  The more common hypothesis is that the earth/universe is only 6000 years old but evidence of prior ages was planted by God or the Devil. Of course, this is functionally indistinguishable from an argument that the world was created last Tuesday, with all evidence of prior existence intact.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > Creationism inherently incorporates a conspiracy theory - that evidence of a young earth exists, but is dismissed or even hidden by scientists because of their "faith" in secularism. My understanding is that this is basically true though. That is, even fundamentalist Christians didn't believe in young earth creationism before the 1920s or so, and the reason it became a popular is that it was a reaction to that fact that mainstream science rejected the existence of climate change and tectonic plates. There's a good talk about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMaUzNlDnSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMaUzNlDnSY It's basically the same as how homeopathy was created as a reaction to the fact that mainstream medicine had a success rate that was substantially lower than placebo treatments. In each case science basically just got forked. And once it gets forked, it's impossible to use science on one side of the fork to convince people on the other side of the fork that they're wrong, because all the commits are out of order in way that changes the meaning of the diffs.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - EdwardDiego 8y ago
    Yep, you're right, if you look into the history of the interpretation of Genesis in Christianity, Augustine of Hippo said this: > Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. > Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. > The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. > If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
- ch4s3 8y ago
  Not to split hairs, but that only applies to "young Earth creationism", which is in itself a subset of a literalist view of "creation."
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jrs95 8y ago
This is interesting and IMO generally true. But, not everything that is called a conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory. Asking “who benefits from this policy, and are they in a position to have influence in creating or maintaining it?” is not inherently a conspiracy theory. But anyone who’s doing something different from what they’re saying would prefer you didn’t notice. And if people are noticing, they’d probably want to dismiss their critics with whatever means they could. Including dismissing legitimate criticism and skepticism as paranoid conspiracy theories. This is especially confusing because there is overlap between actual conspiracies or at the very least dishonest politics/leadership and what people prone to paranoia and conspiracism would be more likely to think about. I just don’t like the idea of people allowing the charicture of a conspiracy theorist to stop them from thinking critically about the information they are being presented.
- codezero 8y ago
  I read some of the article and I don’t think the findings make statements about the existence of conspiracy theories, but rather attribute individuals who attribute conspiracy to a number of things to a cognitive bias. Individual conspiracy theories have sometimes panned out to be real but that doesn’t mean one who leans towards conspiracism to explain things is right.
- empath75 8y ago
  I would argue that a true conspiracy theorist doesn’t just believe that a single event was the result of a single group of people, but that the conspiracy is near omnipotent and responsible for many unrelated terrible things. It’s one thing, for example, to believe that some aspect of the 9/11 story doesn’t hold up — perhaps that you believe the government covered up for Saudi involvement. That may be right or wrong, but it’s at least something that’s plausible. A true conspiracy theorist would believe that the whole thing was made up and never happened, or that the whole thing was planned and executed by the Illuminati, who have been working together for centuries to control the masses through mind control.
  - dudul 8y ago
    I don't disagree with this comment, but unfortunately the label is also used against the people described in your 2nd paragraph.
skh 8y ago
My brother-in-law is a fundamentalist Christian. My sister homeschooled all 8 kids from kindergarten through 12th grade. His view is that since God made Adam as a full grown man then it's possible that God created the world “with age” in his parlance. The point is that people who want something to be true will engage in the nececcsry mental gymnastics to justify their belief. It’s not unique to firinge ideas but it is easier to spot in people with fringe ideas. EDIT: The fringe idea I referenced above is the notion that God created the world to look like it's really old even though it isn’t old. I've not encountered this rationale before. My comment is in no way diminishing religion.
- ars 8y ago
  It's hardly a fringe idea. It's actually pretty mainstream. It even has a dismissive name: Last Tuesdayism. You have to be careful to keep the idea separate from Young Earth Creationism! Young Earth Creationism directly contradicts observation. In contrast believing the universe was created already old does not conflict with science (you just can't prove it one way or another).
  - diego_moita 8y ago
    So basically you're saying that this "God" thingy created the world to look like it evolved and changed but this is the way it always was? Such that he planted fossils and false carbon 14 decay just to fool scientists? Do you really believe this idea? Do you think it is worth intellectual respect? Edit: for perspective: there was a time the Catholic church rejected reason. It ended badly to Galileo and Copernicus and had very bad repercussions on the church credibility, from Spinoza to Voltaire. American Pentecostals and fundamentalist Jews and Muslims should learn that lesson: on the long run reason wins.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      > So basically you're saying that this "God" thingy created the world to look like it evolved and changed but this is the way it always was? Such that he planted fossils and false carbon 14 decay just to fool scientists? There's a large number of people who believe this. Its a bit weird, because it implies that God is above lying to his followers. So as a Christian myself, who believes in Omnipotence (all powerful), Omniscient (all knowing), and Benevolence (all-loving), the viewpoint that God would explicitly lie to us is almost certainly against the 3rd peg: its anti-benevolence. Anyway, different Christians obviously have different beliefs on the matter. I am in agreement with the poster you responded to: it is an... unfortunately... mainstream belief in some Christian communities. I'm sure there are holes people can poke at my specific denomination of course. So it'd be hypocritical for me to push too much against the belief that "God is tricking us to see the true believers vs the evolutionists". But... yeah, its just not a belief I can get behind. > Such that he planted fossils and false carbon 14 decay just to fool scientists? Generally speaking, the argument goes to look at the Old Testament, specifically the Book of Job. In the Old Testament, God tested some of his prophets with incredible tests (ie: letting the Devil kill his kids, take all of his wealth away, etc. etc). So the idea of "God is just testing us" is generally the argument that comes forth. I guess the general idea is that God can cause issues that seem big to us, but are small in the great scheme of His plans. If you want the religious background on this particular school of thought. The Book of Job has the prophet lose everything, but eventually gains greater prosperity in the end. In particular, Job deserves prosperity because even when all hope was lost, he kept his faith. Still, that fundamentally doesn't quite explain why God would particularly lie to us humans about the "evolution" issue. So I've never personally liked this particular religious argument. I find it far more likely that God would prefer us Humans to discover science and properly make discoveries and advance our culture for the good of all mankind. ------------ It comes down to Biblical Literalism. Some people believe that the Bible is literally true. That there were exactly 7 days of creation, that Methusala lived over 900 years old... that a dude named "Samson" had magical hair, etc. etc. And since Biblical Literalism is a foundational peg to those denominations, they go through great pains to prove it. Alternatively, if you're in my camp, you are open to interpreting the Bible. My denomination believes that the Bible is a collection of stories that God wants us to know about. Not necessarily that the word is literally true.
empath75 8y ago
I’ve always believed that conspiracy theories are fundamentally motivated by a belief that things happen for a reason. If a bad thing happened, seemingly undeserved, there must have been some dark force behind it — if not Satan or witches, then Jews or communists or Muslims or globalists or gays or whatever. The alternative — that people suffer for no reason at all, is intolerable for some people.
- codezero 8y ago
  Interestingly that is what the article implies - though they use the term teleological thinking to refer to the belief things happen for a reason.
  - sometimesijust 8y ago
    Actually that's not what the study implies. They found "rejection of science and animism" to be a stronger predictor of conspiracism. Although "finalism" was found to be second best so it is certainly part of the mix but going off this study you could not say it is the fundamental cause. In fact the researchers are careful to point out that they have established correlation and not cause.
    - codezero 8y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. This is clearly out of my league :)
- jonathankoren 8y ago
  Yes. A predisposition to finding agency where there is none is a key finding to both.[0] Its a coping method to randomness. Disease doesn’t just happen, someone did something to cause it. This person didn’t get away with a crime, they’ll be severely punished after they die. A random guy with a gun doesn’t just commit mass murder, someone powerful must of let him, or maybe even faked it. Even when there is a documented conspiracy to commit a horrific act, that’s not enough, because there must be an even bigger conspiracy to allow it to happen, because unacceptable alternative is that the good guys lost. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3712257/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3712257/
toss1 8y ago
Good work here on the teleological bias. The question is what's behind it? My working conjecture is that it is some people that cannot tolerate the ambiguity of many events being essentially random, chaotic, or stochastic. They'd rather have an evil cabal deliberately executing the 9/11 attacks, or school shootings, or faking the school shootings, than to accept that sometimes things just get very far out of hand. But, other than rough observation (and likely confirmation bias), I've not done much to substantiate this conjecture. Comments?
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  We evolved in small groups of people (around 100 people or so). Conspiracies are much more feasible at that scale. It’s basically your standard political intrigue and backstabbing. So that, IMO, is the genesis of conspiratorial thinking. Then I think people have a very hard time thinking about large scale systems, so they revert to explaining the difficult to understand with conspiracy.
- pythonslayer 8y ago
  I agree this paper doesn’t seem to present any issues. I can’t speak to whether it is useful, though. As for your questions, I will put forth a theory that really isn’t all that crazy, or esoteric, but might help. If religion, despite it’s means, has, over time (hundreds, thousands of years) encouraged adherence to social structures beneficial to survival and psychologically healthy livelihoods, shouldn’t that basis alone justify it’s prevalence? If the only reason to deny this is the lucid awareness we ourselves experience, I cannot agree we are adhering to the dialectical approach we celebrate in the scientific method. In this theory, religion serves a benefit to the ends of survival, giving these beliefs an evolutionary origin wildly entangled with the emergence of cognition and self-identity. If this is the case, how do we reconcile that with science? Seems easier to me than any other way. Of course, these are our ancestors. This stuff is surely not simple. This alone just begs for more questions that I think are classically best handled by humanities, but if I’m not mistaken this begs of multidisciplinary introspection. Granted, much of the humanities doesn’t take theology seriously these days but that’s a fairly recent issue. If you’re interested, there’s nobody stopping you from diving in. Carl Jung is a useful place to start in terms of these natural cognitive mappings. Coincidentally Freud was actually a link between Jung and modern psychology these links are not much acknowledged these days. It’s all both very hand wavy and contentious depending who you ask. Anyhow, with Jung you don’t need to agree with his conclusions but he defines a map that can at least give an idea of what we could be working with and it leans heavily on mythology and imagination. It introduces some foundational stuff on how these unstable symbolic mappings could have assisted the transition into the lucid awareness that eventually became modern science. If you’ve never ‘gone here’ before, I will warn you: it’s big and deep. There is a field of “Jungian psychology” but it’s mostly trying to find use in his work and I would recommend going strait to his work. “Man And His Symbols” is approachable enough to start. I’ve opened a can of worms here, but it’s a fruitful one and very related to your interest because I am afraid these contentions with our own self-identities mark a cognitive recursion we are not seriously contending with.
ohsupbro 8y ago
Don't 100% of these "findings" also apply to anyone that believes in evolution?
- olliej 8y ago
  I'm not sure what you're saying here -- evolution is a theory, specifically it has a huge amount of accumulated evidence that indicates that the theory is correct, and makes meaningful falsifiable predictions which have also been validated, and numerous long term experiments that agree entirely with the theory. Religion is defined by faith in something/anything explicitly in the absence of evidence, hence "faith". Conspiracy "theories" often use the absence of evidence as de facto evidence. Which is not remotely logically sound.
claydavisss 8y ago
Not really. No one needs a label for things that are false. Conspiracy theories are things that could actually be true but are designated as ridiculous by someone who perceives discussion as a threat. But lo and behold, "conspiracy theories" sometimes are true despite our efforts to write them off as quackery. My favorite example is Mark Klein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein who was derided and written off as a conspiracy nutjob until his allegations surrounding the diversion of telecommunications traffic ended up being true. We see it and participate in this every day. If you suggest there is life somewhere across the galaxy, they call you an astronomer. If you say you say a flying saucer in a photo of our own solar system, you are a nutjob. What is the fundamental difference?
- krapp 8y ago
  >If you suggest there is life somewhere across the galaxy, they call you an astronomer. No, that has nothing to do with being an astronomer. >If you say you say a flying saucer in a photo of our own solar system, you are a nutjob. What is the fundamental difference? The "astronomer" claims there is likely life somewhere across the galaxy, but doesn't state with absolute certainty that it exists, where it exists, what it looks like, etc. Whereas "you" claim, explicitly, to have seen it in a photo, and that it is a flying saucer, and that anyone who says otherwise "perceives discussion as a threat." Given the size of the known universe, the laws of physics forbidding, so far as we know, any form of FTL travel, the lack of any widespread corroborating evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life or technology in our solar system, and the tendency of the human brain to see things that aren't there (paredolia, false memories, etc.) the likelihood of what "you" believe to be a flying saucer being a flying saucer which just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be caught on camera is very, very, very low. The fundamental difference between "nutjob" and "not a nutjob" is that the "nutjob" refuses to believe it can't be a flying saucer, regardless of the statistics or evidence to the contrary, whereas "not a nutjob" accepts that it almost certainly isn't. The axiom that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" exists for a reason - not because the people requiring proof can't handle discussion, but because those claims inevitably require revising known science to be true, and "ordinary proof" is never sufficient to prove their case.
diego_moita 8y ago
To me, the most interesting about this belief that "everything is part of a master plan and a big conspiracy" are: 1) There is always some kind of political undertone on it. 2) The ones most prone to believe in it are the ones most gullible to accept authoritarian rule. No wonder that every dictator, from Maduro to Erdogan to Putin and Jiping love so much this argument.
sattoshi 8y ago
I am not at all used to academic writing and am finding it difficult to find the questions they asked participants. Could anyone point me in the right direction? I can't really think anything of this study without them.
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nafizh 8y ago
I couldn't find the distribution of religious affiliations in the supplemental material. Did anyone find it? Surely, if you are going to do a study as such, you need to disclose the numbers on religious affiliations of the participants. It would be fun to see the correlations of analytical ability and affiliation to a particular religion. Or if you want to brush all religions under the same rug, then it doesn't matter.
danielvf 8y ago
My all time favorite is conspiracy theory is that the positions and angles of street inspection stickers on the backs of road signs are secretly driving directions to concentration camps for foreign UN soldiers to take people to. I've known plenty of conspiracy theorists, on both sides of the political spectrum - black helicopters, chemtrails, faked moon landings, flat-earthers, NSA-records-your-phone calls-and-emails, white people were bred on an island by a professor named Jacob and are inherently evil as a result of the process, US government did OKC, US government did 9/11, Mossad did 9/11, JFK... But I don't think the defining characteristic of these "believers" is not belief, but rather unbelief - a feeling that someone is lying to them. A lot of times they'll argue in the same evening for mutually contradictory conspiracy theories. Or will happily switch to a different theories about the moon landing as soon as I show some evidence against their first one. It's not at all about any one particular theory being true. In end, perhaps it's a good thing to have a some percentage of the population be disposed to a little skepticism about those in power.
- stallmanite 8y ago
  NSA-records-your-phone-calls is a bit unlike the other entries in your conspiracy list, n'est-ce pas?
  - danielvf 8y ago
    Funnily enough, I heard both that and the road sign one from the same person in the early nineties.
olliej 8y ago
Ok, so right off the bat I have issues with this paper. * A topic like this, especially with the stated result, seems super likely to be subject to confirmation bias so we need to be careful not to fall prey to that. The paper title seems geared to produce that. * Study 1 (the college student study) had N=157, and as is the nature of such quizzes seems way too biased to be meaningful given the claims being presented. All were from one university, they received course credit for participating, 135 were psychology students, etc. This is ignoring potential bias in the results (I recall studies discussing the desire of study participants to "help" studies). So I don't believe anything super meaningful should be taken study 1. * Study 2, French population analysis had a larger sample, but I'd still be reticent to make huge statements. The supplementary material doesn't include the actual quiz questions, but seems to be a 1-4 scale of agreement with a list of conspiracies + horoscope + creationism. The creationist question conflates young earth and creation theories which are obviously correlated but aren't strictly the same (I've known creationists who still realize actual age of earth) * Study 3 is also super biased, N=513 French and 220 Swiss, 72% of the French participants were students at the host university. Again the Swiss students (but not the French) received course credit for participating. Participants were also informed of the goal of the study ahead of participating which could reasonably be expected to skew data. Honestly it irks me that a paper like this has got into something like Cell as given the claims being made I would expect/requirer a larger and less biased sample and more information about the actual quiz contents.
- arminiusreturns 8y ago
  Thank you for articulating what I was thinking as well. Seems like poor science from my quick reading of it for the same reasons you state.

45 points by tlb 8y ago

dang 8y ago

All: if you comment here, please keep it substantive and avoid shallow dismissals, religious smiting (for or against) and whatnot.

furbyhat 8y ago

"Conspiracism" The Matrix is working hard to preemptively discredit any sheep who dare stick their heads up. My fav conspiracies: - moon landing with Aldrin et al did not happen - the left is importing immigrants who are dependent on welfare, which inevitably gets them to vote for more and more free stuff - same financier's financed all sides of WWII - flouride makes you dumb - global warming is about creating global taxation - Brexit was the plan from the very start (you didnt think the Monarchy was actually going to give up their sovereignty did you?)

EdwardDiego 8y ago

Creationism inherently incorporates a conspiracy theory - that evidence of a young earth exists, but is dismissed or even hidden by scientists because of their "faith" in secularism. E.g., the Grand Canyon totally proves a global flood, but scientists refuse to accept that because of their "faith" in the earth being billions of years old.

whatshisface 8y ago
You could probably find a correlation between any two things that involve rejecting mainstream beliefs, right or not. I'm suspicious of any theory that tries to divide everyone up in to the "enlightened ones" and "the dumb ones," on the grounds that you could minimize friction with the public by accepting every mainstream belief, whereas trying to be as right as possible would mean both disagreeing where society is wrong and sometimes when society is right, because if you're in the business of trusting yourself at all you will make at least a few mistakes. To make it personal, think about it like this: if you start by saying to yourself "this thing society thinks is acceptable is wrong," and if you then go on and apply that mindset to everything else, there is a nonzero chance that your honest first-principles evaluation of, say, young-earth creationism would come out positive. Unless you think your inner compass has a zero false positive rate, spin that wheel again for every single commonly accepted belief and you're essentially guaranteed to end up believing at least one think that might appear in a study like this.
- codezero 8y ago
  This article talks about cognitive bias, not dumbness or enlightenment: “which was partly independent from religion, politics, age, education, agency detection, analytical thinking and perception of randomness.” Plenty of smart people suffer from cognitive bias, I’d bet most do to some degree.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  It shouldn't be too hard for a study too determine if the distribution of "number of conspiracy theories someone believes in" is bimodal with one mode near 0. I suspect it is.
seandougall 8y ago
Interestingly, it also requires a conspiracy masterminded by God: the argument I’ve heard goes that dinosaur fossils and other evidence for an ancient earth and evolution were faked and planted by God in order to test our faith.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  The counter is that religion was faked and planted in order to test devotion to truth, no matter the risk to personal consequences. If you were in charge, what would you test?
toss1 8y ago
The more common hypothesis is that the earth/universe is only 6000 years old but evidence of prior ages was planted by God or the Devil. Of course, this is functionally indistinguishable from an argument that the world was created last Tuesday, with all evidence of prior existence intact.
Alex3917 8y ago
> Creationism inherently incorporates a conspiracy theory - that evidence of a young earth exists, but is dismissed or even hidden by scientists because of their "faith" in secularism. My understanding is that this is basically true though. That is, even fundamentalist Christians didn't believe in young earth creationism before the 1920s or so, and the reason it became a popular is that it was a reaction to that fact that mainstream science rejected the existence of climate change and tectonic plates. There's a good talk about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMaUzNlDnSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMaUzNlDnSY It's basically the same as how homeopathy was created as a reaction to the fact that mainstream medicine had a success rate that was substantially lower than placebo treatments. In each case science basically just got forked. And once it gets forked, it's impossible to use science on one side of the fork to convince people on the other side of the fork that they're wrong, because all the commits are out of order in way that changes the meaning of the diffs.
- deleted 8y ago
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- EdwardDiego 8y ago
  Yep, you're right, if you look into the history of the interpretation of Genesis in Christianity, Augustine of Hippo said this: > Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. > Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. > The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. > If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
ch4s3 8y ago
Not to split hairs, but that only applies to "young Earth creationism", which is in itself a subset of a literalist view of "creation."

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jrs95 8y ago

This is interesting and IMO generally true. But, not everything that is called a conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory. Asking “who benefits from this policy, and are they in a position to have influence in creating or maintaining it?” is not inherently a conspiracy theory. But anyone who’s doing something different from what they’re saying would prefer you didn’t notice. And if people are noticing, they’d probably want to dismiss their critics with whatever means they could. Including dismissing legitimate criticism and skepticism as paranoid conspiracy theories. This is especially confusing because there is overlap between actual conspiracies or at the very least dishonest politics/leadership and what people prone to paranoia and conspiracism would be more likely to think about. I just don’t like the idea of people allowing the charicture of a conspiracy theorist to stop them from thinking critically about the information they are being presented.

codezero 8y ago
I read some of the article and I don’t think the findings make statements about the existence of conspiracy theories, but rather attribute individuals who attribute conspiracy to a number of things to a cognitive bias. Individual conspiracy theories have sometimes panned out to be real but that doesn’t mean one who leans towards conspiracism to explain things is right.
empath75 8y ago
I would argue that a true conspiracy theorist doesn’t just believe that a single event was the result of a single group of people, but that the conspiracy is near omnipotent and responsible for many unrelated terrible things. It’s one thing, for example, to believe that some aspect of the 9/11 story doesn’t hold up — perhaps that you believe the government covered up for Saudi involvement. That may be right or wrong, but it’s at least something that’s plausible. A true conspiracy theorist would believe that the whole thing was made up and never happened, or that the whole thing was planned and executed by the Illuminati, who have been working together for centuries to control the masses through mind control.
- dudul 8y ago
  I don't disagree with this comment, but unfortunately the label is also used against the people described in your 2nd paragraph.

skh 8y ago

My brother-in-law is a fundamentalist Christian. My sister homeschooled all 8 kids from kindergarten through 12th grade. His view is that since God made Adam as a full grown man then it's possible that God created the world “with age” in his parlance. The point is that people who want something to be true will engage in the nececcsry mental gymnastics to justify their belief. It’s not unique to firinge ideas but it is easier to spot in people with fringe ideas. EDIT: The fringe idea I referenced above is the notion that God created the world to look like it's really old even though it isn’t old. I've not encountered this rationale before. My comment is in no way diminishing religion.

ars 8y ago
It's hardly a fringe idea. It's actually pretty mainstream. It even has a dismissive name: Last Tuesdayism. You have to be careful to keep the idea separate from Young Earth Creationism! Young Earth Creationism directly contradicts observation. In contrast believing the universe was created already old does not conflict with science (you just can't prove it one way or another).
- diego_moita 8y ago
  So basically you're saying that this "God" thingy created the world to look like it evolved and changed but this is the way it always was? Such that he planted fossils and false carbon 14 decay just to fool scientists? Do you really believe this idea? Do you think it is worth intellectual respect? Edit: for perspective: there was a time the Catholic church rejected reason. It ended badly to Galileo and Copernicus and had very bad repercussions on the church credibility, from Spinoza to Voltaire. American Pentecostals and fundamentalist Jews and Muslims should learn that lesson: on the long run reason wins.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    > So basically you're saying that this "God" thingy created the world to look like it evolved and changed but this is the way it always was? Such that he planted fossils and false carbon 14 decay just to fool scientists? There's a large number of people who believe this. Its a bit weird, because it implies that God is above lying to his followers. So as a Christian myself, who believes in Omnipotence (all powerful), Omniscient (all knowing), and Benevolence (all-loving), the viewpoint that God would explicitly lie to us is almost certainly against the 3rd peg: its anti-benevolence. Anyway, different Christians obviously have different beliefs on the matter. I am in agreement with the poster you responded to: it is an... unfortunately... mainstream belief in some Christian communities. I'm sure there are holes people can poke at my specific denomination of course. So it'd be hypocritical for me to push too much against the belief that "God is tricking us to see the true believers vs the evolutionists". But... yeah, its just not a belief I can get behind. > Such that he planted fossils and false carbon 14 decay just to fool scientists? Generally speaking, the argument goes to look at the Old Testament, specifically the Book of Job. In the Old Testament, God tested some of his prophets with incredible tests (ie: letting the Devil kill his kids, take all of his wealth away, etc. etc). So the idea of "God is just testing us" is generally the argument that comes forth. I guess the general idea is that God can cause issues that seem big to us, but are small in the great scheme of His plans. If you want the religious background on this particular school of thought. The Book of Job has the prophet lose everything, but eventually gains greater prosperity in the end. In particular, Job deserves prosperity because even when all hope was lost, he kept his faith. Still, that fundamentally doesn't quite explain why God would particularly lie to us humans about the "evolution" issue. So I've never personally liked this particular religious argument. I find it far more likely that God would prefer us Humans to discover science and properly make discoveries and advance our culture for the good of all mankind. ------------ It comes down to Biblical Literalism. Some people believe that the Bible is literally true. That there were exactly 7 days of creation, that Methusala lived over 900 years old... that a dude named "Samson" had magical hair, etc. etc. And since Biblical Literalism is a foundational peg to those denominations, they go through great pains to prove it. Alternatively, if you're in my camp, you are open to interpreting the Bible. My denomination believes that the Bible is a collection of stories that God wants us to know about. Not necessarily that the word is literally true.

empath75 8y ago

I’ve always believed that conspiracy theories are fundamentally motivated by a belief that things happen for a reason. If a bad thing happened, seemingly undeserved, there must have been some dark force behind it — if not Satan or witches, then Jews or communists or Muslims or globalists or gays or whatever. The alternative — that people suffer for no reason at all, is intolerable for some people.

codezero 8y ago
Interestingly that is what the article implies - though they use the term teleological thinking to refer to the belief things happen for a reason.
- sometimesijust 8y ago
  Actually that's not what the study implies. They found "rejection of science and animism" to be a stronger predictor of conspiracism. Although "finalism" was found to be second best so it is certainly part of the mix but going off this study you could not say it is the fundamental cause. In fact the researchers are careful to point out that they have established correlation and not cause.
  - codezero 8y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. This is clearly out of my league :)
jonathankoren 8y ago
Yes. A predisposition to finding agency where there is none is a key finding to both.[0] Its a coping method to randomness. Disease doesn’t just happen, someone did something to cause it. This person didn’t get away with a crime, they’ll be severely punished after they die. A random guy with a gun doesn’t just commit mass murder, someone powerful must of let him, or maybe even faked it. Even when there is a documented conspiracy to commit a horrific act, that’s not enough, because there must be an even bigger conspiracy to allow it to happen, because unacceptable alternative is that the good guys lost. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3712257/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3712257/

toss1 8y ago

Good work here on the teleological bias. The question is what's behind it? My working conjecture is that it is some people that cannot tolerate the ambiguity of many events being essentially random, chaotic, or stochastic. They'd rather have an evil cabal deliberately executing the 9/11 attacks, or school shootings, or faking the school shootings, than to accept that sometimes things just get very far out of hand. But, other than rough observation (and likely confirmation bias), I've not done much to substantiate this conjecture. Comments?

toasterlovin 8y ago
We evolved in small groups of people (around 100 people or so). Conspiracies are much more feasible at that scale. It’s basically your standard political intrigue and backstabbing. So that, IMO, is the genesis of conspiratorial thinking. Then I think people have a very hard time thinking about large scale systems, so they revert to explaining the difficult to understand with conspiracy.
pythonslayer 8y ago
I agree this paper doesn’t seem to present any issues. I can’t speak to whether it is useful, though. As for your questions, I will put forth a theory that really isn’t all that crazy, or esoteric, but might help. If religion, despite it’s means, has, over time (hundreds, thousands of years) encouraged adherence to social structures beneficial to survival and psychologically healthy livelihoods, shouldn’t that basis alone justify it’s prevalence? If the only reason to deny this is the lucid awareness we ourselves experience, I cannot agree we are adhering to the dialectical approach we celebrate in the scientific method. In this theory, religion serves a benefit to the ends of survival, giving these beliefs an evolutionary origin wildly entangled with the emergence of cognition and self-identity. If this is the case, how do we reconcile that with science? Seems easier to me than any other way. Of course, these are our ancestors. This stuff is surely not simple. This alone just begs for more questions that I think are classically best handled by humanities, but if I’m not mistaken this begs of multidisciplinary introspection. Granted, much of the humanities doesn’t take theology seriously these days but that’s a fairly recent issue. If you’re interested, there’s nobody stopping you from diving in. Carl Jung is a useful place to start in terms of these natural cognitive mappings. Coincidentally Freud was actually a link between Jung and modern psychology these links are not much acknowledged these days. It’s all both very hand wavy and contentious depending who you ask. Anyhow, with Jung you don’t need to agree with his conclusions but he defines a map that can at least give an idea of what we could be working with and it leans heavily on mythology and imagination. It introduces some foundational stuff on how these unstable symbolic mappings could have assisted the transition into the lucid awareness that eventually became modern science. If you’ve never ‘gone here’ before, I will warn you: it’s big and deep. There is a field of “Jungian psychology” but it’s mostly trying to find use in his work and I would recommend going strait to his work. “Man And His Symbols” is approachable enough to start. I’ve opened a can of worms here, but it’s a fruitful one and very related to your interest because I am afraid these contentions with our own self-identities mark a cognitive recursion we are not seriously contending with.

ohsupbro 8y ago

Don't 100% of these "findings" also apply to anyone that believes in evolution?

olliej 8y ago
I'm not sure what you're saying here -- evolution is a theory, specifically it has a huge amount of accumulated evidence that indicates that the theory is correct, and makes meaningful falsifiable predictions which have also been validated, and numerous long term experiments that agree entirely with the theory. Religion is defined by faith in something/anything explicitly in the absence of evidence, hence "faith". Conspiracy "theories" often use the absence of evidence as de facto evidence. Which is not remotely logically sound.

claydavisss 8y ago

Not really. No one needs a label for things that are false. Conspiracy theories are things that could actually be true but are designated as ridiculous by someone who perceives discussion as a threat. But lo and behold, "conspiracy theories" sometimes are true despite our efforts to write them off as quackery. My favorite example is Mark Klein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein who was derided and written off as a conspiracy nutjob until his allegations surrounding the diversion of telecommunications traffic ended up being true. We see it and participate in this every day. If you suggest there is life somewhere across the galaxy, they call you an astronomer. If you say you say a flying saucer in a photo of our own solar system, you are a nutjob. What is the fundamental difference?

krapp 8y ago
>If you suggest there is life somewhere across the galaxy, they call you an astronomer. No, that has nothing to do with being an astronomer. >If you say you say a flying saucer in a photo of our own solar system, you are a nutjob. What is the fundamental difference? The "astronomer" claims there is likely life somewhere across the galaxy, but doesn't state with absolute certainty that it exists, where it exists, what it looks like, etc. Whereas "you" claim, explicitly, to have seen it in a photo, and that it is a flying saucer, and that anyone who says otherwise "perceives discussion as a threat." Given the size of the known universe, the laws of physics forbidding, so far as we know, any form of FTL travel, the lack of any widespread corroborating evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life or technology in our solar system, and the tendency of the human brain to see things that aren't there (paredolia, false memories, etc.) the likelihood of what "you" believe to be a flying saucer being a flying saucer which just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be caught on camera is very, very, very low. The fundamental difference between "nutjob" and "not a nutjob" is that the "nutjob" refuses to believe it can't be a flying saucer, regardless of the statistics or evidence to the contrary, whereas "not a nutjob" accepts that it almost certainly isn't. The axiom that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" exists for a reason - not because the people requiring proof can't handle discussion, but because those claims inevitably require revising known science to be true, and "ordinary proof" is never sufficient to prove their case.

diego_moita 8y ago

To me, the most interesting about this belief that "everything is part of a master plan and a big conspiracy" are: 1) There is always some kind of political undertone on it. 2) The ones most prone to believe in it are the ones most gullible to accept authoritarian rule. No wonder that every dictator, from Maduro to Erdogan to Putin and Jiping love so much this argument.

sattoshi 8y ago

I am not at all used to academic writing and am finding it difficult to find the questions they asked participants. Could anyone point me in the right direction? I can't really think anything of this study without them.

deleted 8y ago

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nafizh 8y ago

I couldn't find the distribution of religious affiliations in the supplemental material. Did anyone find it? Surely, if you are going to do a study as such, you need to disclose the numbers on religious affiliations of the participants. It would be fun to see the correlations of analytical ability and affiliation to a particular religion. Or if you want to brush all religions under the same rug, then it doesn't matter.

danielvf 8y ago

My all time favorite is conspiracy theory is that the positions and angles of street inspection stickers on the backs of road signs are secretly driving directions to concentration camps for foreign UN soldiers to take people to. I've known plenty of conspiracy theorists, on both sides of the political spectrum - black helicopters, chemtrails, faked moon landings, flat-earthers, NSA-records-your-phone calls-and-emails, white people were bred on an island by a professor named Jacob and are inherently evil as a result of the process, US government did OKC, US government did 9/11, Mossad did 9/11, JFK... But I don't think the defining characteristic of these "believers" is not belief, but rather unbelief - a feeling that someone is lying to them. A lot of times they'll argue in the same evening for mutually contradictory conspiracy theories. Or will happily switch to a different theories about the moon landing as soon as I show some evidence against their first one. It's not at all about any one particular theory being true. In end, perhaps it's a good thing to have a some percentage of the population be disposed to a little skepticism about those in power.

stallmanite 8y ago
NSA-records-your-phone-calls is a bit unlike the other entries in your conspiracy list, n'est-ce pas?
- danielvf 8y ago
  Funnily enough, I heard both that and the road sign one from the same person in the early nineties.

olliej 8y ago

Ok, so right off the bat I have issues with this paper. * A topic like this, especially with the stated result, seems super likely to be subject to confirmation bias so we need to be careful not to fall prey to that. The paper title seems geared to produce that. * Study 1 (the college student study) had N=157, and as is the nature of such quizzes seems way too biased to be meaningful given the claims being presented. All were from one university, they received course credit for participating, 135 were psychology students, etc. This is ignoring potential bias in the results (I recall studies discussing the desire of study participants to "help" studies). So I don't believe anything super meaningful should be taken study 1. * Study 2, French population analysis had a larger sample, but I'd still be reticent to make huge statements. The supplementary material doesn't include the actual quiz questions, but seems to be a 1-4 scale of agreement with a list of conspiracies + horoscope + creationism. The creationist question conflates young earth and creation theories which are obviously correlated but aren't strictly the same (I've known creationists who still realize actual age of earth) * Study 3 is also super biased, N=513 French and 220 Swiss, 72% of the French participants were students at the host university. Again the Swiss students (but not the French) received course credit for participating. Participants were also informed of the goal of the study ahead of participating which could reasonably be expected to skew data. Honestly it irks me that a paper like this has got into something like Cell as given the claims being made I would expect/requirer a larger and less biased sample and more information about the actual quiz contents.

arminiusreturns 8y ago
Thank you for articulating what I was thinking as well. Seems like poor science from my quick reading of it for the same reasons you state.