Posted on 04/28/2012 8:52:00 AM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
In a study published yesterday in the journal Science, researchers from Canada’s University of British Columbia posit that people who believe in God are not analytical thinkers.
That’s a disingenuous way of saying people of faith are stupid.
“Religious belief is intuitive,” explained Ara Norenzayan, co-author of the study, “and analytical thinking can undermine intuitive thinking. So when people are encouraged to think analytically, it can block intuitive thinking.”
In other words, when religious people analyze their beliefs, they become less devout. They go from stupid to smart, like Norenzayan and fellow co-author Will Gervais.
So how did the researchers test their hypothesis?
They recruited 650 or so Canucks and Yanks to participate in their study. They showed some participants images of artwork that supposedly encouraged analytical thinking – like Rodin’s statue, “The Thinker.” Other participants were shown images that did not encourage such thinking.
After viewing the images, researchers measured participants’ religious beliefs through a series of questions. The participants who viewed the images promoting analytical thinking were more likely to experience a decrease in religious belief, the researchers claimed.
And that supposedly included devout believers.
“There’s much more instability to religious belief than we recognize,” said Norenzayan. Apparently so, if a person of faith can look at a few pictures and suddenly lose his or her religion.
As it turns out, there was less to the miraculous de-conversions than the researchers claimed in their study.
Their experiment didn’t really turn devout believers into total atheists, Norenzayan fessed up. Yet, he maintained, if people routinely thought analytically, like scientific researchers do, there would be fewer people of faith.
The study by Norenzayan and Gervais is nothing more than junk science.
It is an insult to people of faith who are well-educated; who arrived at their religious beliefs by analytical thinking.
And it reflects poorly on the judgment of editors at the journal Science.
The researchers’ general approach was to test volunteers — in some cases, Canadian undergraduates, in others, as the paper explains, a “nationwide (though nonrepresentative) sample of American adults recruited online”. Both sets of volunteers constitute only a limited sample, as Gervais and Norenzayan acknowledge.
During the tests, volunteers were either engaged in a task that surreptitiously elicited analytical thinking, or were given a control task. They were then asked if they concurred with a series of statements about religion, such as “I believe in God” or “I don’t really spend much time thinking about my religious beliefs”.
http://www.nature.com/news/is-rationality-the-enemy-of-religion-1.10539
this study was not science, it was satire and contained absolutely no science, did not employ scientific methods, didn’t frame the question properly, and didn’t even design valid test - and this moron thinks he is analytical - lmao.
Actually, I have absolute faith in a creator because of quantum mechanics.
Is that "analytical" enough?
They showed some participants images of artwork that supposedly encouraged analytical thinking – like Rodin’s statue, “The Thinker.”
Get a copy of “50 Nobel Laureates and Other Great Scientists Who Believe in God.”
1 Corinthians 1:25
For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom...
They discredited themselves way before that.
They have had the long knives out for creationists - even to the point of including verbiage in their “charter.”
Not saying that creationists are correct in a scientific way - I *am* saying that the much vaunted practitioners of the scientific method (with peer review, no less) can close their minds with the best of them.
I would have respected them much more if they had actually done some sort of scientific inquiry into the matter rather than dismissing it out of hand.
Change ‘people of faith are not thinking’ -— to ‘people of OTHER faiths are not thinking’, and I suspect the proposition will gain many more supporters. :-) This doesn’t mean, of course, that such persons can’t solve difficult mathematical problems, or do all kinds of things that require considerable intelligence, but really now, isn’t it the opinion of nearly all the persons here that people of other faiths believe all kinds of crazy stuff? (I would judge so from the posts I’ve seen in many threads, and it’s my opinion too.) There seems to be an area of intellectual blindness with respect to religion — called being non-analytical by the persons who did that silly experiment — in the OTHER guy’s beliefs, not in one’s own.
Take the 9-11 terrorists, for instance (from the point of view of probably everybody here). If I recall correctly, these weren’t illiterate peasants taken from some remote village somewhere. They may well have been intelligent and well educated in some respects, especially the leader. Where they went astray, though, was in their religious interpretation of the situation, the belief that they were doing what God wanted them to do, and that — though killed — they would be rewarded for it. I can’t help but draw the conclusion that they didn’t analyze the situation correctly.
“They recruited 650 or so Canucks and Yanks to participate in their study. They showed some participants images of artwork that supposedly encouraged analytical thinking – like Rodin’s statue, “The Thinker.””
So - if I am shown by a Muslim acadmeic psychologist, pictures of MadMo boinking Aisha I will believe pedop[hilia is an Allah inspired activity?
As usual, the PsychPerson confuses correlation with causality.
Papers like this one, by academics such as this author, are just one of the many reasons for the low public opinoin of the “soft sciences”.
Did a search on the title you provided and found a list with 27 Nobel scientists. Your claim was misleading.
Wasn’t basing it strictly on the book, but also on additional research.
I see. So, who are the 23+ other Nobel Prize winning scientists?
Send me your email address and I’ll give you a link to the list.
No thanks. I'm not interested in providing hits to your site or having my mail box spammed.
Wow..!! then that means that there is no religious people successful in life
I’m a genuine Christian. Not a spammer or a scammer. I’m sorry if you’ve had past bad experiences with persons pretending to be true believers.
I’m a genuine Christian. Not a spammer or a scammer. I’m sorry if you’ve had past bad experiences with persons pretending to be true believers.
I'm a Christian and I'm one of the most analytical people I have ever met. I know many other analytical Christians. I have studied the writings of many past and current Christian theologians and I can state that they are surely and thoroughly analytical in their writings and their conclusions.
With all of that said, every Christian I know realizes that we believe in some "crazy stuff" and that the world deems crazy. However, our analysis of the testimony by the witnesses in the bible, the testimony of those fellow Christians who have experienced the affect on our lives from the love of Christ and the power to change ourselves to be like Christ that only comes from the Holy Spirit provides us analytical types with sufficient evidence that the biblical claims are true. Further our personal experience that comes from reading scripture and prayer leads us to the analytical conclusion that Christ was born, Christ died on the cross for us and Christ rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.
We do realize that this conclusion based on analyzing the evidence presented leads to "crazy stuff" but that is the nature of using reason and analysis and applying it to the evidence in the nature of the testimony given by scripture as well as the testing of the scripture in our daily lives.
“The use of statistics overcame any flaws in the study.”
Mark? Mark Twain? Is that your ghost posting under PeterPrinciple’s name?
;-)
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